This the main reason I voted against Biden in 2020 - I knew if he won we'd be at war with Russia probably before the end of his first term. Feckless faux-gressives running MSNBC have been stoking this conflict for years by convincing viewers Trump won with Russia's help.
I've read recently someone saying that both Biden and Pelosi are old enough to not care if they burn the world down on their way out. Whatever their reasoning, there is no excuse for fomenting nuclear war, even if Putin were a "HItler" as they paint him to be. Hate Trump all you want but he'd already be sitting down with Putin to "make a deal" - and even if he were Putin's bitch I'd rather have peace with Putin's bitch than nuclear fallout to deal with.
The anti-war left has been conveniently neutered by how all of this has been framed, BTW. In many ways, it's nefariously brilliant....if you want to see the world burn.
The real "anti-war left" in the US has always been minuscule. Many of the thousands who protested against the pending Iraq invasion in 2003 were simply partisan Democrats. That's why they melted away while Obama surged in Afghanistan, stirred up trouble in Syria, attacked Libya, backed the Saudis in Yemen and orchestrated the Maidan coup that eventually resulted in this crisis.
CODEPINK and Medea troops were the only ones that stayed vigilant, and people like me, who for 12 plus years, then OWS, continued to do what we could. I was not going to let Obama fool me twice!
Obama didn't fool me the first time. I was aware of his Wall Street funding and voted for Cynthia McKinney, but I did continue to vote for other Democrats. But I'm done with that. At least GOP bylaws allowed an outsider to be nominated. Sanders didn't have a chance, and given what he's said since about war, I wouldn't vote for him anyway.
I was just doing some flashback on that year. Kucinich and Gravel... now they were worthy candidates. Gravel gave a now famous attack on Obama and Hillary on the platform on primary debates, had I heard that then, it would have been a huge red flag. It was a magic moment. He was a rare bird. There is now a Gravel Institute, great story behind it. I was in LA when a debate downtown, beteen Hillary and Obama, and CodePink was going to be there to protest, so I found my way there. It is all very foggy. But, not doubt along the same lines Gravel condemned Hillary and Obama.
My dad died 8/07, mom 4/08, while dealing with psychopathic siblings. though i had friends who participated in O's campaign, and dragged me into some of it, looking back, it seems what most defined him was the projections from conservatives that he was this far left radical. Which reminds me, it was shocking and horrifying to learn Wm Barber is full I STAND WITH UKRAINE. Shocking. Dumbfounding.
My dad, then my mom died soon after in 2008, anyone could have fooled me as I had 2.5 years of hell from my psychopathic lying greedy siblings which ended me in hospital for 8 days nearly dead from Swine Flu in 2010.
By 2011 I participated in OWS and learned who Chris Hedges was. Turns out Swine left me with emphysema and enlarged ventricle. Swine, it seems, was another one of Obama's failures as much later, after the data was calculated, it turns out it was far more deadly and damaging than the public was led on to believe.
As for 9/11, the flood of conspiracy theories also syphoned off any legitimate protests we might have gathered around. I watched closely. I could easily shoot holes through most of the narratives. At times I began to think that psyops were creating these fanciful story lines, and some mixed with others even if they did not match or make sense. But, we still stood out regularly, WOMEN IN BLACK, and wondered if GW & Co would get away with their real crimes.
It was stunning, most of these storytellers did not know who Barbara Olson was or the PNAC,. It really helped keep the focus off of Saudi Arabia, and made it impossible to get the messages from RAWA any air time. In fact, none of these fanatics even know who RAWA is. Sigh. So how do you build a coalition of activists when so many prefer to flee to a fantastical fiction while a major crisis emerges when our leaders lie to us? GW & Co were kleptocrats and psychopaths, and they had written a Mein Kampf for everyone to read, it was in black and white. Many years later one of the main founders of that major truth 9/11 group that tried to mash every 9/11 spin into one toilet bowl of vomit, publicly apologized, acknowledging it was a disservice and all BS. There was a time where protesting and creating a united front against our corporate kleptocrats actually required some level of accuracy and accountability, but not anymore.
So you believe the official 9/11 narrative? You believe Barbara Olson made that call from the plane that day? The West saw how successful Putin's apartment bombings were to his overall consolidation of power and they said, "you know, we can do it better and bigger" and they did. The Putin apartment bombings were junior varsity compared to 9/11.
Sorry, I can blow holes through most of the 9/11 fantasies, while I sat on solid ground, I just watched the psychosis rule while we tried to organize a national peace anti-war campaign. The conspiracy business was booming big time. I think some were psyops throwing monkey wrenches. Some retired CIA guy came out and gave a claim this was the case. I totally cut my ties with Ruppert, but that was coming regardless. I undercovered he suffered psychosis by end of 20th c.
We learned through RAWA right after 9/11 in their presentation to congress and writings, that Osama was in Pakistan. Where were the conspiracy folks then? Nowhere to be found. Very important facts did not interest them, I discovered.
The hijacking was clearly blowback from our Cold War era. Plain and simple. But it seems Americans wanted to avoid such a stark realization so they invented another story. 9/11 did not conform to the PNAC Mein Kampf whatsoever, and most certainly the fact that that Osama and other hijackers were Saudis was way way problematic for Bush, this was more than clear. Remember when they scuttled the bin Laden family out of USA ASAP following the incident?
I can think of a lot better provocations to rig if you want to take down Iraq or Afghanistan! LMAO. Read the PNAC game plan. Because I watched every detail closely, had 3 monitors going during the first week, saw live footage from real videographers, analyzed the first conspiracies to hit the floor within days and knew them to be complete lies, not even good ones. I became very vigilant about claims and checked my sources closely.
Easily, most conspiracy generators were ignoring solid facts they did not like in favor of fantasies. If the psyops were helping, I am sure they were laughing their asses off, because the mass delusionals helped to bring down any credible protest front. The war machine is pretty much doing this right in our faces and most time with American approval. If Ukraine is not teaching us this lesson, not sure what will.
Sadly, Barbara Olson truly was in that jet that hit the Pentagon, she was not found later in the Bahamas partying on millions of dollars as some of the nut jobs said. I was no fan of her husband, but that poor man suffered the worst harassment. It is like the Seth Rich story, his family has undergone the worst harassment from unhinged rude thoughtless fanatics.
Osama denied being behind 9/11. Any terrorist worth his/her salt would have IMMEDIATELY claimed 9/11 as their own work and yet the most renowned of all terrorists IMMEDIATELY repudiated it.
It's nothing like the Seth Rich story. I don't believe the Seth Rich bull. I do believe 9/11 was something much more than the official narrative. What that is, well, that's where the creeps enter the picture who seek to obfuscate and obscure with all manner of who-dun-its and don't think that obfuscation isn't purposeful.
That being said, once again, Barbara Olson did not make any call to Ted Olson from the plane that day. The U.S. government’s Moussaoui trial evidence admitted that Barbara Olson never called her husband at the Department of Justice. This shattered the long-standing fabrication of her calls blaming hijackers with box-cutters, and branded the (then) U.S. Solicitor-General Theodore Olson both a liar (claiming they were collect calls from a seat back phone after first claiming they were cellphone calls ) and the dupe of forged phone calls, and revealed the hand of high-level perpetrators manipulating the 9/11 events.
What is so important about if Barbara was on that plane or not, or if she used a fone. I did a little searching, and found out that it was verified that that flight at that time had seat back fones for passengers. So what. Her plane went into the Pentagon. She died. Though some guy who had made a huge industry from 9/11 ended her story in Bahamas where she was paid millions and now lived in exile with a name change. Bravo.
In fact, it does not matter if he was behind it or the leader, does it? I actually recall sensing there were others more involved, and i think some writing has been done on that. I could care less. Means ZERO. That is not the part of the story I am focused on. You are derailing.
He very well could have been a highly recessive element within that operation. He could be lying. He was not dying of Kidney failure either. What misinformationalist made that one up? He was watching porn and doing fine surrounded by women when they shot him. But, RAWA did state to Congress, Bush, and others, they knew where he was in Pakistan. Now, do you know who RAWA is? Do you remotely know why they were significant?
That all does not mean doodley. "Saudis taking over passenger planes." Now, read it five times. Tell me what you see. Saudis taking over passenger jets and steering them into...." Do you see what is wrong with that and why? Why the F would the PNAC and GW & Co want Saudis in their script, and have to sneak the Bin Laden family out of the country ASAP who were visiting them? Wrong on all counts.
Yes, there is still outstanding questions, but this notion that the PNAC orchestrated Saudis to hijack jets, or that there really were not jets, or that this, or that. I tired so much from people needed attention, and making wild claims, only to find out it was a ludicrous deadend. In meantime, IMO, they were only helping GW convince people we needed to invade Iraq. Good job. Seriously, Scott Ritter needed our help, but this huge 9/11 industry was just to busy making up stories about how GW hired Saudis to blow up Pentagon and the Towers, and send Barbara Olson into the Pentagon, where we had to hear that never happened, no jet hit the Pentagon. FFS. Who could listen to that shite.
Many if not most who protested in 1969 were opposed to the draft and 50,000+ dead GIs. Many boomers who protested in 1969 don't even write an anti-war comment today, and went along with the Russiagate hoax for several years.
Also, many protesting had college deferments and the ones that got drafted were overwhelmingly poor and minorities. They were the Deplorables of the day.
Yep, it wasn't 'till much later that I learned they were referred to as "cannon fodder" in earlier wars. Or my term; 'ground beef'. Meat for the imperialist grinder. (I was a professional cook my entire career.)
This is in keeping with much of what Dworkin wrote about this abandonment of anti-war sentiments that voted in Reagan at the same time a backlash against women occured.
Some people do not know that Bill Maher has often said he supported the Nam war and thought it was a "necessary war". on another note, how about the war mongers who say we must use Ukraine as an example to the Chinese?
I didn't see Reagan's election as a repudiation of anti-war sentiment, but Americans were no longer being killed so attention shifted to the economy and Carter's failed Presidency. A lot of people disliked Reagan's Nicaragua policies, but not enough to demonstrate against them.
I was 15 in 1969 and haven't forgot about the 'Nam and the dead protesters that died protesting /fighting against that Imperialist idiocy. Nietzsche's eternal recurrence recurrence in full bloom today. 53 years and 'nuthin's' changed. Except!, that I learned to write about it. Peace
Congratulations on being one of "we happy few." Of course, we're not Brits preparing to slaughter French knights, but the deaths of four at Kent State and two more a few days later at Jackson State remind us this is a life and death struggle. I'm not so sure nuthin's changed. Arguably, those six fatalities were not planned in advance, but the persecution of Julian Assange undoubtedly is, and the establishment of a "Disinformation Governance Board" is an indication of an intent to expand that precedent to others.
