Trump has disinvited the captain of the NBA champions, thus guaranteeing that they will not visit him, while the NHL champions are loudly tweeting their audience with him and NASCAR owners talk about what they'd do to protesting drivers (of course, none are Black so things work out neatly for them).
This is the future we face. Everything that we think of as being part of America is being forced over to one side or the other of a Mason-Dixon Line across our national conscience. Hockey and stock cars are White, football and basketball are multi-racial. Soon every branch of the military, every hobby, every tv station will have to adopt a tribal identity and then fight the enemy tribe. The police? Well, you already know where they stand.
Then these two Americas will have to fight it out (again) to see which one gets to say it's the real America that makes the laws for all Americans. I've known for 35 years that it was going to get there eventually, because a dying empire is at the point where its past begins to carry more weight than its future, and our past is irrevocably racist.
Trump attacked Germany's Chancellor for her immigration policies. He had a conversation with the Australian Prime Minister, which apparently was quite insulting though the Australians are afraid to talk about it. I'm sure he'll have something to say about Macron, who defeated one of Trump's fellow travelers. Note that Putin also sent aid and support to neo-fascist parties in France and Germany (the latter of which this weekend won an unprecedented 88 or so seats in the Bundestag), so Putin has lumped himself with White supremacists using Russian tax money.
I have suspected in the past that racists would deal with equality by simply condemning every national institution and industry where minorities have gotten too much credit. I was wrong that this would happen in the military, because as the economy of the White heartland has hollowed out plenty of Red-State Whites poured into Bush's military to overwrite its growing diversity, culminating today in Trump's lily-White junta-in-waiting.
However, other industries seem to indeed be getting stripped of their "Americanness" by the racists whom we allow to be arbiters of such things. They are creating their own alternate culture and culture industries as a replacement American Way of Life. They go to their own special Christian movies and listen to their own Christian pop music (hardly religious music as civilization has known), egged on by their own phalanx of Christian TV networks. All of that is partly a rejection of too many Black and LGBTQ faces succeeding in the entertainment marketplace.
So now the crisis comes to sports, and it is revealing. The Red States have subtly shifted their enthusiasm from the NFL back to the college game. Why? Because the Blacks there remain under the firm authoritarian pyramid created to exploit them while covering up their misdeeds.
Some of the more articulate right-wingers say they only want Blacks forced to be part of the "ownership society", participating in the free market as goods-exchanging property owners like the rest of us (!). Yet in pro sports, one of the few areas of life where labor has enough leverage to be treated by the capitalist class as fellow businessmen, at least as millionaires are treated by billionaires, we see White backlash. Not from the billionaires - except for the one in the White House - but from relatively poor White fans. They're offended that Blacks don't have to undergo conversion therapy to cleanse them of their Black identity and culture before becoming worthy of all that publicity and money. They like these athletes under control in college, though that environment is far more hypocritical, with so many local police forces inclined to work with the godlike coaches to shield the most useful athletes from their crimes. College is a fantasyland of student-athletes living up to standards and codes, subservient to Coach.
Add in the fact that the NFL is a private business while most college powers are state-owned institutions, and we are truly through the looking glass. Watch how Southerners would scream if they thought for a second that the win-loss record of their favorite (and increasingly inaccessible) state colleges would be damaged by the sort of privatization that they demand in every other area of American life.
But the college athlete of today, especially the one with pro prospects, doesn't worship Coach or the flag. He worships the pro players. America has shown that it puts no value on anyone else from his neighborhood. A whole lot of contradictions and hypocrisy are about to spill out as Trump prosecutes his new war against them.
I think what's happening this time is much more twisted than the past situation. This time there's no labor shortage to justify slavery. Instead, there's a labor surplus. Which presents a danger to the capitalists, because it was one thing to take all the good jobs away from minorities under the last-hired first-fired principle, but now middle-class jobs in retail and services must be destroyed. If Whites and Blacks end up unemployed together, it is the greatest threat to oligarchic ownership of America since Whites and Blacks were indentured servants together joining Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 Virginia.
My theory is, the corporations and investors have known for 60 years or more that this crisis was coming, since critics like Louis Kelso were writing about the danger of technological unemployment back then. The solution from a cultural standpoint is to turn the clock back to restore the caste divisions that protected the rich, and driving down wages has done a fantastic job of stoking White atavism in this way. But you can't do that indefinitely.
The solution is make-work that keeps us both divided and busy, even though there's little useful to do. And the answer lies in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Make enough of us guards, and enough of us prisoners, and the division will take care of itself.
Now you might rightly argue that, yes, labor can be extracted from the prisoners, but the guards aren't genuinely productive. But we don't need more than a few actual workers in the future. What we need is an ideological terror of the prisoners that makes us subsidize the guards out of the pay of those who still have real jobs, then have the guards beat enough labor out of the prisoner/slaves to break even. The deception of GNP is that it is possible for economic activity to increase while our standard of living falls. As utility-maximizers presented with a threat like, say, Global Communism or Black Criminality, we consider the money we pour into our military and police as a net improvement in our well-being even if our standard of living actually falls - because the threat must be dealt with!
So it will appear the American economy is growing, but in fact an ever-shrinking number of actual free laborers will spend more and more of their income in taxes to subsidize the prison-industrial complex just enough to compensate for the inferiority of prison slave labor versus the most advanced automation available. Of course, the free laborers thus dig their own graves as ways are found for slaves to take their jobs if robots can't.
It doesn't have to "work" in the classical sense. It just has to keep the most-armed tribe, the White patriarchy, supporting the system. They will all be engineers or supervisors involved in primitive resource extraction, or part of the prison-industrial complex. Families will have both, doubling the blind loyalty of the truly productive to the parasite guard class. Perhaps their debts will be allowed to slowly increase to keep the economy going until they can never get out. They will slowly regress into Medieval serfdom. But for minorities it will be far worse, because the logical goal of this system is to imprison most of them, not just 5% like today.
Which means somewhere, in at least one of their think-tank dungeons, one of the bastards is working on a plan for how they will rule us in the resulting collapsed civilization.
Watch carefully as the mainstreaming of extreme right-wing ideas turns to the first hints that (a) debtors can be enslaved, and (b) debt can be inherited. That combination equals nothing less than a society of serfdom. It means that when civilization collapses - your debts WON'T disappear. They will simply become too large for you to ever pay off with your bare hands, and the debt holders will own you, and then your children.
Human rights finally died for good last November; we now live in the resurrected age of tribal rights. The last time it degenerated into the Pan-Nationalism that prefixes the name of militant countries with "Greater". The time before that it wore religious garb and culminated in a century of overlapping holy wars between Europe and the Ottomans and Catholics and Protestants and even Anglicans and Congregationalists.
DeVos is one of the aristocrats of the far-right oligarch families, specifically the Christian wing. If she's doing this, it's because of a larger ideological plan, like everything they do. The Baptists have wrestled with public statements that women are in fact inferior by nature. I think that one of the goals of the movement is to break the hold on Americans of the idea of equality before the law. That was inherent in abortion issues, but now it's time for them to make it explicit: a woman is not the legal equal of a man.
Which might be strange for a woman like DeVos. But recall that when our European ancestors really had aristocratic rule, there were countless noblewomen who did their part to defend gender inequality, because it was a foundation of the system that also enshrined class inequality and their class privileges placed them over far more of the population. Like the wives of slaveowners in the American South, they knew which privileges really mattered.
I think the key surprise that could be sprung on America is a backchannel deal by China and South Korea. They have shared distrust of Japan, whose militarists will use N. Korea as an excuse to push for nuclear capability. That is completely unacceptable to Japan's neighbors.
The problem, as in South Vietnam, is disentangling the puppet from the puppetmaster so that it obtains the degree of legitimacy needed to actually get US forces out.
[The revolver found at the scene only showed the officer’s DNA.
However, Wilson ruled that based on “nearly thirty years on the bench … an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly,” concluding that Smith had been the owner of the firearm, and referencing the drug found in Smith’s car.]
I recall when I was in college in the '80s seeing a study that indicated that the leading correlate to military coups was a prior attempt by the civilian government to cut the military budget. This may have led an Army War College scholar to publish an article on the danger of civilian governments relying more and more on their armies to handle governing tasks during crises. Because the generals would come to see themselves more and more as the state, and when the inevitable attempt at budget cutting occurs, that creates the combination of self-interest and self-righteousness that makes the generals willing to betray the populace.
The problems associated with Trump have only begun, and will long outlast him. Good luck getting rid of his military using a more liberal Congress.
But we live in a complicated world where the sides are always changing. During World War 2, Donald Duck was used as a propaganda tool AGAINST Fascism - because the Fascism of the 1930s was heavily anti-American. The US government found that the most popular American remaining down in places like Brazil and Argentina was a fictional cartoon character, Donald Duck. Via connections with Nelson Rockefeller, Disney was put to work making The Three Amigos and Saludos Amigos as a means to promote better US relations with Latin America to foil any plans by Hitler to get his puppets into power there.
So did Mr. Dorfman have the same critique of Donald Duck that the Fascists had? When and why had Fascists switched from being anti-Donald to pro-Donald?
And what about Carl Barks, the most independent and idiosyncratic of Disney's (anonymous) comics creators? His growing cynicism after WW2 became an undercurrent in his immortal Uncle Scrooge adventures. In one story, Scrooge is made so ill by greed that a doctor orders him to move to a place without money. He and his nephews fly to this utopian society in the Himalayas - but unbeknownst to him, a single bottle cap he tossed out the window becomes the first piece of money there, and in days the people become just like the ones back in America.
If you only see that as capitalist propaganda and not a critique of the inextricable power of human greed, your revolutionary ideals will always be sabotaged by the folly of our species.
The issue is that we don't like private individuals to be plotting foreign policy with foreign feudal lords. LBJ should have prosecuted private citizen Nixon for doing that in 1968, and Carter should have prosecuted private citizen Reagan for doing it in 1980. I don't think you'd be at all happy if your shadow Prime Minister were cutting secret war deals with Israel before he'd even become Prime Minister - especially if Israeli money might have been flowing into the election on that basis.
"Reformation" in right-wing Evangelical code speak means "reimposition of capitalist patriarchy." The patriarch is both tyrant of his own household, and CEO entrepreneur.
We know part of the German merchant sector backed Luther's movement; we know that the termination of the sin of usury (as previously defined) became their reward, and modern capitalism has been attributed to the resulting ability for Gentiles to lend money for interest. Islam, notably, still has the ancient Christian ban on usury. The implication is that Islam stands in the way of full-bore greed-driven progress.
There is a reason the White "working class" is far more willing to embrace tax cuts for the rich than its minority counterparts. This is the ancient game that is the foundation for American history, since the plantation owners convinced their largely Scottish and Irish former indentured servants that they were united in a common cause, even brothers of the same concocted tribe, and that the well-being of the small landowner entirely relied on the prosperity of his "community leaders" in that mansion on the hill. Which implied that others outside that community were the enemy, that the ordinary White man was in a struggle for resources against Blacks, native Americans, and a distant government that dared to proclaim that it represented all the people.
They still think that the prosperity of their churches, the resource extraction corporations they work for, the real estate hustlers who build their exurbs, and the military contractors who hand out the elite jobs in their culture, will give them the collective power to take America back by beating down everyone else. They have made a calculation, seemingly bizarre to outsiders, that the benefits of this anti-egalitarian approach will be more tangible than wealth redistribution. I would argue that those benefits are sadism and the self-love of double standards.
When grifters get elected by running on the principles of Polemarchus, who told Socrates 2400 years ago that justice meant doing good to one's "friends" and harm to one's "enemies", those voters have a very particular idea of what color the friends are and what color the enemies are. They think that a grifter can do a better job of getting away with it, because they still fear that their enemies can disrupt their lives if they understand that they are being harmed.
Now in reality, the grifters may have an idea of friends and enemies based on class instead of caste, but they know where the votes are. As Aristotle said a century after Polemarchus, "unequals want to be equals and equals want to be unequals." Note that Athens' democracy had been caused by a class revolution and was eventually undone by a coup by the rich.
The issue of gas vs electric in a disaster area deserves future study. It's not simple, though. Some people are actually prudent enough to stockpile gasoline, more than their car's tank can hold, before the stations shut down. You can't cheaply do that with electricity yet.
However, actual ordinary Americans aren't prudent at all. The ones actually generating solar electricity at home are going to do well after fast, hard-hitting events that don't leave the skies cloudy for a week afterwards like this last hurricane did.
And if the electricity and gasoline supplies both come back at the same time, you will be billed the same for the electricity as before. The way utilities are regulated, they can't just shoot that up on you. Whereas, the Kroger gas station I usually use in Houston ran out of gas for 3 days, then briefly resupplied at the previous price of $2.16, only to hike it to $2.60 several days later. We will see how long this lasts.
