Is it possible to be stupider than Gloria Feldt, Former Head of Planned Parenthood?

She’s getting a one year reprieve while he goes thru the motions. And the sad thing is 75% of liberals feel the same as Feldt.

What an uncomfortable mixture of sadness and anger this sort of gullibility produces in me. There are people I like and care about who are exactly the same as Ms. Fedlt.

Oh, well….

As George W. Bush once said, “You can fool some of the people all the time and those are the ones to concentrate on.”

Looks like Obama’s got that one down too.

We truly live in an insane world. As a white, middle-aged male, I have the most to gain from a Ron Paul presidency…at least according to convention, that is…..keeping in mind that the whole thing is loosely choreographed and Ron Paul’s policies are just Sonar. But, I digress, so let’s assume it’s all on the up and up. I’m not a member of the “1%”, I’m a white male, and I’d like to have a pot brownie every now and then, and not be paranoid that I’ll be thrown in jail for it. Ron Paul’s my guy, right? Obviously, I see through it and comprehend everything else that comes with Ron Paul, if there was any possibility of him and his policies being elected. On another forum, I bring up his skeletons and vulnerabilities and I get pilloried…and some of those pillorying me are Code Pink women who are myopically fixated on the Palestinian issue and Israel. Seriously, you couldn’t write better satire. There are so many people out there giving their energy to their own metaphorical incarceration. This is just one of a bevy of examples. I finally got so fed up, I said the following, because the only response to this unwitting satire, is witting satire.

Quite frankly, I’m coming around. I think I will endorse Ron Paul. I can light up a joint without worrying, sit back and watch the end of U.S. interventionism, and laugh uncontrollably as women like “fill in the blank” are institutionalized for their mouthy hysterics, and incarcerated for their support of abortion and infanticide whilst a “negro” shines my shoes and the “wetbacks” clean my house, cut my lawn and wet nurse the new babies.

We will have those halcyon days again….I can feel it in my bones.

I’ll see your stupid and raise it.

Check out this letter to the President from that other faux Women’s Rights organization -the National Organization of Women.

http://www.now.org/issues/economic/openletter_obamaSOTU_1-20-12.pdf

The paragraphs dealing with Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and Equal Marriage Rights are specifically adorable (see: delusional).

To bayville:

Might Trumka have been referring to Mr Obumma’s stable-full of “0.0001%’er” advisers?

No-one in the comment section at Ablog is having any of it though. One wonders just who exactly it’s supposed to fool.

And to answer your question: stupidity isn’t like temperature, which can only get so low. It’s more like a virus which grows more virulent the more people it infects.

Notorious P.A.T.:

I think something good could actually come from an Obama re-election: many of the people like her who are deluding themselves into thinking the “real” Obama will appear once he doesn’t have to worry about achieving a second term will be forced to confront reality…a lot of Democrats will wake up and move toward the Occupy Wall Street mode of thinking.

Whether that would constitute “confronting reality” is a matter of some dispute.

Unrelated: Ian, any comment? “LAPD And Special Forces Conduct Military Maneuvers In The Skies Above Downtown LA”
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/01/25/lapd-and-special-forces-conduct-military-maneuvers-in-the-skies-above-downtown-la/

Seems we’ve arrived astonishingly quickly where we knew we were headed.

Here are the only words that you need to read in the article:

“But I’m a sappy enough patriot to listen to every word, and to embrace the theater of it as an incredibly important declaration that our democracy lives for all of us to fight passionately another day for what we believe.”

Gaaahhhhh!!!!

Stupider? Maybe, maybe not. Just as stupid? Definitely. See here (and the links herein, which are really incredible), here, here, here, and here. For a start. I linked to Caruso because I knew these would be easy to find since he regularly documents these kinds of atrocities.

The answer to many of these – but not all – is that partisanship makes you stupid. Or at least makes you have to feign stupid.

And at first I wondered if this was the same woman who made up the story (read=lie) about Obama voting “present” on abortion issues in the Illinois Senate as a favor to abortion rights groups and at their request, but it isn’t. Of course, that woman was just lying and may not be stupid. Stupid were the people who believed the story (which made no sense) and thought voting “present” was a very fine way to support women’s rights.

And while I’m at it, speaking of women’s rights and Obama, there is perhaps nothing stupider than this Ms. Magazine cover. It was dumb at the time and has only come to look worse in hindsight.

Gah. I believe it was a commenter here who used the term Peak Stupid. I’d say that about sums it up.

Agh, I need to clean my brain – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkF4WP02plg (for those who don’t watch Parks & Rec, Amy Poehler’s character is trying to take the blame for shooting her boss in the head when another (male) co-worker was the actual culprit and ends up appealing to his sexism by stating pretty much every female cliche).

This ‘victory’ meme.

Life is a fight.
If it is’nt, You have to invent an enemy.

No enemy, no victory.
Such a life is not worth living.
Right?
Q.E.D.

I think something good could actually come from an Obama re-election: many of the people like her who are deluding themselves into thinking the “real” Obama will appear once he doesn’t have to worry about achieving a second term will be forced to confront reality…a lot of Democrats will wake up and move toward the Occupy Wall Street mode of thinking.

Most of the Democrats will follow new delusions with their current way of thinking. You can’t change that way of thinking for them without herculean effort, so why bother. Too many more important matters at hand than reasoning with someone who is unreasonably reasonable.

Arguing with “Liberals” is the same as arguing with “Republicans.” It’s not worth the effort. Justin’s right. Let’s face it, many of us who post here have no place. We’re pariahs….outcasts. Sure, some of us pretend we’re not, just to make it through the day, but let’s be honest, increasingly we feel like this lady.

Petro,
thanks for listening

MB, no. It is about the tedious job of shifting the overton window, adding a grain of -ahem- ‘logic’.

Lisa. Agreed, with the small exception, that the holy grail of ‘full knowledge’ is nothing of ours.
(I once translated a couple of Blake’s poems into German, because I had the impression that he is more German than British, because he is a romanticising dualist.
See Caspar David Friedrich.
http://www.google.de/search?q=caspar+friedrich&hl=de&client=firefox-a&hs=vyd&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=jYwkT9DKNs_Esgb3u9AN&sqi=2&ved=0CC0QsAQ&biw=757&bih=905 )
-See the difference to Blake?
On a deeper level, the two monisms and dualism are in a constant fight. Which is very interesting, how they play out in their respective times.

MB,

This is depressing.
Am having a hard time to explain that.
Has something to do with the strict father, I suppose, and, well makes me depressed of sorts.
Not physically, but mentally.

Amen.

groo, love it. No difference, really…we’re all just wailing at walls, literally in some cases, and figuratively in others.

Yeah, maybe so, Lisa, but there are those on the other side of that divide we call a wall who are trying to do the very same thing and they are as equal as you in their conviction. I know, I know….at this point the idealists buck up and say “but the truth always prevails in the end.” Perhaps, but the end’s a little too late for me.

Speaking of walls, the book I’m currently reading, The Monk Downstairs, has something rather profound and wonderful to say about walls.

All monastery walls, in principle at least, are the borders of a wasteland, and every monk is a man who lives alone. But what we learn in the monastery, eventually, is that the walls are false, a convenience and a lie. There are no borders to the wasteland. The desert is everywhere; it is that which we call the world. And every man is a man alone.

The stupidest view of all is by Fox viewers who claim Obama is a socialist. As Bill Maher aptly put it, “Obama is no socialist. He isn’t even a liberal.” Yes folks, FDR was no socialist but he was a liberal. Looks like we don’t have many of them around and socialists are hard to find.

Btw, FDR averaged a growth rate of 8.5% with not much difference between the war years and the peace years. We celebrate a quarter with a 3% annual increase. Nuts. Yup. So why do we follow right wiong not Keyn sian economics? Well, Keynsian benefited everybody but the upper1% did less well than the masses. Or, increasing inequality makes for a poorer country. Remember, Obama not only praised Reagan but blamed FDR for extending the Depression by n ot following Hoover’s program. He’a right wing standard Republican.