Peace to you as well, and welcome to our tiny "band of brothers."
With a few swift shots from 1-2 of FBI CI's, and the trigger happy National Guard , Nixon got his wish. Effectively, no more anti-war protests. Nixon got his later courtesy of the CIA, it WAS intentional. If there is an evil it is them and their ilk. Peace
I do not think he was referring to the 60s, but after Nam withdrawal we moved on to Reagan in some sort of blowback from males, who overwhelmingly voted for him as he promised to ramp up another Cold War. Dworkin had a very interesting take on this in her book LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE
Jimmy Carter and Mondale ran for POTUS in 1980. Even if it had been a woman VP, it would only qualify as a trigger, not the actual cause. Mondale would later try to capitalize on the strong reaction posed to Reagan's anti-choice positions as well as arms race. He was lackluster, but Geraldine Ferraro had some spunk.
We were 8 years from the end of the Vietnam war. That was 8 years for men to learn they hated feminism and not longer needed women to stay out of an unpopular war. We also seem to sink into a huge porn culture during that time, filled with lots of misogyny and big money.
it is hard to follow these nested threads with my bad eyes and dyslexia. yes, he did put that in there, i must have skipped that part. nonetheless, as very long time activist, just wow, *crickets* since Nam.
Well, we'd been to many ginormous protests in '68-'73 and then again in 2000 & 2003 (where Chelsea Clinton accused us of TREASON and suggested ignoring Posse-Commitatus restrictions, so we could be bayoneted and mowed down by 70 depleted uranium shells a second in Union Park for her mom's amusement? We had no say, then and nobody even SEES us being clubbed, gassed & tased, since Occupy & BLM!
The corporate media staged a blackout of reporting on anti-war protests after the 70s. Yes, there were huge protests around the country but they might as well not have happened, since no one knows about them.
In the rag I created in early 80s, and protests at major nuke sites and about central america, etc. i can say for certain, we got no attention. The Vandenberg one got a large page in one of our paper as Wieinberg was putting on a false story about the Minuteman launch. Long story.
I'd worked at the steel mill, used in the end of Terminator II the day after 22K "Occupy protesters" were kettled & attacked by 36 mounted NYPD in Times Square, and the riot gates smashed by a couple dozen others on Honda Goldwings. About 1/5 of the pretty pissed off crowd were theater-goers, who gleefully joined in. The pretty damn lefty & hep Chicano workers in Fontana had Amy Goodman on and there was NOTHING. They thought I'd made it up, until her recap the following day (she'd been in front of the induction center. Back THEN, we loved her!) Back THEN, C&L, The Wonkette, MoJo, even fucking reactionary Kos finally covered it. But the single USMC Sgt fighting the Israeli trained cops, the 700 arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, etc. NONE was carried by Comcast!
I was a Bernie since 2015. Some fellow Berners back then would say Hillary would start a war with Russia. It took some time for that to sink in, but when she blamed the election results on Putin, these matters started to fall in place, and are still painting out the landscape. Finally, I had to come to realization HRC really is a psychopath.
Considering she is a conservative at heart given she was an acolytic Goldwater Girl, it boggles the mind conservatives do not love her and instead rebuke her at every turn and equally it boggles the mind Liberals embraced her and still do to this day.
I remember a campaign button that said ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ and in background was a mushroom cloud. Hillary has McCarthyism written all over her. I wish someone would close her shop.
She leaves the WH broke but carts off WH furniture, and with Bill is now worth $120 million. From the sham contract/ bribe known as a lecture fee. Her bored stiff audiences e.g Goldman for $250k, must have gotten something from her but it sure wasn’t in the lecture, by all accounts. Tony Blair pulled the same scam.
Exactly. And how about that photo where she and Bill are yucking it up with the future Rapist-In-Chief Donald Trump? Surely you have seen that famous photo, no?
THANK you! I wish some people could step back from cartoons, video games and Neocon TV propaganda gavaged us since birth? This video epitomizes our oilgarchic duopoly (almost like any acknowledgement we'd sold Russian & Ukranian oligarchs Iraqi fields & infrastructure, we're now buying & hiding refining, stateside?)
Biden and Pelosi and Mitch, all part of the “greatest generation” who are NOT boomers (boomers have unjustifiably been blamed for the crimes of the “greatest generation”) have fucked us all left, right, and center.
This is why I only vote for the Socialist Equality Party and have done since 2000. Biden and Pelosi are too old to be in the positions they are in, since they have neither wisdom (which older people are supposed to have), nor sense. The Democrats are just as much a war party as the Republicans and all of the imperialists are rotten to the core.
The duopoly is the WAR PARTY, that is the nickname for both parties, as long as i can remember. My first step out was 1980. At Studs Terkel's recommendation at a rally where Barry Commoner spoke, I vote for Commoner.
In PA, Commoner ran as Consumer Party and we actually got several good candidates' careers up & running in Pgh & Philly. Now, Democrats' LLC is contractually obliged to CRUSH anything, even remotely Democratic in "our party." Democrat & Unions voted in Reagan, to "put the N-----s in our place!" Took reactionary blue collar voters 40yrs to figure out just who THEY were? Hippies gentrified Black "streetcar suburbs" as white flight suburban squalor, death 'o disparity deplorables lost homes, W4 jobs, retirement, lives to fentanyl. Opioids idde religion ob de proletariat!
I'd add that beyond just the framing, a lot of the Left has been censored in such an unprecendented way that their voices are not being heard. We've not seen this level of censorship since WWI and it may be even worse now than then.
We have a state sanctioned manufactured synthetic left that is now been rendered impotent, controlled opposition, faux or regressive Left as some have called it. McCarthyism insured this from the beginning. The GOP has shaped our left, our perception of what is left.
There are no actual left people in US politics on a national level, since maybe Nixon??!! Fascism has blood dripping from its unruly fangs these days along with women's bodies.
McCarthyism was nail in the coffin. As a very old union organizing friend of mine said about his experience in the 30s, "If Americans did not learn from the Depression, they will never learn." He said that back in the 80s. Look what they did to Henry Wallace even before McCarthy and Cohn. Hard to believe such despicable people could rule the country. It was alike a coup. Often I wonder, where was Ike?
I think Ike was tired after the war. He "allowed" the MIC to become the imperial monster that it is today. Truman's biggest mistake after the A-bomb was to allow the OSS to morph into the CIA. Industrialists will end up destroying the world and there's nothing we lowly average citizens can do but watch it all collapse into a heap of toxic waste and decay. Soon too I believe, that is if we're not all vaporized by the psychopaths.
Both Killary Clinton and Creepy Joementia are tools of the British Empire most blatantly manifested by sponsorship from the Commonwealth Press Union's American franchise, The Council on Foreign Relations. They, freemasonry, and the Pilgrim Society and Skull and Bones lead the campaign. Killary was too dirty, so the presidency went to creepy Joe, managed by Dominion vote fraud courtesy of the British and Lord Mark Mallach Brown.
Killing Ukranian, Russian & allied combatants AND tens-of-thousands more trapped civilians, is "worth it" to bail-out kleptocrats' oilgarch's fracked gas/ oil & bitumen Ponzi scheme! There's a special place in hell for BernieBro RooskiBot BLM & Antifa who DARE protest Biden, Kerry, Nancy & Mitt's family cashing-in on any war that stops cleaner Nord Stream II gas competing with our fracking 1.9 million new leaky, soon to be abandoned, unpluggable methane & ethane wells, spewing lethal, radium flavored fracking brine as exponential AGW unleashes the clathrate gun Kraken on us all?
I agree with you about Biden, but you may be too optimistic about Trump. Despite the rhetoric, he did some things to escalate this on the economic front (e.g., sanctions over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline).
Agree. No such thing as the "lesser" of two evils. You is or you ain't.
Trump said three things while campaigning in 2016 that violated my red lines, and it had nothing to do with grabbing pussy. While it's true that neocons and militarists violated his orders, he appointed them and could have fired them. I kept hoping he would redeem himself, but he didn't. The assassination of Suleimani, on a peace mission brokered by the US itself, was beyond the pale, and the recognition of some guy as President of Venezuela was an unforced error as were several subsequent coup and assassination attempts against Maduro.
I've voted 3rd party for President in 7 or 8 of the last Presidential elections. I'll be tempted to vote for Trump if he runs in 2024, since I think he would have kept the timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan he negotiated, which would have gone more smoothly. Plus, he endorsed an outspoken anti-war candidate in Ohio (JD Vance) even though Vance had been critical of him years ago. But my main motivation would be disgust with the Democrats and a desire to punish them. Anger and vengeance are not good reasons, so I'll probably vote 3rd party again.
I'm waffling between repub and 3rd party, too. I respect the repubs for getting the Vax mandates shot down and I care about 2A, but otherwise I'm not right wing in principle. I just find the dnc both terrifying and disgusting.
After writing this, I found out Vance spoke in favor of invading Mexico to clean out the cartels. WTF. So if I were currently living in the state where I was born, I could not in good conscience vote for Vance. It would be 3rd party, write-in or under-vote. No way would I vote for the Democrat.
I'm anti-war. I'm against the war in Ukraine. I'm against Western meddling in Ukraine and I'm against Russian meddling and against Russia's invasion. It's a very rare and unpopular position because apparently you must either be for the West or you must be for Putin and Russia, but you cannot be for neither.
You have chosen to be for Putin's Russia in your opposition to Biden but I fail to see how that is anti-war. Sure, The West has been stoking this for years but Putin has been playing his part too and he took the bait and invaded Ukraine. He is as much responsible for the current predicament as is the West and the Biden administration more specifically.
By any standard, Donald Trump was the worst POTUS ever. Putin and his Western "bitches" are not the answer to NeoLiberalism. Quite the contrary. I can't help but think of all the fool American Communists so enthrall with Stalin and the Soviet Union they moved there in the 30s only to be ultimately be sent to the Gulag in several years after helping build the Soviet's industrial might. There is a lesson in that — a lesson apparently never learned because the same mistake is being repeated today. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
You seem not to understand that Russia is not "meddling" in Mexico, directly on US borders. The US gave Russia no choice. It insisted on maintaining the option of NATO membership for Ukraine, where nuclear missiles could be installed less than 5 min. from Moscow. When you are in a blind alley and a maniac is running toward you with a baseball bat, where are you going to run?