There has always been a White Party and a Black Party in America. What's shocking is how impossible it has been to combine those two for long; basically only the Northern Democratic Party tried it in the mid-20th century, but when it tried to take that nationwide, Whites left the Southern Democratic Party, poured into the Republican Party and made it in practice the replacement White Party.
The GOP actually had no use for Black voters at all after 1876, but it was stuck with the handful of Blacks still allowed to vote in the South due to a peculiarity of the spoils system that we'd find laughable today. See, the State delegations to the national conventions of both parties were literally purchased by the presidential candidates by promises that the local party leaders represented by those delegates would be rewarded upon victory with the only Federal job that existed in most of America: the Postal Service. Since both parties had to maintain the fiction that they had coast-to-coast followings, they made these delegates roughly as powerful no matter which state even if there were few actual voters for them there. Thus the handful of Blacks who could pass the gauntlet of voting restrictions in a Jim Crow state would be overwhelmingly overrepresented as Republican delegates, and while probably wealthy compared to other Blacks back home, they really wanted those Postal administration positions. So the candidates had to bargain with them, and the candidates became the nominees and Presidents who refused to change the absurd spoils system.
This was recounted in the book Nixon's Piano, which reveals that Republican leaders were always scheming for a way to become The Other White Party during the Jim Crow era, meaning a way to embrace White Supremacy while making a clean break with that endless succession of Black Postmasters.
Sure, but why are we all assuming that White conservatives have any loyalty to the concept of democracy at all? How little has it taken to get the mob to turn against one-man-one-vote throughout history?
You need to see how the far right has been laying the groundwork to end democracy since the '90s. They've long known this demographic crisis was coming. They always lay out their most radical ideas in the dark corners of hate radio and gun magazine editorials, then work them into the heart of the Republican Party while that party works to make elections ever more unfair. Those media have been insinuating for years that Blacks and Latinos aren't real Americans, that real Americans must overthrow the government to crush these enemies. Since they need the White woman's vote to get into power first, they won't reveal their intent to terminate that until they've terminated everyone else's vote.
I'm just amazed we don't call the right out on that every day, what with their Confederacy-lusting and "original intent". Tell them what % of the population voted in the first Presidential election and they probably will find a way to insinuate that it was better that way.
They don't believe all humans are created equal.
They don't believe that minorities should ever have their votes count enough to beat them in an election.
Make them own it. It might make them more popular, as Trump's racism made him more popular among those who actually bothered to vote, but we need to make it clear to everyone what this oncoming civil war is really about and find out who is really on the side of democracy.
The Democrats already had seemingly permanent second-party status after Nixon smashed the McGovernite left in 1972. They seemed to recover in 1976 and 1992. How? By bending over backwards to support centrist White Southern Evangelical men, Carter and Clinton. But the White Southerners they got thereby were NOT leftists and didn't stay in the fold. Every day you hear a White liberal talk about some (usually middle-class) friend or older relative who's become an extremist of the sort who would support canceling elections and putting us on the road back to Jim Crow.
White Supremacy and capitalism have been deliberately entwined by centuries of oligarchs so that it is impossible to get enough White people to vote for a true leftist party, no matter how bad the alternative is. Literally, Whiteness is a construct created for the sole purpose of making poor "Whites" help their "White" landlords beat "Black" slaves instead of plotting class insurrection. The evil is built into the identity.
You have to destroy White identity to create a constituency to overthrow capitalism. But identity is a matter of life and death in an alienated capitalist society, so people will fight and kill for it. The more minorities Whites see around them in more of the country, the more of them who embrace identity politics and disenfranchisement, no matter how you leftists blame Blacks and Latinos and women and gays for that. Damn, those plantation owners were clever.
To put it in terms blunt enough to cut through your "ifs" and "maybes", we are living in an actual Stanford Prison Experiment, 350 years old and incredibly successful. The "guards" will never give up their status, which they value more than the hypothetical benefits of redistribution.
I don't think the ordinary Trumpites expect to get much tax relief. I think they have been trained by decades of far-right tribalism to demand that those they view as their tribal chieftains be given license to amass as much power as possible, in the belief that the tribe will thus benefit against all their enemy tribes (Blacks, feminists, Moslems, etc.). If they could, they'd simply replace the income tax with a tax on all who aren't White Christians, a perfect zero-sum game.
The key, then, is how a capitalist poses as a tribal chieftain. I am reminded of Anthony Quinn playing the chief of a tribe of cutthroat bandits in Lawrence of Arabia; "I am a poor man, for I am a river for my people!" We Americans are stupider than that; we have to see our religious and cultural leaders commute between mansions in private jets before we're convinced that they possess the voodoo magic to manipulate the mysteries of global capitalism.
In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected and Bella Abzug said, "We're all Niggers now."
That remark has now been fulfilled. We're all going to need civil rights movements (rather than the patriarchy privileges movement now in charge) in the next few years. How we will get these movements to work together to create a cohesive, principled new republic is sure beyond me.
Nixon may have resigned because he really believed that his authoritarian rule rested on the consent of the majority and the procedures of his lifelong profession. The latter is interesting in that Trump came from outside that profession, and won followers by scorning its procedures.
But the former is crucial. Both men's coalitions were similar in composition, but in nearly 50 years their combined % of the population has radically fallen. Nixon might have been sincere when talking about a "Silent Majority" whose consent justified his actions to destroy their enemies. Trump knows it's not a majority any longer. And in those years in between, the Right-wing movement has laid the groundwork for a reversion to the idea that a republic is not ruled by the consent of the majority, but by its patriarchy. However, the process by which that patriarchal coalition has ceased to be a majority has also made it cease to be silent; it's scared and angry and knows it will become as outnumbered as the Afrikaners in South Africa unless "something" is done. As a result, it has embraced policies that the 1968 version would have considered insane, followed by embracing alternative facts to justify that. That includes tossing out the very idea of democracy and majority rule to revert to a monopoly of power in the hands of "real Americans." Not short-term strongarm tactics like Nixon this time, but permanent Constitutional changes.
To the tribesmen of the conquering tribe, law is only that which they enforce upon their enslaved subcreatures, not for them to obey themselves. Instead, they are ruled by a covenant with their chieftain, a Broederbund, whose only rule is the words of Polemarchus in Plato's Republic: "Justice is doing good to one's friends and harm to one's enemies."
Safest, and most expensive. You can't blame treehuggers for making nuclear so expensive by pushing for so many regulations and then turn around and praise how safe the result is. Especially since we now have two alternatives that haven't had much opportunity to show up in those statistics while their costs have been plummeting.
To summarize, Hinkley Point C, Hinkley Point C, Hinkley Point C.
Mainstream Whites will never, ever, ever admit that mass imprisonment of Blacks was meant to reduce their voting numbers, just as conservative Whites will never admit that voter ID laws were meant to do the same.
While we talk about Trump voters voting against their rational self-interest, you could say the same of voters in general who support the current prison-industrial complex.
Yet it is illuminating to consider why in both cases, they don't see it that way. Our system holds the country back and wastes great amounts of human potential, but the voters are convinced that more liberal policies could make them the next victim of the mythical army of Black predators. It's the all-domestic version of the boogeyman of the Next Terrorist Attack. We pick and choose which statistical risks to throw our tax dollars at; why this one and not global warming?
Because nothing triggers our fear response like the belief that a malign human being is out there targeting us as opposed to some impersonal force like nature or soulless corporate behemoths that just crushes us without caring. That's why, I think, police throw ridiculous amounts of manpower hunting down serial killers who can't be deterred, at the cost of finding ways to deter everyday violence that's faceless because it's really all of us potentially shooting someone we know in a fit of anger. Once racist propaganda puts the villain's face on Blacks or Moslems, we literally can't rest until it is hanging from a noose, statistical probability be damned.
If Oklahomans are willing to deform themselves to live with unnatural earthquakes in the name of their unsustainable way of life, Texans must surely rise to the challenge to do the same. We will not be beaten by Oklahomans in anything, even greed and stupidity.
I don't think the world in general is moving towards justice. The global investor class has learned what we could call "the American game", the alliance between the most extreme plutocrats and those bigots willing to identify with them so as to restore the caste pyramids of their fantasized past. The centralization of past fascism is skipped as media hypnosis and armies of little Hitlers online take over as enforcers. This makes the investor class very happy to play along.
People don't learn; they get left in the dust by more advanced people, whom they finally copy. The world will continue on this course until a nation that champions equality and prospers without an oligarchy eclipses the current empires.
Thank you for posting this video. We see here what we have seen since the rise of private property several thousand years ago; greater concentrations of wealth always have a huge advantage in brainwashing and constructing social practices over lesser concentrations of wealth. Like tiny clusters of cancer cells in the body politic, they will always infect and impose their rigged norms on their lessers. This happens whether under agrarian peonage, industrialization, or the modern consumer economy dominated by advertising and its attendant manipulation of emotions to sell us things we don't really need.
Texas media is too busy engaging in self-congratulation of how many Texans used their private resources to help victims. This is posed in the same tone as American Exceptionalism. Texas' mainstream always puts out the obnoxious subtext that they're better than other Americans, with the implication that they've done better keeping Whites, males and Christians on top and others in their place, which somehow thus causes the greater charity and "can-do spirit. Thus any aid by Texan Moslems does not fit the narrative and drops into the memory hole.
If China is casting around for the magic bullet to finally make solar cheaper than coal, the floating solar array may be the key. We know a real estate bubble already exists in Chinese cities. As that spreads to suburban regions, the land costs for solar arrays could become a problem - but the existence of air pollution from coal becomes an even bigger problem. The bourgeois buying and moving to that land will have more political power than the farmers who have to suffer from the coal-fired stations being built there now to feed urban demand. If enough fresh water can be found to position these arrays, they will have better typhoon protection than offshore wind could.
Or, he knew that he was headed for an arrest for many, many financial improprieties around the world. By being the nominee and thus "leader" of the GOP, he could claim any attempt by Hillary Clinton's Dept. of Justice to arrest him was a political prosecution, and delay justice long enough to die in bed like Stalin. Note that his people were admitting to the media in October that they had big plans in case he lost, using the data they collected on his followers and preparing to create a "Trump News Network" aided by disgraced Fox News mastermind Roger Ailes. This permanent faction could be used to add to that pressure to keep him from prosecution.
I'm very worried that Trump will not take anything like the damage G. W. Bush took from Katrina. Firstly, expectations are already rock-bottom for this regime. Secondly, the public seems more willing to buy into his rah-rah "you'll all have to help each other" spiel despite the fortune we pay in taxes for the governmental functions that primarily benefit billionaires.
Thankfully, water was not trapped the way it was in New Orleans 12 years ago, which caused the high death toll and abetted the politically suspicious behavior of the authorities in not letting urban homeowners back on to their properties for months, causing them to fall into irreparable ruin. White suburbanites, heavily Republican, with the right friends in Washington should face fewer barriers. Any other kind of Texan, well, who cares about them?
The line of attack needs to focus on Trump's recent executive order overturning tough new standards for Federal construction and reconstruction that would have made it harder to keep using tax money to reconstruct exurban homes built in high-risk areas. You can see why a real estate speculator like Trump wants developers free to build anywhere with Federal backup. This is the rare moment when suburban Americans have to ask the question about real estate that they still refuse to ask about fossil fuels: can we really trust ourselves with unlimited development? Destroy that trust, and you destroy what passes for Trump's economic compact with his followers.
Their excuse is that riders on the Sandy bill were "pork barrel." Of course we've never seen this Congress try to blackmail the country into accepting unnecessary riders on vital legislation, have we?
It's not pork barrel when it benefits a true American, and Texans know White Southern Christians are the only true Americans. They're just taking their country back by reaching into your pockets.
He finally caved in to pressure and opened the former NBA arena that he uses as a church to refugees. Given its distance from the other city stadiums and the blocking of all our highways by floodwaters, having all these facilities open is important. Even our medieval ancestors would have expected their priests to act immediately, but then they didn't identify their churches as their private property the way the Evangelical demagogues do.
Tea Party and alt-right protesters good.
Anti-Tea Party and antifascist counter-protesters bad.
Occupy and anti-pipeline protesters bad.
How have the police treated right-wing counter-protesters?
Think I see a pattern here.
There is full understanding here that both sides will organize and retaliate and escalate all the way to war. Their bet is that White people will succumb to fear as this happens and further bias law enforcement towards them, as happened in Weimar Germany. Then they and the police in concert will exterminate freedom for anyone different than themselves. This is the path of least resistance to evil.