I want to close by paraphrasing an old Donovan song: Once there were liberals/ Now there are no liberals (just progressives)/Now there are (in weak speech)

OWS is something that in theory I like (thinking beyond “There is No Alternative”), but in practice I find difficult to totally embrace. I went to a couple of townhall meetings at lunchtime at OccupyLSX and the notion that somehow this is leaderless is complete horseshit. It was very obvious that certain people led discussions and they made sure that what they want goes up to the general meeting. Also, there was no way for me to dedicate my life to their cause, so (like the Crawdad Hole article notes) it was fairly obvious that my voice was a meaningless part of the masses.

They have a fetish for organisational structure and rules that would be cute if it wasn’t already looking rather ossified. Why are their rules any better than the current rubbish we live under? I couldn’t see it.

Also, I find it annoying that the Occupy people still keep saying they have a “right” to protest and a “right” to Occupy. They go through the courts to not be thrown off St. Pauls’ square. Rights are what governments give and can take away. Laws are written by and/or for the elites – that’s where your precious rights come from. They will be given and taken away at whim. The government will use any means necessary to destroy them. They should embrace the fact that they are going beyond the law (i.e. illegal actions). They don’t seem to have the imagination to go beyond legalistic and rules-based thinking.

I think I’m just getting old and cranky. Grr.

Oh, and M.InTheCity wrote: “Rights are what governments give and can take away.”

No, no, no. Rights are not given by the government. They are inherent. They are ours before the notion of government even comes into it. They are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “unalienable.”

Yes, of course I know governments shit on rights all the time. I get it. But government doesn’t grant rights. Rights are not that which are granted, they are that which can’t be taken away — unless we let them. And there’s a lot of letting going on.

Ian, yes. Exactly.

“Link to Ted Rall should have gone here.”

Wow, what a good point. Only violence solves problems. That’s why little-known figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi are such historical failures. And remember how the murder of uber-hawk John F. Kennedy kept us out of Viet Nam?

So who should we kill first, Mr. Rall? The president? The head of Goldman Sachs? Please, enlighten us. Or show us–instructions for building bombs are easy to find on the internet. Put your money where your mouth is.

Violence often solves things.

It does but this study [PDF] looking at major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 says the following:

Our findings show that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns. There are two reasons for this success. First, a campaign’s commitment to nonviolent methods enhances its domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance, which translates into increased pressure being brought to bear on the target. Recognition of the challenge group’s grievances can translate into greater internal and external support for that group and alienation of the target regime, undermining the regime’s main sources of political, economic, and even military power.

Second, whereas governments easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfire against the regime. Potentially sympathetic publics perceive violent militants as having maximalist or extremist goals beyond accommodation, but they perceive nonviolent resistance groups as less extreme, thereby enhancing their appeal and facilitating the extraction of concessions through bargaining.

The authors are not advocating “nonviolence” but “nonviolent resistance”:

Nonviolent (or “civil”) resistance is a method of coercion in which unarmed civilians actively apply sanctions or withdraw cooperation from their governments…Nonviolent resistance includes diverse tactics such as strikes, protests, go-slows, stay-aways, sit-ins, demonstrations, and other forms of civil disobedience.

Many of these tactics seem to be the same ones as those that you’re advocating, Ian. Maybe the distinction here is between “showing up and playing nice” and those acts of nonviolent resistance that, possibly because they’re more effective, elicit violence from those being resisted and backfire.

How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
by George Lakey
Waging Non-Violence, January 25, 2012
http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/struggle-ongoing

10 Everyday Acts of Resistance That Changed the World
Václav Havel called it “the power of the powerless.” How regular people, from Denmark to Liberia, have stood up to power—and won.
by Steve Crawshaw, John Jackson
Yes!, April 01, 2011
http://october2011.org/blogs/organizer/learning-successful-acts-resistance-around-world

How Americans Can “Get Up, Stand Up” Against Corporatocracy Rule
By Bruce Levine on July 20, 2011
http://brucelevine.net/how-americans-can-get-up-stand-up-against-corporatocracy-rule-2/

And thanks to Jeff W for posting the Stephan-Chenoweth study.

In addition, violence is exactly what’s espoused by infiltrators and agents provocateurs. Not only don’t I believe in violence as a means of getting what we want, I would be very suspicious of anyone in the movement advocating it. It’s a big ol’ red flag.

a lot of relevant things have been said here, too much to be considered for all us folks out there?

So probably Ian is right , that there will probably be blood on the streets.
Hobsbawm says this, Wallerstein also.
If You drive people into despair, it will happen. No doubt about that.

I also presume, that everybody here will agree, that nothing will get better by force, but that only a crude form of ‘reciprocity’ will emanate, as with any cornered animal.

So this is the last resort, so to say.
We fall back in the strife to being more human.

One can view Greece as a laboratory, where suicides soar and the overlords watch what happens.
Or to Iceland, where it was the opposite.

My argument is, that this is a multilevel process, going up to Harvard and the driving out of Greg Mankiv with his silly Econ 101.
Or Philip Glass, the composer, before the NY Met.
Here the 1% see that their marbles are potentially glass-beads.

OWS is a multilevel activity, and we should position ourselves at the proper level, which fits us.

9x% of actors and artists are near the poverty-level and not at the celebrity level.
So there is a lot of action, eg if the actors realize that they live in a scam, if they believe that they would ever be at the celebrity-level.
So there is a lot of steam in there.

The Elite has to become be aware, that they are not loved, and as they are mostly narcissists, they have some sensibilities here.
Remember that Erich Mielke, the minister of state-security in East Germany and assassin (murderer) in his early days said:
“But I love You all”
Same with Ceausescu in Romania.
These clowns actually believed that their form of rule was an act of fatherly love.
Illusion of grandeur.
(Strict father. Same with Mubarak, Gaddafi, Kim Yong Il , Bush, and countless others.)

The power-elite has a strange desire that they are loved by the common folk, which is more often than not delusional.
(My ‘love’ for Gandhi or Mandela is also rather low-key.)

If they get the message, that they are are despised, and should change their ways, maybe that helps.
Soros, Buffet and some others seem to get it, what is at stake.
The rest, 90% of the 0.01%, obviously not.

@Petro, like your assessment of the situation

@Lisa the ‘You’ you cited from me, is a misunderstanding. It is not addreeed to ‘You’, but to a generalized ‘One’. My fault.

alyosha, yes, I know. I found out about it because I’m an admirer of Smedley Butler. Congress believed him. The plot is historical fact. The story isn’t more widely known because this country likes its myths and is intent on perpetuating them.

Lisa,
“And all it’s going to accomplish is make the authorities crack down harder, become more repressive, hurt people more.”

And that is pretty much what the peacniks said in 1776 about the British.

“There are other ways to fight. And to win. “

I’m sure that’s what a lot of well-meaning people thought in 1776, too. In the end, it took violence, and one whole hell of a lot of it.

@ Lisa S.

One of the advantages one gains as an expatriate is perspective, no longer engaged in the daily onslaught of trivia. After a while another advantage appears, one’s “filter” of importance engages, being able to discern the grain from the chaff.

Your stated position is admirable, no fault can be lain at the foot of your principles. Never loose sight of those goals. However, those principles will only stand you in good stead as long as there is law, the groves of which provide protection from the storms that assault. The storms that are developing are storms of power, the obtaining and retention of power. There are no laws that withstand these forces, law itself is now lain low in service to power, shelter there no longer exists.

