New York talks to Arkansas and the same old thing happens. They don’t care what we think and we don’t know how they could possibly believe what they think.
Forget income inequality. This is the real Two Americas.
New York talks to Arkansas and the same old thing happens. They don’t care what we think and we don’t know how they could possibly believe what they think.
Forget income inequality. This is the real Two Americas.
It is dangerous and offensive to claim that the Democratic and Republican Parties are the same. All those who do so empower this current radicalized gang of Republicans.
A summary of moments just from yesterday and today:
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-ted-cruz-lead-tea-party-rally-against-iran-deal-370487
http://judiciary.house.gov/index.cfm/hearings?ID=F81A929A-4F23-4CD7-A802-1FE2FC89E9C3
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3226729/Judge-orders-RELEASE-Kentucky-gay-marriage-court-cle
rk-Kim-Davis-just-Mike-Huckabee-Ted-Cruz-planned-meet-jail.html
We haven’t heard as much racist stuff from their top leaders on immigration and Black Lives Matter in the last 36 hours, but that will be arriving (again) any hour now.
Radicalized. This is where the center of the GOP is now. These are not fringe Republicans; these are Congressional leaders and Presidential candidates from their Party.
There’s your sacred: ignorant jackass spouting intolerance.
about Trump
………….
From an essay from Tikkun Magazine: “Trump and the Ghost of Totalitarianism” (Excellent analysis of the Trump phenomenon)
“…And while liberals such as Michal Tomasky have pointed to his appeal to racial resentment, a gladiatorial style, and his ability to combine a war like discourse and elements of conservative fundamentalism with a flair for entertainment,[15] this type of analysis shies away from talking about Trump represents the challenge of understanding how totalitarianism now confronts Americans in new forms.[16]
He is the embodiment of a political party and casino driven social order in which informed judgments, moral responsibility, and collective action disappear from the world of politics. Trump’s often insulting, humiliating, misogynist, and racist remarks signify more than the rantings an antediluvian, privileged white man who is both savvy in the world of public relations and delusional in the world of politics. Trump represents the new face of what Hannah Arendt once called the “banality of evil.”[17] Unapologetic about the racist nature of his remarks, unreflective about an savage economic system that is destroying the planet and the lives of most of its inhabitants, and unaware of his own “criminal” participation in furthering a culture of fear and cruelty, he is typical of an expanding mass of pundits, anti-public intellectuals, and right-wing fundamentalists who live in a historical void and for whom emotion overtakes reason.
Clearly, the attack on reason, evidence, science, and critical thought has reached perilous proportions in the United States. A number of political, economic, social, and technological forces now work to distort reality and keep people passive, unthinking, and unable to act in a critically engaged manner. Politicians, right-wing pundits, and large swaths of the American public embrace positions that support Creationism, capital punishment, torture, and the denial of human-engineered climate change, any one of which not only defies human reason but stands in stark opposition to evidence-based scientific arguments. Reason now collapses into opinion, as thinking itself appears to be both dangerous and antithetical to understanding ourselves, our relations to others, and the larger state of world affairs. Under such circumstances, literacy disappears not just as the practice of learning skills, but also as the foundation for taking informed action. Divorced from any sense of critical understanding and agency, the meaning of literacy is narrowed to completing basic reading, writing, and numeracy tasks assigned in schools. Literacy education is similarly reduced to strictly methodological considerations and standardized assessment, rooted in test taking and deadening forms of memorization, and becomes far removed from forms of literacy that would impart an ability to raise questions about historical and social contexts.
For Arendt the inability to think, to be thoughtful, and assume responsibility for one’s actions spoke not just to a regrettable type of civic and political illiteracy, but was crucial for creating the formative cultures that produced totalitarian regimes. Absent any residue of moral responsibility, political indignation, and collective resistance, crimes committed in a systemic way now emerge, in part, from a society in which thinking had become dangerous and non-thinking normalized. Of course, thinking critically is largely produced in public spheres that instill convictions rather than destroy them, encourage critical capacities rather than shut them down, invest in public spheres rather than eliminate them by turning them over to private interests. What Donald Trump represents is rarely talked about in the media. He is the most current egregious highly visible symbol of a terrifying stage in American society haunted by the protean elements of a new totalitarianism. Totalitarian forms are still with us but they no longer find expression in the rounding up and killing of Jews, gays, and intellectuals or in the spectacles of militarism with the heightened show of armies of thugs dressed in military uniforms and black boots. The new totalitarianism is echoed in the resurgence of religious bigotry that runs through the current like an electric current and personified in the media celebration of bigots such as Kentucky clerk Kim Davis who believes that her religion gives her the right to both deny marriage license to gays and the disavow the separation of church and state. Unfortunately, Davis is more than an embarrassment politically and ethically, she reflects a sizable number of religious fundamentalists who have the backing of Republican Party and presidential candidates such as Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee.