Deniers are going to argue that we went this long between major hurricanes. The problem is, New York just got through being hit by hurricanes in consecutive years, a region simply not accustomed to or prepared for that. No matter how the hurricanes get shuffled around by climate change, the changes themselves force everyone to have to spend more money for a lesser quality of life.
Voting against one's self-interest has entered into a new realm of crazy. Unless we've horribly misidentified how humans assess self-interest, unless rational actor models are useless, unless the "utility" that utilitarians expect us to seek is the endurance of our suffering offset by the pleasure of watching those different than us suffer more.
How, then, can scientific evidence sway us? It will always be easier in the short term to preserve the status quo, or even turn the clock back, than to invest in a future where one's own caste status is yet to be determined.
I'm here in Houston, watching the local media engage in endless self-congratulation of Texans' willingness to help each other. As if that weren't a form of indoctrination to tell us that we're superior to the socialistic hordes beyond our borders, even as we dismantle the government that we formerly paid to do a better job of helping than a bunch of self-righteous amateurs with guns and Bibles. When the floods have subsided, we will go back to our chemical plants poisoning each other so we can buy goodies on credit, we will let the Black babies starve out of sight, we will labor mightily to blame all our problems on the Other in preparation for our schemes of eradication and purification.
How would you, if you'd been living in Weimar Germany, have stopped the Nazis? You seem unperturbed that the Trumpite minority is intimidating the rest of us into silence in the manner of the rising KKK tearing down Reconstruction to impose 90 years of darkness (but hey, they got rid of a Federal dictatorship!); you certainly have nothing to break that silence.
Well, the last time fascism was spread by radio. Whenever a new form of communication sweeps humankind, the pioneers enter a Wild West with no rules or norms to impede the spread of their messages. The corporate establishment bumbles behind to impose its version of order, but once imposed it's there as long as the medium exists. So sure, Facebook can now ban the far right, but it can ban progressives too.
Tolerance isn't a useful enough concept. Because then you're having to punish the intolerant, and they accuse you of being a hypocrite. The norm we need, which was largely buried long before the Internet by the rise of Reagan, is equality. Too many people do not understand that equality is the foundational difference between the Left and the Right. The Right did very well for itself by pretending to be offended by redistributive social practices when in fact these have always been a part of human societies (which fact is not taught in schools). Trump's rise reveals that the lying bastards never had a problem with governmental power as Reagan claimed, they had a problem with anyone or anything at all trying to reduce inequality in all its malignant forms.
Hitler did flip-flop. He flip-flopped on Czechoslovakia, regretting in his diary that he made the deal with Chamberlain. He flip-flopped, after all, on the Soviet Union. The matter of his consistency on domestic policy is complicated by the very subject of this article, his game of playing subordinates against each other, which implies shifting positions on the policies that each were associated with like Ernst Rohm. But the very point of Hitler's Fuhrer Doctrine was that the Fuhrer requires flexibility instead of being a servant of a particular ideology. He placed himself above principle. He thus offered to the most ideological people on Earth, the people who birthed both Communism and Nazism, a chance to surrender to the simplicity of blind loyalty. This cleared the path for his strategic flip-flops, buying time to see which of his foreign enemies would be weak enough to strike next.
Wibberley has made it clear, like a certain segment of the anti-war Left in America, that all people of color who support the Democratic Party and Big Government in general deserve to be punished for the crimes of liberalism. How dare those people not embrace a return to the decentralized America of the 19th century only strong enough to persecute non-Whites within our border, not beyond. They don't give a fuck if Trump puts them all in concentration camps as long as the Left is purified of the evil stain of FDR and LBJ, the desire for guns and butter. That will leave a Left that consists entirely of White "radical" academics and activists who will pontificate and chide as uselessly as the handful of White liberals who still had some rights remaining in the Jim Crow South. Thank God, being relieved of all responsibility of actually having to govern at home or exercise power abroad ever again. That's what they really want.
I unfortunately had to see part of those fascist-rhetoric ads on YouTube. How dare we assume when a heavily-armed White man who embraces our racist past says that he's under attack by evil Negroes, that he's organizing violence.
Hit them again and again with the key questions: Do you believe that all people are created equal? Do you accept that voters different than yourself have the right to defeat you in fair ungerrymandered elections? Do you believe that a non-White person has a right equal to yours to organize armed militias - or do you have an asterisk saying " only if they support the laws and culture of 220 years ago"?
I used to think they were smart enough to lie about these things, but Trump's ascension has suddenly got them cracking their veneer and spouting bits and pieces of their Apartheid vision for America. Make them own it.
Republicans are setting themselves up to justify secession no matter how they feel about Trump. The real problem is that Whites are losing their majority status in a generation. Because most bigots will not admit in front of a microphone that they intend to ensure White rule by undemocratic means, they need to claim that they were forced to do it by murderous minorities presenting an immediate threat. Thus even if they dislike Trump, the sight of us organizing against him serves as their excuse, whether their weapon of choice is control of the Federal government, secession by State governments, or armed terrorism. If we somehow remove Trump, they suddenly become secessionists again claiming that they can't be free under our oppressiveness. If, by that time, minorities are numerous enough in their states to block secession, out come the assault rifles and the death lists.
There is nothing you can do to avoid this clash. You can't negotiate with a Master Race.
That would require people capable of seeing those as being good news. The average Trump supporter seems to believe that conservation is inherently un-American unless used to hurt foreigners - a harder case to make in the age of US fracking. Or that coal miners are better Americans because they're manly men. Or that solar cells have harmful effects on their surroundings - that one's really circulating in the backwaters. Or that big EV motors put out radiation that's more harmful than car exhaust. Or that wind turbines harm Air Force and Navy airfield operations even when those services say that they don't.
It just goes on, and on, and on... Suffice it to say that this is about attacking any change in status quo economics that might further erode patriarchy and the existing pecking order. There's a limit to how much the people who must believe these lies can welcome any good news; by definition if White Christian Fossil Fuel Man is threatened, life must be horrible in all respects.
We need to find a way to make housing stock more expandable in the places where people want to live. It's like, the reward you get for creating a city where creative people want to live is $2000 a month rent for a small apartment and people circling the block all morning looking for a parking space. But it has a macroeconomic effect too: real estate bubbles are a dark stain on modern economic history, from the Tokyo bubble of the '80s to the two-headed US-UK bubble that led to the '08 crash to the precarious Chinese situation today.
Really, she's a lot more like Eisenhower. She's to the Right of most of her recent predecessors, she's in the right-wing party due to where she comes from rather than lifetime dogmatism, and after all she didn't stop the German bankers from wrecking four southern European countries for being too "generous" to the proles. Like the Pope, she's what a conservative was before Anglo-American conservatism went senile and regressive.
No, because there's no oil there. That's the only part of real economics Trump understands: without cheap energy manipulated by actual engineers and scientists, there's no speculative bubble in worthless crap for pimps like him to make a living. Iran is interesting to his lizard brain, Afghanistan is just another place where he can't get what he wants. He'll just keep stalling on an interim basis like the presidents before him.
Only one side in America specializes in running over protesters in cars.
By an amazing coincidence, only one political party specializes in pushing state legislation to legalize running over protesters in cars, very visibly, at this very same moment as if it were signaling to those attackers that they will be protected by this party for a very long time.
Both happen to be the right-wing sides. You know damn well that those right-wing states will only use these laws to protect, ahem, the "right" terrorists.
Isn't that remarkable? Or a fascist conspiracy? Of which nothing comparable exists on the other side.
Someone who bleats that "both sides do it" and then blasts Obama for not being leftist enough is either schizophrenic, or he's looking to paralyze the Left so that his "side" can stay pure as only the impotent can while the fascists arson and arrest those darker-colored than himself. Of course one day you'll just move away and forget about America, leaving Trump's race enemies to an Apartheid fate because no country will take them.
We should consider how wildly different Southern culture and society would be if the colonial plantation investors had not imported slaves to co-opt the rebellious indentured servants. The simmering war between English owners and often Scottish and Irish servants would have kept going. The tribalism of those ethnicities would not have been submerged into the constructed tribalism devised by those landlords to make themselves the replacement chieftains. The Southern colonies would have been weaker and smaller, and their poverty would have weakened the Northern colonies as well. But the British government would have had less incentive to fight to hold onto them.
We would probably not recognize that alternative South, either in the dialects spoken, the forms of worship, or the defiance of local oligarchs. Sort of a West Virginia stretching to a still-French Louisiana.
It wasn't just a diesel scandal, and it wasn't just VW. But as this unfolds it could make it impossible to keep building diesels, and realistically EVs will have to replace them to make up for the lost ground against pollution due to the mass failure of diesels to meet specifications.
Whiteness and Blackness are both constructs commissioned by the American oligarchy. That's both good news and bad news. We could reconstruct them into positive diversity, but we might reconstruct them by many different disguises to justify the inequality that ultimately the oligarchs require. We can recode "White" as "Christian", or the right kind of Christian, you know, not that Martin Luther King kind. We can recode "Black" as criminal, as the NRA does every day that it pretends shootings in America are mostly about "them" assaulting "us" and "us" shooting back, not about people losing their temper at others whom they know or have suddenly gotten angry at at a traffic stop.
We will redefine race any way that makes us feel good, no matter what scientists say. Right now, equality doesn't make most of us feel good enough to make sacrifices for it, so race becomes our surrogate for the inequality we want to see.
I think the actual Nazis are playing the long game right now; they're seizing this moment to begin a long process of normalization, but they know Trump won't be around for much of it. The problem is, once he's gone, his success in conning a wide range of right-wing voters guarantees he will be imitated on the state level, which is already dominated by extreme Republicans. The media has done a bad job of informing us about the state-level takeover of America and its coordination by national groups like ALEC with its cookie-cutter state legislature spamming. How will it handle fifty little Hitlers?
Of course, there's plenty of time for Trump to impose dictatorship that's only Mussolini-bad, as opposed to Hitler-bad. The key to real fascism is mass participation; the followers must be enlisted to become paramilitary enforcers of the leader's will, bypassing the state organs preferred by more conventional authoritarians. With Trump, the call for his followers to go Kristallnacht could happen on any given day if he wakes up in a bad enough mood.
There is one non-violent thing Americans might reasonably do right now that would disrupt the system enough to matter.
Stop shopping for Christmas.
I mean, don't buy at all, if you can. Make it clear to your friends that you will give them things you own that they will appreciate, but will not participate in filling the coffers of the investor class who are Trump's lifeline of support. If you must buy, buy used, buy e-bay, buy direct from local craftsmen.
The black population of South Africa had to beg us in the outside world to boycott their economy to bring down their masters. No one has the power to do that to America but Americans. We've constructed a very unstable, bubble-driven economy vulnerable to panic. We must accept the cost of causing that panic now. Trump could send troops out to butcher protesters and get half of America to excuse it, but he can't send troops door to door to force you to buy from Wal-Mart. That's one power you have over him.
Yeah, that would have worked great against Hitler. There are tens of millions of people who don't WANT to ignore Trump because they are searching for a way to aggregate their hatred. They needed very little to find him. The point of the negative news was to warn the rest of us that he, and his followers, were a real threat.
If warnings are counter-productive, then what the hell's the point of news, or information, or facts? Or even of this very website?
He hasn't backed off his claim that the Central Park Five are guilty, no matter what science says. He hasn't backed off his refusal to accept that American police coerce confessions from Black suspects, which obviously has significance in the matter of American soldiers engaging in torture abroad.
White supremacist terrorism is the worst because it is founded on the past ritual of the lynching, a terrorist act in which the entire White population of a community openly gathers to celebrate, thereby sending a message to the entire Black community that they are outnumbered, outgunned, and outgoverned and resistance to all the other rituals of racism is thus futile.
That entire-town turnout thing changed in the '30s, until lynching became a covert act in the night. That's probably a sign the ritual was falling apart, making the actual lynching itself futile. The logical goal of the modern White supremacist is to reverse the clock and get back to that fascist tribal celebration of raw power over "conquered" peoples.
It was the Satanic bargain my ancestors in the Southern colonies took 350 years ago to be freed from indentured servitude when they had the power to wreck the nascent plantation society by joining the ongoing uprisings of the time. The entire argument is a construct: the jobs (growing dead-end tobacco), the station (henchman as autonomous yeoman farmer), and the idea of race itself were built by the oligarchs on terms that they dictated. But I suspect many of my ancestors came to enjoy the slave-whipping part.
In my heart, I agree. But I've been watching this namecalling for decades, and I've seen American regressives put a lot of work into truthiness-based arguments that they're nothing at all like the Nazis because they "don't believe in Big Government." As long as our public's understanding of Nazism is based on the stereotype of German bureaucracy and intervention in markets, this lie will work. The reality on that front was more complex.