The nexus you find yourself is the final grasp for power. There will be only one winner. Those who loose are lost. Two books illuminate this fact, one anecdotal, the other historical, both about the Spanish “Civil War” (which is a misnomer, it was a coup d’état against the legitimately established republic that split Spain). Giles Tremlett’s “Ghosts of Spain, Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past” (ISBN 0-571-22169-6) gives vivid color to that history. The other book, Paul Preston’s “The Spanish Civil War, Reaction, Revolution & Revenge” (ISBN 978-0-00-723207-9) presents an exceptional history of the coup d’état. Neither book is forgettable. Together these books render a prophesy of what is to come as your empire there collapses. To read a story of empire collapse another book is brilliant, Edmund de Waal’s “The Hare with Amber Eyes, A Hidden Inheritance” (ISBN 978-0-099-53955-1), a biography of a family, and how quickly wealth can disappear.

But if you are ever interested in power, there is no better book than Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Discourses on Livy” (ISBN 978-0-19-955555-0) and his reading and interpretation of the Roman historian (of the Republican era) and its importance to the arts of using power.

Those are the pearls on offer, I know of no better. Good luck with your endeavours.

Hitting the overlords in the pocketbook in what way? I need clarification on that matter, because a great deal of lip service is devoted to it by otherwise well-meaning individuals, but anything actionable that comes from that statement appears to me to be shallowly superficial and lacking any teeth, whatsoever. It’s more like a vanity play…..like “I’ll shop here instead of there until you throw me a crumb, or two.” That’s not going to cut it.

Lisa, are you invested in the stock market in any way? If so, how on earth can you say “hit the overlords in the pocketbook” and yet still be invested with, and in, the “overlords?” For all of you who have “worked hard” and “saved” for your little nest egg of retirement, you can’t claim community is the answer when your actions don’t support that assertion. Investing in the stock market, aka Wall Street, is the antithesis of community and is aiding and abetting the very enemy that is the source of the so-called OWS “movement.”

I’m not in the stock market. As I’ve said for more years than I can count, it’s a casino.

At that point, which is fast approaching, the possibility exists that all those who preached strict non-violent civil disobedience will lament not taking a more active and assertive hand in steering that Overton Window in the opposite direction.

I must say I think this is ironic coming from you, MB, given that we all had a similar discussion on this blog during the UK riots and you got angry at those who were preaching violence then.

When you all figure out what “a more active and assertive” role is, other than working out ideas on a blog, let me know. You can come to some planning meetings where we talk about this stuff in person. I understand you don’t want to put it in writing — though it again strikes me as ironic that those who are afraid to put it in writing are urging others to go out and do it, whatever ‘it’ is.

Lisa, on the Smedley Butler thing: Back in the ’90s I became aware of this plot, and I was gobsmacked. I finally found a copy of “The Plot To Seize The White House” by Jules Archer and paid $800 for it. The story going around was that when it was first published in the 1973, most copies were bought up and destroyed by certain high-placed families – don’t know if that’s true, but the book was certainly rare. (After that sale, other old copies began showing up, more in the $300 range.)

I opti-scanned the book and published it in its entirety on my pre-blog days website (now defunct as of this month, sadly – can’t afford it anymore), and consequently the site received its first (and only, really) traffic and links to it. I was delighted to be spreading this information. After a few years, I was notified that the book would be reprinted and could I please take down the copyrighted material.

My tiny contribution.

MB gives a good example of ‘shifting the Overton window’.

…violence…

‘Violence’ is a a flexible term like ‘freedom’ and ‘terrorism’.

Liberals are mostly defenseless against this ‘occupy-language’ of the right, as Lakoff repeatedly noted.
See Gingrich ‘defending’ his obscure past, both personal and political.
And the flip-flopper was? Eg. Kerry.
(Flip-floppers are always Democrats, Repubs have a natural right to do so.
because they are only pretenders of anything. Never mean what they say.
This is the silent pact between the pretenders and the couch-potatoes.
–>fragmented mind again.)

See Romney invoking (bad) ‘Chinese communism’ against his (good) ‘American’ vulture-capitalism.
He himself channeling his money through tax havens etc.
Call that ‘freedom’.

‘Freedom’ seems to live in the tax-havens nowadays.
Or what?

This is bordering on the absurd, and can only be explained by delusion of a considerable part of the american populace.

Anyway.
I think, eg http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/, does an admirable job of deconstruction from the TOP. (i.e. where rationality reigns.)

No blood here. Only logic.

You have to confront the middle-strata of the system, who are at the control knobs, with the inner logic of the system.
If they would recognize, there would be some hope.

The upper strata are so used to giving orders (lost in abstraction) , that they actually do not know what is going on.
They seem-mentally- incapable to see the problem.
They are so detached, that they equally could live on the Moon or Mars or wherever.
Actually they do.
Hope they succeed, and we can get rid of them in large numbers.
Technology will save us this time.
Haha.

Violence has been the American way for so long. to presume otherwise is to be ignorant of American history, past and present.

to see what has been done by those in power to the “little people”.

unless the threat of violence is held and parlayed into power, the rest of us will continue to suffer the violence of the Elites.

The Riots in Chicago was the signal that violence against the DFH’s were the way to stop the “troubles’ from escalating.

Killing MLK, JFK, RFK, along with teh sudden deaths of peace advocates seem to have produced a “left” that realizes it will be killed if it dares to speak too loudly.

the idea that violence doesn’t work is mindnumbing. and our response has to be smarter than their violence. i don’t doubt there will be some violence on the Left to precipitate a “really violent reaction from the Government. just think of Pine Ridge, Ruby Ridge, Waco and countless other incidents where the “troublemakers” will either shut up or lose their leaders.

fascinating take to think we aren’t and always haven’t used Violence as a natural tenet of what constitutes an AMERICAN.

the divide and conquer strategy has worked so well. even the use of violence is now considered to be futile (for us little people). to think we shall get there by other means is just what the Elites want us to “accept”.

hope dies in such a situation, and violence is the one of the many recources people feel. Doesn’t mean we endorse violence as the “means’ to an end. just there isn’t any other way when peaceful methods are stopped, as i have seen written a lot lately.

i know many people have died since the War on America/Drugs began. the guns are going off now. the poor fighting each other for the crumbs the Elites deign to flick their way.

the blacks kill each other since killing whites violates their tacit acceptance into white society/American Society.

so many ways the violence has been quietly subsumed into American Society and accepted. i suppose the outward effortof the hopes of the rest of the “Little People” will be measured in the number of dead. with nothing left to lose what is life worth!

i guess that is one reason i despise the Republican “let them eat cake” mindset that is America today. That St. Ronnie Reagan let the termites out to destroy the fabric of the great hope that America appeared to represent. without the cover of dreams, America will devolve into the fascist state it already is today. just now the awareness of the inequality is showing through the “facade” of the American Dream. The reality is showing through with all its’ inherent ugliness and pretension.

The plantation is being seen for what it is.

Forgot to clarify that the ILWU-EGT dispute is recent.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11732/longshoremen_get_old-school_with_trespassing_and_train_blockage/

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/12045/longshoreman_struggle_poses_critical_question_about_breaking_the_law/

Maybe you should stop getting your information from pro-police propaganda pieces that greatly inflate the power of the military and police forces?

Seriously, if it was really as impossible to fight back as some make it out to be, the Iraq War would have lasted 4 months. We’d have conquered half the middle-east by the time Bush entered his second term, The rest of Africa and south Asia would have been under our control by the time he left office, and we’d now be following Obama into war with the greener bits of the the latter continent.

In the real world, America is a huge country with a thousand little hidey holes and nowhere near the population to police it all. And if you aren’t prepared to ever fight, then you best go find yourself a nice little hole to crawl into and don’t you think about ‘fighting’ in any other way. When they come to blackbag your ass, they aren’t going to give three shits about your screaming ‘But I was nonviolent!’.

@ groo

Despair you should. There is a cancer rife in the culture, feeding on ignorance, drinking the intoxicating waters of belief, indulging in narcissistic self-righteousness, besotted with the power of wealth, possessing all answers to all questions for all time, there is little left over for those who are not them.

A (suspected) Chinese proverb: Have great care who you choose to be your enemy; you become like them. A saying of great subtlety also showing great sophistication and experience; is alas lost on these folk.