Aside from the fact that the US deliberately precipitated this crisis, people here (pronouns we/us/our) presumably have some political control in Western governments. We are responsible for our governments' actions and have a duty to be critical of our governments when they misbehave. We have no responsibility, no duty and in fact no RIGHT to criticize Russia for acting in what a vast majority of Russians consider self-defense only 75 years after Russia lost 25+ million people in an existential struggle with a racist, ultranationalist, expansionist regime that invaded Russia with support from Banderistas who now control Ukraine.
You can blather on about Stalin and Gulags all you want. The US has its own atrocities against blacks, hispanics, native Americans and Asians that continued through WW 2, right into the '60s and have residual affects even today. We are anti-war because we are willing to criticize OUR OWN government. Our opinions about Putin and Russia are irrelevant. On the other hand, YOUR criticism of the Soviet Union and Stalin, in an attempt to smear Putin and in fact all Russians and Russian culture, contributes to the anti-Russia propaganda that fuels US provocations.
My comment wasn't about Putin or Stalin, it was about others and their opinion of Putin and Stalin and where that got them and will get them. Do you not see the irony of your retort? And until I can verify who and what you really are, the fact you claim you are criticizing your own government means nothing to me. You could be a Russian for all I know or in the least a non-American. For that matter, I will criticize anyone deserved of criticism and that includes Putin and Stalin every bit as much as Trump and Biden and Teddy Roosevelt or Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Yes, you criticized those you ASSUME are acolytes of Putin. You did it by hypocritically raising red herring irrelevancies about the evils of Stalin, Gulags and Communism and the foolishness of those who defend them. There's nothing "ironic" about pointing out your hypocrisy. Underlying it all is your ASSUMPTION that those critical of US policies are necessarily Putin puppets. You do not refute the substance of remarks, but attack the person. Yes, I'm a bot from St. Petersburg, but you still haven't refuted anything I've written.
Yes, you are free to criticize anyone you want. Nobody is denying your right to expose your TDS. That's what freedom and the 1st Amendment are all about. Others have the right to point out the horse manure you spread on the field of US interventionism. For example, neither Stephanie Brail (whose post you were answering) nor I expressed unbridled support for Putin, let alone Stalin, Gulags or Communism. We merely refrained from criticism. Your reference to "red herrings" is merely an attempt to discredit our persons rather than address the actual issue. And yes, your criticism of Russia's actions, even after avowing your own "anti-war" credentials, plays into the demonization of Putin and Russia. I have a right to say that such one-sided criticism contributes to the US Deep State agenda, as most accurately and capably represented by Joe Biden's dementia.
Fyi, unlike you, I was against the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as I was against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. You have stated here you supported the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and yet you're as smug now as you were then. Humble thyself.
From the beginning I screamed WHERE ARE THE PEACEMAKERS? Where is the diplomacy? The response from DC was shocking, yes, the failure to negotiate anything, then, to so swiftly create propaganda, was scandalous for certain. When the I STAND WITH UKRAINE movement went viral and psychotic, it sent my C-PTSD into a spin. But for 40+ I have been an anti-nuclear and peace activist, what else would one expect from me.
Humans are collectively getting more stupid and sociopathic. Remember when we used to think humans would become more enlightened and if properly informed they would act in their own self interest? You can smoke that pipe dream.
We’re on the same page Sandi. It’s very discouraging. I think the main problem is the type of education. No courses in critical thinking. No courses in propaganda. No courses in media control, No courses in either US invasions nor in the lessons learned. Because no lessons were learned?
I had a History teacher at the University I attended. We spent a week talking about how nearly all wars in history were preventable and why. That class really stuck with me. In 1975 I also took a USSR historical geography class, where I learned that the Cold War was melting swiftly, so when Reagan started the Cold War arms race all over again and nearly bankrupted the country, I was traumatized. Then, as a protester who also published a rag, I was swirling dizzy wonder where THF was the outrage? WTF happened to my generation? A old beau on Facebook, a fella who attended Berkeley and now lives in Ashland, said "they just waved a bunch of money at us and we took it." He asked me if I kept the promise we made together, and never had children." I say, "Hell yes, who in their right mind would bring children into this nightmare?"
I understand , our two are saying the same thing about having children. But they are glad they’ve had a chance at life, just despondent about changing it.
If you are not born how could you miss life? there is a whole pathological psychology about those who obsess about the unborn and want to control women's bodies.
The problem with this is that it is predicated on "if properly informed." Apparently the oligarchs read that and realized that the people had better not be properly informed. We have been the victims of a massive campaign of propaganda since the "excess of democracy" in the 70s.
Caitlin Johnstone has written several excellent articles on her website about this. Read "The Left Will Never Achieve Its Goals (Aims?) Until It Confronts the Establishment Propaganda." She wrote another article saying that we don't need to be put in prison if our minds are captured and locked up.
We don't know what our self-interest is any more if we can't think straight.
Consumer culture is always going to make us err on the side of decadence and greed. We are only reproducing Romans and royalty and aristocrats of old. If it is not sexy, it will not sell.
there are those if you really listen out there who do believe if the masses were informed properly they would not be unhinged wackos making up more deranged narratives, but that is never going to happen either. People love wars and mythology (lies). Peace would be boring for most.
We, as it, the collective zeitgeist WE, the NEW AGE "WE", the Age of Aquarius WE, the WE that attain enLIGHTenment, WE, which, never being a New Agey or optimistic much... in regards to human achievement... i never found too much to applaud. i was saying that in a satirical light.
I think the confusion comes from the meaning of the word "liberal." As Sandy Brockway means it, the traditional meaning, is "generous" and "giving."
"Neoliberal" is a corruption (pun intended) of the expression "laissez-faire" which means "leave it alone": leave the corporations alone to get on with their business. They substituted "liberal" (liberal towards businesses) because no one understands French any more and that's where the term "neo-liberal" comes from.
Where did I say neoliberalism? I made a satirical comment about how humans are hopeless and doomed. It is more like I was saying people were swept away by these other movements for decades WHILE neolibs were easily ushered in. Right now I recall Norman Mailers last autobio documentary, very sad. We are no different than the Romans.
I did not say they were the same thing, they are not, but I am depicting two different movements, each with their own weaknesses. New Agers think humans are evolving and becoming more enlightened. Others, believe if you just flood people with factoids they will magically know what is best for them. one or the other or both can be true all at once. One can embrace both, or some can just get lost in astrology and tarot cards.
The Marianne Williamson of today is not the same Williamson of 20-30 years ago, BTW. She is not the ultimate example of New Age. New Age is pretty broad. Maybe she is evolving, but it certainly not what is happening in my heavily NEW AGE community near Big Sur.
I recall a controversial magazine in 90s called NEW PERSPECTIVES. It blended guns, Illuminati myths, and David Icke sort of stuff. There is a huge New Age libertarian faction, some pagans heavily into war mythology and war gods.
It makes me sad to see people attributing all of the worst parts of humanity to "human nature." We seem to forget that qualities like altruism, generosity, and civic responsibility are "human nature" too.
It's certainly easy to become discouraged by the state of the human race today.
But I don't believe that we have a built-in drive to fail.
But they seem to be recessive genes, and the good die young! Humans have forever been known to foul their nests. In early tribes they scorched the earth with abandon and created many of the deserts where forests once stood. Trashing the planet, killing always animals, plants and each other. It is sad, sad for the few of us possess the "generous" spirit and hold on to false hope. If RussiaGate and Ukraine has taught us anything, it is how just how easily so many can lust for war and killing. I defer to Loren Eiseley here. In the next year or two, if nukes have not got us, they will be onto the Next Big Thing, and forget all about Ukraine.
Blessed are the war-mongers, for they shall realize war profits... Blessed are the corrupt politicians, for they shall have their palms greased... Blessed are the brainless mainstream media pundits spewing propaganda, for they shall be hired by the Ministry of Truth one day... Damned are the poor, the oppressed, the peoples of Earth the military-industrial complex seeks to profit from, for theirs is the luck to have to suffer Biden and his lot forever--unless we get the guillotines ready. Soon.
Because we've always known Biden is doing nothing. He's a puppet.
Why are you saying 'Biden the worst President' ?
When are you/we going to call a spade a spade?
Call out those who're running this show.
Home in on the real target.
Prime, inform and prime, the people and then let's use our democratic machinery to get the bastards out and a return to some kind of sanity.
This has been going on for more than two years now.
And all through it we have done nothing, generally speaking, except call for mass rallies and convoys and 'protests' and cry that 'someone should do something'.
Well it needs the REAL manipulators identified and then voter democratic processes to get at them, remove them, incarcerate them for the criminals they clearly are.
Personally I suspect Bush & Co and the continuation of the Bush Doctrine is what this has all been about. The first coup in Ukraine by US was under Bush 2004, the Orange Revolution. But, i think there might have been another under Clinton. So, i just dug this up, seems to suggest this is GW's project. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/09/ukra-s14.html?msclkid=6d7d9fb6ce6d11ec97ac984d456dbc87
Yep. You very well could have hit the nail on the head. So now we need that actual players. The actual people involved. Who drafts the legislation? Who drafts Biden's speeches, or attempted speeches?
Like this takes in reality a 'shadow cabinet', a bunch of top players that 'meet' (nowadays it could all be online - which is a security weakness, could catch them that) frequently and raise issues and plans and decide on implementation..
Like: identify the characters in 'GW & Co' and what roles they play.
That's where we want to be. We want them unmasked.
Our democratic machinery was stolen from us years ago. You really believe, still, that we can take that clunky, broken, corrupted machine and make it work for us?
Nothing was stolen. It's all still there. Simply unused.
there is not 'clunky, broken, corrupted machine' there's an unused machine. There's a guy sitting in his office in receipt of a good salary and all kinds of benefits and with virtually nothing to do except hang around with mates of the same ilk and consider propositions for increasing his own wealth.. And why so? Because he never hears from his constituency in any meaningful way - 99% of what he gets can be handled by his counter staff and the rest fobbed off with an excuse.
And why? Because 99% of his constituency isn't even aware of the rules of a debating society must less the complicated dance required to pass legislation. That's how much interest they have in the actual workings of government, social organisation, democracy.
Get in there and interact with him and things begin to change.
'can't vote our way out of this'. Then how would we 'get out of this' ?
Don't tell, I can guess: force of arms. Insurrection. Violence. Killing.
You want to kill and be killed in order fix something you can't even define.
For the definition IS that man sitting untroubled in his office.
And you reject it out of hand.
You reject him, his neglect, the voters neglect, the whole democratic system out of hand.
A) You're blaming the voters (the victims) for the corruption of our government and the electoral system. The 2016 election should have shown you how the election process has been taken over and diverted to the interests of the powerful. Many precincts returned results which didn't correspond to the exit polls, in such numbers that would have caused international observers to have declared the election null and void if it had taken place in the global South, instead of the United States.
