I spent the last few hours listening to Maajid Nawaz in conversation with Sam Harris on the Waking Up podcast. This is the first time I’ve heard him speak and he seems like a honest, earnest person.
…except for this one thing. This one thing that drives me absolutely nuts.
It is the Democratic party, not the Democrat party. That is how the word is properly used. Pouty Republicans and conservatives who want to discredit the Democrats invented (or reinvented) this little conundrum of wordplay as a dogwhistle to separate themselves from the rest of the liberal press, and anyone who uses this dogwhistle is either a member of the conservative press or is blind to the subtleness of word usage that propagandists rely on to spread their message.
You see, Republicans want to rob Democrats of the subliminal linkage of the Democratic party and the democratic process; and they are attempting to do this by pretending that words when used as a party name should not be conjugated in the same way. This is false and it sounds forced when spoken.
I have a hard time believing someone is being truthful with me when they take the time to pervert the english language in this way, purposefully using a word incorrectly to call attention to the difference between a process and a party name.
The Democrats are far more democratic than the Republicans currently are. It is the neoconservatives who used to be Democrats, Democrats who had no problem perverting the democratic process when they were Democrats, who are now perverting the democratic process by denying the vote to larger and larger sections of the population in efforts to keep their Republican conservatives in power for a few more terms before the inevitable shift of power occurs.
The true test of whether the Democrats are democratic will come when, having regained power, they return to the undemocratic ways of their past. Will they adopt the same perversions of the process that they previously practiced? That their neoconservative soon to be neoliberal power brokers will want to reimpose but now from the other side? Vote suppression? Gerrymandering? Or will we force them to create systems which are actually unbiased and open for the first time in US history?
Will we pass the test our forebears failed, or will we fail as they have?
As for the rest of the subjects of the podcast, they were thought-provoking if not outright wrong on many points. How many times will I have to hear the false conservative talking point “won’t say islamic terrorist?” I’m hoping I have heard it for the last time. We’ll just have to see how much difference there is now that the conservatives have everything they’ve ever wanted since 1980. Now’s your chance boys. How bad can you fuck it all up? Sadly, we are about to find out.
This article is tagged errata because I once had a tendency to do this myself. A failing I have since corrected so isn’t preserved on this blog. But still, I’m trying for absolute honesty here. Well, as close to honesty as any human and his public diary can be.
…the SMELL IS SO GODDAMNED BAD PIGS WOULD DIE PUKING THEIR GUTS OUT just get away from it. And now you’ve done it. The load was supposed to be quietly burned but the machine is jammed and fans wouldn’t pull and the heating elements won’t heat and there you are with a pan of hot bubbling liquid MRE shit ON FIRE and you have to pull it out and carry it through the living quarters which are the size of a closet packed with four people trying to eat and six people trying to sleep and down the connector into the other compartment where more people are sleeping and you’d better hurry up because THEY ALL HAVE TO SHIT TOO while trailing smoke and flames from the burning shit bucket that’s now so fucking hot that your hands are melting off and finally outside where you …
Well, anyway, that’s what I thought of watching the first day of the Republican National Convention.
I remain amazed at how easily the Orange Hate-Monkey (OHM) got the nomination. That is the only part of the equation that I remain mystified by. I remain mystified by it because, as any parliamentarian can tell you, it isn’t easy to hijack a convention like he did. And yet there is no other word to describe how the convention went down other than to say it was hijacked.
Did the “never Trump” faction have enough political savvy to stop him from becoming the nominee? The answer appears to be no. He secured the chair with someone who would gavel the convention to order. His supporters clearly understood how to silence a floor fight. All that is left is for the delegates to vote and he’s the nominee, and the GOP can finally accept the labels we have attempted to pin on them for 30 years and more. They are fascists. They are openly racist and xenophobic. They are happy to promote and embrace a christian theocracy, even when lead by a fakir.