Totalitarianism throws together authoritarian and anti-democratic forms that represent a new historical moment in American history. Economic fundamentalism now governs all of society rather than just the market and in doing so drives politics and sets polices that promote massive inequalities in wealth and power, produce huge amounts of suffering, and appear to delight in a culture of cruelty. Military fundamentalism points to a society that now militarizes everything from knowledge to schools. In this scenario, an increasing number of behaviors are criminalized, militarism feeds the punishing and incarceration state, and a kind of hyper masculinity now parades as the new model for legitimating aggression and violence in multiple spheres and against an increasing range of populations extending from women and black youth to Mexican immigrants. One of the most deadly fundamentalisms is education. We now live in a world in which illiteracy has replaced literacy and civic values have gone the way of the typewriter. As the orbits of privatization increase furthering what has been called by Mark Fisher the “empire of the self,” knowledge is transformed into the flow of non-stop information just as education collapses into training. Students are now defined as test-takers and celebrity culture has overtaken any viable notion of a critical, questioning, and informed culture. Trump’s rise in the polls is tantamount to the collapse of civic literacy and the public spheres that support it.
http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/donald-trump-and-the-ghost-of-totalitarianism
OTOH, Rasmussen Reports Voters Show Little Sympathy for Jailed Clerk in Gay Marriage Spat
A poll number not too different from those that supported the efforts of Jeb(?) and other politicians to keep brain dead Terri Schiavo on life support.
Religion, a pick-and-choose buffet of directives.
OT: I have had differences with this President on foreign policy,but that’s only because I wanted us out of places sooner. Have said it before, will continue to say it: I do not, under ANY circumstances, Trust Hillary Clinton when it comes to foreign policy. There is NOTHING that this President has done that I could point to and say, ‘ Hillary would have done it better.’ Not.one.damn.instance.
………………..
In a break with Obama, Clinton lays out tougher worldview
By Anne Gearan September 9 at 6:32 PM
Hillary Rodham Clinton — who has spent much of her campaign embracing the policies of President Obama — signaled clear disagreement with her former boss Wednesday in key areas of foreign policy, suggesting in some cases that he has been too hesitant.
Again and again, Clinton pointed to instances overseas where she would have taken a tougher stance than Obama, from arming Syrian rebels to confronting an expansionist Russia. In some cases, she was talking about policy debates she lost while serving as Obama’s first-term secretary of state, or about advice she suggested was not heeded.
The critique, delivered as part of a Washington speech focused on the Iran nuclear deal, was in many respects subtle — wrapped inside overall praise for Obama and never targeting him directly. But the differences were nonetheless striking for a candidate who has worked carefully to soften her hawkish national security reputation and who badly needs Obama’s liberal coalition of voters to gain the White House.
“Those of us who have been out there on the diplomatic front lines know that diplomacy is not the pursuit of perfection,” Clinton said. “It’s the balancing of risk.”
That line was meant to answer Republican critics who say the Obama administration failed to drive a hard bargain in international nuclear talks with Iran. But Clinton echoed some GOP criticism of Obama’s hands-off approach to some world problems.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-a-break-with-obama-clinton-lays-out-tougher-worldview/2015
/09/09/be77b058-570f-11e5-abe9-27d53f250b11_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop_b
Hollywood Reporter: R.E.M. Slams Donald Trump for Using Their Song in “Moronic Charade of a Campaign”
Uhhh…Booman…
Yeah.
But:
I have neither been on this site nor privy to your political positions from before Butch II occupied the preznidential highchair, but your tendencies towards orthodox Democratic Party positions suggests to me that you were an avid Clinton supporter during his presidential reign. “Arkansas” elected Bill Clinton. Three times!!! And now “Arkansas” is Mike Huckabee?
Please.
Which Arkansas we talkin’ about here?
I tire of this blanket condemnation style that I hear from all corners of the society now. Urban area dwellers vs. country people. North vs. south. So-called “liberals vs. so-called “conservatives.” Race vs. race vs. race vs. race. And on and on it goes.
An endless set of diatribes, all going nowhere except to the PermaGov fix result.
“New York” wasn’t talking to “Arkansas” in that clip. Two professional media hustlers were talking to a professional political hustler. End of story. Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
WTFU.