Princeton University published a study some years ago that showed that what the 99% wants has 0% effect on the actions of Congress, while what the 1% wants has 99% effect on the actions of Congress. Of course, facts don't sway someone who has a predetermined mindset, so I'm sure that you will be able to come up with counter-arguments that will divert the cognitive dissonance that the facts, which challenge your comfortably-held beliefs, is going to affect you.
Get this: *they're not your friends.*
B) Violence is not *the only way* to choose to change this. That's a(nother) myth.
In fact, several authorities have shown that nonviolent civil resistance is much better for changing your own dysfunctional government, while violence only works to resist an invading foreign country.
If you're interested in educating yourself, I suggest watching How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary and reading From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by Dr Gene Sharp. He was a Harvard professor who spent his life studying nonviolent resistance.
Are you talking to me? For what you're saying doesn't seem to fit.
I'll attempt to point out that by definition the voters are to blame for everything that happens in a democracy.
But that is just an attempt - I see you've decided that :
"....so I'm sure that you will be able to come up with counter-arguments that will divert the cognitive dissonance that the facts, which challenge your comfortably-held beliefs, is going to affect you..."
which isn't exactly comprehensible English but I think can fairly be taken to mean that you assert anything I might say is nonsense.
I do agree that people deserve the government they get. I disagree that voting in this country will change that, nor do I agree that violence is the ONLY alternative.
In better English, it is an established psychological principle that a person who is deeply invested in a strongly held belief will suffer a painful state of mind, called cognitive dissonance, when they are faced with an incontrovertible fact which contradicts their settled belief.
They will do almost anything to stop the painful feelings. Some of the most popular tactics are
* attacking the messenger
* denial
* rationalization.
I was saying that my statements would cause you to suffer from cognitive dissonance and that you were most likely to resort to these or other tactics to continue to believe what you want to believe in denial of the evidence.
True, Biden is a marionette, but where does the buck stop in your view? And how does one get a more responsible executive if we never hold him to account?
You're asking me? I think the buck stops with us, the public. And I'm thinking Biden cannot be held to account because he's a puppet. But the puppet masters should be identified and held to account.
I think it is very, very important. That the correct persons be identified and that an accounting be held.
For I believe there's been and still is a pandemic of malfeasance in public office and its been accepted as the norm.
Its not our business to accept any such thing as the norm. That's our part of the 'social contract' we democracy.
'malfeasance' if often ill defined and poorly understood and hard to distinguish for us laypersons from misfeasance I guess.
No matter: the point of the whole thing is failure to perform according to your oath of office is a good way to look at it.
The higher the office the greater the responsibility to perform to higher standards.
Isn't it?
Isn't that why the higher the office the more ceremony and ritual and solemnity they bring to the proceedings? And the more respect we are supposed to have for the office holder?
That's fine. That side of it.
But then when they are left to behave in any way they like and we do nothing it all becomes a farce.
Which is what it has become.
I think we hold Biden to account by identifying the real actors and holding them to account and on the way identify all malfeasants and hold them to account.
According to Alfred Adler, finding the "cause" of a problem now is fruitless. It won't change anything. Calling for us to find a shadow figure (which is why they're shadowy!) is sending us down a rabbit's hole.
Why not just get rid of the lot of them and then maybe we can discover who's hiding in the shadows.
I can sort of appreciate your perspective, but the problem with your approach is that when you identify "the real actors" they respond by saying that they aren't the ones really in charge, and that the guy at the head of the org chart with the formal power to hire and fire is.
Just like in 'Yes Minister' if you ever saw that UK series? The 'power behind the throne' tries to remain hidden, hides behind the throne.
Yep, that'd be the way they'd try to work.
But through all the ages the truth has often come out about who is really to blame.
And it still happens today and perhaps even more so because we get stealthily taken smartphone pics, voice and video recording, we get hacked emails and leaked papers.
And we even have much that is clearly there on public record and we just ignore it, let it pass.
It's for us to clamour, to insist that the appropriate offices take action, isn't it?
Yeah, citizen activism and "stealthily taken smartphone pics", that's working great. Like Wikileaks. Good thing that the powers that be don't reflexively label anything that they don't like as "Russian propaganda".
Meaning wikileaks didn't work: no one took enough notice/cared enough to make anything happen and Julian Assange is heading for life imprisonment abandoned by justice, by the UK and Australia ?
And that 'the powers that be' do label things they don't like as Russian propaganda?
Well, we know. That's what we're talking about.
The point is that WE need to 'take enough notice/care enough' to make things happen and those features or paths or whatever you might call them ARE the avenues of preference and are handy tools: much better than posting agitated vicious abusive comments all over the web calling for instant insurrection, violence in the streets, rioting, civil war which is what so many seem to do. Isn't it?
This has been a long time coming , more than a decade. The sniffing around Ukraine began at least a decade ago, then regime change, implantation of the obligate puppet, the consequent puppeteering, the baby potatoes Russiagate fiasco, the very dubious Navalny and Skripals incidents. the flouting of Russia’s lines in the sand, and then the proxy war now.
No vote was ever taken on the proxy war, any more than there were public votes on Nam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Some democracy!
Not sure what’s scarier - that he still has 30% approval rating or that Kamala is a heartbeat away with even lower ratings. 81 million votes is a bigger farce than 14 days to slow the spread.
A president who brings on the apocalypse, the end of everything on this planet, is by definition the worst. And it's not like he's brilliant or anything: he's been playing his cards like a drunken gambling addict. But he will not have done it all on his own, were the worst outcome to befall us; the world is soft on Nazis and other fascists: that is the hard fact we refuse to acknowledge, and it is the key.
I was riding home in a car this morning when I read Caitlin's article and I started to wonder, what bumper-sticker-political slogan might we adapt here. What do you think?
This is a very good, well argued article. I'd like to add that, our fears of annihilation in nuclear war aside, people in eurasia deserve, as much as we do or anyone else does, the freedom to live their lives in safety and to feel that their friends, neighbors, families, and communities are adequately secure and provided for.
Good point, Tony. Or at least what he promised to the unwashed on the campaign trail. What he promised to the psychopathic Western elite in private is another matter entirely.
"Biden's refusal to attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine is the greatest scandal in American political history."
I would be the last one to question Scott Horton in his statement about Biden and “scandals”.
However, if one wanted to take this further, with a cast of hundreds of events competing for that prize, I would have to question his choice based of the well engineered fictional world of 9/11 leading to Afghanistan, Bush and his "shock and awe” in Iraq (for no reason at all), the deaths due to Nixon and Johnson and Co in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and the two unnecessary atomic bombs in Japan in 1945 designed to win a war, already won, the introduction to the world of things to come, US-style.
But Chile and the after effects of that outrage is a hard one to beat with so many competing for that prize but the winner being Kissinger by a large margin. Still a respected US hero figure.
Well, I am still going. Cuba and the US intrusions in that little country, still living in the 1960’s with not a lot of progress for 30 years thanks to US sanctions and devious deeds of mischief.
Let’s not identify all the Neocons of the Bush era, Colin Powell’s visit to the UN, the multi millions dead over decades through the inhumane process of sanctions, the list of public servants such as Albright, Clinton, Pompeo, Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Nixon and Bolton The list is endless. Yes, hard too believe but the US started with a George Washington. Remember?
Current day shame would be the pursuit of Julian Assange which could end with just one word from the current feeble-minded Biden.
Who has the time to list American crimes over 70 years but they make the centuries of British exploitation around the world read like a like a friendly travelogue.
But for sheer bloody-mindedness and international corruption, Israel and its dirty tricks history through bribery and corruption, .......exampled by the total control of the whole US Congress.....being the biggest success to date, the corruption that made all UN Resolutions passed for Palestinian justice since 1967 a collection of waste paper, the infiltration into western governments around the world while there in Dimona it sits waiting with 400+ nuclear warheads on hand (thanks to the covert cooperation of the USA again), and you can see the future, just waiting to happen…..and just around the corner.
Biden is a naive fool when compared to the long range plans of Israel. He is a willing part of their plans together with the BlackRocks and Vanguards, the controlling investor bosses owning half the world as well as all past and undoubtedly all future US politicians. The US system encourages such corruption.
This the main reason I voted against Biden in 2020 - I knew if he won we'd be at war with Russia probably before the end of his first term. Feckless faux-gressives running MSNBC have been stoking this conflict for years by convincing viewers Trump won with Russia's help.
I've read recently someone saying that both Biden and Pelosi are old enough to not care if they burn the world down on their way out. Whatever their reasoning, there is no excuse for fomenting nuclear war, even if Putin were a "HItler" as they paint him to be. Hate Trump all you want but he'd already be sitting down with Putin to "make a deal" - and even if he were Putin's bitch I'd rather have peace with Putin's bitch than nuclear fallout to deal with.
The anti-war left has been conveniently neutered by how all of this has been framed, BTW. In many ways, it's nefariously brilliant....if you want to see the world burn.
The real "anti-war left" in the US has always been minuscule. Many of the thousands who protested against the pending Iraq invasion in 2003 were simply partisan Democrats. That's why they melted away while Obama surged in Afghanistan, stirred up trouble in Syria, attacked Libya, backed the Saudis in Yemen and orchestrated the Maidan coup that eventually resulted in this crisis.
CODEPINK and Medea troops were the only ones that stayed vigilant, and people like me, who for 12 plus years, then OWS, continued to do what we could. I was not going to let Obama fool me twice!
Obama didn't fool me the first time. I was aware of his Wall Street funding and voted for Cynthia McKinney, but I did continue to vote for other Democrats. But I'm done with that. At least GOP bylaws allowed an outsider to be nominated. Sanders didn't have a chance, and given what he's said since about war, I wouldn't vote for him anyway.
I was just doing some flashback on that year. Kucinich and Gravel... now they were worthy candidates. Gravel gave a now famous attack on Obama and Hillary on the platform on primary debates, had I heard that then, it would have been a huge red flag. It was a magic moment. He was a rare bird. There is now a Gravel Institute, great story behind it. I was in LA when a debate downtown, beteen Hillary and Obama, and CodePink was going to be there to protest, so I found my way there. It is all very foggy. But, not doubt along the same lines Gravel condemned Hillary and Obama.
Not sure of your views on the "C19 Narrative" but as a Vermonter Bernie urges us all to comply. Highly disappointing on both counts!
I know. Sad, even shocking. But, he started a groundswell, we can only build on it now that he abandoned us. Now he is just a Per Issue sketchy guy.