It is also worth noting that the best politicians that the GOP can muster could not stop a political newb from taking over their convention and making them all dance his tune. They appear to deserve all the ridicule and embarrassment that can be piled on them at this point. They really are the NSDAP. They equate to the PNF. May they be remembered by history in the same light as their failure predecessor political organizations.
The choice in this election could not be more starkly drawn no matter what the Hillary haters say. It is now up to the informed and the thinking to lay out just how bad it can be with an authoritarian of the caliber of the Birther-in-Chief. Just how grim the future is when lead by the Orange Hate-monkey. Just how untrustworthy a real-estate developer is. Time to lay it all out for everyone to see so that there is no question that anyone who votes for Trump votes for concentration camps and mass extermination. Anyone who supports Trump wants the US to be destroyed in a paroxysm of self-hatred. Anyone who supports Trump wants to see civilization end. Make them prove that this is not the case at every turn. Hammer them into submission with ideas too strong to be refuted.
The next President will be Hillary Clinton. If we are lucky.
Dick jokes and eager young interns with their hands on your junk. Giggling impotent old men eager for a show. Inflexible self righteous authoritarianism. Anger. Shouting. Marines. Jerking off. Outrage. Violation. Embarrassment. Mortification. Forced to tough it out to the bitter end.
And finally you go home dirty and used, clothes ruined, dignity long fled, covered in sticky goo and shooting blanks.
In the rain.
Honestly, what DOESN’T it have to do with the Republican National Convention?
This sums up modern conservativism in six simple words.
Here’s a small church in the middle of nowhere, safe, protected, unburned, free to worship as they please, free to yell at the rest of us without consequence, protected by law in fact and in practice … and yet they feel persecuted. Under assault. Endangered. Doomed. The end is nigh and it’s game over, lights out, America. Oh woe, woe! Save us, Jesus!
And they feel that way solely because they have to live in a world with other people.
They feel like that because they are afraid every single goddamned day of their lives.
This horrible religion didn’t create that fear, their fear created it.”
No, Donald Trump is not Mussolini. He is a wild, sociopathic American genius who has yanked the reins of a rampaging horse away from the monsters who spurred and whipped the beast into a mad-populist frenzy. Trump may be a sociopath, but he is not the one who tormented that horse into screaming, nostril agony.
Stop looking for villains to compare to Mussolini, to Huey Long or MacArthur, Mr. Will.
Look in a mirror. You have reached out to choose treason with both eyes and with both hands and with a willing heart.
Rather than compare Trump to any particular fascist, even though his talking points are reminiscent of a few of them and his past behaviors are demonstrably corporatist in nature (Mussolini’s brand of fascism) I will go straight to the source. Learned people in positions of authority in the GOP (like George Will) should have known where their actions were taking them. The Republican party has made themselves into the NSDAP, the party of Germany that elected Hitler. They could be any one of the groups that backed fascists in the troubled times before and during World War Two, it really doesn’t matter which group you choose to compare the Republican party to. What is important is that if Republicans nominate Trump and he wins because they give him the status of ‘Republican nominee’ then the horrors he inflicts get hung around their collective necks.
They need to understand this point going into the convention. It needs to be made blatantly clear that we are at a historic turning point. They have an important choice to make now. They should probably put some real thought into that. Perhaps it is time they actually noted the points illustrated, and revised their goals. That is, unless they want to be the party that brings fascism to the US.
What I think is “that is why I will support a centrist nominee from the Democratic party so that a victory in the general election can be assured. Thereby securing the SCOTUS against further conservative dilution of the guarantees we American’s hold dear.” Speech. Choice. Opportunity. Ability. Mobility. Much more specific than the toss-off word “Freedom” that you hear so often but means so little when examined. Freedom is all those things and more, but without those things freedom is meaningless.
We probably should have taken the move to limit democratic involvement in government more seriously in past years. That is what the 2016 election proved to me. Like the 2000 election, 2016 was just another signpost on the road towards dictatorship from an imperial presidency, the vision of American Republicans. The Trumpists of 2022. They will impose a white dictatorship on the United States in 2024. I wonder if we will let them get away with that?