You have to find a way to make people understand that the cornerstone of fascist belief is human inequality, and that fascism embraced all things that seemed to prove inequality in the crude way that racists always do. Thus fascists are not opposed to private property; they are opposed to "aliens" and "traitors" being allowed to earn enough property to matter. (Good ol' American hiring discrimination, supported by right-wingers as an inalienable liberty, fits perfectly with this.) Their mentality is essentially of their race being a warrior tribe who have won a trial by combat to own and control EVERYTHING (and everyone) within a certain "nation". Markets, government, religion, anything that makes that control more absolute is embraced to the extent it contributes.
Once in power, that all changes to a cynical collaboration with the capitalist oligarchs. But fascists have to be stopped before that point. No fascist regime has ever been overthrown by its own people, only by foreign invasions. With the exception of Franco's Spain, which could not wall itself off from the wealthier democracies that flourished in Europe after WW2 and was worn down over 40 years.
Before you can label them as Nazis with any credibility, you have to get them to say what mechanisms of our racist past they will restore in making America great "again", and then call those out as being both oppressive and supremacist. You have to paint them into a rhetorical corner where they finally admit that they will use state power to promote Whites over everyone else in the private realm, and restore a "natural" White monopoly on power.
Hitler had a great disadvantage in his anti-Semitism of having to restore attitudes that seemed to be dying out in Wilhelmine Germany. It was not surprising that he used the revolutionary framing of a need for a dictatorship to cleanse society from the depravity of bourgeois liberalism that, once successful, would magically wither away (in his case into a Medievalized society under Nazi nobles, not a worker's paradise). It's much easier for an American racist, who can appeal to a fantasy of turning the clock back not 300 years, but only 50 or so, and not back to a feudal order but to the simple capitulation to individual States and their local oligarchs, to get White Supremacy back into power.
To give you an idea of how stubborn American exceptionalism might be, consider a phenomenon that we might once have called "European exceptionalism". 1400 years ago Europe was a collapsed civilization, held together only by blind faith in a Christian church that exploited the very collapse it helped cause to seize certain levers of power. The explosive rise of Islam on the African side of that empire rebooted culture, economics and science, but Europeans held out and defeated Islamic invaders advancing from Spain into France.
Now any Moslem at that time could have given any Euro-Christian at that time exactly the same argument that many Euro/American greedbags are giving to Moslems today, from the occupation of Iraq to the HQs of multinational corporations. "Our civilization has proven superior; surrender to us and your children will have better lives." But in both cases, the "inferiors" said Hell No. That stubbornness and lack of appreciation for the humanity of aliens is a weakness if it causes your extinction, but you just may outlast those who lecture you for reasons beyond anyone's control. Eventually, your descendants may be the ones on top again, and they will have learned nothing.
This absurd cycle may well be America's fate, unless the willpower of the barbarian can be defeated by reason. What we see instead is that the barbarians learn enough technology to get by and bide their time for generations on a tribal mythology of grievance and revenge.
I despise these guys and their hypocrisy but let's be honest: we define "terrorism" based on whether we're among the targets in some small or large sense. The instant we can see a crack of daylight between us and those intended to be terrorized, we can freely choose to label the perpetrators as terrorists or not terrorists depending on our own agendas.
What that means when it happens in Virginia is that I'm revealing that I'm personally not "terrorized" by attacks on those who intend to obtain civil rights and equality by any means possible, because I intend to advocate those things from safe places even if it means they will be defeated. I've already retreated to impotence. Whereas I AM terrorized by Blacks legally protesting police violence, because I need those violent cops to protect my goodies by maintaining a state of terror over minority populations. Sympathies are weak, interests are murderous.
Instead of continuing the self-serving arguments on who is the terrorist, we can learn a lot by listening to who does or does not consider themselves terrorized. And it reveals that real advocates for minorities' rights are as isolated and endangered today as they were in the 1870s, when that bulk of the Northern population that had supported the Civil War decided that the KKK was not terrorizing them in particular, so they wouldn't spend tax dollars to stop what the KKK was helping to build.
The problem is, a defeated "Them" will always be safely despised. A defeated "Us" is a trickier matter. It doesn't matter how much like a Nazi one chooses to be, as long as he is a White American who doesn't adopt foreign regalia or praise Herr Hitler; he will always be treated as a member of the White family. Just like our slaveowning ancestors.
I mean, if Trump thinks that nuclear cremation is a joyous risk to take for the opportunities of tourism, then he has no actual understanding of death or pain at all. For him publicity literally is the sole engine of existence.
If you think Trump wouldn't mind seeing the West Coast nuked, imagine how he feels about sacrificing South Korea, a country that has "taken our jobs", that has the audacity to be more technologically advanced than the USA in ways that actually benefit its citizens, who showed their true patriotism by recently running a President out of office for the crimes of a single crony as opposed to Trump's dozens.
I'm very afraid for the South Korean people right now.
You are correct - Wayne wouldn't take roles that attacked the legitimacy of the existing government. He played (in what some consider his greatest performance) an ex-Confederate Texan in Red River, but that's as close to the Confederacy as he got. Conversely, he refused the role Gary Cooper immortalized in High Noon - a movie seen as an attack on McCarthyism, which Wayne supported. But his specific justification was that Cooper threw away his badge to deal with the bullies when the community he was supposed to represent refused to support him.
Now Michael Herr, whose writings about Vietnam were so influential that he worked on the scripts of both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, does discuss in his book Dispatches how young GI's were "making their own war movies in their heads", charging the enemy trying to replicate the actions they saw in Sands of Iwo Jima.
Wayne had his moments as an actor. The Ringo Kid had no small influence on future anti-hero characters. True Grit and The Shootist are examples of an actor who's played a type of character so long that you can no longer tell where the reality ends, which is sort of a goal for actors. Unfortunately, that's a terrible goal for citizens and chief executives.
And we're not the only country permanently hijacked by a romantic era of violence. If you watch Japanese TV, what's striking is that everything set before the modern era seems to occur during the Sengoku Jidai, the final squareoff between Japan's feudal lords all during the 16th century, or (if it's a tv show about more orderly people) the early Tokugawa dictatorship that followed. Think about all the centuries of Japanese culture before that. People seem to prefer the absolute chaos of the last, biggest feudal wars, and the absolute order of the subsequent dictatorship, as the simplistic foundation for stories of violence and honor.
Remember that many Western stories that AREN'T about young gunfighters, but instead are about the triumph of the settlers and the sad obsolescence of those gunmen seem to take place after 1886, from The Rifleman (a retired gunman with a son) to The Wild Bunch (1916, and like many such later stories set in Mexico where the West stayed wild a little longer). You could say that they are the equivalent to the Japanese dramas set under the Tokugawas when modern bureaucratic civilization became possible, a sort of propaganda of vindication or a lament for the violent freedom that was lost.
We are not living in the second, but actually the THIRD time when Black voting rights were undermined. In the early days of colonial Virginia, chattel slavery was not yet the legal norm and African captives shipped in to its ports were normally sold into indentured servitude. If you could survive the servitude, you were free, though stranded far from home. But as I understand it, that meant that some of these men gained the right to vote in local elections. The participation of both Black and White servants in Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 scared the oligarchs, who devised a divide & conquer strategy that scars our nation to this day: the White servants were freed and even given farmland, the Black servants were legally recategorized as permanent slaves. The very terms "White" and "Black" didn't exist in law before then. They were devised to weld the White servants to the White oligarchs by manufacturing a common enemy: everyone who wasn't White.
And that's why this keeps happening.
I say, three strikes, and White rule is out. Forever.
Eight of Bacevich's proposals would immediately be denounced as "leftist" by the entire right-wing political segment. Even the National Service proposal. Yet he is a conservative by global standards, like the current Pope. America is just very deranged to the Right, and not by accident.
The problem is, under globalization there are still distinct national capitalisms with different value systems. Globalization can be channeled by a mercantilist government to create leverage against the multinational corporations.
Globalization has happened in various ways before. There are always peaking empires turning from the productive economic behaviors that enabled their military prowess, towards speculative economics and wealth polarization. There are always hungry states on the way up, willing to play the angles on the existing system as they build their power for the promise of overthrow.
However, it's inexcusable with the educational and informational resources at our disposal for today's top empire to stumble through the process of decay as though history didn't exist. We could have prepared ourselves for this time. Nixon and Kissinger believed that American power was relatively in decline - for which, believe it or not, they were hated by the Right for their cynicism. Carter tried to warn us of the national malaise, and we punished him by installing a motivational speaker to hypnotize us.
We've had draconian loyalty legislation in America under John Adams and Woodrow Wilson, but both times the US was in a state of war and the end of that state brought things back to normal. Consider that by extending that same tyrannical power to the advancement of Israel, we make it permanent, and potentially universal.
I don't think, other than Mattis, that those are the generals the combat troops would obey.
However, for many years I've had a growing fear that the Air Force is the service that would use its power against the American people. Watch its stateside activities closely.
I can live with that as long as the system remains paralyzed. What I'm terrified of is the day Trump tells that rally crowd to go home, get out whatever weapons they possess and start hunting down his enemies on the Internet.
man, explain to me Constitutionally what Democrats can do to stop one disastrous policy after another when they don't control any of the three branches of government? Come on, Hillary is gone now. America is a one-party state right now. We literally require a few Republican congressmen and judges to occasionally defect on the most offensive Republican initiatives to keep us from total dictatorship.
You mean your people weren't poring over the tabloids during the Profumo scandal and a dozen smaller scandals of the more-cautious politicians of later generations? Murdoch owns Britain's hindbrain too.
We are wishing not to be ruled by Trump, the White supremacist, misogynist global warming denier and conspiracy theorist. You seem to want bad things to happen to America so much that you want it to be ruled by Trump while those of us of the wrong gender, religion, race and income level (meaning most of us) suffer.
India now has 125 million English-speakers.
I somehow don't think these are the English-speakers those who hide behind language to justify draconian policies are trying to favor.
Keep spinning. Eventually you'll be right about something.
Perhaps as an American (and a Texan) I know those who elected Trump a lot better than you. It's the EXACT same people who have turned our state governments, which have no foreign policy for you to deplore, into pits of far-right insanity and bankrupting tax cut mania, cells for theocracy, deniers of all forms of pollution, advocates for private prisons. How about you listen to some of us tell you how many stone-cold racists there are here? How many who wish the Confederacy had won? How many wanted homosexuals to be herded into concentration camps during the AIDS crisis (including Pat Buchanan, who was the genesis for so much of what we call Trumpism?
I fucking guarantee you that 90% of the people who voted for Trump are gun-obsessed, soldier-worshiping neo-Victorians who want America to be an aggressive military power. They just want to attack people they can beat. They don't even care what the economic variables are; just win and they'll volunteer to whip the slaves.
Why the Hell are you conflating our imperialism with "the doors" staying open? You seem to imply that the immigrants are the source of our imperialism. Again, you will never catch the sort who obsesses about being a "real" American at a peace rally.
You Britons must have a very strange idea of what our rednecks are like. Believe me, Harper Lee had them nailed pretty well with her withering portrayal of Jeb Ewell in To Kill A Mockingbird. What's changed since then is suburbs and Fox News.
Because all those activities required government approval, and at a certain point, the mandarins decided that trade with the outside world was not in their interests.
Also, China is not monolithic. It embraced the idea of greedy multinational corporations, and those corporations do many different things at cross-purposes with each other.
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Trump has disinvited the captain of the NBA champions, thus guaranteeing that they will not visit him, while the NHL champions are loudly tweeting their audience with him and NASCAR owners talk about what they'd do to protesting drivers (of course, none are Black so things work out neatly for them).
This is the future we face. Everything that we think of as being part of America is being forced over to one side or the other of a Mason-Dixon Line across our national conscience. Hockey and stock cars are White, football and basketball are multi-racial. Soon every branch of the military, every hobby, every tv station will have to adopt a tribal identity and then fight the enemy tribe. The police? Well, you already know where they stand.
Then these two Americas will have to fight it out (again) to see which one gets to say it's the real America that makes the laws for all Americans. I've known for 35 years that it was going to get there eventually, because a dying empire is at the point where its past begins to carry more weight than its future, and our past is irrevocably racist.
There were so many hurricanes this summer that Trump got to choose which one would be his Katrina. Naturally, the one with the fewest White faces.
