How do you know the people the reactionary right hates aren't just as mad? It's just that when we pick up guns we're automatically branded radical terrorists. You saw what they did to Occupy.
People will go both ways because of this. But the people Trump loses, he can afford to lose because those won't be in the key Christian Right states. The people he gains will be in the Midwest, South and Far West. In effect, he further extends the split he's already created in the Christian Right instead of Cruz reuniting it. Palin is very popular over there. Maybe most of all in the states where Christian extremism is not as blatantly racially coded, meaning Iowa, Kansas, of course the Dakotas.
She's a mercenary. Both she and Ted's dad Rafael spout the cartoonish heresies of the New Apostolic Reformation, like the talk of a "great transfer of wealth to the righteous." The NAR got to her in Alaska, an entertaining story in itself. But she got on the celebrity gravy train and doesn't seem to take orders from them anymore, so they've been looking for new host bodies to possess.
Up to now the worst thing that has happened under this governor was the plan to declare cities, typically black-majority, bankrupt and terminate their elected governments in favor of appointed "technocratic" rulers likely to be corporate pals of the GOP. The role of the appointed receiver in this contamination disaster must be stressed, the result of a GOP strategy to silence minority voters in the most fundamental way.
Thank you for running this article. It is important that many idealists at this site be made to understand how difficult it is to change the attitudes of human societies to violence, instead of becoming convinced that one's own society must be uniquely evil in reaction to everyone else's prejudice that it is uniquely good.
Both are correct, but we must remember that humans evolved as social animals, and the hunter-gatherer band was our society for 99% of our past. Liberals denying the power and utility of tribalism just leaves it as a weapon to picked up off the dirt by monsters. If we understand the functions of tribalism (mutual support under scarcity, common defense), then we won't be misled by those who appropriate tribal instincts to empower an agenda alien to our ancestors: casteism, imperialism, mass extermination, and concentration of wealth.
So all the people who rebelled against Assad's dictatorship are terrorists and deserve to be exterminated? You really are an ass-kisser for Arab "socialist" dictators, who no longer command any allegiance anywhere.
The issue is, why did so many Republicans scream about Obama's birth certificate when, even in the worst case scenario, he was as much a US citizen as Cruz. The answer is, in their eyes no liberal is really American, and the tiniest legal angle thus proves that Obama and his supporters are traitors. This is about allegiance to the religion of Americanism, by which Cruz's anti-Communist Cuban parents were okay, and Obama's hippie mom wasn't.
As we saw in Iraq last year, to win you must have troops willing to sacrifice their lives for their regime. I've never heard a single GI who's had any dealings with the the Saudi military express any respect for its men. They're like ARVN with Rolex watches.
The KSA and Iran can only fight each other in the countries in-between. If actual Saudi troops try to take the offensive in Lebanon, Hezbollah will annihilate them. The Saudis could try to wipe out the non-Sunnis in Syria with airstrikes and atrocities, but Russia probably could wipe out their supply lines - unless the US is willing to sign on to this crime. Iran, conversely, has no place to march its own army to inflict a decisive offensive blow. It can't supply troops on the Arabian peninsula. So all I can see coming is a bigger version of the current Syrian stalemate, a sort of Islamic World War One on a trench line cutting across western Iraq.
The Chinese can afford to play paymaster in such a regional conflagration as the Bank of England used to. Their agenda is always brutal stability. In the past that meant propping up dictators in place against their own people, but how does that work in a war where each faction has unconnected territories crossing official borders?
You're one of the very few people anywhere I've seen on the Internet who understands the obvious debt that the Saudis hold over the US. I don't know why this isn't widely known. They also own a pile of Treasury debt. The fact that the proceeds of crude oil sales are dollar denominated has chained the USA and KSA together to preserve the $ as the world's reserve currency for 44 years after that should have ended. Saudi votes in OPEC maintain that reality, so Saudi power to crash the $ is even greater than its own holdings.
The only way out of this trap is to explain it to the citizenry and make it clear that our freedom will require the sacrifice of the $, and the construction of an export-driven, low-wage economy - low wages for EVERYBODY, not just the workers, like what happened when the US Occupation jump-started the Japanese economic miracle in 1948 by a brutal devaluation of the yen. No one has the guts to do this.
Surprisingly, tyrannies have been peacefully replaced by democracy. It's rare, but at least we have examples that might show us how to make it happen.
I would expect that Juan Carlos steered Spain to democracy after Franco died because the king was a product of postwar European culture, and there were a lot of other affluent Spaniards who were sick of Falangism for the same reason. I know that Nelson Mandela used the threat of revolution to get the National Party to accept real elections, but he didn't have to go too far down that road.
The problem is that you need elites who think that they are either safer or more prosperous if they share power, and masses who have the discipline to apply the correct amount of coercive force to bring that about. Most elites these days think only about stealing everything and buying private islands as quickly as possible. And the masses lack ideologies that can get them to reason out the benefits of applying that pressure in the name of democracy instead of joining up with a new would-be elite to seize control. The speed with which bad parties rise to the top after the restoration of democracy is now breathtaking. I think that markets and the merchandizing of self-serving faith have undermined the value of civil society in the eyes of people worldwide.
I'm still angry with the attempts by peaceniks here to embrace Trump like they tried to embrace the Tea Party 7 years ago. Dr. Martin Luther King denounced the United States for committing far worse crimes in Vietnam than anything it's done under Obama, but he didn't call for the overthrow of Lyndon Johnson in favor of George Wallace, who is Trump's closest American analogue. He didn't call for the US to surrender its empire to the USSR on the grounds that anything would be better than American power. He understood that supporting the liberal commitment to overthrow Jim Crow was a necessary first step in creating a social democratic America. He understood that annihilating big government in the name of "peace" would throw Blacks back into the tender embrace of States' Rights. He supported the Federal Great Society and wanted it to get even more money; in a 1967 sermon he said a just solution to poverty would cost a trillion dollars, but it was worth it. Yet now the hunger of the Left to destroy the American empire is so great that you want to let racist barbarians dismantle the government and restore some bullshit isolationist Walden America.
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
Interposition and nullification are now the words of the GOP, along with "States' Rights" and "limited government." Look them up before you sign on.
I dare the whole worthless lot of you to refute this.
Exactly. And we should point out to Islamophobes that the difference between Moslems and Christians is that Christian terrorism is mostly conducted by the United States Armed Forces.
It appears the peaceniks on this site are so desperate to return to isolationism that they will vote for the Nazi instead of the crook. Now what is the historical flaw in that logic?
What could be more dangerous than declaring war on all the non-white people in the United States? A hundred million of us can make a much bigger mess with the tools we have at our disposal than those people Gadafi and Assad oppressed.
But she never egged on a crowd of Southerners in person to beat up a black man protesting against police brutality. Trump did. A return to Jim Crow is the point where I justify revolutionary violence against America. You may have no problem with that, but how many of your fellow Americans will you kill to enforce Fuehrer Trump's will?
I am suspicious of the idea that independent voters simply fall between Democrats and Republicans on the political spectrum. I think they are people who don't like to think ideologically, but by that token they have no ideological restraints against jumping on a bandwagon regardless of the consequences in other areas. My great fear of Trump is that his talk of solving all our problems merely by treating all Latinos and Moslems as enemy aliens will actually attract a lot of independents who don't want to think this through. Once they become loyal to him personally, they will keep following him as he starts pushing for the power to use the government or even mobs of supporters to harass his critics.
Clearly a man who intends to seize power this way will find a war with someone, anyone, to be an attractive solution.
The competing narrative was Marxism; but Reagan and the Saudi despots were allied in crushing secular leftism everywhere in the Middle East.. Egypt's generals were bought out, Bhutto was beheaded, and the conspirators created a jihad infrastructure in Afghanistan that spread everywhere. The US sent a message to the poor of this region: adopt a socialist narrative to explain your poverty and we will kill you. Adopt an Islamist narrative, and we will send you guns.
I think about how the fascists won in Depression-wrecked Japan. Young radicalized Army officers murdered pro-Western politicians on the grounds that Western ideas had failed, then the public hailed them as martyrs, not their victims. As sudden as that, everything changed.
We simply don't yet know how many Americans are ready to flip that switch.
In recent years I've tried to hold to a narrow definition of fascism in order to distinguish historical fascists from any number of right-wing oligarchical regimes of modern times. I think FDR's definition of fascism merely being the control of government by the rich is too broad, because it doesn't account for feudal oligarchies like those in Latin America that simply perpetuate medieval ideas of class privilege to support backwardness.
What makes fascism distinct is that it arises from within a democratic polity, while embracing a POPULIST nostalgia for a defeated feudalist past. This contradiction happens when a large faction is able to view itself as the true and pure patriots across class boundaries, but in reality its members dream of overthrowing modern democracy and economic relations at the cost of everyone else, installing themselves as the new titled nobility. Restoring feudalism in an industrialized democracy is very different than preserving it in a 3rd world economy. The latter, from El Salvador to the American South, benefits from demobilizing voters and encouraging mass cynicism with the efficacy of secular government; its allies within the clergy and local police give their masters control over the reins of power as they always have. The fascist must selectively mobilize millions of followers in all walks of life, organizing a replacement government free of any external restraint. This is done by replacing a belief in ideology with a blind faith in the person of the leader, Hitler's fuehrer principle.
Mapping this out over America today, I was not willing to say the Christian Right was specifically fascist, though I hate it and think it's the greatest threat to our democracy. Their nostalgia is still based on abolishing government to return to localized plantation-owner oligarchy. Their leadership caste of wealthy clergymen, private-company fortunes (Kochs), militia supremacists and neo-Confederates work together by holding down their own bailiwicks outside of elected government, with the implication that the entire white Christian people are to act as an Invisible Empire of unpaid enforcers.
But in the fascist model, those supporters go on the warpath in an all-out effort that they intend to hand off to the government when their fuehrer has mastered it. They believe they've got limited time to restore traditional hierarchy because the untermenschen have already tasted power and are breeding like rats. Thus they believe that government must actively brainwash the public and exterminate their enemies right now.
I think that the patient, relentless feudalist agenda is that which came out of the never-fully modernized South and lucked into our reactionary Suburbia as a growth medium. But the urgency and volatility of fascism characterize the bigots and bullies of the North, Trump's core constituents. They are uncomfortable with theocratic formulations and Byzantine Southern race codes, and now are getting impatient with the 35-year-lie of trickle-down economics propagated by the anti-government rich. They want government strong enough to carry out redistribution, but only based on loyalty/tribal membership. They want to physically beat and shoot a whole lot of Others, and then go home and bask in their new protected status.
And the amazing thing is, the fascists are stealing Southern votes away from the feudalists before our eyes in GOP polls. There have been too many betrayals, round after round of deregulation & tax cuts that only benefited the rich, costly wars that seemed to yield less and less gain, too many real issues like pollution swept under the rug per the requirements of ideological cohesion. Even Southerners seem to be sick of trusting the collective conspiracy of their elites, when they want to trust a single tyrant who will smash status quos with no end game.
I trust Russia and Iran's agenda for the region more than I do my own country's, because my country completely depends on Israel and Saudi Arabia to tell it whom to kill or starve, and they are the true enemies of the ordinary people of the Middle East.