My dad died 8/07, mom 4/08, while dealing with psychopathic siblings. though i had friends who participated in O's campaign, and dragged me into some of it, looking back, it seems what most defined him was the projections from conservatives that he was this far left radical. Which reminds me, it was shocking and horrifying to learn Wm Barber is full I STAND WITH UKRAINE. Shocking. Dumbfounding.
My dad, then my mom died soon after in 2008, anyone could have fooled me as I had 2.5 years of hell from my psychopathic lying greedy siblings which ended me in hospital for 8 days nearly dead from Swine Flu in 2010.
By 2011 I participated in OWS and learned who Chris Hedges was. Turns out Swine left me with emphysema and enlarged ventricle. Swine, it seems, was another one of Obama's failures as much later, after the data was calculated, it turns out it was far more deadly and damaging than the public was led on to believe.
As for 9/11, the flood of conspiracy theories also syphoned off any legitimate protests we might have gathered around. I watched closely. I could easily shoot holes through most of the narratives. At times I began to think that psyops were creating these fanciful story lines, and some mixed with others even if they did not match or make sense. But, we still stood out regularly, WOMEN IN BLACK, and wondered if GW & Co would get away with their real crimes.
It was stunning, most of these storytellers did not know who Barbara Olson was or the PNAC,. It really helped keep the focus off of Saudi Arabia, and made it impossible to get the messages from RAWA any air time. In fact, none of these fanatics even know who RAWA is. Sigh. So how do you build a coalition of activists when so many prefer to flee to a fantastical fiction while a major crisis emerges when our leaders lie to us? GW & Co were kleptocrats and psychopaths, and they had written a Mein Kampf for everyone to read, it was in black and white. Many years later one of the main founders of that major truth 9/11 group that tried to mash every 9/11 spin into one toilet bowl of vomit, publicly apologized, acknowledging it was a disservice and all BS. There was a time where protesting and creating a united front against our corporate kleptocrats actually required some level of accuracy and accountability, but not anymore.
So you believe the official 9/11 narrative? You believe Barbara Olson made that call from the plane that day? The West saw how successful Putin's apartment bombings were to his overall consolidation of power and they said, "you know, we can do it better and bigger" and they did. The Putin apartment bombings were junior varsity compared to 9/11.
Sorry, I can blow holes through most of the 9/11 fantasies, while I sat on solid ground, I just watched the psychosis rule while we tried to organize a national peace anti-war campaign. The conspiracy business was booming big time. I think some were psyops throwing monkey wrenches. Some retired CIA guy came out and gave a claim this was the case. I totally cut my ties with Ruppert, but that was coming regardless. I undercovered he suffered psychosis by end of 20th c.
We learned through RAWA right after 9/11 in their presentation to congress and writings, that Osama was in Pakistan. Where were the conspiracy folks then? Nowhere to be found. Very important facts did not interest them, I discovered.
The hijacking was clearly blowback from our Cold War era. Plain and simple. But it seems Americans wanted to avoid such a stark realization so they invented another story. 9/11 did not conform to the PNAC Mein Kampf whatsoever, and most certainly the fact that that Osama and other hijackers were Saudis was way way problematic for Bush, this was more than clear. Remember when they scuttled the bin Laden family out of USA ASAP following the incident?
I can think of a lot better provocations to rig if you want to take down Iraq or Afghanistan! LMAO. Read the PNAC game plan. Because I watched every detail closely, had 3 monitors going during the first week, saw live footage from real videographers, analyzed the first conspiracies to hit the floor within days and knew them to be complete lies, not even good ones. I became very vigilant about claims and checked my sources closely.
Easily, most conspiracy generators were ignoring solid facts they did not like in favor of fantasies. If the psyops were helping, I am sure they were laughing their asses off, because the mass delusionals helped to bring down any credible protest front. The war machine is pretty much doing this right in our faces and most time with American approval. If Ukraine is not teaching us this lesson, not sure what will.
Sadly, Barbara Olson truly was in that jet that hit the Pentagon, she was not found later in the Bahamas partying on millions of dollars as some of the nut jobs said. I was no fan of her husband, but that poor man suffered the worst harassment. It is like the Seth Rich story, his family has undergone the worst harassment from unhinged rude thoughtless fanatics.
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.binladen.denial/
Osama denied being behind 9/11. Any terrorist worth his/her salt would have IMMEDIATELY claimed 9/11 as their own work and yet the most renowned of all terrorists IMMEDIATELY repudiated it.
It's nothing like the Seth Rich story. I don't believe the Seth Rich bull. I do believe 9/11 was something much more than the official narrative. What that is, well, that's where the creeps enter the picture who seek to obfuscate and obscure with all manner of who-dun-its and don't think that obfuscation isn't purposeful.
That being said, once again, Barbara Olson did not make any call to Ted Olson from the plane that day. The U.S. government’s Moussaoui trial evidence admitted that Barbara Olson never called her husband at the Department of Justice. This shattered the long-standing fabrication of her calls blaming hijackers with box-cutters, and branded the (then) U.S. Solicitor-General Theodore Olson both a liar (claiming they were collect calls from a seat back phone after first claiming they were cellphone calls ) and the dupe of forged phone calls, and revealed the hand of high-level perpetrators manipulating the 9/11 events.
What is so important about if Barbara was on that plane or not, or if she used a fone. I did a little searching, and found out that it was verified that that flight at that time had seat back fones for passengers. So what. Her plane went into the Pentagon. She died. Though some guy who had made a huge industry from 9/11 ended her story in Bahamas where she was paid millions and now lived in exile with a name change. Bravo.
I do recall that very early pronouncement.
In fact, it does not matter if he was behind it or the leader, does it? I actually recall sensing there were others more involved, and i think some writing has been done on that. I could care less. Means ZERO. That is not the part of the story I am focused on. You are derailing.
He very well could have been a highly recessive element within that operation. He could be lying. He was not dying of Kidney failure either. What misinformationalist made that one up? He was watching porn and doing fine surrounded by women when they shot him. But, RAWA did state to Congress, Bush, and others, they knew where he was in Pakistan. Now, do you know who RAWA is? Do you remotely know why they were significant?
That all does not mean doodley. "Saudis taking over passenger planes." Now, read it five times. Tell me what you see. Saudis taking over passenger jets and steering them into...." Do you see what is wrong with that and why? Why the F would the PNAC and GW & Co want Saudis in their script, and have to sneak the Bin Laden family out of the country ASAP who were visiting them? Wrong on all counts.
Yes, there is still outstanding questions, but this notion that the PNAC orchestrated Saudis to hijack jets, or that there really were not jets, or that this, or that. I tired so much from people needed attention, and making wild claims, only to find out it was a ludicrous deadend. In meantime, IMO, they were only helping GW convince people we needed to invade Iraq. Good job. Seriously, Scott Ritter needed our help, but this huge 9/11 industry was just to busy making up stories about how GW hired Saudis to blow up Pentagon and the Towers, and send Barbara Olson into the Pentagon, where we had to hear that never happened, no jet hit the Pentagon. FFS. Who could listen to that shite.
So true, if Trump was in office and pursuing identical policy the streets would be on fire.
Many if not most who protested in 1969 were opposed to the draft and 50,000+ dead GIs. Many boomers who protested in 1969 don't even write an anti-war comment today, and went along with the Russiagate hoax for several years.
Also, many protesting had college deferments and the ones that got drafted were overwhelmingly poor and minorities. They were the Deplorables of the day.
Yep, it wasn't 'till much later that I learned they were referred to as "cannon fodder" in earlier wars. Or my term; 'ground beef'. Meat for the imperialist grinder. (I was a professional cook my entire career.)
This is in keeping with much of what Dworkin wrote about this abandonment of anti-war sentiments that voted in Reagan at the same time a backlash against women occured.
Some people do not know that Bill Maher has often said he supported the Nam war and thought it was a "necessary war". on another note, how about the war mongers who say we must use Ukraine as an example to the Chinese?
I didn't see Reagan's election as a repudiation of anti-war sentiment, but Americans were no longer being killed so attention shifted to the economy and Carter's failed Presidency. A lot of people disliked Reagan's Nicaragua policies, but not enough to demonstrate against them.
Well, that is your serious blindness. Reagan sold us down the river in so many ways, then the Bushes.
I was 15 in 1969 and haven't forgot about the 'Nam and the dead protesters that died protesting /fighting against that Imperialist idiocy. Nietzsche's eternal recurrence recurrence in full bloom today. 53 years and 'nuthin's' changed. Except!, that I learned to write about it. Peace
Congratulations on being one of "we happy few." Of course, we're not Brits preparing to slaughter French knights, but the deaths of four at Kent State and two more a few days later at Jackson State remind us this is a life and death struggle. I'm not so sure nuthin's changed. Arguably, those six fatalities were not planned in advance, but the persecution of Julian Assange undoubtedly is, and the establishment of a "Disinformation Governance Board" is an indication of an intent to expand that precedent to others.
Peace to you as well, and welcome to our tiny "band of brothers."
With a few swift shots from 1-2 of FBI CI's, and the trigger happy National Guard , Nixon got his wish. Effectively, no more anti-war protests. Nixon got his later courtesy of the CIA, it WAS intentional. If there is an evil it is them and their ilk. Peace
I do not think he was referring to the 60s, but after Nam withdrawal we moved on to Reagan in some sort of blowback from males, who overwhelmingly voted for him as he promised to ramp up another Cold War. Dworkin had a very interesting take on this in her book LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE
Wasn't the "blowback from males" caused by the Democratic candidate running with a woman for Vice President?
Jimmy Carter and Mondale ran for POTUS in 1980. Even if it had been a woman VP, it would only qualify as a trigger, not the actual cause. Mondale would later try to capitalize on the strong reaction posed to Reagan's anti-choice positions as well as arms race. He was lackluster, but Geraldine Ferraro had some spunk.
I couldn't remember Mondale's name, and I live in Minnesota! Had a senior moment.
We were 8 years from the end of the Vietnam war. That was 8 years for men to learn they hated feminism and not longer needed women to stay out of an unpopular war. We also seem to sink into a huge porn culture during that time, filled with lots of misogyny and big money.
it is hard to follow these nested threads with my bad eyes and dyslexia. yes, he did put that in there, i must have skipped that part. nonetheless, as very long time activist, just wow, *crickets* since Nam.
in the end, McCarthy won. Capitalism is the victor.
Well, we'd been to many ginormous protests in '68-'73 and then again in 2000 & 2003 (where Chelsea Clinton accused us of TREASON and suggested ignoring Posse-Commitatus restrictions, so we could be bayoneted and mowed down by 70 depleted uranium shells a second in Union Park for her mom's amusement? We had no say, then and nobody even SEES us being clubbed, gassed & tased, since Occupy & BLM!