Like the loss of language, sacrificed on the alter of PC (politically correctness), there is a loss of political choice, sacrificed on the alter of “rectitude”, some perfidious integrity. You are not allowed to question these sacred constructs of the ruling social cliques on pain of expulsion from their temple, from their presence.

To shed any light in these precincts by way of history, of memory, of assessment, of critical thought, is highly un-welcomed; you are only allowed to be one of the herd, a follower. No discussion allowed; and no discussion will be heard from the herd. Besides, after a while, it becomes not worth the effort to speak out, of the terrain one sees ahead, of the cliff towards which the herd relentlessly thunders. One can only prepare ones-self, break off from the herd, withdraw consent to the path the herd takes, break free of the mind shackles socially imposed. Others will also, they will eventually provide the safety of number as well as being example of diverse experiences to meet the future’s challenges.

The cliff ahead will sort out the problem, it is the only way that removes the where-with-all, the resources of the elite, it will remove those elite as well. The rule (of the elite) that failure will not be tolerated is the foot of clay of the elite; they will be held to those standards. Their struggles to control will loosen the quicksands upon which they trod underfoot, and their mighty fortifications will be swallowed by the sands of the desert they have made. For all their wealth and power, they leave no hand about with the ability (or will) to save themselves. It was their choice, it will be their fate.

Is that a question or a challenge? It’s an election year, Welsh. Please phrase more carefully!

There are no immunity cards in this penultimate game of Survivor. The herd will carry all of us along, regardless of any and all resistance to it predilections. We can run, but we cannot hide from the menace it unceasingly conjures and nurtures.

groo, it’s not constructive to say “YOU Americans” so chastisingly. Would you like it if we referred to all German posters to this forum as “YOU Nazis?”

You don’t think Merkel, or any leadership in Germany, or Europe, or anywhere on this increasingly shrinking planet, hasn’t sold, or wouldn’t sell the “Little People” down the river for an ounce of gold? The poison of Globalization is everywhere. Metaphorically, it is a nuclear holocaust, and its ubiquitous and all reaching radiation touches everyone and everything, no matter how sublime.

You know what I say is true. Your preoccupation with the discussions here belies any boasts to the contrary, and the same applies to the expats. You can expatriate yourself physically, but you can’t psychically, as is witnessed by your unhealthy obsession with the realities your former loved one enticingly lays at your feet for you to chew on like a daily dose of khat.

Speaking of cattle defecation, this should brighten your day. I know it made me smile.

http://news.yahoo.com/vermont-inmates-hide-pig-official-police-car-decal-004403610.html

You can expatriate yourself physically, but you can’t psychically

Kind of meaningless, since none of us can “expatriate” ourselves from the human race. Nationalism is always stupid, but in these times it is glaringly so.

In any case, last time I checked, the relative pacification of Germany to U.S. is rather disparate (even including the economic cudgel G. can wield in the EZ), so I think groo is standing on solid-enough higher moral ground to do some unqualified criticism of America. Which we deserve. In spades. Over and over again.

We’re still murdering babies.

Thanks for linking to the hijinks of the Vermont inmates, MB. Definitely smiled.

An uprising with dedicated roots to non-violence would be ideal, but it takes training and discipline to achieve that. The people who marched with Gandhi and MLK had to exercise enormous restraint and dignity, that I think is sorely lacking in Americans today. But don’t worry Lisa, any signs of an uprising and the police will simply start disappearing you. And with the next age of technology arriving within a decade, i.e. perfect lie detector tests, carbon nanotubing, invisibility, mind reading devices, etc. you can be sure that there will be no uprising, whether violent or otherwise, to muck up the elite’s plans. Your window of opportunity to throw the bums out will close in about a year. After that, you’re finished.

Tallifer

re ‘family values’

…in 2010 Texas police prosecuted nearly 300 000 children, partly not older than six years, for “Class C Misdemeanors”…
With a high probability being criminalized for the rest of their life.

http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/ausland/0,1518,812885,00.html
(german–google translate helps out)

This is clearly against the continental European value-system.
Note: we have our shootings at schools to, but there is definitely more soul-searching,
and not a reflexive regress to authoritarianism, blaming the bad on to the kids.
Only the British seem to be sympathetic to this view in Europe.
Legalizing physical punishment of children (again).

Morocco Bama’s hair certainly stands up.

I blame this to a significant part on ‘theodemocratic’ tendencies in the US (e.g. Mormon Romney).
An agnostic presidential candidate has 0% chance, so they fake all quack sorts of religiosity, not to lose the base.
I interpret this as a regress to a punishing authoritarian god-figure, where the president is the mediator, akin to the pope.
And as such, he has the authority to do extrajudicial killings, bringing Manning to a military court, etc.
He is above established enlightenment law and eg the ICC.
If Spanish or Italian prosecutors go after some CIA minions, who engage in abduction of citizens to the nearest torture center in Egypt etc, the global sovereign gets indignant, and feels his self-attributed entitlement by god challenged.

—–
LaughingCat

Yves Smith recently ran a post
Erica Chenoweth: Confronting the myth of the rational insurgent
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/erica-chenoweth-confronting-the-myth-of-the-rational-insurgent-2.html

Where Erica evaluated the success rates of some 323 violent/nonviolent insurgencies, with a clear result: violence is mostly regressive.

groo PERMALINK
February 4, 2012

I blame this to a significant part on ‘theodemocratic’ tendencies in the US (e.g. Mormon Romney).
An agnostic presidential candidate has 0% chance, so they fake all quack sorts of religiosity, not to lose the base.
I interpret this as a regress to a punishing authoritarian god-figure, where the president is the mediator, akin to the pope.
And as such, he has the authority to do extrajudicial killings, bringing Manning to a military court, etc.
He is above established enlightenment law and eg the ICC.
If Spanish or Italian prosecutors go after some CIA minions, who engage in abduction of citizens to the nearest torture center in Egypt etc, the global sovereign gets indignant, and feels his self-attributed entitlement by god challenged.
_________________________

That’s quite a post…and I agree, for the most part. America has become the enemy it always alleged to have fought.
The nationalism here is at a fever pitch; I’ve never seen this in my 67 years. I was too young for McCarthy, but vividly remember the nuclear fear, duck-and-cover, bomb shelters, and Sputnik, 1957.
Our “leaders/rulers” are despots.

There is no “American” mind. That’s baloney. How about we blame the German mind, considering a significant percentage of “Americans”, especially influential ones, are of German origin.

And groo, citing Texas is not emblematic of “America”, at large. Texas is its own dysfunction, and is quite distinct in its brand of reward and punishment.

Celsius 233,

well done, well said.

It is quite some time ago, when I visited the US of A, and did not understand.
The guy in the Greyhound from Oregon to California, whose family has been murdered in Detroit.

The black guy in SF, who tried to sell me some drugs, and I said “no, boy”, not realizing what an offense that was.
He followed me up for quite a distance.
The immigration guys, who checked me, longhaired Me then, when I was on the way to NASA and NOAA.

Long gone.

What a disgusting folk!
Never will go there again!

Texas, as much as any state in the union, is heavily influenced by German culture. Interesting, considering Texas’ unique flavor of punishment.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/png02

The largest ethnic group in Texas derived directly from Europe was persons of German birth or descent. As early as 1850, they constituted more than 5 percent of the total Texas population, a proportion that remained constant through the remainder of the nineteenth century. Intermarriage has blurred ethnic lines, but the 1990 United States census revealed that 1,175,888 Texans claimed pure and 1,775,838 partial German ancestry, for a total of 2,951,726, or 17½ percent of the total population.

And what about the Evangelicals and the Mormons…well, a good argument can be made that the seeds of these manifestations can be found to have been nurtured in the putrid soil of the great German reformer himself, Martin Luther.

http://jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Lutherans/truth_about_martin_luther.htm

“Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger, and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here, for this life is not a place where justice resides… No sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day.” (‘Let Your Sins Be Strong, from ‘The Wittenberg Project;’ ‘The Wartburg Segment’, translated by Erika Flores, from Dr. Martin Luther’s
Saemmtliche Schriften, Letter No. 99, 1 Aug. 1521).