Let them breath their own exhaust fumes. The further right they go, the less appeal they will have to the general public, the more Democrats will be elected in protest. The more Democrats move into new areas with new people the more change we will get in voter registration laws, gerrymandering laws, finance laws. Win-win.
Postscript
Well, that took longer than I thought. Tragically longer. Too long? Can’t say yet.
My view is he saw the writing on the wall. If he stayed on as speaker he would be remembered as the man who lead the house Republicans to the biggest upset election in US history. That the majority are going to force through their agenda one way or the other. That their agenda will be so staggeringly unpopular as to insure the upset that I’ve already mentioned. That the Pope telling him to give way is just a handy excuse for him to save face. It’ll be a tough year, but all of the US will know what returning this group of idiots to Congress will mean.
It would be silly, of course, to be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ modernity tout court, not only because it is pointless to try to stop the development of technology, science, and economic rationality, but because both modernity and antimodernity may be expressed in barbarous and antihuman terms.
I do not know what postmodern is and how it differs from the premodern, nor do I feel that I ought to know.
Typical of my attempts to title things, this brief blurb’s title largely misses the mark. Another one of the things I wrote on those dead DanCarlin.com boards, perhaps even one of the last things I wrote. I’m sure I had some deeper point I was planning on making, but like most of my plans this one also went nowhere. How to distinguish what I wrote then from what I’m writing now? Hmm, that is a puzzler. How about the quote I selected from The Federalist article that thrashes Star Trek and liberalism? Yes, that shall be the demarcation point. What juicey bit of bullshit should I select from that piece, though? That is the next question.
This was a critique of a critique that attempts to show the correlation between the decline of liberalism and the decline of Star Trek as a franchise. The postmodernism allusion was probably in reference to the now well-known belief that we live in a post-truth world. As if truth, reality, causality, really cares about human problems, a hallmark of my issue with everything postmodern. Reality continues being exactly what it was before, while the people living in it tell themselves different lies that explain it and believe that their lies change the existence of reality. but I digress.
Over nearly 50 years, “Star Trek” tracked the devolution of liberalism from the philosophy of the New Frontier into a preference for non-judgmental diversity and reactionary hostility to innovation, and finally into an almost nihilistic collection of divergent urges. At its best, “Star Trek” talked about big ideas, in a big way. Its decline reflects a culture-wide change in how Americans have thought about the biggest idea of all: mankind’s place in the universe.
In the author of the above quotes defense, he actually understands the degradation of Star Trek as a philosophical looking glass into mindless action-entertainment. This is why I haven’t considered myself a Trek fan since the Abramanation aired. I deemed Trek dead on the day that film released. However, like nearly all things conservative, the author oversimplifies to prove his point. As an example, Star Trek 6 aired after Roddenberry died (and is one of the worst Trek films ever made. Weirdly Star Trek 2 by the same director is one of the best) but the multi-year rehabilitation of the Klingons that preceded his denouncement of their portrayal in Star Trek 6, starting with Worf on The Next Generation Enterprise is completely left out, because it complicates the point he’s trying to make.
As usual, the intent to decry the ideology of another while uplifting one’s own leads to hypocrisy on the part of the writer. This is a serious problem with most conservatives these days. The real culprit here is not liberalism, but postmodernism. This is an illness that afflicts all modern ideology, philosophy and politics alike. Not just Star Trek and not just liberalism.
…and that is where I left it. For two and a half years. Why? Because I always aspire to knowing more than I know, and then the realization that I don’t know that much brings the entire edifice crashing down and then I abandon the work entirely. Postmodernism is an active ill in society, of that much I am certain. We can know things about the world around us, and not everything in existence is dismissible as the delusions of a weak mind. How we can know these things is a task for epistemology to figure out. That we do know them (existence exists) is not really in question here.