None of your criticisms in any way alienate Trump from the actual white illiberal American population. All that you think is bad, they go out of their way to regard as good. They're like my cousin who enjoyed buying the National Enquirer (whose covers now blare forth smears that Obama is protecting Islamic terrorist cells) because he knew it irritated me. They will not believe there are any bad consequences of their stupidity until it's far too late to save America.
A fractured, out of step Republican Party that believes it has a Divine Right to cheat in elections, that America "is a republic, not a democracy", that passing laws to eliminate every kind of voting that African-Americans are statistically likely to engage in is not racist, that they have the right to secession and violent revolution if the country is not right-wing enough. You want to hate Hillary so much that you refuse to acknowledge a fascist movement in front of your eyes.
No, Trump is saying that he will carry out this policy of controlling the Middle East better. Which may mean better bombings. But it definitely means banning Moslems from entering the USA. So stop pretending that Trump is no big deal.
Well, there's a difference between "continue and worsen" and "concentration camps and right-wing lynch mobs by 2017". With Trump and Cruz you are facing leaders who want to worsen conditions in order to scapegoat entire groups of Americans, who will then be legally stripped of their right to vote, thereby making impossible any subsequent democratic change at all short of revolution. That's what the right-wing movement has been talking about for decades, via codewords that you didn't care to decipher, like "13th Amendment citizen" and "restore the Republic" and "take back our country" and "original intent". When the country started, only a few percent of Americans could vote. The GOP is lining up not just voters, but armed extremists, who would be necessary to enforce such a restoration.
The settler movement is the creation of Zionism, and pre-dates the Israeli state. It then was turned by the state into its weapon of ethnic cleansing. The rulers need to create an ever more hateful environment to get enough enough votes to cling to power despite their incompetence and corruption, but that hatred makes their Frankenstein monster more uncontrollable. Like the KKK, it is the dark hand of the plantation owners, but the owners refuse to take responsibility for its crimes.
They were given the option of answering "not sure". It's something more than ignorant to be unwilling to admit that you don't know if a place deserves to be annihilated. And by your criteria, how can we have an electorate qualified to select the rulers who control ten thousand nuclear weapons?
It is increasingly evident that American far-right Christians worship a different God than everyone else in the world, a tribal God that they've concocted to claim that He has transferred His covenant, and the bloody murder always associated with it, to only the "real" Americans. The rest of us are barely tolerated servant races under their Patriarchal authority. American Christianity is evolving into a heresy.
The Republicans' wars have not been proven to have accomplished anything at all. There were no Iraqi WMDs. There was no global Islamist army until REAGAN allied with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's tyrants to create such an army to kill Commies in Afghanistan. Reagan fled from Lebanon after his blundering support for a faction in its war led to the Marine barracks bombing. We killed half a million to a million Iraqis over the years, and you can't prove that it has reduced the numbers of terrorists worldwide at all.
You can't even articulate a solution except genocide. You can't. Your fascist candidates can't. We can't impose a non-Moslem government in the region. Thus we can only destroy people to create a power vacuum that will be filled with another Moslem regime or a new terrorist group. The regime we are helping is Saudi Arabia, the greatest supporter of Islamist terrorism in the world. America's business oligarchy is tightly allied with Saudi Arabia. You have no solution for that.
But on the other hand, the price drop ruins the idea that abandoning fossil fuels is a pragmatic idea because oil is bound to get expensive one day. Cheap oil will restore all the bad habits and make alternative energy seem like a punishment, not an inevitability.
I think the moral equivocation between Clinton and Donald Trump at sites like this is disgusting. It's like leftists in Weimar Germany complaining that the Social Democrats aren't pure enough and not bothering to vote against Hitler.
As they said in Louisiana when Edwin Edwards beat David Duke, "Better the crook than the Nazi." But in fact Trump is both:
I have a theory that the corrupt aristocracy of Games of Thrones actually is how most Americans would prefer to be governed as long as they didn't have to bear the consequences of being on one of the many losing sides. They project themselves out of their miserable lives and into imagined lives as barons and knights who can get away with murder. Queen Elizabeth I knew what she was doing when she subsidized Shakespeare's patriotic plays.
Excuse me, but you have completely overestimated the wisdom of the American people. To them, across most of the political spectrum, wars to slaughter Moslems are JUSTIFIED by Moslem terrorist attacks. They never see it as vice versa because they see America as defending a just status quo. There was no danger that Clinton was going to be made to look bad by terrorists, except from successful right-wing fearmongering that she is not murderous enough. None. Zero. Not at all. That is the kind of country you're living in. We will always believe in Manichean struggles, and we will always believe that the side we back will prevail after sufficient violence. Even the Americans cheering for ISIS (or the USSR, or Mao, or Saddam Hussein, or Gaddafi) to destroy the American empire have fallen into that trap. But inevitably they are outnumbered by people cheering for their country, because humans are like that everywhere.
Not enough people are discussing this idea. At one time we had maybe one representative for every thirty thousand or so inhabitants. Now it's almost one per million. That makes for easy one-stop shopping for oligarchic interests. Not only should we have several thousand representatives, but they should all stay in their district offices and rely on teleconferencing to deal with each other.
Well, that answers the question of how Trump wanted to handle the Israel issue. He went from not having a clear position to trying to go so far overboard in waging war on Palestinians that he even scared the Israelis - something that our very worst Christian theocrats couldn't manage. Now it would be great if Trump's right-wing populist scapegoating of financiers as the only capitalists to blame for the '08 crash begins to add the prefix "Jewish". Hey, Hitler did business with the Zionist colonies at first because he wanted an easy place to expel his Jews. Persecuting Jewish liberals at home while arming Zionist colonists overseas is not a new formula.
Zuckerberg is a rationalist, not a saint. A resumption of old-style holy wars and nationalist crusades disrupts his plans for global market penetration the same way that WW1 destroyed the laissez-faire imperialist hegemony of 1913, where capital was remarkably mobile. Everyone goes on a Chinese-style us-against-them footing and tries to wall off their fragment of the Internet.
But like the vast majority of US liberals (gentiles too), he's unlikely to challenge the basic act of Zionist aggression that fuels everything else; the colonial conquest of Palestinian property.
Possibly, but it was a mistake for him to mention the internment of Japanese-Americans. He doesn't even seem to know that Congress apologized for that and issued reparations. At the time Asians were viewed as genetically inferior and an alien threat, which is really why the Japanese-Americans were targeted but not German-Americans. Thus if we do that to Moslems now, we imply that they are genetically inferior and inherently evil - and history has proven that we were very wrong about Japanese people.
The internment of the Japanese was nothing?
And what about the issue of whether Trump would even allow Moslem US citizens to return to America? In the '30s, US states didn't just round up illegal aliens, they rounded up Mexican-American citizens and trucked them deep into Mexico so they couldn't return home.
That's ethnic cleansing, the thing our country went to war with Serbia about.
"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights..."
This is absolutely critical in understanding where modern right-wingers are coming from. They DO think that they are really the Master Race and that they have only allowed any rights for blacks, Latinos, atheists, etc, etc, as an indulgence based on their endless Christian generosity. So even equality is actually proof of their superiority. But now, they imply, those groups have abused their undeserved gift and are to blame for all the country's problems, for surely the Master Race and infallible Free Enterprise and our unimpeachable boys in uniform can't possibly be to blame. So they must now restore the natural order.
And to do that, they need a legal angle that the public will largely support that divides citizenship into first-class and second-class. Just as the racists who built Jim Crow started on the tiny crack of voter suppression via Grandfather Clauses and poll taxes, and widened it into an entire culture of apartheid. That's why they now scream so wildly for things like a religious right to discriminate against gays (but not for people of other religions to discriminate against other people). Or the right of a white man to regard a black man as a more "natural" threat than vice versa and thus have the right to shoot first. Or the right to profile-search Moslems at airports, but not good, gun-nut Christians. All of those are of value to them, but the greater value is the restoration of legal precedents for the return of massive, legal discrimination by them against everyone else. They only need one victory; they already have an organized legal cult ready to seize upon it and argue that it applies to everything else they want in more cases than normal citizens can ever keep track of.
The American Right today is, in all its forms, a cult of inequality, worshiping the past for its injustices, not despite them.
The point is that right-wingers use "original intent" as coded language based on the assumption that the Founding Fathers were infallible, that the state they founded was perfect and that all revisions were heresy, and that the Founding Fathers made no provision for a more liberal future. In other words, the Right's agenda is to restore all the worst of life 250 years ago, while censoring out all the demands of intellectuals like Jefferson (who did benefit from many of those bad things) that society be set on a path to greater equality via an activist, secular government.
Our society is built on a definition of freedom that implies it is the power of right-thinking people to oppress lesser beings. Yet it is presented as freedom for everybody - because if the lesser beings want the "wrong" things then it's license, not freedom. All other double standards might emerge from that.
And by the way, how can you possibly explain Obama intentionally re-starting the Cold War when his Republican mortal enemies (as in doing nothing for 8 years but trying to ruin him and take away the rights of blacks to vote) are the obvious beneficiaries?
NATO didn't have Erdogan's back when Israel shot up Turkey's Gaza convoy, so I don't see why he'd be its lackey when he's fighting for his political survival. Dig it, America is not the only country whose voters reward warmongering politicians.
The savagery of secularism? That sounds like bull**** coming from Ted Cruz and Ben Carson and the abortion clinic bombers and homophobes whining and terrorizing their way to power in America.
"At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal."
A beautiful and succinct statement of the broad political strategy of the American reactionary movement. The restoration of decentralized tyranny, under racist private institutions and the police. The soldier/police/prison guard class is put on a pedestal by conservative whites, recruited from among their number as actual productive economic opportunities are destroyed by their capitalist barons. That enforcer class is armored, well paid, and now expected to be above the common law and privileged with the assumption that their honor and truthfulness can't be questioned. They're the new knighthood, and will side with the barons. Feudalism was decentralized tyranny too. White power keeps the mass of peasants loyal to their hierarchy as did the blind Christianity of Medieval times.
There may be conflation between the resurgent (and in many cases traditional) racism of America's poorer white-majority regions and the class of poorer whites nationwide. However, an article I saw recently discussed survey data indicating that the VERY poorest whites support the government programs of which they are recipients - but then can't be bothered to vote. Whereas the class of whites just ahead of them - what in military culture would be considered the corporals - have the worst, most militantly hateful ideas and do vote. The implication is that they hate anything that reduces the gap between them and those below them, like Obamacare.
So it's whether you're a poor private or a poor corporal. A huge difference to them.
In regard to the Christians, the key distinction to regard (and Google) is between the familiar Premillenarian reading of the Book of Revelation (the Left Behind tale), and the view held by the much more secretive Postmillenarians. The Pre's tell a passive story where you just get Raptured and God does all the killing of your enemies. The Posts have a much scarier tale: the Millenium actually began a thousand years ago, presumably as Christians rose to global power and conquest, and it's when the conquest is completed - the entire world enslaved by the right kind of Christians - that Jesus returns. I think you can see where America and its massive military fit in to all this. A militant faction of the Posts has wormed its way South into evangelical churches, slowly revising their Rapture tropes into something more actively seditious.