The corporate media staged a blackout of reporting on anti-war protests after the 70s. Yes, there were huge protests around the country but they might as well not have happened, since no one knows about them.
In the rag I created in early 80s, and protests at major nuke sites and about central america, etc. i can say for certain, we got no attention. The Vandenberg one got a large page in one of our paper as Wieinberg was putting on a false story about the Minuteman launch. Long story.
I'd worked at the steel mill, used in the end of Terminator II the day after 22K "Occupy protesters" were kettled & attacked by 36 mounted NYPD in Times Square, and the riot gates smashed by a couple dozen others on Honda Goldwings. About 1/5 of the pretty pissed off crowd were theater-goers, who gleefully joined in. The pretty damn lefty & hep Chicano workers in Fontana had Amy Goodman on and there was NOTHING. They thought I'd made it up, until her recap the following day (she'd been in front of the induction center. Back THEN, we loved her!) Back THEN, C&L, The Wonkette, MoJo, even fucking reactionary Kos finally covered it. But the single USMC Sgt fighting the Israeli trained cops, the 700 arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, etc. NONE was carried by Comcast!
I was a Bernie since 2015. Some fellow Berners back then would say Hillary would start a war with Russia. It took some time for that to sink in, but when she blamed the election results on Putin, these matters started to fall in place, and are still painting out the landscape. Finally, I had to come to realization HRC really is a psychopath.
She showed that very early. Her first political job with Goldwater bespeaks her attraction for his campaign to nuke the peasants of Nam.
Considering she is a conservative at heart given she was an acolytic Goldwater Girl, it boggles the mind conservatives do not love her and instead rebuke her at every turn and equally it boggles the mind Liberals embraced her and still do to this day.
I remember a campaign button that said ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ and in background was a mushroom cloud. Hillary has McCarthyism written all over her. I wish someone would close her shop.
She leaves the WH broke but carts off WH furniture, and with Bill is now worth $120 million. From the sham contract/ bribe known as a lecture fee. Her bored stiff audiences e.g Goldman for $250k, must have gotten something from her but it sure wasn’t in the lecture, by all accounts. Tony Blair pulled the same scam.
and WTF did she do to the women who were raped and abused by Bill?
Exactly. And how about that photo where she and Bill are yucking it up with the future Rapist-In-Chief Donald Trump? Surely you have seen that famous photo, no?
Exactly. And how about this photo where she and Bill are yucking it up with the fellow future Rapist-In-Chief Donald Trump.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/11/06/magazine/06clintontrump1/06clintontrump1-articleLarge.jpg
A 24 carat humbug to be sure. Watching the hagiographic homage to Albright was sickening. “ there’s a special place in hell….”
Goldman did not pay HRC to talk.
They paid her to listen.
Agree, and to guarantee their interests.
You folks might want to listen to and/or Read Putin's 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference. Look at John McCain and Joe Lieberman in the front row scoffing. Our leaders want to kill us. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Putin-has-been-warning-the-by-John-Zwiebel-Increasing-The-Risk-Of-Nuclear-War_John-McCain_Mccain-the-liar_Nuclear-War-220507-439.html
it is an OPINION piece, but i am shocked they would give such a rabid war monger such space.
What are you talking about? It is Putin giving a speech.
Every speech or writing I've seen from Putin has been well-reasoned and well-written.
THANK you! I wish some people could step back from cartoons, video games and Neocon TV propaganda gavaged us since birth? This video epitomizes our oilgarchic duopoly (almost like any acknowledgement we'd sold Russian & Ukranian oligarchs Iraqi fields & infrastructure, we're now buying & hiding refining, stateside?)
https://mobile.twitter.com/sethcropsey
Good point.
Biden and Pelosi and Mitch, all part of the “greatest generation” who are NOT boomers (boomers have unjustifiably been blamed for the crimes of the “greatest generation”) have fucked us all left, right, and center.
This is why I only vote for the Socialist Equality Party and have done since 2000. Biden and Pelosi are too old to be in the positions they are in, since they have neither wisdom (which older people are supposed to have), nor sense. The Democrats are just as much a war party as the Republicans and all of the imperialists are rotten to the core.
The duopoly is the WAR PARTY, that is the nickname for both parties, as long as i can remember. My first step out was 1980. At Studs Terkel's recommendation at a rally where Barry Commoner spoke, I vote for Commoner.
In PA, Commoner ran as Consumer Party and we actually got several good candidates' careers up & running in Pgh & Philly. Now, Democrats' LLC is contractually obliged to CRUSH anything, even remotely Democratic in "our party." Democrat & Unions voted in Reagan, to "put the N-----s in our place!" Took reactionary blue collar voters 40yrs to figure out just who THEY were? Hippies gentrified Black "streetcar suburbs" as white flight suburban squalor, death 'o disparity deplorables lost homes, W4 jobs, retirement, lives to fentanyl. Opioids idde religion ob de proletariat!
I'd add that beyond just the framing, a lot of the Left has been censored in such an unprecendented way that their voices are not being heard. We've not seen this level of censorship since WWI and it may be even worse now than then.
All dissenting voices are being censored, left, right or other.
We have a state sanctioned manufactured synthetic left that is now been rendered impotent, controlled opposition, faux or regressive Left as some have called it. McCarthyism insured this from the beginning. The GOP has shaped our left, our perception of what is left.
There are no actual left people in US politics on a national level, since maybe Nixon??!! Fascism has blood dripping from its unruly fangs these days along with women's bodies.
McCarthyism was nail in the coffin. As a very old union organizing friend of mine said about his experience in the 30s, "If Americans did not learn from the Depression, they will never learn." He said that back in the 80s. Look what they did to Henry Wallace even before McCarthy and Cohn. Hard to believe such despicable people could rule the country. It was alike a coup. Often I wonder, where was Ike?
I think Ike was tired after the war. He "allowed" the MIC to become the imperial monster that it is today. Truman's biggest mistake after the A-bomb was to allow the OSS to morph into the CIA. Industrialists will end up destroying the world and there's nothing we lowly average citizens can do but watch it all collapse into a heap of toxic waste and decay. Soon too I believe, that is if we're not all vaporized by the psychopaths.
can i cut and paste that?
Remember all those great epic movies and songs from 60s and early 70s? Speaking of vaporizing.
Both Killary Clinton and Creepy Joementia are tools of the British Empire most blatantly manifested by sponsorship from the Commonwealth Press Union's American franchise, The Council on Foreign Relations. They, freemasonry, and the Pilgrim Society and Skull and Bones lead the campaign. Killary was too dirty, so the presidency went to creepy Joe, managed by Dominion vote fraud courtesy of the British and Lord Mark Mallach Brown.
Killing Ukranian, Russian & allied combatants AND tens-of-thousands more trapped civilians, is "worth it" to bail-out kleptocrats' oilgarch's fracked gas/ oil & bitumen Ponzi scheme! There's a special place in hell for BernieBro RooskiBot BLM & Antifa who DARE protest Biden, Kerry, Nancy & Mitt's family cashing-in on any war that stops cleaner Nord Stream II gas competing with our fracking 1.9 million new leaky, soon to be abandoned, unpluggable methane & ethane wells, spewing lethal, radium flavored fracking brine as exponential AGW unleashes the clathrate gun Kraken on us all?
I agree with you about Biden, but you may be too optimistic about Trump. Despite the rhetoric, he did some things to escalate this on the economic front (e.g., sanctions over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline).
Agree. No such thing as the "lesser" of two evils. You is or you ain't.
Trump said three things while campaigning in 2016 that violated my red lines, and it had nothing to do with grabbing pussy. While it's true that neocons and militarists violated his orders, he appointed them and could have fired them. I kept hoping he would redeem himself, but he didn't. The assassination of Suleimani, on a peace mission brokered by the US itself, was beyond the pale, and the recognition of some guy as President of Venezuela was an unforced error as were several subsequent coup and assassination attempts against Maduro.
I've voted 3rd party for President in 7 or 8 of the last Presidential elections. I'll be tempted to vote for Trump if he runs in 2024, since I think he would have kept the timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan he negotiated, which would have gone more smoothly. Plus, he endorsed an outspoken anti-war candidate in Ohio (JD Vance) even though Vance had been critical of him years ago. But my main motivation would be disgust with the Democrats and a desire to punish them. Anger and vengeance are not good reasons, so I'll probably vote 3rd party again.
I'm waffling between repub and 3rd party, too. I respect the repubs for getting the Vax mandates shot down and I care about 2A, but otherwise I'm not right wing in principle. I just find the dnc both terrifying and disgusting.
After writing this, I found out Vance spoke in favor of invading Mexico to clean out the cartels. WTF. So if I were currently living in the state where I was born, I could not in good conscience vote for Vance. It would be 3rd party, write-in or under-vote. No way would I vote for the Democrat.
I'm anti-war. I'm against the war in Ukraine. I'm against Western meddling in Ukraine and I'm against Russian meddling and against Russia's invasion. It's a very rare and unpopular position because apparently you must either be for the West or you must be for Putin and Russia, but you cannot be for neither.
You have chosen to be for Putin's Russia in your opposition to Biden but I fail to see how that is anti-war. Sure, The West has been stoking this for years but Putin has been playing his part too and he took the bait and invaded Ukraine. He is as much responsible for the current predicament as is the West and the Biden administration more specifically.
By any standard, Donald Trump was the worst POTUS ever. Putin and his Western "bitches" are not the answer to NeoLiberalism. Quite the contrary. I can't help but think of all the fool American Communists so enthrall with Stalin and the Soviet Union they moved there in the 30s only to be ultimately be sent to the Gulag in several years after helping build the Soviet's industrial might. There is a lesson in that — a lesson apparently never learned because the same mistake is being repeated today. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
You seem not to understand that Russia is not "meddling" in Mexico, directly on US borders. The US gave Russia no choice. It insisted on maintaining the option of NATO membership for Ukraine, where nuclear missiles could be installed less than 5 min. from Moscow. When you are in a blind alley and a maniac is running toward you with a baseball bat, where are you going to run?
Aside from the fact that the US deliberately precipitated this crisis, people here (pronouns we/us/our) presumably have some political control in Western governments. We are responsible for our governments' actions and have a duty to be critical of our governments when they misbehave. We have no responsibility, no duty and in fact no RIGHT to criticize Russia for acting in what a vast majority of Russians consider self-defense only 75 years after Russia lost 25+ million people in an existential struggle with a racist, ultranationalist, expansionist regime that invaded Russia with support from Banderistas who now control Ukraine.