Postmodernism, the school of thought that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Cliven Bundy told supporters last week, according to a New York Times story that published on Wednesday night. The Nevada rancher was previously best known for refusing to pay two decades-worth of fines for grazing his cattle on federal land and fighting off the Bureau of Land Management for the nth time, this time with the help of armed militia — or for being the patron saint of state’s rights, pick your poison. But since those controversial comments were published, he has seen most of his friends in high places vanish overnight. Republican politicians who saw the Bundy stand-off as an opportunity to connect with the far right are now trying to figure out which adverb will put the most distance between themselves and the rancher. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul went with wholeheartedly, releasing a statement on Thursday saying Bundy’s “remarks on race are offensive and I wholeheartedly disagree with him.” Nevada Sen. Dean Heller chose completely. His spokesperson said Thursday, “Senator Heller completely disagrees with Mr. Bundy’s appalling and racist statements, and condemns them in the most strenuous way.” Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore, who previously battled with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes about Bundy, preferred strongly. “I strongly disagree with Cliven Bundy’s comments about slavery,” she said.
Don’t even pretend to me you didn’t recognize what this man was saying from the beginning, conservative politicians. All of you know where these arguments come from, because I knew where they came from. If you didn’t know, your vaunted experience in politics isn’t worth the spit necessary for you to talk about it.
Nothing new here. This is old, old news; that white supremacists still exist, and that their arguments have been adopted and inculcated into the politics of libertarians and conservatives, and through them into the Republican party. I recognized his arguments as being representative of this particular flavor of politics even before he showed his hand in that interview.
What I want to know is, why has this man not been arrested? Why does he still have land, possessions, etc? Because he is a wealthy rancher in a sparsely populated state, he gets to hold guns on federal officials and remain at large? He’s a simple tax cheat. Make an example of him, already.
The original thread for this episode on the bulletin board went way over sixty pages within hours of the podcast releasing. There was a flood of pointless back and forth about getting involved in Ukraine, and very little about whether or not it was the fault of the United States that Ukraine was in outright revolt.
…Which was the core assertion that Dan made in the episode, that the United States was to blame for the violence occurring in Ukraine. Directly at fault for it, if not actually conducting it ourselves.
I couldn’t get a word in edgewise to discuss the issue that I thought was more important than whether or not we could keep Ukraine away from Russia without destroying all of human civilization in the process. Whether or not the DCBBS-hated President Obama was to blame for Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.
Nor did I buy that the United States would be actively trying to undermine a government that it had contracted to fly into space with for the next four years:
NASA has signed a new deal that will keep American astronauts flying on Russian spacecraft through early 2017 at a cost of $70.7 million per seat — about $8 million more per astronaut than the previous going rate.
The $424 million deal, which was announced today (April 30), is good for six seats aboard Russia’s Soyuz space capsules. Under the agreement, Soyuz vehicles will now ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station through 2016, with return and rescue services extending until June 2017. The previous contract provided Soyuz flights for NASA astronauts through 2015, at a cost of roughly $62.7 million per seat.
NASA has been dependent on the Soyuz since the retirement of its space shuttle fleet in July 2011. The agency is currently encouraging American private spaceflight firms to develop their own astronaut taxis under its Commercial Crew Program….because, you know, we’re always going to gen up hostilities with people we’re contracted to fly into space with for the next 4 years. Sorry, Dan. I’m simply not buying this one.
A common assertion on the DCBBS. I was simply not buying the argument. Any part of the argument. I’m not buying 9/10’s of the history of spying that spies relate, because they can’t offer proof until long, long after the events in question are over and done with. Dan’s main source for the episode was this newscast from Democracy Now. The last I checked Democracy Now wasn’t a legitimate news source. Until there is real news to relate, citing fringe sources makes Dan sound like the guy that the Estonian poster on the first page of the thread recollected:
…it is often very easy for me to agree with Dan and see the common sense in his arguments, because I’m not from US. So having no personal bias and being completely disengaged from the vast majority of issues he addresses, it is very easy for me to agree.
But today was little different. Today he touched some issues which also involve me a bit. And it wasn’t that the big picture view of potential US vs russia+china cold war didn’t make rational sense and isn’t worrying, it just felt odd hearing this american-centric view on things, where I know I’d also be involved in the equation(together with 10s of millions other people), yet not important enough in the big picture.