Problem: Israel specializes in the creepy weapons of the modern police/surveillance state. It got a lot of good Soviet engineers a few years back. It penetrated the US military-industrial complex even before 9/11. Governments of all ideologies are hungry for that Orwellware and I'm not sure they can embargo both Israel and the US.
Or the mass famines caused by the Japanese in Vietnam and China that killed hundreds of thousands of people, or their killing of a million Filipinos in 1944-45? Or the mass famine the British caused in Bengal in 1943 by continuing exports during a drought? Or the internment and deaths of hundreds of Japanese and German POWs in the Gulags up to 10 years after the war ended? It just goes on and on... but a reasonable person would not want to live in the world where the other side won.
Everyone on your side says that, but as soon as they get enough power they immediately start attacking even the right to contraception. Attacking abortion, then conception is NOT consistent with the opinion that an unborn child is a human. It IS consistent with the patriarchal dogma that a woman exists to breed babies under bondage to men to make the tribe stronger than its enemies. The fetus-as-human myth is not in the Bible, it was created after societies began to accept that women had rights.
The word "dealbreaker" is the most important mystery in America's political system. It appears that far-right extremists are overrunning Congress and state government simply because their hateful, classist and racist agendas are NOT dealbreakers for most of the people who bother to vote.
They would vote for Hitler if they could get a tax cut out of it.
So, beating black protesters in Birmingham while the leading GOP contender for president eggs them on, shooting black protesters in Minneapolis, shooting up and burning Planned Parenthood clinics after a completely bogus GOP smear campaign that was like Shake & Bake McCarthyism. Ready to fight back yet?
This isn't about the leaders, after all. It's about our fellow Americans and whether we can share a country with them anymore. You won't save yourselves by letting them secede, either, because I'm in one of the prime secession zones and I deny their right to restore barbarism, racism, and theocracy on one acre of our soil. I will fight, and as we have seen in other parts of the world, you will not be able to avoid being dragged in.
You are missing the point of stochastic terrorism. Instead of a unified terrorist force with a unified ideology that can be identified and hated, the right wing in our capitalist media culture can simply issue fatwas in the form of smears, and violent individuals can choose the fatwa that they are willing to kill for and then carry it out with the ample weapons at everyone's disposal. The central, totalitarian ideology is not lacking, it exists as an overlap of the all the seemingly independent right-wing extremist factions. But if you dig into the furthest right prophets of extremism, like R. J. Rushdoony, you discover that they unified all these ideas into a comprehensive system of patriarchal tyranny, then disguised it by forming hundreds of foundations, think tanks, and religious pressure groups. Then they all advanced together, a sort of cloud of extremism that could maintain plausibly deniable links with elected GOP leaders.
You will find that the rank & file soldiers of ISIS and al-Qaeda are often ignorant boys who know little about their leaders' global agenda. They care about their village or a killed relative or their own bad experiences. Hitler understood with the Fuhrer principle that the henchmen don't want to mess with the complexities of an organic, world-explaining ideology, they want faith and trust in leaders as a replacement for complex argumentation. Stochastic terrorism carries that further by a "politics of the deed" that once inspired anarchists to independently carry out the assassinations of several world leaders.
There's a much simpler answer. People who want to drag America back to its barbaric, racist past are called "patriots", and in reality tens of millions of Americans support that and condemn anyone who shows any signs of moderation or compromise. Therefore, terrorists who are the antithesis of moderation and compromise are the best patriots of all. And of course a patriot supports the supremacy of the race responsible for all that is good about America, so he is 99% likely to be white.
You claim they're not part of an intentional conspiracy. The abortion clinic bombers have essentially won their war and gotten away with it. Their violence did not discredit the establishment anti-abortion movement, it strengthened it to the point where it no longer needs the bombers to legislate abortion out of existence piecemeal. We are dealing with a large faction of Americans who turn their worst males into terrorists to carry out plausibly deniable executions of dissenters. Maybe one day after they've killed off all of us they will get funding from the regime to go overseas and commit terrorism there to spread its ideology. Saudi Arabia has done exactly that.
The problem is, white conservatives define order as the protection of their asses at the expense of all others. They deny being on the same side as white supremacists, but they know they're safe from them while even a one in a million chance of being killed by a salafi justifies the American Inquisition.
My worst-case scenario was outright war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. We're now over 50% of the way there. Someone needs to derail these converging trains.
Erdogan doesn't have zero allies; he has Saudi Arabia and the Arab monarchies as an ally - the ally no one who consumes oil can say no to. That gives him leverage with the US to offset the Israelis.
"After his supporters beat up a Black Lives Matter protester on video, Donald Trump suggested that they may have done the right thing.
The protester, a black man, reportedly started chanting Black Lives Matter at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday. In a video captured by CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond, rally attendees swarm around the man, kicking and punching him as he curls up on the ground
Trump was asked to weigh in on his supporters’ actions on Fox & Friends Sunday morning. “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said. “It was disgusting what he was doing.”"
Trump's bombast is the conversion of that activity from a secret of professionals, to a crusade by the entire "loyal" population, like those assailants in Birmingham.
It did not take a generation or two for Pol Pot to show the worst that a revolution by nostalgic lunatics can do. It took four years.
I'm not saying that will happen here. I am saying that the tyrants of the Gulf monarchies CHOSE to create the ideological parameters under which ISIS must be so insanely brutal to prove its worthiness. No matter the size of the mess the US made, those monarchs and their Wahhabi agents deliberately embraced irrational faith against empirical, secular problem-solving as a way to fix that mess, because said problem-solving would eventually have condemned those monarchs to overthrow as it did in the entire rest of the world. Those monarchs chose to spend their infinite funds to NOT improve people's lives in a sustainable way. How can you trust things to ever get better until these US-propped anachronisms are all decapitated?
There's another thing going on here. You point out that it's easier for government to collect everything on everybody due to the nature of technology. However, what is really being fought over is the idea that discrimination and double standards represent a moral good. Collecting data ONLY on Moslems is a form of stigmatization; that's exactly what movement conservatives want, a restoration of America's real tradition of caste and racial oppression. You see different issues where the Right mobilizes frenzied opposition, like Hobby Lobby, police brutality, even how people are searched at airports. But I see that all of these cases are part of a relentless crusade to create precedents to restore the right of "real" Americans to discriminate against inferiors, with the knowledge that one victory against Moslems can be twisted into precedent used against blacks, atheists, etc. Hobby Lobby was all about the right of the religious to discriminate, a right that I guarantee will be interpreted so that only the Christian Right gets to use it. Stand Your Ground says that you are reasonable in shooting anyone you consider a threat, so a fearful bigot - indoctrinated to be so by right-wing media - has more license to shoot blacks than blacks do to shoot whites.
So to the Right, universal data collection is offensive, because it dares imply that "real" Americans have to be held to the same standard of threat as the subhuman Other. The legal recognition of inequality, once attained, will be widened and deepened all the way back to Dred Scott. This is NOT about practical enforcement or actual crime prevention at all, it is about the idea that America is the property of the rich, by the whites, for the Christians.
The government, ironically, shares your observation and thus wants to view everyone as a threat to its administrative imperatives. Pick your poison.
The difference between a president and a dictator is merely what exists to stop him. Now if President Trump decides to use our incompetent military to attack a country and as usual it doesn't work, will he walk away, or will he bring out the nukes, since he proudly rejects all norms of international conduct on the grounds that only "babies" support them?
You act as though America was still One-Man-One-Vote. The electoral system is so perverted that Democratic votes are simply worth less than Republicans', fulfilling the latter's beliefs that they are the only real Americans. The ones who most openly and successfully assault democracy are the ones with the most say in the primaries. Now we will see if decades of extremist indoctrination have hollowed out Americans' fundamental loyalty to democratic norms, and made them frenzied enthusiasts of whichever candidate most brazenly promises to restore the "good old days" of white patriarchal monopoly by holy decree. If it's not Trump, it will be someone who promises to be worse.
Also, if you look at the archive, you will notice that Cole has published one complimentary article after another about Sanders, whom I also support, but has little good to say about Clinton.
You should consider that so many suicide bombers have been followers of right-wing reactionary movements financed by billionaires. Then consider our homegrown terrorists and abortion clinic bombers, who have basically won their 40-year war to drag America far enough to the Right to make the current GOP candidates acceptable. Now, do you think the people running the Right have ruled out the option of inciting more Christian, neo-Confederate, militia sociopaths to carry out assassinations to supplement their police state? The GOP libels Planned Parenthood, and in days the arsons begin at Planned Parenthood clinics. Will it be gays next, or Moslems, or Mexican-Americans? Just as in the Jim Crow South, the police state will look the other way as the secret state of untraceable true believers enforces unwritten laws by terror.
Yet every time he makes a new, more fascistic statement, his approval ratings rise. If he loses, it will be because someone else won delegates from him by being even more horrible. Those Republicans will still be a danger to us and the world for the rest of their lives. At least we are being given a moment of clarity as to how numerous and powerful this barbarian horde has become, along with its analogs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Japan, and every other place where people are angry that the "system" fails to give their lives value by sufficiently persecuting those who are different.
I guess as right-wingers, ISIS has no problem with private property and inequality. So it appeals to the young not as progressive, but romantic and reactionary. Sort of like the Society for Creative Anachronism for kids who aren't bourgeois whites, where everyone is somehow a nobleman and the peasants aren't acknowledged.
What likely happens is exactly what you'd expect of something like that: they don't understand economics. People too stupid to figure out how to make goods of value in legal markets usually turn to narcotics. Narcostates are the modern equivalent of the pirate states of old, and we've done very badly battling them. But even the Taliban had to pretend to be anti-opium when it was allied with al-Qaeda and trying to bring in devout Moslem boys from around the world. A narcostate in Syria sounds like an easy drone target to me. Absent that, their economy will fall into the squalor typical of failed communes of the '70s.
In support of your analysis, al-Qaeda is now a rival of ISIS in Syria and has a motive for a false-flag attack. If that's true, then it is NOT ISIS retaliating for Western intervention, but al-Qaeda trying to provoke Western intervention to get rid of the competition so it can take over. Note that Putin has been accused of only bombing groups like al-Qaeda and leaving ISIS alone - perhaps so that he can keep them around as an excuse for his general goal of saving Assad?
So please, folks, let's not think that any of our options here are easy.
This is why I don't get people who think that Trump is less likely to start a war as President than one of the candidates who has more experience in government. He has based his entire appeal on being the opposite of diplomatic. For a country, the alternative to negotiation is not ignoring a problem, the alternative is war.
Quite the opposite. The more you are like a real nation-state, the more vulnerable you become to conventional weapons, because states are all about machinery, infrastructure and organization, preferably competent, to meet the demands of their constituents. Guerrilla and terrorist groups evade all that tedious responsibility, and thus are invisible to tanks and airstrikes.
Wall Street and Washington have done several things already that have thrown over 100 million people into poverty. It's easy to do. Climate change is going to throw a billion people into poverty just for starters.
India has the largest Moslem population in the world.
Indonesia and Malaysia are also large Moslem countries.
The Philippines has a restive Moslem minority.
The anti-colonial narrative has power in S. Korea.
China has huge plans underway in Moslem Central Asia, which may surge into Iran, Pakistan, and the Arab world.