AG
Oh, fundamentalist Christians from the rural South are most definitively in spiritual and verbal warfare with urban Northerners. Their feelings, and the intensity of this fight, is real. The heat of this fight can be sensationalized by the media, but the media did not create the fight.
So, Arthur, what do you think about the issue here? Should Kentucky residents in Davis’ County have their civil rights enforced so that they can get a marriage license in the County where they live?
Should they?
Oh, absolutely.
But…how?
Really.
Long term, what are their prospects in that area of the country? Consider it. Publicly homosexual in an area where they are considered to be totally alien freaks by the majority white Christian populace? Please. Are their civil rights going to be “enforced” when people drive by their house and throw things at it? When their faces and names are published in the local fundamentalist press? When some hooligans…just as likely to be local cops as anything else…pull them into an alley as they are going to dinner and beat the shit out of them? This government cannot even enforce the “civil rights” of the soon-to-be-majority of darker-skinned citizens in areas like that or even in the biggest cities of this country, with DC being perhaps the worst offender of all. The rule of law means nothing if the majority of people in a given area do not believe in it. Not unless that area is under some sort of martial law.
I personally believe that this union in which so many of us seem to passionately believe should be broken up into smaller countries. Someone wants to live in a country where homosexuals are stoned to death? Great. Move to the U.S D.S…the United States of the Deep South…wallow in your ignorance surrounded by others like you and watch your system implode from sheer stupidity. Someone wants to live in a society founded on real equality, on the idea of human ecology? Founded on the idea that we all have a valued place in the vast cosmos? That’s great, too. Move to the U.S.N.E. or U.S. N.W…the United States of the NorthEast or the United States of the NorthWest, etc. and watch the society blossom on every level imaginable.
Of course,this is not going to happen as long as present conditions hold…too much stateless, international money and power riding on the U.S. as World Cop/World Consumer…but when the BIG bubble crashes? (As it must, eventually. What goes up always comes down.) When it does, those of us who survive will have yet another chance to start a system that works.
We all should live so long.
So long…
AG
The people of Kentucky 2015 are not like the Alabama 1964 populace. Nor are the public officials. This fundamentalist County Clerk is an outlier; almost all other County Clerks throughout the South are issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
In Rowan County, let’s consider the many same-sex couples who have already gained marriage licences from Davis’ office in the last week, led by this couple which pressed for their rights repeatedly:
Do they look like they’re worried that thugs will be coming by to assault them or terrorize them at their homes? They had been asking for the media to cover their story, and newspapers, television and radio have done so.
Arthur, your willingness to delude yourself re. the record of the Pauls is part of a growing list of your views which causes us to doubt your support for civil rights. Your statements here re. the hopelessness of Federal civil rights enforcements are very similar to the views and actions of the Citizens’ Councils.
And your expressed wish to dissolve the Union is in complete service of those citizens who would want to terrorize and murder Americans in some areas of the country if they could gain government sanction for it. Very Confederate of you.
I stand by my statements.
As far as dissolving the union…this country is now too big, too diverse culturally and too populous to be adequately governed by a centralized federal system. If one truly believes in rule by majority consensus, then decentralization is the only way that it is going to happen. I live in the most culturally diverse city in the nation, NYC, and in its most culturally diverse borough, the Bronx. I live here on purpose because I believe in the concept that it has been the continuous input of immigrant cultures that has kept this country alive and well for its entire history. I also believe…hope, at any rate…that someday the entire world will be that way.
But now?
With control of the media in the hands of gigantic multinational companies? With control of the federal government firmly in their hands as well? It ain’t gonna happen. Instead a synthetic, shallow, glitz-heavy “culture” has been forced into place throughout most of the U.S.. It is so patently false that large portions of the population are reflexively rejecting anything and everything that it says. This is the real secret to the rise of Trump. The one true thing that he says is that the federal government and the media are not to be trusted, and he has found a large section of the culture that agrees with him about that and is simultaneously too undereducated/economically frightened/racist or just plain ol’ country stupid to see through the rest of his act.
So it goes.
Trump vs. whomever in the finals?
Great.
He gets to be preznit of the states that he wins; the other one gets to be preznit of the rest of the country and let’s see how those two sections do.
My bet’s on the smarter one, and it ain’t the Trump country.
Of course…that will never happen.
What will happen is that a compromise candidate will be found and selected by the PermaGov to win the election. By hook or by crook. And that person…no matter who it is…will fail just as miserably as has Obama.
OH yes!!! The single most potent evidence of his failure is that after 8 years in office there are still racial riots occurring in our cities. Riots that have real reason to occur, and not just because of trigger-happy white cops shooting unarmed black teenagers. Minority workers…including the so-called “illegals” are paid so little overall that there is no way that they can live even a just-get-by life on what they make.