I’m speaking here about what was briefly mentioned, the NATO expanding it’s borders right next to russia and what potential problems it can cause. I’d like to put it out there, that there was/is actually 2 sides to that coin. With those countries, as much as it was probably NATO looking to expand east, it was as much about those counties running for their lives, as hard and fast as they could so they could get as far far away from russia as they could.
I live in Estonia and our entire foreign policy seems to be built up only on 1 thing – maintaining extremely good relations with US and advocating they would in fact get involved in situations like the one in Ukraina, in case when we get in trouble with russia ourselves. And what we also think like Dan does, that with russia getting stronger over time, is just matter of when, not if. For us, the US policy of playing the world policeman is the best we have going for us. So Dans nightmare scenarios of US being forced to involve itself against russia is our dream scenario in such situation. Cause if not, my country would probably done within days and I myself would be likely dead. Or actually the real dream scenario the perception of that looming threat of US getting involved keeps russians away in first place, high stakes game this. Anyways I guess it is much easier not to worry about global power balances stuff if things are very black and white for you personally
I just feel like this is a small niche perspective which went slightly ignored in todays show, justified or not, just wanted to get it off my chest.
The short answer is, Dan is assigning too much importance to the presence of the US in the region and downplaying the aspirations of Vladimir Putin and Russia, the actors present on the scene at the time.
There is real news out there to be commented on. We don’t have to go to fringe elements to get our news. Might I suggest surfing over to the BBC and watching As it happened: Ukraine turmoil for a little more level-headed view of what is happening in Ukraine right now. It’s too bad we don’t have real news agencies in the US.
If we’re going to talk about unwanted United States interference in Russia today, let’s talk about this interference:
IN NOVEMBER 2010, Russia’s Sanctity of Motherhood organization kicked off its first-ever national conference. The theme, according to its organizers, was urgent: solving “the crisis of traditional family values” in a modernizing Russia. The day opened with a sextet leading 1,000 swaying attendees in a prayer. Some made the sign of the cross, others bowed or raised their arms to the sky before settling into the plush red and gold seats of the conference hall at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral.
On the second morning of the conference, the only American in attendance, a tall, collected man, stepped up for his speech. Larry Jacobs, vice president of the Rockford, Illinois-based World Congress of Families (WCF), an umbrella organization for the US religious right’s heavy hitters, told the audience that American evangelicals had a 40-year track record of “defending life and family” and they hoped to be “true allies” in Russia’s traditional values crusade.
The gathering marked the beginning of the family values fervor that has swept Russia in recent years. Warning that low birth rates are a threat to the long-term survival of the Russian people, politicians have been pushing to restrict abortion and encourage bigger families. Among the movement’s successes is a law that passed last summer and garnered global outrage in the run-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors,” a vague term that has been seen as effectively criminalizing any public expression of same-sex relationships.
Interference that is coming straight out of Dan’s religious blind spot as per usual. I mean, if it matters that NGO’s are pushing American agendas in Ukraine, the crux of Dan’s complaints in the episode, then it should be a matter of great concern for Vladimir Putin that American evangelicals are exporting their religious beliefs to his people. But he doesn’t seem concerned about that. He only seems concerned about what happens in Ukraine. As if his real problem is controlling Ukraine and not the influence of the United States at all.
The discussion that I wanted to have on the DCBBS was getting lost amidst the wargaming scenarios that were taking over the Poking the Bear thread, so I created another thread. The title of this post was the title of that second thread. In the original post I simply observed that:
Since Nostradamus has never predicted anything with accuracy or precision, I’d grant Buchanan resides in that realm.