I would go back in time and save Rosa Luxemburg and give her Communists a chance instead, creating an alternative to Lenin. The Weimar Republic and the interwar order were such a mess that I think revolution was necessary.
I always thought the likely alternative was Ernst Rohm, the leader of the Brownshirts and along with Hitler one of the founders of the NSDAP. His ideology was a sort of racist populism in which the bosses would be overthrown and the workers would move to communes in the countryside, while the Brownshirts would replace the Army. So kind of like a KKK Pol Pot.
The world would have been better off with that. Such stupidity would either deindustrialized Germany into impotence, or it would have fallen to the German Communists instead.
You are expecting facts to mean the same to them as to other people. If your entire identity and reason for living is based on your "race", "faith" or some other dog-whistle identity being the only ones fit to rule and judge the value of everything in existence, then all facts must be made to support that. In that case, those in your identity group who have the most money and power are seen not as your exploiters, but as your natural tribal chieftains, using their power to lead your people in a war against all the other kinds of people on Earth. The value you place on that war is greater than your short-term well-being, because you are certain that only by dominating others (by whatever mechanism your ideology worships) will you survive in the long term. You will tell yourself that everyone else is out to eradicate your culture and even your bloodline. This is a big deal with right-wingers.
I think it's pretty depressing that the Russian people have more power to hold their tyrant responsible for provoking a costly war with terrorists absent proper precautions - while the people of the United States never held G. W. Bush or past US policy responsible for 9/11 at all.
Besides, the US now depends on Israel for lots of military technology, so we don't even do that great with arms sales anymore. They used our past aid money to develop creepy killer robots and Orwell-ware, and that's now the hot "military" technology that all the governments of the world buy to use against their own citizens.
The right wing is formulating their ideological attack to justify what Exxon did, or formulated it years ago. We should fear it, because it will work the same way all their ideological attacks do; by signalling to their followers that they are the only real men and everyone else on Earth is inferior, mandated by God to slave for the profits of the Patriarchs and then starve to death. What Exxon did, they all must do, it is their sacred birthright. Bit by bit they have been conditioned to wage open war against the world. However, all that is needed is for them to conquer the United States and hold us in terror.
As for saving his son Jeb's campaign, sorry, the barn door's open, the horse has fled, and then was attacked by bees, sunk in quicksand, and then chopped up for dog food.
What is missing from Peres' account of events is that Israel always planned for ethnic cleansing; he just now realizes that it can't be done without consequences, which the Likud ignores. Terminating democracy and creating an apartheid state is a perfectly acceptable fallback for the Likud in case its plans fail.
Well, I guess that will probably cost Bernie Sanders more support than all the "socialist" ideas he might propose. Since people are so ignorant about what socialism actually is, his opponents have to painstakingly frame each of his policy positions and reindoctrinate us as to why they are evil. But physically touching the Other will cause a visceral disgust that will flush out a lot of fake liberals and populists who secretly hate Moslems far more than they hate criminal banks. Of course, those people would eventually have figured it out and switched to Clinton or (if they were really confused) to Trump down the road, but we need the moment of clarity.
This probably was the bravest act of this entire 2016 campaign.
And yet Harper's Americanized far-right party ruled for 9 years, because 40% of Canadians always supported him, and the rest of Canadians refused to unite their four left-leaning parties to put a stop to him. The Liberals got their landslide with 40% as well, meaning it could unravel very quickly.
The monolithic unity of right-wingers in America and Canada forged by theocrats and corporate media exposes the degree of projection in right-wing claims that liberals are intolerant, narrow-minded, and all part of one giant monolithic conspiracy against everyone different than themselves. We "liberal bigots" are in fact defined by the fact that we can't agree on anything, which is the best argument for protecting liberty but the worst vehicle for actually doing so.
"Effort, as measured by operations conducted, bomb tonnage dropped, or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of progress made."
That nicely sums up both the fundamental doctrine of industrialized warfare, and the United States Army. Which is why our Army did very well in big conventional wars. Firepower delivered tends to correlate to enemy units eliminated, territory conquered, and enemy war production ground to a halt.
So what changed about war? Here are but a few things:
Conventional war assumes discrete, sovereign entities are attacking other discrete, sovereign entities. These entities, when battling for the highest stakes, have plans in place to mobilize their entire population, transportation network, and economic resources. However, that makes all of those known targets in advance, so each side knows what it's trying to destroy, and the supposed consequences.
War was not always this way. In fact, it has gone in cycles of absoluteness, meaning the willingness of sovereigns to wage war to eliminate other sovereigns and their states. This is not surprising because the sovereigns had little legitimacy and ability to raise armies.
We seem to live in a hybrid time, when organized states have little appetite to directly govern alien populations and do not give their citizens existential demands to fight for. This has created a world of opportunity for non-sovereign entities to create small armies of committed followers. It's not just happening in the Fourth World of failed states.
Why does Israel seem to want ISIS to win in Syria? Will this be the next "proof" that Arabs, and thus Palestinians, are monsters who must be eliminated? But Israel surely understands that mass-deporting Palestinians means sending them to ISIS-controlled regions where they will be far more dangerous.
I wonder if Netanyahu has convinced himself that he's finally found a way to use his nuclear arsenal in a first strike to exterminate the Palestinians? Send them all to The Caliphate, intentionally build it up as a threat, then unleash the nukes to the world's applause?
This linked article was very alarming. The timing of Hitler's decision to switch to organized extermination is well known.
1. Though he had previously concentrated on ethnic cleansing, many of those fleeing him moved to the very countries he later invaded. Jews in invaded countries were increasingly dealt with by Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS troops who sped into vast areas untouched by battle with death lists and rounded up victims before they even understood what was happening. However, the logistics of this practice bogged down; the whole point of Blitzkreig was a relatively cheap war for a resource-strapped Reich. Even Einsatzgruppen were too costly to support in the field. His officials were complaining about this in Russia during 1941, before the Mufti's visit with Hitler.
2. Hitler had violated his own doctrine of not having a 2-front war, and by unilaterally declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor, he now guaranteed that both fronts would be much stronger. He couldn't accept that he made an error, as usual, so he specifically blamed Franklin Roosevelt, and the Jews he had convinced himself were running the USA, for tricking him into a disastrous decision. His embrace of genocide was his idea of revenge against the Jewish conspiracy that kept outsmarting him.
That's no secret. Drones don't do what the military says they will, just as smart bombs don't. The public knows that by now, but has embraced the lie because it wants our country to have power untrammeled by the regard for civilian life that we claim to profess. Our citizenry is kept scared, it believes all the Mud Races out there are plotting against its supply of goodies, it wants a tribal warlord President to crush them, and it doesn't want to pay said President the cost of a conventional world war or bring back the draft. We all privately agree that the drone deaths are regrettable but necessary, thus so is lying to cover them up.
"The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes from the states that allegedly harbor them."
Which was our entire premise in suddenly holding the Taliban responsible for al-Qaeda as though they were one and the same, and overthrowing it. We might as well have held Pakistan's military regime fully responsible for creating and molding the Taliban to rule Afghanistan, but that would have meant war with a nuclear power.
This also explains why Washington pays unsuccessful lip service to nation-building, but ultimately it doesn't mind destroying governments and creating power vacuums. It believes that only governments create terrorism, not power vacuums. I think that both of them can create terrorism, but popular will also plays a role and the US has really created a vast amount of ill will over the years.
What happened is that before 9/11, Brzezinski told a French radio interviewer that in '79 he discussed with Carter the latter's interest in helping the CIA make trouble for the then independent but pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. He told Carter that IF he intervened, the Soviets would find out and retaliate there. But he told the interviewer that he personally desired that outcome. So he was honest with Carter, but diabolical with the rights of Afghans to be spared his desire for revenge against the USSR. Moreover, the interviewer asked him if he regretted what resulted in Afghanistan and he derided the Taliban regime's ability to make us pay for it. So in my opinion Zbiggy was also a fool who didn't get the threat of asymmetrical warfare and proxy movements to the USA.
But that wasn't a Civil War inside Britain. Going back further in history, Britain's attempts to establish Home Rule in Ireland were wrecked by the coming of WW1, the militarization of the Troubles as partisans on both sides came home from the trenches, and surplus weapons poured in. That's closer to Syria than Churchill's Britain, which was at least internally a nation of laws.
I disagree. It is more logical that it is Israel that wants the entire Moslem world in chaos, since it doesn't get any oil from it anyway while Wall Street oversees a global economy that must have that oil. Have you forgotten Dick Cheney's Project for a New American Century was full of Zionist operatives, some of whom officially worked for the Likud Party on its Clean Break document before Bush was elected? That paper called for the overthrow of all the unfriendly governments in the region in the interest of Israel. Saudi Arabia also has chosen to make Iran an enemy because of its fear of its own Shia population, and perhaps a larger fear of the Arab world turning on it because of its refusal to confront Israel. Saudi Arabia and Israel may both looking to a regional war to justify the elimination of their own hostile ethnicities - knowing the US lacks the will to object. The US has actually tried to fight ISIS; Saudi Arabia and Israel both seem to feel that ISIS serves some terrifying purpose.
All private property systems tend towards wealth polarization and oligarchic tyranny. You can go through history and find farmers becoming divided between unlucky ones who must borrow to survive bad years, and lucky ones who lend to them for vast interest or even in exchange for their fundamental liberties. Polarization would continue until collapse, invaders, or a new regime of redistribution. The Greeks of the Classical era were just a bunch of olive farmers, but in hundreds of city-states wealthy oligarchies became so intolerable that they were overthrown by revolutions, whose first order of business was mandated redistribution. It worked for a few centuries, but the oligarchs grew back.
So small business capitalism is simply a few generations away from becoming oligarchy. The redistributive mechanisms to combat this are always complex, aggravating and under threat by oligarchic propaganda.
The partisan witchhunt is an essential characteristic of the Republican Party. It is too provocative to demonize the hundred million supporters of the Democratic Party directly, so their leaders must be demonized instead. From Clinton to Swiftboating to Gore-paranoia to Birtherism, the intent is to wall off an entire universe of political possibilities that working Americans need to know about by indoctrinating them with the idea that those possibilities are only a front by a conspiracy of evil socialists, scheming non-whites, Satanic gays, etc, whose leaders must be traitors: the leaders of the Democratic Party, no matter how centrist they actually are. Manichean dualism, us vs them in God's war. This murderous fantasy keeps the GOP base voting to screw themselves to make their own leaders richer and more powerful to save them all from the Devil.
Sanders is correct in understanding the e-mail issue is simply trivial compared to the issues he's talking about, and as long as tabloid politics are the order of the day, he has no chance of changing anything about America. He can't win unless he teaches American voters a lesson about what matters, and he has to start early. It's not about personages, it's about the fundamental ends of democratic policy.
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In the primaries, no.
In the general election, yes.
How do you know the people the reactionary right hates aren't just as mad? It's just that when we pick up guns we're automatically branded radical terrorists. You saw what they did to Occupy.
People will go both ways because of this. But the people Trump loses, he can afford to lose because those won't be in the key Christian Right states. The people he gains will be in the Midwest, South and Far West. In effect, he further extends the split he's already created in the Christian Right instead of Cruz reuniting it. Palin is very popular over there. Maybe most of all in the states where Christian extremism is not as blatantly racially coded, meaning Iowa, Kansas, of course the Dakotas.