Did he fail on purpose?
Maybe, maybe not. It really makes no difference. The failure is there for all with eyes to see. He acceded in continuing the power structure basically unchanged instead of going on the attack the day he stepped up to give his first inaugural speech.
So it goes.
I personally think that he did what he did because he recognized the essential ungovernability of the U.S. as it stands but had no idea how to change it.
My idea?
Break the damned thing up.
You infer that i am a racist because of this idea and others that I have presented here?
A cursory look at my life from middle-class white Irish-American early ’60s teenager to my present position as an honored member of the multiracial, multicultural NYC jazz and latin musical worlds…and Booman knows my real name and what I have done, he can attest to this…puts the lie to that ignorant bullshit right on the spot. You don’t like it? Get in touch and let’s meet to talk about it.
I dare ya.
Later…
AG
It’s simple.
You’re telling us that it’s just too haaaaard to enforce Federal civil rights laws, and we should throw homosexuals, religious and racial minorities to the wolves by splitting up the Union and abandoning our fellow Americans.
I don’t have to know if you, personally, are a racist to know that many of your policy preferences, from the real (such as voter ID laws) to the unreal (such as re-establishing the Confederacy), empower the worst racists to get what they want in many portions of the United States.
With all the words and images you spill here, the reason you want to empower racists is not clear. But you certainly do want to empower racists. You are very consistent on that point.
Not just racists, but the explicitly and/or violently intolerant bigoted of all types which could wield cultural dominance to oppress others- sexist, Christian fundamentalist, and the rest. You’re empowering bigots of all types.
The ugly side of the libertarian coin. Which is why most decent people outgrow any fascination with libertarianism within the six months from which they first encounter this seductive sounding political stance in late adolescence.
Sigh…
There it is again. A variation on the “everybody knows” riff.
From my comment here, on Booman’s recent “Quote of the Day: Bobby Jindal” thread.
Your “decent people” appear to be people with whom you agree, Marie.
Who are we to say that no “decent people” believe other things than do we?
My grandparents were “decent people” on both sides of the family. They went to church; they stayed married…sometimes for the sole reason of raising their children well…; they fought wars in which they believed; they took care to harm no one who did not threaten them and their families. They also had no fucking idea about what it means to be a minority citizen in this country, thought that women belonged in the house raising children, would never have dreamed of voting for a black dogcatcher let alone a black president, lived in strictly segregated neighborhoods, had absolutely no use for people whose sexuality was different from their own…including people who had sex out of wedlock even if they were heterosexual…and cast a squinty eye even on Christians of other denominations. My parents…one a member of a rabble-rousing NYC Irish Catholic Democratic family, the other a member of a semi-rural, rock-ribbed Protestant Republican family whose history in the NYC area went back to the 1630s…had to elope and go join the Royal Canadian Air Force and fight in The Battle of Britain because their families were so opposed to the relationship. Do you not have “decent people” in your family who never evolved to the level at which you exist in terms of social beliefs? I’m betting that you do.
We all do.
So now…back to the problem at hand.
It is often said that you cannot legislate morality. I’ll go one step further. You cannot legislate evolution. It either happens or it doesn’t. How many millions of the roughly 325 million Americans (not counting however many millions of so-called “illegals” are here, most of whom work for people like you and me washing dishes and delivering food, etc. at wages so low that they that defy imagination) absolutely, positively resemble your ancestors and mine in their beliefs. Given the low tide 28% approval rate of people like Butch II when he was in office, it looks to me like fully 1/4 or more of U.S. residents are right back where my grandparents lived in terms of societal evolution. That’s pushing on 100 million people. Plus…they’re the ones who own most of the guns. Can we somehow “legislate” their obedience to what we consider higher socially evolved notions? On the evidence of the last 50+ years, the answer is a resounding “No!!!” Are they dying out? I sometimes wonder. Given the Trump phenomenon, I wonder more now than at any time in the past. So I say…give them their own damned country/countries and let’s see who wins that competition. My bet? The country/countries that operate on the principle of human ecology will win and the others will degenerate into satellite states like the many small Eastern European countries that now waver back and forth between being part of Europe and part or Russia.
But that’s a real minority opinion.
At least for now.
It’s a dream.
So it goes.
We will see how long it remains a dream.
Another 8 years of the bullshit in which we have all been forced to live by the oligarchy and there are going to be a lot of people looking for a way out.
On all sides of the societal evolutionary scale.
Watch.
AG
Now a stand-alone post.
BREAK UP THE U.S.!!!
Comment there if you so desire.
AG