The entirety of the argument that Dan was relating in the Poking the Bear episode relied upon whether or not Pat Buchanan’s book A Republic Not an Empire (chapter two) was prescient in predicting that America’s meddling in Russian politics while it was weak after the USSR collapsed lead directly to Putin’s aggression on the world stage. Pat Buchanan is only accurate because Dan deems his predictions accurate, like Nostradamus fans deem Nostradamus accurate while they squint at disjointed phrases and try to apply them to modern events. What Buchanan’s predictions are proof of is that you can make generically vague predictions and then sit back and wait for their very vagueness to make them appear prescient. People will laud you for your foresight when something that looks almost like what you suggested comes true.
They do all the work, you get all the credit. That is what is wrong with opportunists like Pat Buchanan. Opportunists are just in it for the credit, they just want to look good while saying I told you so.
There are no honest actors on the conservative/neo-con side of the political spectrum today. No people willing to act in good faith. None of them can admit what their true agendas are because the public would not approve of the agenda. Maybe Bill O’Reilly would be that stupid. He’s politically clueless enough to air what he really thinks and has been subsequently embarrassed because of it. Honest actors do not conceal what their real motives are. You can find them in the pundit class because the pundit class doesn’t have to win election. They are almost unheard of in politics and Pat Buchanan has political aspirations. He’s going to lie and he’s not very good at it, either.
…although I didn’t hit publish on the research that I started in the Poking the Bear thread until June, after Russia shot down a civilian airliner in Ukrainian airspace, and there was a subject that wasn’t being discussed elsewhere for me to comment on here on the blog. I know I started it then because I posted links that I use in that article in the thread at that point, and I saved them.
Kyiv was the original Russian capital. It was the original Russian/Slavic capital until it was sacked by the Mongols, and the people who survived fled North and established Moscow. That is a crude oversimplification of the facts, but it remains true that the population of Kyiv is more European than the more Northern Russian speakers are, because the city’s bones were refleshed by people who were not Slavic, even if Kyiv itself remains essentially a Russian city. As the good professor says in the Democracy Now interview:
And the longer-term outcome may be—and I want to emphasize this, because nobody in the United States seems to want to pay attention to it—the outcome may be the construction, the emergence of a new Cold War divide between West and East, not this time, as it was for our generation, in faraway Berlin, but right on the borders of Russia, right through the heart of Slavic civilization. And if that happens, if that’s the new Cold War divide, it’s permanent instability and permanent potential for real war for decades to come. That’s what’s at stake.
…even if every other thing he says in the interview was unsubstantiatable bullshit, that part remains true. It’s true because that is how events have played out since then, with no resolution.
I have to hand it to Smitty-48 who replied to my posts in the original Poking the Bear thread. He had it right. Russia and Putin were coming for us, and we weren’t ready. Just like he said. Talk about prophetic.
If Dan’s major point was that Pat Buchanan objected to efforts to democratize Ukraine, similar to the kinds of systems that the rest of Europe has adopted, if Pat Buchanan saw that as attempting to sway Ukraine and bring it under our influence, then Dan Carlin should have said that and illustrated why this activity wasn’t what it pretended to be on the surface, an attempt to make Ukraine more European and less oligarchic. Less like Putin’s Russia and the other countries still under his control. Less corrupt than it was. Dan never did that legwork and so consequently never got my buy-in on his and Buchanan’s supposition.
I was not going to spend a month reading a bullshit book authored by someone whose basic premises I disagreed with just to shoot down the mistaken hype of those premises by a podcaster that I only vaguely still agreed with anymore. Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin agree that the US is trying to take over Ukraine. History has proven that assertion to be the correct one. I’m not sure that proof is a convincing defense for either Pat Buchanan or Dan Carlin from a historical perspective. At best it is advice for future leaders dealing with Russia, and what they might take from that advice is completely open to question.
As I pointed out with my one example in the thread, there were hundreds of NGO’s working in all of the various former Republics of the Soviet Union including inside of Russia. Efforts that changed Russia and that Putin embraced as part of his power grab. The problem wasn’t the NGO’s, the problem was and is Vladimir Putin. If you don’t deal harshly with the aggressor in your midst you will come to rue the day that you didn’t act sooner. The regret will occur because the aggressor will not by stopped by appeasement.
In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity.