She's a mercenary. Both she and Ted's dad Rafael spout the cartoonish heresies of the New Apostolic Reformation, like the talk of a "great transfer of wealth to the righteous." The NAR got to her in Alaska, an entertaining story in itself. But she got on the celebrity gravy train and doesn't seem to take orders from them anymore, so they've been looking for new host bodies to possess.
Up to now the worst thing that has happened under this governor was the plan to declare cities, typically black-majority, bankrupt and terminate their elected governments in favor of appointed "technocratic" rulers likely to be corporate pals of the GOP. The role of the appointed receiver in this contamination disaster must be stressed, the result of a GOP strategy to silence minority voters in the most fundamental way.
This may be the most important guest article Prof. Cole has ever published.
Thank you for running this article. It is important that many idealists at this site be made to understand how difficult it is to change the attitudes of human societies to violence, instead of becoming convinced that one's own society must be uniquely evil in reaction to everyone else's prejudice that it is uniquely good.
Both are correct, but we must remember that humans evolved as social animals, and the hunter-gatherer band was our society for 99% of our past. Liberals denying the power and utility of tribalism just leaves it as a weapon to picked up off the dirt by monsters. If we understand the functions of tribalism (mutual support under scarcity, common defense), then we won't be misled by those who appropriate tribal instincts to empower an agenda alien to our ancestors: casteism, imperialism, mass extermination, and concentration of wealth.
So all the people who rebelled against Assad's dictatorship are terrorists and deserve to be exterminated? You really are an ass-kisser for Arab "socialist" dictators, who no longer command any allegiance anywhere.
The issue is, why did so many Republicans scream about Obama's birth certificate when, even in the worst case scenario, he was as much a US citizen as Cruz. The answer is, in their eyes no liberal is really American, and the tiniest legal angle thus proves that Obama and his supporters are traitors. This is about allegiance to the religion of Americanism, by which Cruz's anti-Communist Cuban parents were okay, and Obama's hippie mom wasn't.
But Trump has never even run for any political office before.
But Trump has never even run for any political office before.
As we saw in Iraq last year, to win you must have troops willing to sacrifice their lives for their regime. I've never heard a single GI who's had any dealings with the the Saudi military express any respect for its men. They're like ARVN with Rolex watches.
The KSA and Iran can only fight each other in the countries in-between. If actual Saudi troops try to take the offensive in Lebanon, Hezbollah will annihilate them. The Saudis could try to wipe out the non-Sunnis in Syria with airstrikes and atrocities, but Russia probably could wipe out their supply lines - unless the US is willing to sign on to this crime. Iran, conversely, has no place to march its own army to inflict a decisive offensive blow. It can't supply troops on the Arabian peninsula. So all I can see coming is a bigger version of the current Syrian stalemate, a sort of Islamic World War One on a trench line cutting across western Iraq.
The Chinese can afford to play paymaster in such a regional conflagration as the Bank of England used to. Their agenda is always brutal stability. In the past that meant propping up dictators in place against their own people, but how does that work in a war where each faction has unconnected territories crossing official borders?
You're one of the very few people anywhere I've seen on the Internet who understands the obvious debt that the Saudis hold over the US. I don't know why this isn't widely known. They also own a pile of Treasury debt. The fact that the proceeds of crude oil sales are dollar denominated has chained the USA and KSA together to preserve the $ as the world's reserve currency for 44 years after that should have ended. Saudi votes in OPEC maintain that reality, so Saudi power to crash the $ is even greater than its own holdings.
The only way out of this trap is to explain it to the citizenry and make it clear that our freedom will require the sacrifice of the $, and the construction of an export-driven, low-wage economy - low wages for EVERYBODY, not just the workers, like what happened when the US Occupation jump-started the Japanese economic miracle in 1948 by a brutal devaluation of the yen. No one has the guts to do this.
Surprisingly, tyrannies have been peacefully replaced by democracy. It's rare, but at least we have examples that might show us how to make it happen.
I would expect that Juan Carlos steered Spain to democracy after Franco died because the king was a product of postwar European culture, and there were a lot of other affluent Spaniards who were sick of Falangism for the same reason. I know that Nelson Mandela used the threat of revolution to get the National Party to accept real elections, but he didn't have to go too far down that road.
The problem is that you need elites who think that they are either safer or more prosperous if they share power, and masses who have the discipline to apply the correct amount of coercive force to bring that about. Most elites these days think only about stealing everything and buying private islands as quickly as possible. And the masses lack ideologies that can get them to reason out the benefits of applying that pressure in the name of democracy instead of joining up with a new would-be elite to seize control. The speed with which bad parties rise to the top after the restoration of democracy is now breathtaking. I think that markets and the merchandizing of self-serving faith have undermined the value of civil society in the eyes of people worldwide.
I'm still angry with the attempts by peaceniks here to embrace Trump like they tried to embrace the Tea Party 7 years ago. Dr. Martin Luther King denounced the United States for committing far worse crimes in Vietnam than anything it's done under Obama, but he didn't call for the overthrow of Lyndon Johnson in favor of George Wallace, who is Trump's closest American analogue. He didn't call for the US to surrender its empire to the USSR on the grounds that anything would be better than American power. He understood that supporting the liberal commitment to overthrow Jim Crow was a necessary first step in creating a social democratic America. He understood that annihilating big government in the name of "peace" would throw Blacks back into the tender embrace of States' Rights. He supported the Federal Great Society and wanted it to get even more money; in a 1967 sermon he said a just solution to poverty would cost a trillion dollars, but it was worth it. Yet now the hunger of the Left to destroy the American empire is so great that you want to let racist barbarians dismantle the government and restore some bullshit isolationist Walden America.
"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."
Interposition and nullification are now the words of the GOP, along with "States' Rights" and "limited government." Look them up before you sign on.
I dare the whole worthless lot of you to refute this.
Exactly. And we should point out to Islamophobes that the difference between Moslems and Christians is that Christian terrorism is mostly conducted by the United States Armed Forces.
It appears the peaceniks on this site are so desperate to return to isolationism that they will vote for the Nazi instead of the crook. Now what is the historical flaw in that logic?
What could be more dangerous than declaring war on all the non-white people in the United States? A hundred million of us can make a much bigger mess with the tools we have at our disposal than those people Gadafi and Assad oppressed.
I think that Politifact disagrees with you. And you sound like the people of Weimar Germany in 1933 looking for an excuse to give up democracy.
But she never egged on a crowd of Southerners in person to beat up a black man protesting against police brutality. Trump did. A return to Jim Crow is the point where I justify revolutionary violence against America. You may have no problem with that, but how many of your fellow Americans will you kill to enforce Fuehrer Trump's will?
I am suspicious of the idea that independent voters simply fall between Democrats and Republicans on the political spectrum. I think they are people who don't like to think ideologically, but by that token they have no ideological restraints against jumping on a bandwagon regardless of the consequences in other areas. My great fear of Trump is that his talk of solving all our problems merely by treating all Latinos and Moslems as enemy aliens will actually attract a lot of independents who don't want to think this through. Once they become loyal to him personally, they will keep following him as he starts pushing for the power to use the government or even mobs of supporters to harass his critics.
Clearly a man who intends to seize power this way will find a war with someone, anyone, to be an attractive solution.
The competing narrative was Marxism; but Reagan and the Saudi despots were allied in crushing secular leftism everywhere in the Middle East.. Egypt's generals were bought out, Bhutto was beheaded, and the conspirators created a jihad infrastructure in Afghanistan that spread everywhere. The US sent a message to the poor of this region: adopt a socialist narrative to explain your poverty and we will kill you. Adopt an Islamist narrative, and we will send you guns.
President Trump will go to war with the first people to piss him off. Including you and me.
I think about how the fascists won in Depression-wrecked Japan. Young radicalized Army officers murdered pro-Western politicians on the grounds that Western ideas had failed, then the public hailed them as martyrs, not their victims. As sudden as that, everything changed.
We simply don't yet know how many Americans are ready to flip that switch.
In recent years I've tried to hold to a narrow definition of fascism in order to distinguish historical fascists from any number of right-wing oligarchical regimes of modern times. I think FDR's definition of fascism merely being the control of government by the rich is too broad, because it doesn't account for feudal oligarchies like those in Latin America that simply perpetuate medieval ideas of class privilege to support backwardness.
What makes fascism distinct is that it arises from within a democratic polity, while embracing a POPULIST nostalgia for a defeated feudalist past. This contradiction happens when a large faction is able to view itself as the true and pure patriots across class boundaries, but in reality its members dream of overthrowing modern democracy and economic relations at the cost of everyone else, installing themselves as the new titled nobility. Restoring feudalism in an industrialized democracy is very different than preserving it in a 3rd world economy. The latter, from El Salvador to the American South, benefits from demobilizing voters and encouraging mass cynicism with the efficacy of secular government; its allies within the clergy and local police give their masters control over the reins of power as they always have. The fascist must selectively mobilize millions of followers in all walks of life, organizing a replacement government free of any external restraint. This is done by replacing a belief in ideology with a blind faith in the person of the leader, Hitler's fuehrer principle.
Mapping this out over America today, I was not willing to say the Christian Right was specifically fascist, though I hate it and think it's the greatest threat to our democracy. Their nostalgia is still based on abolishing government to return to localized plantation-owner oligarchy. Their leadership caste of wealthy clergymen, private-company fortunes (Kochs), militia supremacists and neo-Confederates work together by holding down their own bailiwicks outside of elected government, with the implication that the entire white Christian people are to act as an Invisible Empire of unpaid enforcers.
But in the fascist model, those supporters go on the warpath in an all-out effort that they intend to hand off to the government when their fuehrer has mastered it. They believe they've got limited time to restore traditional hierarchy because the untermenschen have already tasted power and are breeding like rats. Thus they believe that government must actively brainwash the public and exterminate their enemies right now.
I think that the patient, relentless feudalist agenda is that which came out of the never-fully modernized South and lucked into our reactionary Suburbia as a growth medium. But the urgency and volatility of fascism characterize the bigots and bullies of the North, Trump's core constituents. They are uncomfortable with theocratic formulations and Byzantine Southern race codes, and now are getting impatient with the 35-year-lie of trickle-down economics propagated by the anti-government rich. They want government strong enough to carry out redistribution, but only based on loyalty/tribal membership. They want to physically beat and shoot a whole lot of Others, and then go home and bask in their new protected status.
And the amazing thing is, the fascists are stealing Southern votes away from the feudalists before our eyes in GOP polls. There have been too many betrayals, round after round of deregulation & tax cuts that only benefited the rich, costly wars that seemed to yield less and less gain, too many real issues like pollution swept under the rug per the requirements of ideological cohesion. Even Southerners seem to be sick of trusting the collective conspiracy of their elites, when they want to trust a single tyrant who will smash status quos with no end game.
I trust Russia and Iran's agenda for the region more than I do my own country's, because my country completely depends on Israel and Saudi Arabia to tell it whom to kill or starve, and they are the true enemies of the ordinary people of the Middle East.