Luther is actually saying that our actions — even the most sinful actions imaginable — don’t matter! He is saying we can commit any sin we want — willfully, presumptuously, purposefully — and we will not offend God! After all, we require nothing more than “faith” to be saved. What we do is incidental.

“Those pious souls who do good to gain the Kingdom of Heaven not only will never succeed, but they must even be reckoned among the impious; and it is more important to guard them against good works than against sin.” (Wittenberg, VI, 160, quoted by O’Hare, in ‘The Facts About Luther, TAN Books, 1987, p. 122.)

You must be thinking, “What? Could he possibly have written what I thought I just read? ‘It is more important to guard them against good works than against sin.'” Well okay, read it again, just to make sure. We’ll wait.

See? You were right the first time. Luther cautions us against good and upright actions. He says, don’t worry about sin — Jesus will take care of it. But doing good — that you’d better watch out for. Especially if you think being kind and generous and loving will affect your outcome at the final judgment.

“Like the mules who will not move unless you perpetually whip them with rods, so the civil powers must drive the common people, whip, choke, hang, burn, behead and torture them, that they may learn to fear the powers that be.” (El. ed. 15, 276, quoted by O’Hare, in ‘The Facts About Luther, TAN Books, 1987, p. 235.)

“A peasant is a hog, for when a hog is slaughtered it is dead, and in the same way the peasant does not think about the next life, for otherwise he would behave very differently.” (‘Schlaginhaufen,’ ‘Aufzeichnungen,’ p. 118, quoted ibid., p. 241)

Consider all those conservative white Texans of Germanic origin, with their flaky Lutherian belief/value system, and their approach to Mexican immigration, and their treatment of the Hispanic serfs.

Of course, the best has been saved for last since someone mentioned the Mormons and their embrace of polygamy.

“I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture. If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God. In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in the matter.” (De Wette II, 459, ibid., pp. 329-330.)

Morocco Bama,
in no way I endorse Luther.

He was just a reaction to a deeply corrupted Catholic regime.

Just lately I found out about the Cathars, and their destruction by the church.
Inquisition started as a tool to destroy the Cathars.
I plan to visit the region this year.
It is heartbreaking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
What force is it exactly, which repeatedly destroys the flowering of a better humanity?
——-
Celsius.

Ofcourse you are right, and I am embarrassed by that.
History is a mess.
And mankind.
I am trying to spot the evildoers.
Not everyone is.

Groo, my last “my, my” comment was at MB; not you. Cheers…

Thanks, guest, for proving my point. The point is I don’t believe anything I posted in the last two posts. The point is that there is no “American Mind” any more than there is a “German Mind.” The point is, groo was stereotyping, but I noticed you didn’t point that out, did you guest? That’s why I did with a ludicrous stereotyping of my own. Why didn’t you point out groo’s stereotyping? Are you afraid? Do you agree with groo’s assessment of “America?” Do you agree it’s a dangerous place where people try to sell you drugs and people call the police when you try to help? groo points out the evangelicals, the mormons and a poll and claims that everyone posting here that is a U.S. citizen is that when he says “YOU Americans.” He made sure to capitalize it for emphasis. So, I turn it back on you, guest. I don’t know why I bother when those of your ilk are too dense to get it, and so pathetically spineless as to not take a stand when someone makes bigoted remarks like groo did.

@ groo comment 20884

Now distant cousins were compatriots of yours, she of the first women to sit on a city council in Germany, her husband a medical Dr. who treated a seriously famous person of the war years. They lived in a large southern German city having a famous cathedral to the west of Munich. Your angst is real, there are no easy answers, and my responses to you here were based upon my experiences which you can find here:
https://www.ianwelsh.net/yes-the-american-people-are-responsible/#comment-20509
and here:
https://www.ianwelsh.net/ron-paul-hysteria/#comment-20559
and there is another one even earlier which I haven’t found, saying in effect that the sins of the fathers are not the sins of the sons, not those sons who gained control of their being after the fact. That one came from the wisdom of a youngster from Bitburg many years ago. That comment was also addressed to you here at Ian’s place.

Like Celsius 233, expatriated from the nowadays “homeland” is also my story. There are no voices that speak for me from that country, nor is it likely there will ever be. Repudiation of those rude voices pretending to speak with such authority should be automatically assumed; they are voices of ignorance and fools, their words given appropriate weight, you will find no pearls hidden in their garbage.

I can distance myself.
But then what am I?
On it goes.

But you are distancing yourself by saying “YOU Americans” to all of U.S. citizens who post here who stand up against us in any way we know how without running away and pretending we’ve disowned our country of origin, but yet checking its vitals everyday to test whether it still lives.

I stand by what I said. We’re all in this together. Global Capital, that which is largely responsible for creating a global environment of destructive collective behavior, no know bounds such as nation-states….instead, it uses nation-states as foils and arbitrage devices.

Also, your characterization of “America” is anecdotal, and certainly not my experience. America is many things wrapped all into one. America is like a carnival with its joy rides, its bearded ladies, the snake man, the strong man, the soothsayer…..and the carny barker. There is no singular American Mind, and I don’t believe there is a singular German Mind.

And the guilt you feel for the Nazi atrocities……you need to move past it, or understand it further. How could you be guilty, or made to feel guilty for something that was committed prior to your birth? You can’t be held to account for that, nor should you, just as I shouldn’t be held to account for slavery as a third generation immigrant to the U.S. Yes, you can feel empathy and sympathy, but guilt serves no constructive purpose.

groo, speaking of Texas, and Texas Justice, I think you would appreciate this excellent documentary from Errol Morris with the score by Philip Glass called The Thin Blue Line. I highly recommend it to anyone who has not seen it. It really hits homes with me since I lived on Inwood Rd. and attended school on Inwood Rd.

http://mubi.com/films/the-thin-blue-line

Also, I suggest this book from Dave McGowan (Programmed to Kill) where, in part, he covers Dubya as Governor of Texas and George Lee Lucas. It will leave you scratching your head and realizing that nothing is what it seems and the answers for which we all are searching are very deep….perhaps too deep.

http://www.konformist.com/2000/henry.htm

On June 30th of 1998, Henry Lee Lucas, arguably the most prolific and certainly one of the most sadistic serial killers in the annals of crime was scheduled for execution by the state of Texas. Given the advocacy of the death penalty by Governor George W. Bush, things clearly weren’t looking good for Henry at that time.

Bush had not granted clemency to any condemned man in his tenure as governor. In fact, no governor of any state in the entire history of the country has carried out more judicial executions than has Governor George. At last count, the state of Texas had dispatched 130 inmates on Bush’s watch.

So Texas was definitely not the place to be for a man in Henry’s position. And considering the nature of Henry’s crimes, it seemed a certainty that nothing would stand in the way of Henry’s scheduled execution. There weren’t likely to be any high-profile supporters, a la Karla Faye Tucker (though even personal appeals to Bush from the likes of Pat Robertson failed to dissuade the governor from proceeding on schedule with Miss Tucker’s execution). Not likely because Henry’s crimes were of a particularly brutal nature, involving rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, necrophilia, cannibalism, and pedophilia, with the number of victims running as high as 300-600 by some accounts – including Henry’s own, at times – though this figure is likely inflated.

By all accounts though, Lucas, frequently working with partner Ottis Toole – a self described arsonist and cannibal – savagely murdered literally scores of victims of all ages, races, and genders. All indications were then that this was pretty much of a no-brainer for America’s premier hanging governor. But then a most remarkable thing happened. On June 18, just twelve days before Henry’s scheduled demise, Governor Bush asked the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members are appointed by Bush himself, to review Henry’s case. Strangely enough, eight days later the Board uncharacteristically recommended that Henry’s execution not take place.