You can blather on about Stalin and Gulags all you want. The US has its own atrocities against blacks, hispanics, native Americans and Asians that continued through WW 2, right into the '60s and have residual affects even today. We are anti-war because we are willing to criticize OUR OWN government. Our opinions about Putin and Russia are irrelevant. On the other hand, YOUR criticism of the Soviet Union and Stalin, in an attempt to smear Putin and in fact all Russians and Russian culture, contributes to the anti-Russia propaganda that fuels US provocations.
My comment wasn't about Putin or Stalin, it was about others and their opinion of Putin and Stalin and where that got them and will get them. Do you not see the irony of your retort? And until I can verify who and what you really are, the fact you claim you are criticizing your own government means nothing to me. You could be a Russian for all I know or in the least a non-American. For that matter, I will criticize anyone deserved of criticism and that includes Putin and Stalin every bit as much as Trump and Biden and Teddy Roosevelt or Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Yes, you criticized those you ASSUME are acolytes of Putin. You did it by hypocritically raising red herring irrelevancies about the evils of Stalin, Gulags and Communism and the foolishness of those who defend them. There's nothing "ironic" about pointing out your hypocrisy. Underlying it all is your ASSUMPTION that those critical of US policies are necessarily Putin puppets. You do not refute the substance of remarks, but attack the person. Yes, I'm a bot from St. Petersburg, but you still haven't refuted anything I've written.
Yes, you are free to criticize anyone you want. Nobody is denying your right to expose your TDS. That's what freedom and the 1st Amendment are all about. Others have the right to point out the horse manure you spread on the field of US interventionism. For example, neither Stephanie Brail (whose post you were answering) nor I expressed unbridled support for Putin, let alone Stalin, Gulags or Communism. We merely refrained from criticism. Your reference to "red herrings" is merely an attempt to discredit our persons rather than address the actual issue. And yes, your criticism of Russia's actions, even after avowing your own "anti-war" credentials, plays into the demonization of Putin and Russia. I have a right to say that such one-sided criticism contributes to the US Deep State agenda, as most accurately and capably represented by Joe Biden's dementia.
Fyi, unlike you, I was against the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan as I was against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. You have stated here you supported the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and yet you're as smug now as you were then. Humble thyself.
I demonize tyranny anywhere because that's all tyranny deserves.
But not Joe Biden and those surrounding him.
From the beginning I screamed WHERE ARE THE PEACEMAKERS? Where is the diplomacy? The response from DC was shocking, yes, the failure to negotiate anything, then, to so swiftly create propaganda, was scandalous for certain. When the I STAND WITH UKRAINE movement went viral and psychotic, it sent my C-PTSD into a spin. But for 40+ I have been an anti-nuclear and peace activist, what else would one expect from me.
Humans are collectively getting more stupid and sociopathic. Remember when we used to think humans would become more enlightened and if properly informed they would act in their own self interest? You can smoke that pipe dream.
We’re on the same page Sandi. It’s very discouraging. I think the main problem is the type of education. No courses in critical thinking. No courses in propaganda. No courses in media control, No courses in either US invasions nor in the lessons learned. Because no lessons were learned?
Crime pays redux.
I had a History teacher at the University I attended. We spent a week talking about how nearly all wars in history were preventable and why. That class really stuck with me. In 1975 I also took a USSR historical geography class, where I learned that the Cold War was melting swiftly, so when Reagan started the Cold War arms race all over again and nearly bankrupted the country, I was traumatized. Then, as a protester who also published a rag, I was swirling dizzy wonder where THF was the outrage? WTF happened to my generation? A old beau on Facebook, a fella who attended Berkeley and now lives in Ashland, said "they just waved a bunch of money at us and we took it." He asked me if I kept the promise we made together, and never had children." I say, "Hell yes, who in their right mind would bring children into this nightmare?"
I understand , our two are saying the same thing about having children. But they are glad they’ve had a chance at life, just despondent about changing it.
If you are not born how could you miss life? there is a whole pathological psychology about those who obsess about the unborn and want to control women's bodies.
Just reporting their reply, not judging it. I couldn’t be objective anyway.
The problem with this is that it is predicated on "if properly informed." Apparently the oligarchs read that and realized that the people had better not be properly informed. We have been the victims of a massive campaign of propaganda since the "excess of democracy" in the 70s.
Caitlin Johnstone has written several excellent articles on her website about this. Read "The Left Will Never Achieve Its Goals (Aims?) Until It Confronts the Establishment Propaganda." She wrote another article saying that we don't need to be put in prison if our minds are captured and locked up.
We don't know what our self-interest is any more if we can't think straight.
Consumer culture is always going to make us err on the side of decadence and greed. We are only reproducing Romans and royalty and aristocrats of old. If it is not sexy, it will not sell.
there are those if you really listen out there who do believe if the masses were informed properly they would not be unhinged wackos making up more deranged narratives, but that is never going to happen either. People love wars and mythology (lies). Peace would be boring for most.
We, as it, the collective zeitgeist WE, the NEW AGE "WE", the Age of Aquarius WE, the WE that attain enLIGHTenment, WE, which, never being a New Agey or optimistic much... in regards to human achievement... i never found too much to applaud. i was saying that in a satirical light.
I think the confusion comes from the meaning of the word "liberal." As Sandy Brockway means it, the traditional meaning, is "generous" and "giving."
"Neoliberal" is a corruption (pun intended) of the expression "laissez-faire" which means "leave it alone": leave the corporations alone to get on with their business. They substituted "liberal" (liberal towards businesses) because no one understands French any more and that's where the term "neo-liberal" comes from.
Where did I say neoliberalism? I made a satirical comment about how humans are hopeless and doomed. It is more like I was saying people were swept away by these other movements for decades WHILE neolibs were easily ushered in. Right now I recall Norman Mailers last autobio documentary, very sad. We are no different than the Romans.
I did not say they were the same thing, they are not, but I am depicting two different movements, each with their own weaknesses. New Agers think humans are evolving and becoming more enlightened. Others, believe if you just flood people with factoids they will magically know what is best for them. one or the other or both can be true all at once. One can embrace both, or some can just get lost in astrology and tarot cards.
The Marianne Williamson of today is not the same Williamson of 20-30 years ago, BTW. She is not the ultimate example of New Age. New Age is pretty broad. Maybe she is evolving, but it certainly not what is happening in my heavily NEW AGE community near Big Sur.
I recall a controversial magazine in 90s called NEW PERSPECTIVES. It blended guns, Illuminati myths, and David Icke sort of stuff. There is a huge New Age libertarian faction, some pagans heavily into war mythology and war gods.
It makes me sad to see people attributing all of the worst parts of humanity to "human nature." We seem to forget that qualities like altruism, generosity, and civic responsibility are "human nature" too.
It's certainly easy to become discouraged by the state of the human race today.
But I don't believe that we have a built-in drive to fail.
Hope would be a luxury for me at this time. Saw this video a couple years back, and it summed it up for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU
But they seem to be recessive genes, and the good die young! Humans have forever been known to foul their nests. In early tribes they scorched the earth with abandon and created many of the deserts where forests once stood. Trashing the planet, killing always animals, plants and each other. It is sad, sad for the few of us possess the "generous" spirit and hold on to false hope. If RussiaGate and Ukraine has taught us anything, it is how just how easily so many can lust for war and killing. I defer to Loren Eiseley here. In the next year or two, if nukes have not got us, they will be onto the Next Big Thing, and forget all about Ukraine.
Blessed are the war-mongers, for they shall realize war profits... Blessed are the corrupt politicians, for they shall have their palms greased... Blessed are the brainless mainstream media pundits spewing propaganda, for they shall be hired by the Ministry of Truth one day... Damned are the poor, the oppressed, the peoples of Earth the military-industrial complex seeks to profit from, for theirs is the luck to have to suffer Biden and his lot forever--unless we get the guillotines ready. Soon.
Watch How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary and read From Dictatorship to Democracy the book by Dr Gene Sharp.
Matthew 7:23
Well that makes us the worst public in history.
From the common voter to our top 'pundits'.
Doesn't it?
Because we've always known Biden is doing nothing. He's a puppet.
Why are you saying 'Biden the worst President' ?
When are you/we going to call a spade a spade?
Call out those who're running this show.
Home in on the real target.
Prime, inform and prime, the people and then let's use our democratic machinery to get the bastards out and a return to some kind of sanity.
This has been going on for more than two years now.
And all through it we have done nothing, generally speaking, except call for mass rallies and convoys and 'protests' and cry that 'someone should do something'.
Well it needs the REAL manipulators identified and then voter democratic processes to get at them, remove them, incarcerate them for the criminals they clearly are.
Did you just ask for us to vote “them” out?
Do you not realize both parties are the twin cheeks of the same coin/ass?
Sweet Jesus if voting worked the Green party would have won decades ago and the Socialist party would at least have been on the ballot.
Independents are in the lead now, bigger than both parties. It has now come to this.
https://news.yahoo.com/nearly-60-per-cent-us-163617921.html?msclkid=ecd0b5d7ce7211ec9cf04f0c346744e1
Personally I suspect Bush & Co and the continuation of the Bush Doctrine is what this has all been about. The first coup in Ukraine by US was under Bush 2004, the Orange Revolution. But, i think there might have been another under Clinton. So, i just dug this up, seems to suggest this is GW's project. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/09/ukra-s14.html?msclkid=6d7d9fb6ce6d11ec97ac984d456dbc87
and
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/11/ukra-n30.html?msclkid=6d7e5d61ce6d11ec8fd0b88a043b895b
Not tell me that GW & Co is not the Oz behind the curtain?
Yep. You very well could have hit the nail on the head. So now we need that actual players. The actual people involved. Who drafts the legislation? Who drafts Biden's speeches, or attempted speeches?
Like this takes in reality a 'shadow cabinet', a bunch of top players that 'meet' (nowadays it could all be online - which is a security weakness, could catch them that) frequently and raise issues and plans and decide on implementation..
Like: identify the characters in 'GW & Co' and what roles they play.
That's where we want to be. We want them unmasked.
Well, we cannot blame it on Larry Summers any more!
Our democratic machinery was stolen from us years ago. You really believe, still, that we can take that clunky, broken, corrupted machine and make it work for us?
We can't vote our way out of this.
Nothing was stolen. It's all still there. Simply unused.
there is not 'clunky, broken, corrupted machine' there's an unused machine. There's a guy sitting in his office in receipt of a good salary and all kinds of benefits and with virtually nothing to do except hang around with mates of the same ilk and consider propositions for increasing his own wealth.. And why so? Because he never hears from his constituency in any meaningful way - 99% of what he gets can be handled by his counter staff and the rest fobbed off with an excuse.