To all:
None of your criticisms in any way alienate Trump from the actual white illiberal American population. All that you think is bad, they go out of their way to regard as good. They're like my cousin who enjoyed buying the National Enquirer (whose covers now blare forth smears that Obama is protecting Islamic terrorist cells) because he knew it irritated me. They will not believe there are any bad consequences of their stupidity until it's far too late to save America.
A fractured, out of step Republican Party that believes it has a Divine Right to cheat in elections, that America "is a republic, not a democracy", that passing laws to eliminate every kind of voting that African-Americans are statistically likely to engage in is not racist, that they have the right to secession and violent revolution if the country is not right-wing enough. You want to hate Hillary so much that you refuse to acknowledge a fascist movement in front of your eyes.
No, Trump is saying that he will carry out this policy of controlling the Middle East better. Which may mean better bombings. But it definitely means banning Moslems from entering the USA. So stop pretending that Trump is no big deal.
Well, there's a difference between "continue and worsen" and "concentration camps and right-wing lynch mobs by 2017". With Trump and Cruz you are facing leaders who want to worsen conditions in order to scapegoat entire groups of Americans, who will then be legally stripped of their right to vote, thereby making impossible any subsequent democratic change at all short of revolution. That's what the right-wing movement has been talking about for decades, via codewords that you didn't care to decipher, like "13th Amendment citizen" and "restore the Republic" and "take back our country" and "original intent". When the country started, only a few percent of Americans could vote. The GOP is lining up not just voters, but armed extremists, who would be necessary to enforce such a restoration.
The settler movement is the creation of Zionism, and pre-dates the Israeli state. It then was turned by the state into its weapon of ethnic cleansing. The rulers need to create an ever more hateful environment to get enough enough votes to cling to power despite their incompetence and corruption, but that hatred makes their Frankenstein monster more uncontrollable. Like the KKK, it is the dark hand of the plantation owners, but the owners refuse to take responsibility for its crimes.
They were given the option of answering "not sure". It's something more than ignorant to be unwilling to admit that you don't know if a place deserves to be annihilated. And by your criteria, how can we have an electorate qualified to select the rulers who control ten thousand nuclear weapons?
It is increasingly evident that American far-right Christians worship a different God than everyone else in the world, a tribal God that they've concocted to claim that He has transferred His covenant, and the bloody murder always associated with it, to only the "real" Americans. The rest of us are barely tolerated servant races under their Patriarchal authority. American Christianity is evolving into a heresy.
The Republicans' wars have not been proven to have accomplished anything at all. There were no Iraqi WMDs. There was no global Islamist army until REAGAN allied with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's tyrants to create such an army to kill Commies in Afghanistan. Reagan fled from Lebanon after his blundering support for a faction in its war led to the Marine barracks bombing. We killed half a million to a million Iraqis over the years, and you can't prove that it has reduced the numbers of terrorists worldwide at all.
You can't even articulate a solution except genocide. You can't. Your fascist candidates can't. We can't impose a non-Moslem government in the region. Thus we can only destroy people to create a power vacuum that will be filled with another Moslem regime or a new terrorist group. The regime we are helping is Saudi Arabia, the greatest supporter of Islamist terrorism in the world. America's business oligarchy is tightly allied with Saudi Arabia. You have no solution for that.
He looks like Joe McCarthy with a hairpiece.
This is the placeholder for the first comment on there being no difference between the parties.
But on the other hand, the price drop ruins the idea that abandoning fossil fuels is a pragmatic idea because oil is bound to get expensive one day. Cheap oil will restore all the bad habits and make alternative energy seem like a punishment, not an inevitability.
I think the moral equivocation between Clinton and Donald Trump at sites like this is disgusting. It's like leftists in Weimar Germany complaining that the Social Democrats aren't pure enough and not bothering to vote against Hitler.
As they said in Louisiana when Edwin Edwards beat David Duke, "Better the crook than the Nazi." But in fact Trump is both:
http://www.alternet.org/21-questions-donald-trump
I have a theory that the corrupt aristocracy of Games of Thrones actually is how most Americans would prefer to be governed as long as they didn't have to bear the consequences of being on one of the many losing sides. They project themselves out of their miserable lives and into imagined lives as barons and knights who can get away with murder. Queen Elizabeth I knew what she was doing when she subsidized Shakespeare's patriotic plays.
Excuse me, but you have completely overestimated the wisdom of the American people. To them, across most of the political spectrum, wars to slaughter Moslems are JUSTIFIED by Moslem terrorist attacks. They never see it as vice versa because they see America as defending a just status quo. There was no danger that Clinton was going to be made to look bad by terrorists, except from successful right-wing fearmongering that she is not murderous enough. None. Zero. Not at all. That is the kind of country you're living in. We will always believe in Manichean struggles, and we will always believe that the side we back will prevail after sufficient violence. Even the Americans cheering for ISIS (or the USSR, or Mao, or Saddam Hussein, or Gaddafi) to destroy the American empire have fallen into that trap. But inevitably they are outnumbered by people cheering for their country, because humans are like that everywhere.
Not enough people are discussing this idea. At one time we had maybe one representative for every thirty thousand or so inhabitants. Now it's almost one per million. That makes for easy one-stop shopping for oligarchic interests. Not only should we have several thousand representatives, but they should all stay in their district offices and rely on teleconferencing to deal with each other.
Well, that answers the question of how Trump wanted to handle the Israel issue. He went from not having a clear position to trying to go so far overboard in waging war on Palestinians that he even scared the Israelis - something that our very worst Christian theocrats couldn't manage. Now it would be great if Trump's right-wing populist scapegoating of financiers as the only capitalists to blame for the '08 crash begins to add the prefix "Jewish". Hey, Hitler did business with the Zionist colonies at first because he wanted an easy place to expel his Jews. Persecuting Jewish liberals at home while arming Zionist colonists overseas is not a new formula.
Zuckerberg is a rationalist, not a saint. A resumption of old-style holy wars and nationalist crusades disrupts his plans for global market penetration the same way that WW1 destroyed the laissez-faire imperialist hegemony of 1913, where capital was remarkably mobile. Everyone goes on a Chinese-style us-against-them footing and tries to wall off their fragment of the Internet.
But like the vast majority of US liberals (gentiles too), he's unlikely to challenge the basic act of Zionist aggression that fuels everything else; the colonial conquest of Palestinian property.
Possibly, but it was a mistake for him to mention the internment of Japanese-Americans. He doesn't even seem to know that Congress apologized for that and issued reparations. At the time Asians were viewed as genetically inferior and an alien threat, which is really why the Japanese-Americans were targeted but not German-Americans. Thus if we do that to Moslems now, we imply that they are genetically inferior and inherently evil - and history has proven that we were very wrong about Japanese people.
The internment of the Japanese was nothing?
And what about the issue of whether Trump would even allow Moslem US citizens to return to America? In the '30s, US states didn't just round up illegal aliens, they rounded up Mexican-American citizens and trucked them deep into Mexico so they couldn't return home.
That's ethnic cleansing, the thing our country went to war with Serbia about.
"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights..."
This is absolutely critical in understanding where modern right-wingers are coming from. They DO think that they are really the Master Race and that they have only allowed any rights for blacks, Latinos, atheists, etc, etc, as an indulgence based on their endless Christian generosity. So even equality is actually proof of their superiority. But now, they imply, those groups have abused their undeserved gift and are to blame for all the country's problems, for surely the Master Race and infallible Free Enterprise and our unimpeachable boys in uniform can't possibly be to blame. So they must now restore the natural order.
And to do that, they need a legal angle that the public will largely support that divides citizenship into first-class and second-class. Just as the racists who built Jim Crow started on the tiny crack of voter suppression via Grandfather Clauses and poll taxes, and widened it into an entire culture of apartheid. That's why they now scream so wildly for things like a religious right to discriminate against gays (but not for people of other religions to discriminate against other people). Or the right of a white man to regard a black man as a more "natural" threat than vice versa and thus have the right to shoot first. Or the right to profile-search Moslems at airports, but not good, gun-nut Christians. All of those are of value to them, but the greater value is the restoration of legal precedents for the return of massive, legal discrimination by them against everyone else. They only need one victory; they already have an organized legal cult ready to seize upon it and argue that it applies to everything else they want in more cases than normal citizens can ever keep track of.
The American Right today is, in all its forms, a cult of inequality, worshiping the past for its injustices, not despite them.
The point is that right-wingers use "original intent" as coded language based on the assumption that the Founding Fathers were infallible, that the state they founded was perfect and that all revisions were heresy, and that the Founding Fathers made no provision for a more liberal future. In other words, the Right's agenda is to restore all the worst of life 250 years ago, while censoring out all the demands of intellectuals like Jefferson (who did benefit from many of those bad things) that society be set on a path to greater equality via an activist, secular government.
Our society is built on a definition of freedom that implies it is the power of right-thinking people to oppress lesser beings. Yet it is presented as freedom for everybody - because if the lesser beings want the "wrong" things then it's license, not freedom. All other double standards might emerge from that.
And by the way, how can you possibly explain Obama intentionally re-starting the Cold War when his Republican mortal enemies (as in doing nothing for 8 years but trying to ruin him and take away the rights of blacks to vote) are the obvious beneficiaries?
NATO didn't have Erdogan's back when Israel shot up Turkey's Gaza convoy, so I don't see why he'd be its lackey when he's fighting for his political survival. Dig it, America is not the only country whose voters reward warmongering politicians.
The savagery of secularism? That sounds like bull**** coming from Ted Cruz and Ben Carson and the abortion clinic bombers and homophobes whining and terrorizing their way to power in America.
"At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal."
A beautiful and succinct statement of the broad political strategy of the American reactionary movement. The restoration of decentralized tyranny, under racist private institutions and the police. The soldier/police/prison guard class is put on a pedestal by conservative whites, recruited from among their number as actual productive economic opportunities are destroyed by their capitalist barons. That enforcer class is armored, well paid, and now expected to be above the common law and privileged with the assumption that their honor and truthfulness can't be questioned. They're the new knighthood, and will side with the barons. Feudalism was decentralized tyranny too. White power keeps the mass of peasants loyal to their hierarchy as did the blind Christianity of Medieval times.
There may be conflation between the resurgent (and in many cases traditional) racism of America's poorer white-majority regions and the class of poorer whites nationwide. However, an article I saw recently discussed survey data indicating that the VERY poorest whites support the government programs of which they are recipients - but then can't be bothered to vote. Whereas the class of whites just ahead of them - what in military culture would be considered the corporals - have the worst, most militantly hateful ideas and do vote. The implication is that they hate anything that reduces the gap between them and those below them, like Obamacare.
So it's whether you're a poor private or a poor corporal. A huge difference to them.
In regard to the Christians, the key distinction to regard (and Google) is between the familiar Premillenarian reading of the Book of Revelation (the Left Behind tale), and the view held by the much more secretive Postmillenarians. The Pre's tell a passive story where you just get Raptured and God does all the killing of your enemies. The Posts have a much scarier tale: the Millenium actually began a thousand years ago, presumably as Christians rose to global power and conquest, and it's when the conquest is completed - the entire world enslaved by the right kind of Christians - that Jesus returns. I think you can see where America and its massive military fit in to all this. A militant faction of the Posts has wormed its way South into evangelical churches, slowly revising their Rapture tropes into something more actively seditious.