The very next day, just three days short of Henry’s scheduled exit from this world, Lucas became the first – and to date only – recipient of Governor Bush’s compassionate conservatism. The official rationale for this act of mercy was, apparently, that the evidence on which Lucas was sentenced did not support his conviction. There was a possibility that Henry was in fact innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Never mind that many of the 130 death row inmates who did not get special gubernatorial attention prior to their executions had credible claims of innocence that were met with by nothing but scorn and mockery.

Suddenly Little George had developed a keen interest in not executing innocent convicts. Never mind as well that some of those who have been executed despite claims of innocence were – other than the crime for which they were being executed – law-abiding citizens. Whereas Henry was by all accounts a serial rapist, kidnapper, torturer and murderer. And never mind that once Henry was spared, Bush promptly lost this passing interest and began once again rubber stamping every execution order that crossed his desk, including that of a great-grandmother in her sixties who was convicted of killing her chronically abusive husband (Betty Lou Beets, in February 2000).

Morocco Bama PERMALINK
February 5, 2012
I can distance myself.
But then what am I?
On it goes.
But you are distancing yourself by saying “YOU Americans” to all of U.S. citizens who post here who stand up against us in any way we know how without running away and pretending we’ve disowned our country of origin, but yet checking its vitals everyday to test whether it still lives.
____________________

Whoa, whoa! Don’t you dare speak for me! Just who do you think you are?
Speak for yourself, ONLY!
I have no problem with Groo’s statement or posts and as an American I take great exception to your hubris. Please knock it the fuck off!

groo, thanks for sharing that about your father. That’s a different situation, altogether, and raises some interesting discussion points about guilt and how it can be transferred and/or fostered. I saw a documentary recently about a Holocaust survivor who traveled to Germany to meet with the daughter of the monster, Amon Goeth. At times, it made me so uncomfortable, I had to avert my gaze.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQrq4ljb48g

She is amazingly genuine and forthright. She also mentions some incredible facts…like how she didn’t even know what a Jew was growing up because there weren’t any, and the Holocaust was never mentioned, nor taught.

Speaking of Texas Justice, groo, it is unique even amongst the backdrop of the entirety of Justice as it’s practiced in the U.S. This excellent documentary by Errol Morris, The Thin Blue Line, exemplifies it nicely. It hits home with me in a nostalgic way since I lived on Inwood Rd. and attended high school on Inwood Rd. For anyone who hasn’t seen this pearl, you really must. It’s a gem from, and about, the Hinterland.

http://movieclips.com/9cdne-the-thin-blue-line-movie-the-death-sentence/

Just listen to Romney

Nope, I won’t. He’s got nothing to say. None of them do. It’s all a bunch of horseshit. I repudiate it.

There’s no inconsistency there, Guesty. All those statements are quite compatible, not inconsistent.

If Ian’s statement were to have read as follows, I would have taken umbrage with it:

The pathetic attempts of you Americans to pretend you’re good people and don’t deserve what’s happening to you are just that, pathetic. The American Mind is a perverse abomination that should be wiped from the face of the earth. It’s just that simple.

Ian understood his audience here. He understands that many of the U.S. citizens who post here do not possess the qualities that comprise what is often referred to as “Americans.” He even provided the caveat that there are good people in America, but not enough.

As groo says, it’s difficult to think of it as good versus evil. As my statement that you quoted asserts, the “Little People,” because of their prejudices, traded away what little liberty and freedom they had for short-term conveniences, thus deferring responsibility and accountability until their progeny were rendered permanent infants, or at best, adolescents. That rendering, and of course there are exceptions, has had the capacity for accountability and responsibility stunted through indoctrination. I guess in that sense, they will have to pay the price for the trade-offs of prior generations. Well, we all will. Not just “Americans.” And, I stand by the American Mind accusation. There’s no such thing. There’s a great deal of mindlessness, that’s for sure, but by and large, “Americans” are spoon fed what to think and do to the point where the will of an independently collective Mind is non-existent.

What’s interesting in your accusation that doesn’t take into account linguistical nuance and instead conflates, is that even if you were correct about me being inconsistent, you treat consistency as though it is superior to inconsistency, when that’s really not the case. One can think of numerous cases, and pose a very rational argument that one is not not superior to the other….but rather, it’s all relative.

And no, I clarified to Lisa what I meant, and it was not inconsistent with what I asserted previously. However, from Lisa’s perspective, wouldn’t it be advantageous if I was inconsistent, and instead of remaining neutral, and leaving my options open concerning potential violence, I instead changed my tune and adopted a strict stance of non-violent civil disobedience? She would have persuaded me, and inconsistency, at least relative to her and her aspirations, would have been a positive thing, not the opposite.

I can’t wait for you to rationalize away and justify Thailand’s foibles, like one would flick off a mosquito.
_______________

Oh, so now your an expert on Thailand? You do seem to like personal attacks when your on the defensive: Oh well, do carry on…

MB, first off, love the passive-aggressive contortionism. You rock.

2nd off, Ian has clearly stated that all Americans are complicit—I think he singled out candy-ass Montessori teachers in particular for not rioting in the streets post-SCOTUS 2000.

Carry on.

“Carry on (that’s a clue)”.
___________________

Yes, I noticed that as well; I wish he had used a different ending.
But he didn’t; you’re acting nut’s!
Get a grip and grow up!

Hedges goes after the Black Bloc – self-described “anarchists” who feed the chaos-and-violence cliche about anarchy:

The Cancer in Occupy

Here’s a good first step. Kudos to them, and may their actions be replicated worldwide.

Greek Hospital Now Under Workers’ Control

I was going to post Chris Hedges’s column, but I see that Petro beat me to it. At the risk of further pissing people off, I will excerpt only this out of a column excellent in its entirety, because I’ve been thinking about precisely this over the past few days:

The Black Bloc movement is infected with a deeply disturbing hypermasculinity. This hypermasculinity, I expect, is its primary appeal. It taps into the lust that lurks within us to destroy, not only things but human beings. It offers the godlike power that comes with mob violence. Marching as a uniformed mass, all dressed in black to become part of an anonymous bloc, faces covered, temporarily overcomes alienation, feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness and loneliness. It imparts to those in the mob a sense of comradeship. It permits an inchoate rage to be unleashed on any target. Pity, compassion, and tenderness are banished for the intoxication of power. It is the same sickness that fuels the swarms of police who pepper-spray and beat peaceful demonstrators. It is the sickness of soldiers in war. It turns human beings into beasts.

@ 233ºC

Nice watch, however there may be a fundamental flaw ascribing the difference to philosophical outlooks (notice how uniform the “conservative” response was in all categories, a warning of dangerous conclusions if anything). Other studies reported in European media point to evidence that the liberal/conservative divide was based upon the use of differing brain regions to process information and thought. The short version, liberals use higher developed parts of the brain in their thinking processes, the conservative rely on the primitive areas in their cognition. The presentation of the theory was too smooth to ring true, much the same as free markets, trickle-down and deregulation theories but at the same time good licks for goombaiya rapprochement and rapport evidenced in what passes as the political conduct and philosophy of the current occupant of the whitehouse. Cheers

@ Ian

You are wasting your time bringing this information to the majority of your audience, anything that is not already programmed into their consciousness is programmed to be disregarded, beside your minder in the comments will not agree and will disrupt all attempts at discourse, diverting whatever conservation to subjects of their approbation. The minders suppression of opinion with which they disagree stifles entry into the conversation of many and has in the past driven off some outstanding points of view whose authors failed to contend with the outpouring of insidious crap from your minder. Good luck with that.