Trump attacked Germany's Chancellor for her immigration policies. He had a conversation with the Australian Prime Minister, which apparently was quite insulting though the Australians are afraid to talk about it. I'm sure he'll have something to say about Macron, who defeated one of Trump's fellow travelers. Note that Putin also sent aid and support to neo-fascist parties in France and Germany (the latter of which this weekend won an unprecedented 88 or so seats in the Bundestag), so Putin has lumped himself with White supremacists using Russian tax money.
I have suspected in the past that racists would deal with equality by simply condemning every national institution and industry where minorities have gotten too much credit. I was wrong that this would happen in the military, because as the economy of the White heartland has hollowed out plenty of Red-State Whites poured into Bush's military to overwrite its growing diversity, culminating today in Trump's lily-White junta-in-waiting.
However, other industries seem to indeed be getting stripped of their "Americanness" by the racists whom we allow to be arbiters of such things. They are creating their own alternate culture and culture industries as a replacement American Way of Life. They go to their own special Christian movies and listen to their own Christian pop music (hardly religious music as civilization has known), egged on by their own phalanx of Christian TV networks. All of that is partly a rejection of too many Black and LGBTQ faces succeeding in the entertainment marketplace.
So now the crisis comes to sports, and it is revealing. The Red States have subtly shifted their enthusiasm from the NFL back to the college game. Why? Because the Blacks there remain under the firm authoritarian pyramid created to exploit them while covering up their misdeeds.
Some of the more articulate right-wingers say they only want Blacks forced to be part of the "ownership society", participating in the free market as goods-exchanging property owners like the rest of us (!). Yet in pro sports, one of the few areas of life where labor has enough leverage to be treated by the capitalist class as fellow businessmen, at least as millionaires are treated by billionaires, we see White backlash. Not from the billionaires - except for the one in the White House - but from relatively poor White fans. They're offended that Blacks don't have to undergo conversion therapy to cleanse them of their Black identity and culture before becoming worthy of all that publicity and money. They like these athletes under control in college, though that environment is far more hypocritical, with so many local police forces inclined to work with the godlike coaches to shield the most useful athletes from their crimes. College is a fantasyland of student-athletes living up to standards and codes, subservient to Coach.
Add in the fact that the NFL is a private business while most college powers are state-owned institutions, and we are truly through the looking glass. Watch how Southerners would scream if they thought for a second that the win-loss record of their favorite (and increasingly inaccessible) state colleges would be damaged by the sort of privatization that they demand in every other area of American life.
But the college athlete of today, especially the one with pro prospects, doesn't worship Coach or the flag. He worships the pro players. America has shown that it puts no value on anyone else from his neighborhood. A whole lot of contradictions and hypocrisy are about to spill out as Trump prosecutes his new war against them.
I think what's happening this time is much more twisted than the past situation. This time there's no labor shortage to justify slavery. Instead, there's a labor surplus. Which presents a danger to the capitalists, because it was one thing to take all the good jobs away from minorities under the last-hired first-fired principle, but now middle-class jobs in retail and services must be destroyed. If Whites and Blacks end up unemployed together, it is the greatest threat to oligarchic ownership of America since Whites and Blacks were indentured servants together joining Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 Virginia.
My theory is, the corporations and investors have known for 60 years or more that this crisis was coming, since critics like Louis Kelso were writing about the danger of technological unemployment back then. The solution from a cultural standpoint is to turn the clock back to restore the caste divisions that protected the rich, and driving down wages has done a fantastic job of stoking White atavism in this way. But you can't do that indefinitely.
The solution is make-work that keeps us both divided and busy, even though there's little useful to do. And the answer lies in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Make enough of us guards, and enough of us prisoners, and the division will take care of itself.
Now you might rightly argue that, yes, labor can be extracted from the prisoners, but the guards aren't genuinely productive. But we don't need more than a few actual workers in the future. What we need is an ideological terror of the prisoners that makes us subsidize the guards out of the pay of those who still have real jobs, then have the guards beat enough labor out of the prisoner/slaves to break even. The deception of GNP is that it is possible for economic activity to increase while our standard of living falls. As utility-maximizers presented with a threat like, say, Global Communism or Black Criminality, we consider the money we pour into our military and police as a net improvement in our well-being even if our standard of living actually falls - because the threat must be dealt with!
So it will appear the American economy is growing, but in fact an ever-shrinking number of actual free laborers will spend more and more of their income in taxes to subsidize the prison-industrial complex just enough to compensate for the inferiority of prison slave labor versus the most advanced automation available. Of course, the free laborers thus dig their own graves as ways are found for slaves to take their jobs if robots can't.
It doesn't have to "work" in the classical sense. It just has to keep the most-armed tribe, the White patriarchy, supporting the system. They will all be engineers or supervisors involved in primitive resource extraction, or part of the prison-industrial complex. Families will have both, doubling the blind loyalty of the truly productive to the parasite guard class. Perhaps their debts will be allowed to slowly increase to keep the economy going until they can never get out. They will slowly regress into Medieval serfdom. But for minorities it will be far worse, because the logical goal of this system is to imprison most of them, not just 5% like today.
Which means somewhere, in at least one of their think-tank dungeons, one of the bastards is working on a plan for how they will rule us in the resulting collapsed civilization.
Watch carefully as the mainstreaming of extreme right-wing ideas turns to the first hints that (a) debtors can be enslaved, and (b) debt can be inherited. That combination equals nothing less than a society of serfdom. It means that when civilization collapses - your debts WON'T disappear. They will simply become too large for you to ever pay off with your bare hands, and the debt holders will own you, and then your children.
Human rights finally died for good last November; we now live in the resurrected age of tribal rights. The last time it degenerated into the Pan-Nationalism that prefixes the name of militant countries with "Greater". The time before that it wore religious garb and culminated in a century of overlapping holy wars between Europe and the Ottomans and Catholics and Protestants and even Anglicans and Congregationalists.
DeVos is one of the aristocrats of the far-right oligarch families, specifically the Christian wing. If she's doing this, it's because of a larger ideological plan, like everything they do. The Baptists have wrestled with public statements that women are in fact inferior by nature. I think that one of the goals of the movement is to break the hold on Americans of the idea of equality before the law. That was inherent in abortion issues, but now it's time for them to make it explicit: a woman is not the legal equal of a man.
Which might be strange for a woman like DeVos. But recall that when our European ancestors really had aristocratic rule, there were countless noblewomen who did their part to defend gender inequality, because it was a foundation of the system that also enshrined class inequality and their class privileges placed them over far more of the population. Like the wives of slaveowners in the American South, they knew which privileges really mattered.
I think the key surprise that could be sprung on America is a backchannel deal by China and South Korea. They have shared distrust of Japan, whose militarists will use N. Korea as an excuse to push for nuclear capability. That is completely unacceptable to Japan's neighbors.
California has 21 2/3 the population of West Virginia but loses 29 times as much money. I wonder if that's part of a pattern of partisan punishment.
The problem, as in South Vietnam, is disentangling the puppet from the puppetmaster so that it obtains the degree of legitimacy needed to actually get US forces out.
[The revolver found at the scene only showed the officer’s DNA.
However, Wilson ruled that based on “nearly thirty years on the bench … an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly,” concluding that Smith had been the owner of the firearm, and referencing the drug found in Smith’s car.]
Still lying about that Iraqi WMD...
As of November 2016, human rights now only means the rights of your fellow tribesmen. Which means there are no human rights at all.
I recall when I was in college in the '80s seeing a study that indicated that the leading correlate to military coups was a prior attempt by the civilian government to cut the military budget. This may have led an Army War College scholar to publish an article on the danger of civilian governments relying more and more on their armies to handle governing tasks during crises. Because the generals would come to see themselves more and more as the state, and when the inevitable attempt at budget cutting occurs, that creates the combination of self-interest and self-righteousness that makes the generals willing to betray the populace.
The problems associated with Trump have only begun, and will long outlast him. Good luck getting rid of his military using a more liberal Congress.
But we live in a complicated world where the sides are always changing. During World War 2, Donald Duck was used as a propaganda tool AGAINST Fascism - because the Fascism of the 1930s was heavily anti-American. The US government found that the most popular American remaining down in places like Brazil and Argentina was a fictional cartoon character, Donald Duck. Via connections with Nelson Rockefeller, Disney was put to work making The Three Amigos and Saludos Amigos as a means to promote better US relations with Latin America to foil any plans by Hitler to get his puppets into power there.
So did Mr. Dorfman have the same critique of Donald Duck that the Fascists had? When and why had Fascists switched from being anti-Donald to pro-Donald?
And what about Carl Barks, the most independent and idiosyncratic of Disney's (anonymous) comics creators? His growing cynicism after WW2 became an undercurrent in his immortal Uncle Scrooge adventures. In one story, Scrooge is made so ill by greed that a doctor orders him to move to a place without money. He and his nephews fly to this utopian society in the Himalayas - but unbeknownst to him, a single bottle cap he tossed out the window becomes the first piece of money there, and in days the people become just like the ones back in America.
If you only see that as capitalist propaganda and not a critique of the inextricable power of human greed, your revolutionary ideals will always be sabotaged by the folly of our species.
The issue is that we don't like private individuals to be plotting foreign policy with foreign feudal lords. LBJ should have prosecuted private citizen Nixon for doing that in 1968, and Carter should have prosecuted private citizen Reagan for doing it in 1980. I don't think you'd be at all happy if your shadow Prime Minister were cutting secret war deals with Israel before he'd even become Prime Minister - especially if Israeli money might have been flowing into the election on that basis.
Humanitarian interventionism is discredited right now. It's like a Get Out of Nuremburg Free card for anyone who wants to commit genocide.
"Reformation" in right-wing Evangelical code speak means "reimposition of capitalist patriarchy." The patriarch is both tyrant of his own household, and CEO entrepreneur.
We know part of the German merchant sector backed Luther's movement; we know that the termination of the sin of usury (as previously defined) became their reward, and modern capitalism has been attributed to the resulting ability for Gentiles to lend money for interest. Islam, notably, still has the ancient Christian ban on usury. The implication is that Islam stands in the way of full-bore greed-driven progress.
There is a reason the White "working class" is far more willing to embrace tax cuts for the rich than its minority counterparts. This is the ancient game that is the foundation for American history, since the plantation owners convinced their largely Scottish and Irish former indentured servants that they were united in a common cause, even brothers of the same concocted tribe, and that the well-being of the small landowner entirely relied on the prosperity of his "community leaders" in that mansion on the hill. Which implied that others outside that community were the enemy, that the ordinary White man was in a struggle for resources against Blacks, native Americans, and a distant government that dared to proclaim that it represented all the people.
They still think that the prosperity of their churches, the resource extraction corporations they work for, the real estate hustlers who build their exurbs, and the military contractors who hand out the elite jobs in their culture, will give them the collective power to take America back by beating down everyone else. They have made a calculation, seemingly bizarre to outsiders, that the benefits of this anti-egalitarian approach will be more tangible than wealth redistribution. I would argue that those benefits are sadism and the self-love of double standards.
When grifters get elected by running on the principles of Polemarchus, who told Socrates 2400 years ago that justice meant doing good to one's "friends" and harm to one's "enemies", those voters have a very particular idea of what color the friends are and what color the enemies are. They think that a grifter can do a better job of getting away with it, because they still fear that their enemies can disrupt their lives if they understand that they are being harmed.
Now in reality, the grifters may have an idea of friends and enemies based on class instead of caste, but they know where the votes are. As Aristotle said a century after Polemarchus, "unequals want to be equals and equals want to be unequals." Note that Athens' democracy had been caused by a class revolution and was eventually undone by a coup by the rich.
In other words, he was the beta-test for the product President Donald Trump.
The issue of gas vs electric in a disaster area deserves future study. It's not simple, though. Some people are actually prudent enough to stockpile gasoline, more than their car's tank can hold, before the stations shut down. You can't cheaply do that with electricity yet.
However, actual ordinary Americans aren't prudent at all. The ones actually generating solar electricity at home are going to do well after fast, hard-hitting events that don't leave the skies cloudy for a week afterwards like this last hurricane did.
And if the electricity and gasoline supplies both come back at the same time, you will be billed the same for the electricity as before. The way utilities are regulated, they can't just shoot that up on you. Whereas, the Kroger gas station I usually use in Houston ran out of gas for 3 days, then briefly resupplied at the previous price of $2.16, only to hike it to $2.60 several days later. We will see how long this lasts.
There has always been a White Party and a Black Party in America. What's shocking is how impossible it has been to combine those two for long; basically only the Northern Democratic Party tried it in the mid-20th century, but when it tried to take that nationwide, Whites left the Southern Democratic Party, poured into the Republican Party and made it in practice the replacement White Party.