And why? Because 99% of his constituency isn't even aware of the rules of a debating society must less the complicated dance required to pass legislation. That's how much interest they have in the actual workings of government, social organisation, democracy.
Get in there and interact with him and things begin to change.
'can't vote our way out of this'. Then how would we 'get out of this' ?
Don't tell, I can guess: force of arms. Insurrection. Violence. Killing.
You want to kill and be killed in order fix something you can't even define.
For the definition IS that man sitting untroubled in his office.
And you reject it out of hand.
You reject him, his neglect, the voters neglect, the whole democratic system out of hand.
With nothing to replace it but violence.
I really don't think that's the way to go.
A) You're blaming the voters (the victims) for the corruption of our government and the electoral system. The 2016 election should have shown you how the election process has been taken over and diverted to the interests of the powerful. Many precincts returned results which didn't correspond to the exit polls, in such numbers that would have caused international observers to have declared the election null and void if it had taken place in the global South, instead of the United States.
Princeton University published a study some years ago that showed that what the 99% wants has 0% effect on the actions of Congress, while what the 1% wants has 99% effect on the actions of Congress. Of course, facts don't sway someone who has a predetermined mindset, so I'm sure that you will be able to come up with counter-arguments that will divert the cognitive dissonance that the facts, which challenge your comfortably-held beliefs, is going to affect you.
Get this: *they're not your friends.*
B) Violence is not *the only way* to choose to change this. That's a(nother) myth.
In fact, several authorities have shown that nonviolent civil resistance is much better for changing your own dysfunctional government, while violence only works to resist an invading foreign country.
If you're interested in educating yourself, I suggest watching How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary and reading From Dictatorship to Democracy, the book by Dr Gene Sharp. He was a Harvard professor who spent his life studying nonviolent resistance.
Are you talking to me? For what you're saying doesn't seem to fit.
I'll attempt to point out that by definition the voters are to blame for everything that happens in a democracy.
But that is just an attempt - I see you've decided that :
"....so I'm sure that you will be able to come up with counter-arguments that will divert the cognitive dissonance that the facts, which challenge your comfortably-held beliefs, is going to affect you..."
which isn't exactly comprehensible English but I think can fairly be taken to mean that you assert anything I might say is nonsense.
Given that I'd be better off saying nothing.
So that's what I'll say.
:)
I do agree that people deserve the government they get. I disagree that voting in this country will change that, nor do I agree that violence is the ONLY alternative.
In better English, it is an established psychological principle that a person who is deeply invested in a strongly held belief will suffer a painful state of mind, called cognitive dissonance, when they are faced with an incontrovertible fact which contradicts their settled belief.
They will do almost anything to stop the painful feelings. Some of the most popular tactics are
* attacking the messenger
* denial
* rationalization.
I was saying that my statements would cause you to suffer from cognitive dissonance and that you were most likely to resort to these or other tactics to continue to believe what you want to believe in denial of the evidence.
Quote:
You want to kill and be killed in order fix something you can't even define.
For the definition IS that man sitting untroubled in his office.
And you reject it out of hand.
You reject him, his neglect, the voters neglect, the whole democratic system out of hand.
With nothing to replace it but violence.
I really don't think that's the way to go.
Unquote;
This time I'm truly done with you.
True, Biden is a marionette, but where does the buck stop in your view? And how does one get a more responsible executive if we never hold him to account?
You're asking me? I think the buck stops with us, the public. And I'm thinking Biden cannot be held to account because he's a puppet. But the puppet masters should be identified and held to account.
I think it is very, very important. That the correct persons be identified and that an accounting be held.
For I believe there's been and still is a pandemic of malfeasance in public office and its been accepted as the norm.
Its not our business to accept any such thing as the norm. That's our part of the 'social contract' we democracy.
'malfeasance' if often ill defined and poorly understood and hard to distinguish for us laypersons from misfeasance I guess.
No matter: the point of the whole thing is failure to perform according to your oath of office is a good way to look at it.
The higher the office the greater the responsibility to perform to higher standards.
Isn't it?
Isn't that why the higher the office the more ceremony and ritual and solemnity they bring to the proceedings? And the more respect we are supposed to have for the office holder?
That's fine. That side of it.
But then when they are left to behave in any way they like and we do nothing it all becomes a farce.
Which is what it has become.
I think we hold Biden to account by identifying the real actors and holding them to account and on the way identify all malfeasants and hold them to account.
According to Alfred Adler, finding the "cause" of a problem now is fruitless. It won't change anything. Calling for us to find a shadow figure (which is why they're shadowy!) is sending us down a rabbit's hole.
Why not just get rid of the lot of them and then maybe we can discover who's hiding in the shadows.
well that's just plain silly. If my car isn't working just throw away the car?
that's nonsensical.
I can sort of appreciate your perspective, but the problem with your approach is that when you identify "the real actors" they respond by saying that they aren't the ones really in charge, and that the guy at the head of the org chart with the formal power to hire and fire is.
Watch old re-runes of "Yes, Minister".
Just like in 'Yes Minister' if you ever saw that UK series? The 'power behind the throne' tries to remain hidden, hides behind the throne.
Yep, that'd be the way they'd try to work.
But through all the ages the truth has often come out about who is really to blame.
And it still happens today and perhaps even more so because we get stealthily taken smartphone pics, voice and video recording, we get hacked emails and leaked papers.
And we even have much that is clearly there on public record and we just ignore it, let it pass.
It's for us to clamour, to insist that the appropriate offices take action, isn't it?
It just is. That's the scheme. That's democracy.
Yeah, citizen activism and "stealthily taken smartphone pics", that's working great. Like Wikileaks. Good thing that the powers that be don't reflexively label anything that they don't like as "Russian propaganda".
I'm thinking that's sarcasm, is it?
Meaning wikileaks didn't work: no one took enough notice/cared enough to make anything happen and Julian Assange is heading for life imprisonment abandoned by justice, by the UK and Australia ?
And that 'the powers that be' do label things they don't like as Russian propaganda?
Well, we know. That's what we're talking about.
The point is that WE need to 'take enough notice/care enough' to make things happen and those features or paths or whatever you might call them ARE the avenues of preference and are handy tools: much better than posting agitated vicious abusive comments all over the web calling for instant insurrection, violence in the streets, rioting, civil war which is what so many seem to do. Isn't it?
Watch How to Start a Revolution DVD documentary and read From Dictatorship to Democracy the book by Dr Gene Sharp.
why?
He was the worst before Ukraine, but this seals it permanently.
This has been a long time coming , more than a decade. The sniffing around Ukraine began at least a decade ago, then regime change, implantation of the obligate puppet, the consequent puppeteering, the baby potatoes Russiagate fiasco, the very dubious Navalny and Skripals incidents. the flouting of Russia’s lines in the sand, and then the proxy war now.
No vote was ever taken on the proxy war, any more than there were public votes on Nam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Some democracy!
D mockracy for thee
Not for me
A healthy press would be grilling him every day on why he wasn't working towards peace.
Not sure what’s scarier - that he still has 30% approval rating or that Kamala is a heartbeat away with even lower ratings. 81 million votes is a bigger farce than 14 days to slow the spread.
A president who brings on the apocalypse, the end of everything on this planet, is by definition the worst. And it's not like he's brilliant or anything: he's been playing his cards like a drunken gambling addict. But he will not have done it all on his own, were the worst outcome to befall us; the world is soft on Nazis and other fascists: that is the hard fact we refuse to acknowledge, and it is the key.
An OUTSTANDING new interview:
Scott Ritter; Ukraine, Finland and Nato, a Warning to the People of Finland – May 8, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciUNBIKNxMw
A deeply corrupt war criminal
MAKE PEACE NOT PROXY
I was riding home in a car this morning when I read Caitlin's article and I started to wonder, what bumper-sticker-political slogan might we adapt here. What do you think?
This is a very good, well argued article. I'd like to add that, our fears of annihilation in nuclear war aside, people in eurasia deserve, as much as we do or anyone else does, the freedom to live their lives in safety and to feel that their friends, neighbors, families, and communities are adequately secure and provided for.
The president is doing nothing as promised
Good point, Tony. Or at least what he promised to the unwashed on the campaign trail. What he promised to the psychopathic Western elite in private is another matter entirely.
"Biden's refusal to attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine is the greatest scandal in American political history."
I would be the last one to question Scott Horton in his statement about Biden and “scandals”.
However, if one wanted to take this further, with a cast of hundreds of events competing for that prize, I would have to question his choice based of the well engineered fictional world of 9/11 leading to Afghanistan, Bush and his "shock and awe” in Iraq (for no reason at all), the deaths due to Nixon and Johnson and Co in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and the two unnecessary atomic bombs in Japan in 1945 designed to win a war, already won, the introduction to the world of things to come, US-style.
But Chile and the after effects of that outrage is a hard one to beat with so many competing for that prize but the winner being Kissinger by a large margin. Still a respected US hero figure.
Well, I am still going. Cuba and the US intrusions in that little country, still living in the 1960’s with not a lot of progress for 30 years thanks to US sanctions and devious deeds of mischief.
Let’s not identify all the Neocons of the Bush era, Colin Powell’s visit to the UN, the multi millions dead over decades through the inhumane process of sanctions, the list of public servants such as Albright, Clinton, Pompeo, Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Nixon and Bolton The list is endless. Yes, hard too believe but the US started with a George Washington. Remember?
Current day shame would be the pursuit of Julian Assange which could end with just one word from the current feeble-minded Biden.
Who has the time to list American crimes over 70 years but they make the centuries of British exploitation around the world read like a like a friendly travelogue.
But for sheer bloody-mindedness and international corruption, Israel and its dirty tricks history through bribery and corruption, .......exampled by the total control of the whole US Congress.....being the biggest success to date, the corruption that made all UN Resolutions passed for Palestinian justice since 1967 a collection of waste paper, the infiltration into western governments around the world while there in Dimona it sits waiting with 400+ nuclear warheads on hand (thanks to the covert cooperation of the USA again), and you can see the future, just waiting to happen…..and just around the corner.
Biden is a naive fool when compared to the long range plans of Israel. He is a willing part of their plans together with the BlackRocks and Vanguards, the controlling investor bosses owning half the world as well as all past and undoubtedly all future US politicians. The US system encourages such corruption.
A scandalous country, indeed.
Thank you Rex for keeping it real. Biden is a scumbag but he's a got a long way to go before awarding him with worst president ever.
ABC would do the American public a favor by airing The Day After
Yes, and RT could play it in Russia with subtitles of course.
That would work for me!
Let's not forget the even more powerful UK Drama Threads.