Formerly T-Bear PERMALINK
February 7, 2012
@ 233ºC
Nice watch, however there may be a fundamental flaw ascribing the difference to philosophical outlooks (notice how uniform the “conservative” response was in all categories, a warning of dangerous conclusions if anything). Other studies reported in European media point to evidence that the liberal/conservative divide was based upon the use of differing brain regions to process information and thought. The short version, liberals use higher developed parts of the brain in their thinking processes, the conservative rely on the primitive areas in their cognition. The presentation of the theory was too smooth to ring true, much the same as free markets, trickle-down and deregulation theories but at the same time good licks for goombaiya rapprochement and rapport evidenced in what passes as the political conduct and philosophy of the current occupant of the whitehouse. Cheers
______________________

Yeah, appreciate the heads up; but I already am looking at it and couldn’t agree more.
I only trust my own gut; and it rings true 99%.
Jonathan Haidt was a bit too calm (for lack of a better word) in his analysis, but I found some nuggets there which garnered some attention. Remember Sun Tsu, The Art of War? Know your enemy; understand your enemy/adversary.
But he did say some things regarding liberals and conservatives which seemed to ring true for understanding the dichotomy. Being neither it’s more of an exercise in understanding the “other” for me.
The differing brain regions shtick is just another rationalization for choices made. As are most other crap psychology theories.
I also agree with your comment to Ian; which, once again, makes me question WTF am I doing commenting here or anywhere else?
Oh well, the beat goes on, no?
Cheers Bear…

Here’s a trippy German documentary that touches on Kaczynski…but placed in a much larger context. It’s intriguing, in the least.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doQAwLb-DEE

Do’nt know if I’m still welcome here, but anyway.

I was confused by the trashing of Chris Hedges , whom I keep in high regard.
I read quite a lot of comments at commondreams, and concerning the black block he maybe got something wrong here.
I don’t know.
The black block, as I see it, is somehow universal.
It played a role at Tahrir (the football guys) and is present in Germany (sorry to mention this again) also. The black block is to my understanding an intrinsic affair of a/any(?) resistance-movement.
This is on both sides.

Who is -ahem – ‘communicating’ depends on the situation, and hopefully the more moderate factions get the overhand.
This is a struggle with some hinterland.

I myself associate to Zerzan-type primitivism, but pay attention to the Kaczinsky-type also.
TK was no nutcase, as conventional thinking tried to corner him.
I read the manifesto quite thoroughly some time ago, and also know the film MB has linked to. It’s a good one.

Maybe my testosterone-level is not high enough anymore, and lose any fight with the bankster-mob with their long ring-fingers and that and their strange behaviors in the ultimatum game.

To avoid a fight, I just would want to shift them through an fmri-scanner, detect their mental deficiencies, and put them into some asylum. (no killing, please)
All the Hitlers, Stalins, Goebbels, Bushes, Mladics, Gaddafis, Assads, and whathaveyou.

As convenient this may be, I am afraid this will not solve our problems.

Petro,

what annoys me at times , is, that we look at the Egyptians or the Greek, or the Syrians as sort of an unenlightened, primitive people, which they are not.

They are just in a different situation, and the tools of resistance they use match the situation.

We can see how much this can deteriorate, and the tools of resistance match the situation.
All this is not starightforward, because the west, so to sy, has developed a very sophisticated method of ‘democratic ‘ face-preservation, which totalitarian regimes lack.

Quite some time ago I tried to formulate as ‘appeal to shame’ as the lowest, most decent appeal to recover a decent society.
Appeal to shame is an appeal to the moral faculties of the societal collective and especially the
elite. This is currently imploding.

The next step would be appeal to law.

This is also in danger, but I have some hope on this level .
Eg tax evasion over 1Million € is UNCONDITIONALLY punished with prison in Germany.
This gives me some hope, that the rule of law actually can be effective.
We’ll see.
No need for the guillotine yet.

The US is definitely in a worse condition, but not yet everything is lost.

There is an extreme divergence concerning the rule of law.
See eg the Spanish, who give the primates human rights status.
This is embarrassing for me backward German, to see the Spanish abandon ‘Corrida’ and such.
Maybe the ICC will succeed in not only indicting Mladic and Milosevic, but also Bush and Blair.
But this is a power-struggle, which has some way to go.

There is a certain movement, which bases on the appeal to shame and the rule of law, where we do not yet have to appeal to force.

Maybe this will change sometime, but not yet.
Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama should feel ashamed, when they appeal to ‘freedom’ in China, simultaneously restricting freedoms in the homeland.
This should produce some shame via cognitive dissonance.

Maybe Obama develops some shame, if eg the Nobel-Price is retracted from him.

If he has no shame then. Well. We see.

Here’s an excellent retort to Hedges article. It appears Hedges also has his inconsistencies….we all do, and that’s alright, because in order to have proper conviction on this topic, and not end up a tool of someone or something that is ten steps ahead of you, you must be ambivalent and reflect and introspect on it after engaging a process of personal due diligence before coming to a conviction, and even then, you must remain reflexive and adaptive, willing to change your view as more information presents itself that may disconfirm what you previously held to be true.

http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/to-be-fair-he-is-a-journalist-a-short-response-to-chris-hedges-on-the-black-bloc/

Some of this is personal to me, in the interest of full disclosure. I have friends in Oakland. They’re brave and awesome. Seeing them stand up to police repression and attempt to take an empty building while people sleep in the streets was exciting and invigorating for me. It was a welcome sight in today’s age of non-violent fundamentalism, where so many are beset with the crippling belief that if we just get beat up badly enough we’ll attract “the masses” with our moral superiority and somehow the wealthy and powerful will recognize the error of their ways and give us the world back that they’ve so successfully turned into their nightmarish, authoritarian, and wasted playground. My friends were gassed, beaten, given broken faces, broken dreams, and locked in cages for their bravery. And now they’re being denounced by a comfortable journalist who wasn’t there who refers to them as a “cancer”.

I don’t want to suggest that they shouldn’t be critiqued. Self-critique is important for any improvement of practice—if it’s honest.

But here I feel betrayed. When Hedges wrote about the Greeks, notorious for their black blocs, he praised them for “getting it.” Indeed, according to Hedges, they knew what to do. In Hedges own words:

“They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.”

Apparently for Hedges, that’s good enough for the Greeks. But, by God, don’t you dare bring this filthy resistance to his home! You might accidentally (horror of horrors!) break a window! Perhaps it might belong to Hedges! Well, I passed around his piece on Greece thinking that perhaps there was, in fact, a journalist that “gets it.” I was wrong and I feel betrayed.

So I am angry at Hedges. I know it shows and it will look ugly to some people, but at one point, I trusted his work. And now, I have broken and brave friends that he is denouncing in a movement that he is dividing and presuming to speak for.

After the Move-In Day, the Mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, asked the Occupy movement to “disown” Oakland because they were militant, uncompromising, and because they were willing to engage in the kinds of “class warfare” that Hedges once praised in Greece. Occupy groups quickly dismissed this as a divisive tactic, but Hedges and Derrick Jensen seem all too eager to help Mayor Quan out. We live in interesting times, but we need to see these kinds of attacks for what they are—forms of recuperating needed and justified rage. When rigid ideologues who think they have some kind of special access to “Truth” come in swinging like this, particularly right after being politely asked to by liberal Mayors like Quan to do so, it’s time to do some quick disowning. We should reject the attempts to divide us by the likes of Quan, Jensen, and Hedges and, more importantly, reject the lies and distortions embedded in these facile “critiques.” Shame on you, Chris. If you want to denounce “violence,” you might use your time to target the police and Mayor Quan instead of doing the work they’ve asked Occupy “leaders” to do for them.

MB – thanks for linking to Gato’s post at RBTB. It successfully challenges what Hedges wrote, and what I’ve been thinking and saying. I hope that I will not be accused of intellectual contortionism by what follows, but a guys got to try to get his intellectual ducks in line…

I think the nut of contention is in your statement that “Greece is us, and we are Greece” – implications, made more strongly elsewhere, that condoning the often-violent uprisings of the Arab spring is a cultural bigotry (OK for those “backward” people.) This may be true for some people (this is “America,” after all), I hope its not necessary for me to say that I find such notions repellant.

And yet, I think I can contain this apparent contradiction of Hedges’ and (well-meaning) others’.