The GOP actually had no use for Black voters at all after 1876, but it was stuck with the handful of Blacks still allowed to vote in the South due to a peculiarity of the spoils system that we'd find laughable today. See, the State delegations to the national conventions of both parties were literally purchased by the presidential candidates by promises that the local party leaders represented by those delegates would be rewarded upon victory with the only Federal job that existed in most of America: the Postal Service. Since both parties had to maintain the fiction that they had coast-to-coast followings, they made these delegates roughly as powerful no matter which state even if there were few actual voters for them there. Thus the handful of Blacks who could pass the gauntlet of voting restrictions in a Jim Crow state would be overwhelmingly overrepresented as Republican delegates, and while probably wealthy compared to other Blacks back home, they really wanted those Postal administration positions. So the candidates had to bargain with them, and the candidates became the nominees and Presidents who refused to change the absurd spoils system.
This was recounted in the book Nixon's Piano, which reveals that Republican leaders were always scheming for a way to become The Other White Party during the Jim Crow era, meaning a way to embrace White Supremacy while making a clean break with that endless succession of Black Postmasters.
Sure, but why are we all assuming that White conservatives have any loyalty to the concept of democracy at all? How little has it taken to get the mob to turn against one-man-one-vote throughout history?
You need to see how the far right has been laying the groundwork to end democracy since the '90s. They've long known this demographic crisis was coming. They always lay out their most radical ideas in the dark corners of hate radio and gun magazine editorials, then work them into the heart of the Republican Party while that party works to make elections ever more unfair. Those media have been insinuating for years that Blacks and Latinos aren't real Americans, that real Americans must overthrow the government to crush these enemies. Since they need the White woman's vote to get into power first, they won't reveal their intent to terminate that until they've terminated everyone else's vote.
I'm just amazed we don't call the right out on that every day, what with their Confederacy-lusting and "original intent". Tell them what % of the population voted in the first Presidential election and they probably will find a way to insinuate that it was better that way.
They don't believe all humans are created equal.
They don't believe that minorities should ever have their votes count enough to beat them in an election.
Make them own it. It might make them more popular, as Trump's racism made him more popular among those who actually bothered to vote, but we need to make it clear to everyone what this oncoming civil war is really about and find out who is really on the side of democracy.
The Democrats already had seemingly permanent second-party status after Nixon smashed the McGovernite left in 1972. They seemed to recover in 1976 and 1992. How? By bending over backwards to support centrist White Southern Evangelical men, Carter and Clinton. But the White Southerners they got thereby were NOT leftists and didn't stay in the fold. Every day you hear a White liberal talk about some (usually middle-class) friend or older relative who's become an extremist of the sort who would support canceling elections and putting us on the road back to Jim Crow.
White Supremacy and capitalism have been deliberately entwined by centuries of oligarchs so that it is impossible to get enough White people to vote for a true leftist party, no matter how bad the alternative is. Literally, Whiteness is a construct created for the sole purpose of making poor "Whites" help their "White" landlords beat "Black" slaves instead of plotting class insurrection. The evil is built into the identity.
You have to destroy White identity to create a constituency to overthrow capitalism. But identity is a matter of life and death in an alienated capitalist society, so people will fight and kill for it. The more minorities Whites see around them in more of the country, the more of them who embrace identity politics and disenfranchisement, no matter how you leftists blame Blacks and Latinos and women and gays for that. Damn, those plantation owners were clever.
To put it in terms blunt enough to cut through your "ifs" and "maybes", we are living in an actual Stanford Prison Experiment, 350 years old and incredibly successful. The "guards" will never give up their status, which they value more than the hypothetical benefits of redistribution.
I don't think the ordinary Trumpites expect to get much tax relief. I think they have been trained by decades of far-right tribalism to demand that those they view as their tribal chieftains be given license to amass as much power as possible, in the belief that the tribe will thus benefit against all their enemy tribes (Blacks, feminists, Moslems, etc.). If they could, they'd simply replace the income tax with a tax on all who aren't White Christians, a perfect zero-sum game.
The key, then, is how a capitalist poses as a tribal chieftain. I am reminded of Anthony Quinn playing the chief of a tribe of cutthroat bandits in Lawrence of Arabia; "I am a poor man, for I am a river for my people!" We Americans are stupider than that; we have to see our religious and cultural leaders commute between mansions in private jets before we're convinced that they possess the voodoo magic to manipulate the mysteries of global capitalism.
In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected and Bella Abzug said, "We're all Niggers now."
That remark has now been fulfilled. We're all going to need civil rights movements (rather than the patriarchy privileges movement now in charge) in the next few years. How we will get these movements to work together to create a cohesive, principled new republic is sure beyond me.
Nixon may have resigned because he really believed that his authoritarian rule rested on the consent of the majority and the procedures of his lifelong profession. The latter is interesting in that Trump came from outside that profession, and won followers by scorning its procedures.
But the former is crucial. Both men's coalitions were similar in composition, but in nearly 50 years their combined % of the population has radically fallen. Nixon might have been sincere when talking about a "Silent Majority" whose consent justified his actions to destroy their enemies. Trump knows it's not a majority any longer. And in those years in between, the Right-wing movement has laid the groundwork for a reversion to the idea that a republic is not ruled by the consent of the majority, but by its patriarchy. However, the process by which that patriarchal coalition has ceased to be a majority has also made it cease to be silent; it's scared and angry and knows it will become as outnumbered as the Afrikaners in South Africa unless "something" is done. As a result, it has embraced policies that the 1968 version would have considered insane, followed by embracing alternative facts to justify that. That includes tossing out the very idea of democracy and majority rule to revert to a monopoly of power in the hands of "real Americans." Not short-term strongarm tactics like Nixon this time, but permanent Constitutional changes.
To the tribesmen of the conquering tribe, law is only that which they enforce upon their enslaved subcreatures, not for them to obey themselves. Instead, they are ruled by a covenant with their chieftain, a Broederbund, whose only rule is the words of Polemarchus in Plato's Republic: "Justice is doing good to one's friends and harm to one's enemies."
Baseload is becoming a myth as power networks become more sophisticated.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/baseload-rearview-mirror-todays-electric-grid
Safest, and most expensive. You can't blame treehuggers for making nuclear so expensive by pushing for so many regulations and then turn around and praise how safe the result is. Especially since we now have two alternatives that haven't had much opportunity to show up in those statistics while their costs have been plummeting.
To summarize, Hinkley Point C, Hinkley Point C, Hinkley Point C.
Mainstream Whites will never, ever, ever admit that mass imprisonment of Blacks was meant to reduce their voting numbers, just as conservative Whites will never admit that voter ID laws were meant to do the same.
While we talk about Trump voters voting against their rational self-interest, you could say the same of voters in general who support the current prison-industrial complex.
Yet it is illuminating to consider why in both cases, they don't see it that way. Our system holds the country back and wastes great amounts of human potential, but the voters are convinced that more liberal policies could make them the next victim of the mythical army of Black predators. It's the all-domestic version of the boogeyman of the Next Terrorist Attack. We pick and choose which statistical risks to throw our tax dollars at; why this one and not global warming?
Because nothing triggers our fear response like the belief that a malign human being is out there targeting us as opposed to some impersonal force like nature or soulless corporate behemoths that just crushes us without caring. That's why, I think, police throw ridiculous amounts of manpower hunting down serial killers who can't be deterred, at the cost of finding ways to deter everyday violence that's faceless because it's really all of us potentially shooting someone we know in a fit of anger. Once racist propaganda puts the villain's face on Blacks or Moslems, we literally can't rest until it is hanging from a noose, statistical probability be damned.
If Oklahomans are willing to deform themselves to live with unnatural earthquakes in the name of their unsustainable way of life, Texans must surely rise to the challenge to do the same. We will not be beaten by Oklahomans in anything, even greed and stupidity.
I don't think the world in general is moving towards justice. The global investor class has learned what we could call "the American game", the alliance between the most extreme plutocrats and those bigots willing to identify with them so as to restore the caste pyramids of their fantasized past. The centralization of past fascism is skipped as media hypnosis and armies of little Hitlers online take over as enforcers. This makes the investor class very happy to play along.
People don't learn; they get left in the dust by more advanced people, whom they finally copy. The world will continue on this course until a nation that champions equality and prospers without an oligarchy eclipses the current empires.
Thank you for posting this video. We see here what we have seen since the rise of private property several thousand years ago; greater concentrations of wealth always have a huge advantage in brainwashing and constructing social practices over lesser concentrations of wealth. Like tiny clusters of cancer cells in the body politic, they will always infect and impose their rigged norms on their lessers. This happens whether under agrarian peonage, industrialization, or the modern consumer economy dominated by advertising and its attendant manipulation of emotions to sell us things we don't really need.
Texas media is too busy engaging in self-congratulation of how many Texans used their private resources to help victims. This is posed in the same tone as American Exceptionalism. Texas' mainstream always puts out the obnoxious subtext that they're better than other Americans, with the implication that they've done better keeping Whites, males and Christians on top and others in their place, which somehow thus causes the greater charity and "can-do spirit. Thus any aid by Texan Moslems does not fit the narrative and drops into the memory hole.
If China is casting around for the magic bullet to finally make solar cheaper than coal, the floating solar array may be the key. We know a real estate bubble already exists in Chinese cities. As that spreads to suburban regions, the land costs for solar arrays could become a problem - but the existence of air pollution from coal becomes an even bigger problem. The bourgeois buying and moving to that land will have more political power than the farmers who have to suffer from the coal-fired stations being built there now to feed urban demand. If enough fresh water can be found to position these arrays, they will have better typhoon protection than offshore wind could.
Or, he knew that he was headed for an arrest for many, many financial improprieties around the world. By being the nominee and thus "leader" of the GOP, he could claim any attempt by Hillary Clinton's Dept. of Justice to arrest him was a political prosecution, and delay justice long enough to die in bed like Stalin. Note that his people were admitting to the media in October that they had big plans in case he lost, using the data they collected on his followers and preparing to create a "Trump News Network" aided by disgraced Fox News mastermind Roger Ailes. This permanent faction could be used to add to that pressure to keep him from prosecution.
I'm very worried that Trump will not take anything like the damage G. W. Bush took from Katrina. Firstly, expectations are already rock-bottom for this regime. Secondly, the public seems more willing to buy into his rah-rah "you'll all have to help each other" spiel despite the fortune we pay in taxes for the governmental functions that primarily benefit billionaires.
Thankfully, water was not trapped the way it was in New Orleans 12 years ago, which caused the high death toll and abetted the politically suspicious behavior of the authorities in not letting urban homeowners back on to their properties for months, causing them to fall into irreparable ruin. White suburbanites, heavily Republican, with the right friends in Washington should face fewer barriers. Any other kind of Texan, well, who cares about them?
The line of attack needs to focus on Trump's recent executive order overturning tough new standards for Federal construction and reconstruction that would have made it harder to keep using tax money to reconstruct exurban homes built in high-risk areas. You can see why a real estate speculator like Trump wants developers free to build anywhere with Federal backup. This is the rare moment when suburban Americans have to ask the question about real estate that they still refuse to ask about fossil fuels: can we really trust ourselves with unlimited development? Destroy that trust, and you destroy what passes for Trump's economic compact with his followers.
Their excuse is that riders on the Sandy bill were "pork barrel." Of course we've never seen this Congress try to blackmail the country into accepting unnecessary riders on vital legislation, have we?
It's not pork barrel when it benefits a true American, and Texans know White Southern Christians are the only true Americans. They're just taking their country back by reaching into your pockets.
Why secede when you've put Jefferson Davis in the Dept. of Justice and Nathan Bedford-Forrest in the White House?
He finally caved in to pressure and opened the former NBA arena that he uses as a church to refugees. Given its distance from the other city stadiums and the blocking of all our highways by floodwaters, having all these facilities open is important. Even our medieval ancestors would have expected their priests to act immediately, but then they didn't identify their churches as their private property the way the Evangelical demagogues do.
Tea Party and alt-right protesters good.
Anti-Tea Party and antifascist counter-protesters bad.
Occupy and anti-pipeline protesters bad.
How have the police treated right-wing counter-protesters?
Think I see a pattern here.
There is full understanding here that both sides will organize and retaliate and escalate all the way to war. Their bet is that White people will succumb to fear as this happens and further bias law enforcement towards them, as happened in Weimar Germany. Then they and the police in concert will exterminate freedom for anyone different than themselves. This is the path of least resistance to evil.
Deniers are going to argue that we went this long between major hurricanes. The problem is, New York just got through being hit by hurricanes in consecutive years, a region simply not accustomed to or prepared for that. No matter how the hurricanes get shuffled around by climate change, the changes themselves force everyone to have to spend more money for a lesser quality of life.