Problem: Israel specializes in the creepy weapons of the modern police/surveillance state. It got a lot of good Soviet engineers a few years back. It penetrated the US military-industrial complex even before 9/11. Governments of all ideologies are hungry for that Orwellware and I'm not sure they can embargo both Israel and the US.
Or the mass famines caused by the Japanese in Vietnam and China that killed hundreds of thousands of people, or their killing of a million Filipinos in 1944-45? Or the mass famine the British caused in Bengal in 1943 by continuing exports during a drought? Or the internment and deaths of hundreds of Japanese and German POWs in the Gulags up to 10 years after the war ended? It just goes on and on... but a reasonable person would not want to live in the world where the other side won.
Everyone on your side says that, but as soon as they get enough power they immediately start attacking even the right to contraception. Attacking abortion, then conception is NOT consistent with the opinion that an unborn child is a human. It IS consistent with the patriarchal dogma that a woman exists to breed babies under bondage to men to make the tribe stronger than its enemies. The fetus-as-human myth is not in the Bible, it was created after societies began to accept that women had rights.
The word "dealbreaker" is the most important mystery in America's political system. It appears that far-right extremists are overrunning Congress and state government simply because their hateful, classist and racist agendas are NOT dealbreakers for most of the people who bother to vote.
They would vote for Hitler if they could get a tax cut out of it.
So, beating black protesters in Birmingham while the leading GOP contender for president eggs them on, shooting black protesters in Minneapolis, shooting up and burning Planned Parenthood clinics after a completely bogus GOP smear campaign that was like Shake & Bake McCarthyism. Ready to fight back yet?
This isn't about the leaders, after all. It's about our fellow Americans and whether we can share a country with them anymore. You won't save yourselves by letting them secede, either, because I'm in one of the prime secession zones and I deny their right to restore barbarism, racism, and theocracy on one acre of our soil. I will fight, and as we have seen in other parts of the world, you will not be able to avoid being dragged in.
You are missing the point of stochastic terrorism. Instead of a unified terrorist force with a unified ideology that can be identified and hated, the right wing in our capitalist media culture can simply issue fatwas in the form of smears, and violent individuals can choose the fatwa that they are willing to kill for and then carry it out with the ample weapons at everyone's disposal. The central, totalitarian ideology is not lacking, it exists as an overlap of the all the seemingly independent right-wing extremist factions. But if you dig into the furthest right prophets of extremism, like R. J. Rushdoony, you discover that they unified all these ideas into a comprehensive system of patriarchal tyranny, then disguised it by forming hundreds of foundations, think tanks, and religious pressure groups. Then they all advanced together, a sort of cloud of extremism that could maintain plausibly deniable links with elected GOP leaders.
You will find that the rank & file soldiers of ISIS and al-Qaeda are often ignorant boys who know little about their leaders' global agenda. They care about their village or a killed relative or their own bad experiences. Hitler understood with the Fuhrer principle that the henchmen don't want to mess with the complexities of an organic, world-explaining ideology, they want faith and trust in leaders as a replacement for complex argumentation. Stochastic terrorism carries that further by a "politics of the deed" that once inspired anarchists to independently carry out the assassinations of several world leaders.
There's a much simpler answer. People who want to drag America back to its barbaric, racist past are called "patriots", and in reality tens of millions of Americans support that and condemn anyone who shows any signs of moderation or compromise. Therefore, terrorists who are the antithesis of moderation and compromise are the best patriots of all. And of course a patriot supports the supremacy of the race responsible for all that is good about America, so he is 99% likely to be white.
You claim they're not part of an intentional conspiracy. The abortion clinic bombers have essentially won their war and gotten away with it. Their violence did not discredit the establishment anti-abortion movement, it strengthened it to the point where it no longer needs the bombers to legislate abortion out of existence piecemeal. We are dealing with a large faction of Americans who turn their worst males into terrorists to carry out plausibly deniable executions of dissenters. Maybe one day after they've killed off all of us they will get funding from the regime to go overseas and commit terrorism there to spread its ideology. Saudi Arabia has done exactly that.
In our culture, "shooter" is practically the same thing as saying "real man".
The problem is, white conservatives define order as the protection of their asses at the expense of all others. They deny being on the same side as white supremacists, but they know they're safe from them while even a one in a million chance of being killed by a salafi justifies the American Inquisition.
My worst-case scenario was outright war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. We're now over 50% of the way there. Someone needs to derail these converging trains.
Erdogan doesn't have zero allies; he has Saudi Arabia and the Arab monarchies as an ally - the ally no one who consumes oil can say no to. That gives him leverage with the US to offset the Israelis.
New developments:
"After his supporters beat up a Black Lives Matter protester on video, Donald Trump suggested that they may have done the right thing.
The protester, a black man, reportedly started chanting Black Lives Matter at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday. In a video captured by CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond, rally attendees swarm around the man, kicking and punching him as he curls up on the ground
Trump was asked to weigh in on his supporters’ actions on Fox & Friends Sunday morning. “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” he said. “It was disgusting what he was doing.”"
Any questions?
Trump's bombast is the conversion of that activity from a secret of professionals, to a crusade by the entire "loyal" population, like those assailants in Birmingham.
It did not take a generation or two for Pol Pot to show the worst that a revolution by nostalgic lunatics can do. It took four years.
I'm not saying that will happen here. I am saying that the tyrants of the Gulf monarchies CHOSE to create the ideological parameters under which ISIS must be so insanely brutal to prove its worthiness. No matter the size of the mess the US made, those monarchs and their Wahhabi agents deliberately embraced irrational faith against empirical, secular problem-solving as a way to fix that mess, because said problem-solving would eventually have condemned those monarchs to overthrow as it did in the entire rest of the world. Those monarchs chose to spend their infinite funds to NOT improve people's lives in a sustainable way. How can you trust things to ever get better until these US-propped anachronisms are all decapitated?
There's another thing going on here. You point out that it's easier for government to collect everything on everybody due to the nature of technology. However, what is really being fought over is the idea that discrimination and double standards represent a moral good. Collecting data ONLY on Moslems is a form of stigmatization; that's exactly what movement conservatives want, a restoration of America's real tradition of caste and racial oppression. You see different issues where the Right mobilizes frenzied opposition, like Hobby Lobby, police brutality, even how people are searched at airports. But I see that all of these cases are part of a relentless crusade to create precedents to restore the right of "real" Americans to discriminate against inferiors, with the knowledge that one victory against Moslems can be twisted into precedent used against blacks, atheists, etc. Hobby Lobby was all about the right of the religious to discriminate, a right that I guarantee will be interpreted so that only the Christian Right gets to use it. Stand Your Ground says that you are reasonable in shooting anyone you consider a threat, so a fearful bigot - indoctrinated to be so by right-wing media - has more license to shoot blacks than blacks do to shoot whites.
So to the Right, universal data collection is offensive, because it dares imply that "real" Americans have to be held to the same standard of threat as the subhuman Other. The legal recognition of inequality, once attained, will be widened and deepened all the way back to Dred Scott. This is NOT about practical enforcement or actual crime prevention at all, it is about the idea that America is the property of the rich, by the whites, for the Christians.
The government, ironically, shares your observation and thus wants to view everyone as a threat to its administrative imperatives. Pick your poison.
The difference between a president and a dictator is merely what exists to stop him. Now if President Trump decides to use our incompetent military to attack a country and as usual it doesn't work, will he walk away, or will he bring out the nukes, since he proudly rejects all norms of international conduct on the grounds that only "babies" support them?
You act as though America was still One-Man-One-Vote. The electoral system is so perverted that Democratic votes are simply worth less than Republicans', fulfilling the latter's beliefs that they are the only real Americans. The ones who most openly and successfully assault democracy are the ones with the most say in the primaries. Now we will see if decades of extremist indoctrination have hollowed out Americans' fundamental loyalty to democratic norms, and made them frenzied enthusiasts of whichever candidate most brazenly promises to restore the "good old days" of white patriarchal monopoly by holy decree. If it's not Trump, it will be someone who promises to be worse.
Also, if you look at the archive, you will notice that Cole has published one complimentary article after another about Sanders, whom I also support, but has little good to say about Clinton.
You should consider that so many suicide bombers have been followers of right-wing reactionary movements financed by billionaires. Then consider our homegrown terrorists and abortion clinic bombers, who have basically won their 40-year war to drag America far enough to the Right to make the current GOP candidates acceptable. Now, do you think the people running the Right have ruled out the option of inciting more Christian, neo-Confederate, militia sociopaths to carry out assassinations to supplement their police state? The GOP libels Planned Parenthood, and in days the arsons begin at Planned Parenthood clinics. Will it be gays next, or Moslems, or Mexican-Americans? Just as in the Jim Crow South, the police state will look the other way as the secret state of untraceable true believers enforces unwritten laws by terror.
Yet every time he makes a new, more fascistic statement, his approval ratings rise. If he loses, it will be because someone else won delegates from him by being even more horrible. Those Republicans will still be a danger to us and the world for the rest of their lives. At least we are being given a moment of clarity as to how numerous and powerful this barbarian horde has become, along with its analogs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Japan, and every other place where people are angry that the "system" fails to give their lives value by sufficiently persecuting those who are different.
I guess as right-wingers, ISIS has no problem with private property and inequality. So it appeals to the young not as progressive, but romantic and reactionary. Sort of like the Society for Creative Anachronism for kids who aren't bourgeois whites, where everyone is somehow a nobleman and the peasants aren't acknowledged.
What likely happens is exactly what you'd expect of something like that: they don't understand economics. People too stupid to figure out how to make goods of value in legal markets usually turn to narcotics. Narcostates are the modern equivalent of the pirate states of old, and we've done very badly battling them. But even the Taliban had to pretend to be anti-opium when it was allied with al-Qaeda and trying to bring in devout Moslem boys from around the world. A narcostate in Syria sounds like an easy drone target to me. Absent that, their economy will fall into the squalor typical of failed communes of the '70s.
In support of your analysis, al-Qaeda is now a rival of ISIS in Syria and has a motive for a false-flag attack. If that's true, then it is NOT ISIS retaliating for Western intervention, but al-Qaeda trying to provoke Western intervention to get rid of the competition so it can take over. Note that Putin has been accused of only bombing groups like al-Qaeda and leaving ISIS alone - perhaps so that he can keep them around as an excuse for his general goal of saving Assad?
So please, folks, let's not think that any of our options here are easy.
This is why I don't get people who think that Trump is less likely to start a war as President than one of the candidates who has more experience in government. He has based his entire appeal on being the opposite of diplomatic. For a country, the alternative to negotiation is not ignoring a problem, the alternative is war.
Quite the opposite. The more you are like a real nation-state, the more vulnerable you become to conventional weapons, because states are all about machinery, infrastructure and organization, preferably competent, to meet the demands of their constituents. Guerrilla and terrorist groups evade all that tedious responsibility, and thus are invisible to tanks and airstrikes.
Wall Street and Washington have done several things already that have thrown over 100 million people into poverty. It's easy to do. Climate change is going to throw a billion people into poverty just for starters.
India has the largest Moslem population in the world.