Perhaps the lines are drawn differently in our different cultures. While it is in decline, we still have a relatively robust “middle class,” and these are people who, while deserving of the condemnations expressed here (e.g., Ian’s awesomely provocative post Yes, the American people are responsible), they can still be characterized as relatively innocent (recall the contentious debate there that still crops up in these threads), or at least naive, about their political role in enabling the elite’s sacking of the commons.

Money is grease everywhere, but our system(s) are designed to put a credible veneer on it, so there is a significant swath of the American population that does not “get” the sort of rioting that was more quickly embraced by masses overseas – at least not until more decimation of the “middle class” occurs here, and the gap and clean delineation of rich and poor is more decisively established.

Yes, I am making a point about “tactical” non-violence. So – lest I, at this point, be accused of contradicting myself (having argued upthread that non-violence is a moral virtue to be considered independently of efficacy), I would like to make the point that in a culture where the lines are more clearly drawn, so is the violence against the people more clearly visible, so that what looks like aggression from afar is much more defensive to the participants involved.

Simply put – the American “Black Bloc” in general have not yet suffered the privations – material and emotional – that populations abroad have suffered. In this view they are, relatively speaking, poseurs.

It’s a tautology, really. As long as the population in general doesn’t get it, it isn’t popular. When they do get it, the nature of “revolution” changes. It’s like insurgency – if you have the popular support, you have the beds and the foods to play rope-a-dope with the State. If you don’t, then you are a criminal.

(This is me thinking on the fly, doing that “philosophizin’ to justify my position” thing. I’m sure you folks will let me know how well, or badly, I’ve pulled it off.)

MB,

I reread Hedges article and must confess that I did’nt thoroughly enough in the first round.
Also Zerzan, whom I remember as a deep primitivist (>5years ago) with no association to the black bloc. Maybe this has changed, or i never understood him.
Primitivists destructing dams and being sentenced to >10years prison maybe has changed his mind. ahem. Rightly so.
Mea culpa.

Hedges got a lot of headwinds at commondreams.
625 Comments so far per 20120208 20:44 CET.
A record.
Not all for reasons I endorse, to be sure.

What to do?
No magic formula.

But as it goes, the left starts to disintegrate.

See this:
The Right’s Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by a Too-Polite Left.
( George Monbiot )
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/07-5

Am sort of consternated.

The Elite has a special technique to appeal to the stupids, to use violence to their advantage, whereas the left seem to behave like sheeple, ready to be slaughtered.

This is a dangerous meme!

Re the appeal to stupidity.

this is the mastery of the right-wing authoritarians.
Rantorum, Romney, Gingrich.

Stir up the Stupids, bring them to the ballot, and win an election.
Quite simple.
Why engage in deep thinking, if a simple trick does the job and fills your pockets?

Appealing to IQ >120 is nonsensical, when IQ <100 makes 50% of the population per definition.
you only need to stir them up to go to the ballot-box, do some Gerrymandering and other massaging of the outcome, and there you go.

'Democracy' is a game, destined to be rigged by the clever people.

No facts.
Only stubborn leftists believe in 'facts'.
It is BELIEVE.
Or, as the Marx brothers said: Do you believe what I say or your lying eyes?

McDonalds eating fatties viewing Fox etc are prone to BELIEVE, else their miserable existence would get too hard to bear.

Sorry. sorry.
I am not entiteled to say that.

Rantorum works. 🙂

In the end; it’s possible to be way stupider than Gloria Feldt; witness our president and “his” minions (but they’re not actually HIS, he is theirs) and their current decisions regarding the world order.
It’s a guarantee of continuing turmoil and unmitigated violence throughout the world propagated by the U.S. Imperialist machine.
Sovereignty is relegated to the past; this is indeed the new world order and a guarantee of a world of violence and lawlessness; welcome to the real world.
The real question is; how will you deal with it?
This will be the deciding factor from now and into the future; are you prepared?
For my humble opinion; I think not…

It sounds like the remnants of Franco’s Fascism still survive to this day, and considering Spain is one of the European countries that will be hardest hit by the austerity that’s being passed out, at least for now although all of Europe will eventually be deeply affected with no exceptions, I would suspect such remnants to blossom once again, and for any gains made in curbing spousal abuse to be quickly undermined and rolled back half a century. In fact, this article from the NYT underscores that it is already happening.

Spain Struggles to Tackle Domestic Violence

But efforts to protect women have fallen below expectations. “We are not doing well,” Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba said in October, describing the number of 2010 victims at the time — 58 — as “horrible.”

To help combat gender violence, Spain overhauled its laws in December 2004 to make it easier for victims to seek legal redress: orders for abusers to stay away from victims were strengthened, and aggressive behavior like issuing death threats was deemed criminal.

Spanish courts have since passed 145,000 sentences against male aggressors; on average, those convicted have been sentenced to about two years in prison, Ms. Cavanna said. In the past six years, judges also awarded special protection to almost 141,000 women, or 73 percent of the requests.

But the number of women who have abandoned legal proceedings before a final ruling, generally in physical abuse cases, has soared 46 percent in the past three years.

Ms. Cavanna noted that one of her clients was still awaiting a ruling 20 months after starting legal action. “Changing laws does not solve the problem of malfunctioning courts,” she said, “nor does it change overnight attitudes in a society where the machismo ideology is still firmly anchored and in which many judges have not come to accept how serious a problem domestic violence is.”

A wonderful movie by the director Guillermo Del Toro entitled Pan’s Labyrinth does an excellent job of revealing the psychology of Fascist Spain under Franco through the character of Vidal.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth

MB,

The spin-doctors use every means, to destroy what is dear to us.
One way or the other.
This is not new, it is around us for nearly 100years.

The methods of propaganda are highly sophisticated nowadays, and is backed by all sorts of psychophysiological means.

So there quite possibly a race, ‘we’, as a collective of decent human beings can never win .
At least this would never be a democratic majority, which recognizes their genuine interests , because they are conditioned otherwise.

————–
Re Formerly T-Bear and the Spanish Judge.

One interesting aspect is, that Spanish and Italian judges and prosecutors are among the boldest in all Europe.

Why is this?
I don’t know.

Not really. It is force and counter-force, based on legality, in this case.

See this:
The country of Corrida (bullfight/Spain) now has the most advanced legislation for animal-rights! Who could ever expected that?

The U.S. cancer has fully metastasized; the Maldives have ousted their president in a U.S. condoned coup. Mohamed Nasheed was forced at gun-point to sign a resignation letter.
Amy Goodman is on it;
http://www.democracynow.org/

I vote that one unifying campaign song should be chosen to comprehensively cover the spirit and theme of this latest election farce. It’s this:

No Need For Promises

Don’t look at Obama with your eyes — Gaze at him with your heart!

Morocco Bama,

so, what you are arguing for, is two types of justice?

This is true in an imperfect world as ours.

But on the other hand, any act toward ‘justice’ has to bring together the two, as in a Hegelian dialectical world.

Ofcourse we are far from that, and the ugly real world is forcefully marching backwards (habeas corpus), which would make Hegel’s hair stand up, or make him rotate in his grave.

Anyway, in my somehow twisted view of the world, which You hopefully do not share totally,
US-Cuban relations are/have ever been, Hegel backwards.
Rum-Bacardi — Castro/Che. Current dialectical middle-ground: Guantanamo. HaHa!
Same with Bernard – Garcon.

“May the force be with You.”
(absent any consideration of +/- and any such -ahem- minor distractions.)

upon further reflection:

Hemingway/Che is such a such an impressive dichotomy on what is wrong on a global scale, that I cannot resist.

Hemingway suffered bipolar disorder. Hedonist. Hunter. Addict. Drinker.
The archetypal US-American.

Che the asthmatic Humanist Doctor. Fighter.

Fill in the blanks and take sides.

So, I wonder if Hedges is still going to be applauding the Greeks or, are they now in line for a stern lecture about hypermasculinity?