Voting against one's self-interest has entered into a new realm of crazy. Unless we've horribly misidentified how humans assess self-interest, unless rational actor models are useless, unless the "utility" that utilitarians expect us to seek is the endurance of our suffering offset by the pleasure of watching those different than us suffer more.
How, then, can scientific evidence sway us? It will always be easier in the short term to preserve the status quo, or even turn the clock back, than to invest in a future where one's own caste status is yet to be determined.
I'm here in Houston, watching the local media engage in endless self-congratulation of Texans' willingness to help each other. As if that weren't a form of indoctrination to tell us that we're superior to the socialistic hordes beyond our borders, even as we dismantle the government that we formerly paid to do a better job of helping than a bunch of self-righteous amateurs with guns and Bibles. When the floods have subsided, we will go back to our chemical plants poisoning each other so we can buy goodies on credit, we will let the Black babies starve out of sight, we will labor mightily to blame all our problems on the Other in preparation for our schemes of eradication and purification.
How would you, if you'd been living in Weimar Germany, have stopped the Nazis? You seem unperturbed that the Trumpite minority is intimidating the rest of us into silence in the manner of the rising KKK tearing down Reconstruction to impose 90 years of darkness (but hey, they got rid of a Federal dictatorship!); you certainly have nothing to break that silence.
Well, the last time fascism was spread by radio. Whenever a new form of communication sweeps humankind, the pioneers enter a Wild West with no rules or norms to impede the spread of their messages. The corporate establishment bumbles behind to impose its version of order, but once imposed it's there as long as the medium exists. So sure, Facebook can now ban the far right, but it can ban progressives too.
Tolerance isn't a useful enough concept. Because then you're having to punish the intolerant, and they accuse you of being a hypocrite. The norm we need, which was largely buried long before the Internet by the rise of Reagan, is equality. Too many people do not understand that equality is the foundational difference between the Left and the Right. The Right did very well for itself by pretending to be offended by redistributive social practices when in fact these have always been a part of human societies (which fact is not taught in schools). Trump's rise reveals that the lying bastards never had a problem with governmental power as Reagan claimed, they had a problem with anyone or anything at all trying to reduce inequality in all its malignant forms.
Hitler did flip-flop. He flip-flopped on Czechoslovakia, regretting in his diary that he made the deal with Chamberlain. He flip-flopped, after all, on the Soviet Union. The matter of his consistency on domestic policy is complicated by the very subject of this article, his game of playing subordinates against each other, which implies shifting positions on the policies that each were associated with like Ernst Rohm. But the very point of Hitler's Fuhrer Doctrine was that the Fuhrer requires flexibility instead of being a servant of a particular ideology. He placed himself above principle. He thus offered to the most ideological people on Earth, the people who birthed both Communism and Nazism, a chance to surrender to the simplicity of blind loyalty. This cleared the path for his strategic flip-flops, buying time to see which of his foreign enemies would be weak enough to strike next.
Wibberley has made it clear, like a certain segment of the anti-war Left in America, that all people of color who support the Democratic Party and Big Government in general deserve to be punished for the crimes of liberalism. How dare those people not embrace a return to the decentralized America of the 19th century only strong enough to persecute non-Whites within our border, not beyond. They don't give a fuck if Trump puts them all in concentration camps as long as the Left is purified of the evil stain of FDR and LBJ, the desire for guns and butter. That will leave a Left that consists entirely of White "radical" academics and activists who will pontificate and chide as uselessly as the handful of White liberals who still had some rights remaining in the Jim Crow South. Thank God, being relieved of all responsibility of actually having to govern at home or exercise power abroad ever again. That's what they really want.
It won't be balance. It will be every petty tyrant for himself, and all our leaders will be petty tyrants. With nukes.
You keep saying that things will get better thanks to Trump, and they keep getting worse.
America is not uniquely evil and its downfall will merely redistribute evil to a host of other players who have been held back.
I unfortunately had to see part of those fascist-rhetoric ads on YouTube. How dare we assume when a heavily-armed White man who embraces our racist past says that he's under attack by evil Negroes, that he's organizing violence.
Hit them again and again with the key questions: Do you believe that all people are created equal? Do you accept that voters different than yourself have the right to defeat you in fair ungerrymandered elections? Do you believe that a non-White person has a right equal to yours to organize armed militias - or do you have an asterisk saying " only if they support the laws and culture of 220 years ago"?
I used to think they were smart enough to lie about these things, but Trump's ascension has suddenly got them cracking their veneer and spouting bits and pieces of their Apartheid vision for America. Make them own it.
Republicans are setting themselves up to justify secession no matter how they feel about Trump. The real problem is that Whites are losing their majority status in a generation. Because most bigots will not admit in front of a microphone that they intend to ensure White rule by undemocratic means, they need to claim that they were forced to do it by murderous minorities presenting an immediate threat. Thus even if they dislike Trump, the sight of us organizing against him serves as their excuse, whether their weapon of choice is control of the Federal government, secession by State governments, or armed terrorism. If we somehow remove Trump, they suddenly become secessionists again claiming that they can't be free under our oppressiveness. If, by that time, minorities are numerous enough in their states to block secession, out come the assault rifles and the death lists.
There is nothing you can do to avoid this clash. You can't negotiate with a Master Race.
That would require people capable of seeing those as being good news. The average Trump supporter seems to believe that conservation is inherently un-American unless used to hurt foreigners - a harder case to make in the age of US fracking. Or that coal miners are better Americans because they're manly men. Or that solar cells have harmful effects on their surroundings - that one's really circulating in the backwaters. Or that big EV motors put out radiation that's more harmful than car exhaust. Or that wind turbines harm Air Force and Navy airfield operations even when those services say that they don't.
It just goes on, and on, and on... Suffice it to say that this is about attacking any change in status quo economics that might further erode patriarchy and the existing pecking order. There's a limit to how much the people who must believe these lies can welcome any good news; by definition if White Christian Fossil Fuel Man is threatened, life must be horrible in all respects.
We need to find a way to make housing stock more expandable in the places where people want to live. It's like, the reward you get for creating a city where creative people want to live is $2000 a month rent for a small apartment and people circling the block all morning looking for a parking space. But it has a macroeconomic effect too: real estate bubbles are a dark stain on modern economic history, from the Tokyo bubble of the '80s to the two-headed US-UK bubble that led to the '08 crash to the precarious Chinese situation today.
My suggestion: Buckminster Fuller's Triton City.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/2971307/richard-buckminster-fullers-triton-city-project
What the heck does Putin expect will happen if the far-right German parties he's supporting take control of Germany?
Really, she's a lot more like Eisenhower. She's to the Right of most of her recent predecessors, she's in the right-wing party due to where she comes from rather than lifetime dogmatism, and after all she didn't stop the German bankers from wrecking four southern European countries for being too "generous" to the proles. Like the Pope, she's what a conservative was before Anglo-American conservatism went senile and regressive.
No, because there's no oil there. That's the only part of real economics Trump understands: without cheap energy manipulated by actual engineers and scientists, there's no speculative bubble in worthless crap for pimps like him to make a living. Iran is interesting to his lizard brain, Afghanistan is just another place where he can't get what he wants. He'll just keep stalling on an interim basis like the presidents before him.
Only one side in America specializes in running over protesters in cars.
By an amazing coincidence, only one political party specializes in pushing state legislation to legalize running over protesters in cars, very visibly, at this very same moment as if it were signaling to those attackers that they will be protected by this party for a very long time.
Both happen to be the right-wing sides. You know damn well that those right-wing states will only use these laws to protect, ahem, the "right" terrorists.
Isn't that remarkable? Or a fascist conspiracy? Of which nothing comparable exists on the other side.
Someone who bleats that "both sides do it" and then blasts Obama for not being leftist enough is either schizophrenic, or he's looking to paralyze the Left so that his "side" can stay pure as only the impotent can while the fascists arson and arrest those darker-colored than himself. Of course one day you'll just move away and forget about America, leaving Trump's race enemies to an Apartheid fate because no country will take them.
We should consider how wildly different Southern culture and society would be if the colonial plantation investors had not imported slaves to co-opt the rebellious indentured servants. The simmering war between English owners and often Scottish and Irish servants would have kept going. The tribalism of those ethnicities would not have been submerged into the constructed tribalism devised by those landlords to make themselves the replacement chieftains. The Southern colonies would have been weaker and smaller, and their poverty would have weakened the Northern colonies as well. But the British government would have had less incentive to fight to hold onto them.
We would probably not recognize that alternative South, either in the dialects spoken, the forms of worship, or the defiance of local oligarchs. Sort of a West Virginia stretching to a still-French Louisiana.
Separate But Equal is always bullshit.
Premise: God placed "us" on this planet to conquer it and live as gluttons in His name.
Corollary: Scientists exist only to discovery those facts necessary for this endeavor, not to tell us why we're thus committing suicide.
People need to know about this:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-cartel-collusion-between-germany-s-biggest-carmakers-a-1159471.html
It wasn't just a diesel scandal, and it wasn't just VW. But as this unfolds it could make it impossible to keep building diesels, and realistically EVs will have to replace them to make up for the lost ground against pollution due to the mass failure of diesels to meet specifications.
Whiteness and Blackness are both constructs commissioned by the American oligarchy. That's both good news and bad news. We could reconstruct them into positive diversity, but we might reconstruct them by many different disguises to justify the inequality that ultimately the oligarchs require. We can recode "White" as "Christian", or the right kind of Christian, you know, not that Martin Luther King kind. We can recode "Black" as criminal, as the NRA does every day that it pretends shootings in America are mostly about "them" assaulting "us" and "us" shooting back, not about people losing their temper at others whom they know or have suddenly gotten angry at at a traffic stop.
We will redefine race any way that makes us feel good, no matter what scientists say. Right now, equality doesn't make most of us feel good enough to make sacrifices for it, so race becomes our surrogate for the inequality we want to see.
After Charlottesville, I don't even want to imagine what Trump wants to bring his forces home to do.
Don't forget cranks. Cranks are very, very big in America right now.
It doesn't get more Orwellian than punishing people for pointing out that your victory meant their defeat.
Or more bourgeois.
I think the actual Nazis are playing the long game right now; they're seizing this moment to begin a long process of normalization, but they know Trump won't be around for much of it. The problem is, once he's gone, his success in conning a wide range of right-wing voters guarantees he will be imitated on the state level, which is already dominated by extreme Republicans. The media has done a bad job of informing us about the state-level takeover of America and its coordination by national groups like ALEC with its cookie-cutter state legislature spamming. How will it handle fifty little Hitlers?
Of course, there's plenty of time for Trump to impose dictatorship that's only Mussolini-bad, as opposed to Hitler-bad. The key to real fascism is mass participation; the followers must be enlisted to become paramilitary enforcers of the leader's will, bypassing the state organs preferred by more conventional authoritarians. With Trump, the call for his followers to go Kristallnacht could happen on any given day if he wakes up in a bad enough mood.
There is one non-violent thing Americans might reasonably do right now that would disrupt the system enough to matter.
Stop shopping for Christmas.
I mean, don't buy at all, if you can. Make it clear to your friends that you will give them things you own that they will appreciate, but will not participate in filling the coffers of the investor class who are Trump's lifeline of support. If you must buy, buy used, buy e-bay, buy direct from local craftsmen.
The black population of South Africa had to beg us in the outside world to boycott their economy to bring down their masters. No one has the power to do that to America but Americans. We've constructed a very unstable, bubble-driven economy vulnerable to panic. We must accept the cost of causing that panic now. Trump could send troops out to butcher protesters and get half of America to excuse it, but he can't send troops door to door to force you to buy from Wal-Mart. That's one power you have over him.
Yeah, that would have worked great against Hitler. There are tens of millions of people who don't WANT to ignore Trump because they are searching for a way to aggregate their hatred. They needed very little to find him. The point of the negative news was to warn the rest of us that he, and his followers, were a real threat.
If warnings are counter-productive, then what the hell's the point of news, or information, or facts? Or even of this very website?
He hasn't backed off his claim that the Central Park Five are guilty, no matter what science says. He hasn't backed off his refusal to accept that American police coerce confessions from Black suspects, which obviously has significance in the matter of American soldiers engaging in torture abroad.
White supremacist terrorism is the worst because it is founded on the past ritual of the lynching, a terrorist act in which the entire White population of a community openly gathers to celebrate, thereby sending a message to the entire Black community that they are outnumbered, outgunned, and outgoverned and resistance to all the other rituals of racism is thus futile.
That entire-town turnout thing changed in the '30s, until lynching became a covert act in the night. That's probably a sign the ritual was falling apart, making the actual lynching itself futile. The logical goal of the modern White supremacist is to reverse the clock and get back to that fascist tribal celebration of raw power over "conquered" peoples.