Indonesia and Malaysia are also large Moslem countries.
The Philippines has a restive Moslem minority.
The anti-colonial narrative has power in S. Korea.
China has huge plans underway in Moslem Central Asia, which may surge into Iran, Pakistan, and the Arab world.
I would go back in time and save Rosa Luxemburg and give her Communists a chance instead, creating an alternative to Lenin. The Weimar Republic and the interwar order were such a mess that I think revolution was necessary.
I always thought the likely alternative was Ernst Rohm, the leader of the Brownshirts and along with Hitler one of the founders of the NSDAP. His ideology was a sort of racist populism in which the bosses would be overthrown and the workers would move to communes in the countryside, while the Brownshirts would replace the Army. So kind of like a KKK Pol Pot.
The world would have been better off with that. Such stupidity would either deindustrialized Germany into impotence, or it would have fallen to the German Communists instead.
You are expecting facts to mean the same to them as to other people. If your entire identity and reason for living is based on your "race", "faith" or some other dog-whistle identity being the only ones fit to rule and judge the value of everything in existence, then all facts must be made to support that. In that case, those in your identity group who have the most money and power are seen not as your exploiters, but as your natural tribal chieftains, using their power to lead your people in a war against all the other kinds of people on Earth. The value you place on that war is greater than your short-term well-being, because you are certain that only by dominating others (by whatever mechanism your ideology worships) will you survive in the long term. You will tell yourself that everyone else is out to eradicate your culture and even your bloodline. This is a big deal with right-wingers.
I think it's pretty depressing that the Russian people have more power to hold their tyrant responsible for provoking a costly war with terrorists absent proper precautions - while the people of the United States never held G. W. Bush or past US policy responsible for 9/11 at all.
Besides, the US now depends on Israel for lots of military technology, so we don't even do that great with arms sales anymore. They used our past aid money to develop creepy killer robots and Orwell-ware, and that's now the hot "military" technology that all the governments of the world buy to use against their own citizens.
The right wing is formulating their ideological attack to justify what Exxon did, or formulated it years ago. We should fear it, because it will work the same way all their ideological attacks do; by signalling to their followers that they are the only real men and everyone else on Earth is inferior, mandated by God to slave for the profits of the Patriarchs and then starve to death. What Exxon did, they all must do, it is their sacred birthright. Bit by bit they have been conditioned to wage open war against the world. However, all that is needed is for them to conquer the United States and hold us in terror.
As for saving his son Jeb's campaign, sorry, the barn door's open, the horse has fled, and then was attacked by bees, sunk in quicksand, and then chopped up for dog food.
What is missing from Peres' account of events is that Israel always planned for ethnic cleansing; he just now realizes that it can't be done without consequences, which the Likud ignores. Terminating democracy and creating an apartheid state is a perfectly acceptable fallback for the Likud in case its plans fail.
Well, I guess that will probably cost Bernie Sanders more support than all the "socialist" ideas he might propose. Since people are so ignorant about what socialism actually is, his opponents have to painstakingly frame each of his policy positions and reindoctrinate us as to why they are evil. But physically touching the Other will cause a visceral disgust that will flush out a lot of fake liberals and populists who secretly hate Moslems far more than they hate criminal banks. Of course, those people would eventually have figured it out and switched to Clinton or (if they were really confused) to Trump down the road, but we need the moment of clarity.
This probably was the bravest act of this entire 2016 campaign.
And yet Harper's Americanized far-right party ruled for 9 years, because 40% of Canadians always supported him, and the rest of Canadians refused to unite their four left-leaning parties to put a stop to him. The Liberals got their landslide with 40% as well, meaning it could unravel very quickly.
The monolithic unity of right-wingers in America and Canada forged by theocrats and corporate media exposes the degree of projection in right-wing claims that liberals are intolerant, narrow-minded, and all part of one giant monolithic conspiracy against everyone different than themselves. We "liberal bigots" are in fact defined by the fact that we can't agree on anything, which is the best argument for protecting liberty but the worst vehicle for actually doing so.
"Effort, as measured by operations conducted, bomb tonnage dropped, or bodies counted, is taken as evidence of progress made."
That nicely sums up both the fundamental doctrine of industrialized warfare, and the United States Army. Which is why our Army did very well in big conventional wars. Firepower delivered tends to correlate to enemy units eliminated, territory conquered, and enemy war production ground to a halt.
So what changed about war? Here are but a few things:
Conventional war assumes discrete, sovereign entities are attacking other discrete, sovereign entities. These entities, when battling for the highest stakes, have plans in place to mobilize their entire population, transportation network, and economic resources. However, that makes all of those known targets in advance, so each side knows what it's trying to destroy, and the supposed consequences.
War was not always this way. In fact, it has gone in cycles of absoluteness, meaning the willingness of sovereigns to wage war to eliminate other sovereigns and their states. This is not surprising because the sovereigns had little legitimacy and ability to raise armies.
We seem to live in a hybrid time, when organized states have little appetite to directly govern alien populations and do not give their citizens existential demands to fight for. This has created a world of opportunity for non-sovereign entities to create small armies of committed followers. It's not just happening in the Fourth World of failed states.
Why does Israel seem to want ISIS to win in Syria? Will this be the next "proof" that Arabs, and thus Palestinians, are monsters who must be eliminated? But Israel surely understands that mass-deporting Palestinians means sending them to ISIS-controlled regions where they will be far more dangerous.
I wonder if Netanyahu has convinced himself that he's finally found a way to use his nuclear arsenal in a first strike to exterminate the Palestinians? Send them all to The Caliphate, intentionally build it up as a threat, then unleash the nukes to the world's applause?
This linked article was very alarming. The timing of Hitler's decision to switch to organized extermination is well known.
1. Though he had previously concentrated on ethnic cleansing, many of those fleeing him moved to the very countries he later invaded. Jews in invaded countries were increasingly dealt with by Einsatzgruppen, mobile SS troops who sped into vast areas untouched by battle with death lists and rounded up victims before they even understood what was happening. However, the logistics of this practice bogged down; the whole point of Blitzkreig was a relatively cheap war for a resource-strapped Reich. Even Einsatzgruppen were too costly to support in the field. His officials were complaining about this in Russia during 1941, before the Mufti's visit with Hitler.
2. Hitler had violated his own doctrine of not having a 2-front war, and by unilaterally declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor, he now guaranteed that both fronts would be much stronger. He couldn't accept that he made an error, as usual, so he specifically blamed Franklin Roosevelt, and the Jews he had convinced himself were running the USA, for tricking him into a disastrous decision. His embrace of genocide was his idea of revenge against the Jewish conspiracy that kept outsmarting him.
That's no secret. Drones don't do what the military says they will, just as smart bombs don't. The public knows that by now, but has embraced the lie because it wants our country to have power untrammeled by the regard for civilian life that we claim to profess. Our citizenry is kept scared, it believes all the Mud Races out there are plotting against its supply of goodies, it wants a tribal warlord President to crush them, and it doesn't want to pay said President the cost of a conventional world war or bring back the draft. We all privately agree that the drone deaths are regrettable but necessary, thus so is lying to cover them up.
You can only be a traitor for supporting too little violence, never too much.
"The Bush group-think holds that asymmetrical organizations are not a threat in themselves, that the threat comes from the states that allegedly harbor them."
Which was our entire premise in suddenly holding the Taliban responsible for al-Qaeda as though they were one and the same, and overthrowing it. We might as well have held Pakistan's military regime fully responsible for creating and molding the Taliban to rule Afghanistan, but that would have meant war with a nuclear power.
This also explains why Washington pays unsuccessful lip service to nation-building, but ultimately it doesn't mind destroying governments and creating power vacuums. It believes that only governments create terrorism, not power vacuums. I think that both of them can create terrorism, but popular will also plays a role and the US has really created a vast amount of ill will over the years.
What happened is that before 9/11, Brzezinski told a French radio interviewer that in '79 he discussed with Carter the latter's interest in helping the CIA make trouble for the then independent but pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. He told Carter that IF he intervened, the Soviets would find out and retaliate there. But he told the interviewer that he personally desired that outcome. So he was honest with Carter, but diabolical with the rights of Afghans to be spared his desire for revenge against the USSR. Moreover, the interviewer asked him if he regretted what resulted in Afghanistan and he derided the Taliban regime's ability to make us pay for it. So in my opinion Zbiggy was also a fool who didn't get the threat of asymmetrical warfare and proxy movements to the USA.
But that wasn't a Civil War inside Britain. Going back further in history, Britain's attempts to establish Home Rule in Ireland were wrecked by the coming of WW1, the militarization of the Troubles as partisans on both sides came home from the trenches, and surplus weapons poured in. That's closer to Syria than Churchill's Britain, which was at least internally a nation of laws.
I disagree. It is more logical that it is Israel that wants the entire Moslem world in chaos, since it doesn't get any oil from it anyway while Wall Street oversees a global economy that must have that oil. Have you forgotten Dick Cheney's Project for a New American Century was full of Zionist operatives, some of whom officially worked for the Likud Party on its Clean Break document before Bush was elected? That paper called for the overthrow of all the unfriendly governments in the region in the interest of Israel. Saudi Arabia also has chosen to make Iran an enemy because of its fear of its own Shia population, and perhaps a larger fear of the Arab world turning on it because of its refusal to confront Israel. Saudi Arabia and Israel may both looking to a regional war to justify the elimination of their own hostile ethnicities - knowing the US lacks the will to object. The US has actually tried to fight ISIS; Saudi Arabia and Israel both seem to feel that ISIS serves some terrifying purpose.
All private property systems tend towards wealth polarization and oligarchic tyranny. You can go through history and find farmers becoming divided between unlucky ones who must borrow to survive bad years, and lucky ones who lend to them for vast interest or even in exchange for their fundamental liberties. Polarization would continue until collapse, invaders, or a new regime of redistribution. The Greeks of the Classical era were just a bunch of olive farmers, but in hundreds of city-states wealthy oligarchies became so intolerable that they were overthrown by revolutions, whose first order of business was mandated redistribution. It worked for a few centuries, but the oligarchs grew back.
So small business capitalism is simply a few generations away from becoming oligarchy. The redistributive mechanisms to combat this are always complex, aggravating and under threat by oligarchic propaganda.
The partisan witchhunt is an essential characteristic of the Republican Party. It is too provocative to demonize the hundred million supporters of the Democratic Party directly, so their leaders must be demonized instead. From Clinton to Swiftboating to Gore-paranoia to Birtherism, the intent is to wall off an entire universe of political possibilities that working Americans need to know about by indoctrinating them with the idea that those possibilities are only a front by a conspiracy of evil socialists, scheming non-whites, Satanic gays, etc, whose leaders must be traitors: the leaders of the Democratic Party, no matter how centrist they actually are. Manichean dualism, us vs them in God's war. This murderous fantasy keeps the GOP base voting to screw themselves to make their own leaders richer and more powerful to save them all from the Devil.
Sanders is correct in understanding the e-mail issue is simply trivial compared to the issues he's talking about, and as long as tabloid politics are the order of the day, he has no chance of changing anything about America. He can't win unless he teaches American voters a lesson about what matters, and he has to start early. It's not about personages, it's about the fundamental ends of democratic policy.