"I hate Illinois Nazis." - Jake Blues.
It was the Satanic bargain my ancestors in the Southern colonies took 350 years ago to be freed from indentured servitude when they had the power to wreck the nascent plantation society by joining the ongoing uprisings of the time. The entire argument is a construct: the jobs (growing dead-end tobacco), the station (henchman as autonomous yeoman farmer), and the idea of race itself were built by the oligarchs on terms that they dictated. But I suspect many of my ancestors came to enjoy the slave-whipping part.
In my heart, I agree. But I've been watching this namecalling for decades, and I've seen American regressives put a lot of work into truthiness-based arguments that they're nothing at all like the Nazis because they "don't believe in Big Government." As long as our public's understanding of Nazism is based on the stereotype of German bureaucracy and intervention in markets, this lie will work. The reality on that front was more complex.
You have to find a way to make people understand that the cornerstone of fascist belief is human inequality, and that fascism embraced all things that seemed to prove inequality in the crude way that racists always do. Thus fascists are not opposed to private property; they are opposed to "aliens" and "traitors" being allowed to earn enough property to matter. (Good ol' American hiring discrimination, supported by right-wingers as an inalienable liberty, fits perfectly with this.) Their mentality is essentially of their race being a warrior tribe who have won a trial by combat to own and control EVERYTHING (and everyone) within a certain "nation". Markets, government, religion, anything that makes that control more absolute is embraced to the extent it contributes.
Once in power, that all changes to a cynical collaboration with the capitalist oligarchs. But fascists have to be stopped before that point. No fascist regime has ever been overthrown by its own people, only by foreign invasions. With the exception of Franco's Spain, which could not wall itself off from the wealthier democracies that flourished in Europe after WW2 and was worn down over 40 years.
Before you can label them as Nazis with any credibility, you have to get them to say what mechanisms of our racist past they will restore in making America great "again", and then call those out as being both oppressive and supremacist. You have to paint them into a rhetorical corner where they finally admit that they will use state power to promote Whites over everyone else in the private realm, and restore a "natural" White monopoly on power.
Hitler had a great disadvantage in his anti-Semitism of having to restore attitudes that seemed to be dying out in Wilhelmine Germany. It was not surprising that he used the revolutionary framing of a need for a dictatorship to cleanse society from the depravity of bourgeois liberalism that, once successful, would magically wither away (in his case into a Medievalized society under Nazi nobles, not a worker's paradise). It's much easier for an American racist, who can appeal to a fantasy of turning the clock back not 300 years, but only 50 or so, and not back to a feudal order but to the simple capitulation to individual States and their local oligarchs, to get White Supremacy back into power.
To give you an idea of how stubborn American exceptionalism might be, consider a phenomenon that we might once have called "European exceptionalism". 1400 years ago Europe was a collapsed civilization, held together only by blind faith in a Christian church that exploited the very collapse it helped cause to seize certain levers of power. The explosive rise of Islam on the African side of that empire rebooted culture, economics and science, but Europeans held out and defeated Islamic invaders advancing from Spain into France.
Now any Moslem at that time could have given any Euro-Christian at that time exactly the same argument that many Euro/American greedbags are giving to Moslems today, from the occupation of Iraq to the HQs of multinational corporations. "Our civilization has proven superior; surrender to us and your children will have better lives." But in both cases, the "inferiors" said Hell No. That stubbornness and lack of appreciation for the humanity of aliens is a weakness if it causes your extinction, but you just may outlast those who lecture you for reasons beyond anyone's control. Eventually, your descendants may be the ones on top again, and they will have learned nothing.
This absurd cycle may well be America's fate, unless the willpower of the barbarian can be defeated by reason. What we see instead is that the barbarians learn enough technology to get by and bide their time for generations on a tribal mythology of grievance and revenge.
I despise these guys and their hypocrisy but let's be honest: we define "terrorism" based on whether we're among the targets in some small or large sense. The instant we can see a crack of daylight between us and those intended to be terrorized, we can freely choose to label the perpetrators as terrorists or not terrorists depending on our own agendas.
What that means when it happens in Virginia is that I'm revealing that I'm personally not "terrorized" by attacks on those who intend to obtain civil rights and equality by any means possible, because I intend to advocate those things from safe places even if it means they will be defeated. I've already retreated to impotence. Whereas I AM terrorized by Blacks legally protesting police violence, because I need those violent cops to protect my goodies by maintaining a state of terror over minority populations. Sympathies are weak, interests are murderous.
Instead of continuing the self-serving arguments on who is the terrorist, we can learn a lot by listening to who does or does not consider themselves terrorized. And it reveals that real advocates for minorities' rights are as isolated and endangered today as they were in the 1870s, when that bulk of the Northern population that had supported the Civil War decided that the KKK was not terrorizing them in particular, so they wouldn't spend tax dollars to stop what the KKK was helping to build.
The problem is, a defeated "Them" will always be safely despised. A defeated "Us" is a trickier matter. It doesn't matter how much like a Nazi one chooses to be, as long as he is a White American who doesn't adopt foreign regalia or praise Herr Hitler; he will always be treated as a member of the White family. Just like our slaveowning ancestors.
There are times when I think there should be a statue of Nat Turner next to every statue of a Confederate general.
This is a joke, right?
I mean, if Trump thinks that nuclear cremation is a joyous risk to take for the opportunities of tourism, then he has no actual understanding of death or pain at all. For him publicity literally is the sole engine of existence.
If you think Trump wouldn't mind seeing the West Coast nuked, imagine how he feels about sacrificing South Korea, a country that has "taken our jobs", that has the audacity to be more technologically advanced than the USA in ways that actually benefit its citizens, who showed their true patriotism by recently running a President out of office for the crimes of a single crony as opposed to Trump's dozens.
I'm very afraid for the South Korean people right now.
You are correct - Wayne wouldn't take roles that attacked the legitimacy of the existing government. He played (in what some consider his greatest performance) an ex-Confederate Texan in Red River, but that's as close to the Confederacy as he got. Conversely, he refused the role Gary Cooper immortalized in High Noon - a movie seen as an attack on McCarthyism, which Wayne supported. But his specific justification was that Cooper threw away his badge to deal with the bullies when the community he was supposed to represent refused to support him.
Now Michael Herr, whose writings about Vietnam were so influential that he worked on the scripts of both Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, does discuss in his book Dispatches how young GI's were "making their own war movies in their heads", charging the enemy trying to replicate the actions they saw in Sands of Iwo Jima.
Wayne had his moments as an actor. The Ringo Kid had no small influence on future anti-hero characters. True Grit and The Shootist are examples of an actor who's played a type of character so long that you can no longer tell where the reality ends, which is sort of a goal for actors. Unfortunately, that's a terrible goal for citizens and chief executives.
And we're not the only country permanently hijacked by a romantic era of violence. If you watch Japanese TV, what's striking is that everything set before the modern era seems to occur during the Sengoku Jidai, the final squareoff between Japan's feudal lords all during the 16th century, or (if it's a tv show about more orderly people) the early Tokugawa dictatorship that followed. Think about all the centuries of Japanese culture before that. People seem to prefer the absolute chaos of the last, biggest feudal wars, and the absolute order of the subsequent dictatorship, as the simplistic foundation for stories of violence and honor.
Remember that many Western stories that AREN'T about young gunfighters, but instead are about the triumph of the settlers and the sad obsolescence of those gunmen seem to take place after 1886, from The Rifleman (a retired gunman with a son) to The Wild Bunch (1916, and like many such later stories set in Mexico where the West stayed wild a little longer). You could say that they are the equivalent to the Japanese dramas set under the Tokugawas when modern bureaucratic civilization became possible, a sort of propaganda of vindication or a lament for the violent freedom that was lost.
We are not living in the second, but actually the THIRD time when Black voting rights were undermined. In the early days of colonial Virginia, chattel slavery was not yet the legal norm and African captives shipped in to its ports were normally sold into indentured servitude. If you could survive the servitude, you were free, though stranded far from home. But as I understand it, that meant that some of these men gained the right to vote in local elections. The participation of both Black and White servants in Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 scared the oligarchs, who devised a divide & conquer strategy that scars our nation to this day: the White servants were freed and even given farmland, the Black servants were legally recategorized as permanent slaves. The very terms "White" and "Black" didn't exist in law before then. They were devised to weld the White servants to the White oligarchs by manufacturing a common enemy: everyone who wasn't White.
And that's why this keeps happening.
I say, three strikes, and White rule is out. Forever.
Trump intends to fight North Korea to the last South Korean.
Eight of Bacevich's proposals would immediately be denounced as "leftist" by the entire right-wing political segment. Even the National Service proposal. Yet he is a conservative by global standards, like the current Pope. America is just very deranged to the Right, and not by accident.
The problem is, under globalization there are still distinct national capitalisms with different value systems. Globalization can be channeled by a mercantilist government to create leverage against the multinational corporations.
Globalization has happened in various ways before. There are always peaking empires turning from the productive economic behaviors that enabled their military prowess, towards speculative economics and wealth polarization. There are always hungry states on the way up, willing to play the angles on the existing system as they build their power for the promise of overthrow.
However, it's inexcusable with the educational and informational resources at our disposal for today's top empire to stumble through the process of decay as though history didn't exist. We could have prepared ourselves for this time. Nixon and Kissinger believed that American power was relatively in decline - for which, believe it or not, they were hated by the Right for their cynicism. Carter tried to warn us of the national malaise, and we punished him by installing a motivational speaker to hypnotize us.
We've had draconian loyalty legislation in America under John Adams and Woodrow Wilson, but both times the US was in a state of war and the end of that state brought things back to normal. Consider that by extending that same tyrannical power to the advancement of Israel, we make it permanent, and potentially universal.
I don't think, other than Mattis, that those are the generals the combat troops would obey.
However, for many years I've had a growing fear that the Air Force is the service that would use its power against the American people. Watch its stateside activities closely.
Unfortunately LBJ chose not to apply it to Nixon in November 1968 when he had him dead to rights colluding with the dictator of South Vietnam.
I can live with that as long as the system remains paralyzed. What I'm terrified of is the day Trump tells that rally crowd to go home, get out whatever weapons they possess and start hunting down his enemies on the Internet.
man, explain to me Constitutionally what Democrats can do to stop one disastrous policy after another when they don't control any of the three branches of government? Come on, Hillary is gone now. America is a one-party state right now. We literally require a few Republican congressmen and judges to occasionally defect on the most offensive Republican initiatives to keep us from total dictatorship.
You mean your people weren't poring over the tabloids during the Profumo scandal and a dozen smaller scandals of the more-cautious politicians of later generations? Murdoch owns Britain's hindbrain too.
We are wishing not to be ruled by Trump, the White supremacist, misogynist global warming denier and conspiracy theorist. You seem to want bad things to happen to America so much that you want it to be ruled by Trump while those of us of the wrong gender, religion, race and income level (meaning most of us) suffer.
India now has 125 million English-speakers.
I somehow don't think these are the English-speakers those who hide behind language to justify draconian policies are trying to favor.
Keep spinning. Eventually you'll be right about something.
Perhaps as an American (and a Texan) I know those who elected Trump a lot better than you. It's the EXACT same people who have turned our state governments, which have no foreign policy for you to deplore, into pits of far-right insanity and bankrupting tax cut mania, cells for theocracy, deniers of all forms of pollution, advocates for private prisons. How about you listen to some of us tell you how many stone-cold racists there are here? How many who wish the Confederacy had won? How many wanted homosexuals to be herded into concentration camps during the AIDS crisis (including Pat Buchanan, who was the genesis for so much of what we call Trumpism?
I fucking guarantee you that 90% of the people who voted for Trump are gun-obsessed, soldier-worshiping neo-Victorians who want America to be an aggressive military power. They just want to attack people they can beat. They don't even care what the economic variables are; just win and they'll volunteer to whip the slaves.
Why the Hell are you conflating our imperialism with "the doors" staying open? You seem to imply that the immigrants are the source of our imperialism. Again, you will never catch the sort who obsesses about being a "real" American at a peace rally.
You Britons must have a very strange idea of what our rednecks are like. Believe me, Harper Lee had them nailed pretty well with her withering portrayal of Jeb Ewell in To Kill A Mockingbird. What's changed since then is suburbs and Fox News.
Because all those activities required government approval, and at a certain point, the mandarins decided that trade with the outside world was not in their interests.
Also, China is not monolithic. It embraced the idea of greedy multinational corporations, and those corporations do many different things at cross-purposes with each other.
I wonder what % of that action gets kicked back by Big Oil to various fronts of the Trump Organization.