Bernie (a) doing the right thing, and (b) attempting to repair his fuckup from early in the year.
What I like about Daniel Dale is that even though he is media, he’s still willing sometimes to pull back the curtains and show the ugly truth of the media’s role in manufacturing reality:
I get that, but it’s still really hard. Like that tweet above by Krang T. Nelson about Trump deporting fewer people than Obama. That’s presently right. But arrests are way up. That they aren’t leading to deportations means that there are more people who are in contact for the first time with immigration. Those people can’t just be deported, they get detained and go through hearings. Probably otherwise law-abiding people, maybe people who got busted because they reported a crime or went to pick up their kids at school. So it seems really weird to be minimizing the very real fears and anxieties people have right now in order to go after ‘liberals.’ To me, it’s really hard to swallow the lack of nuance in the discussion about complex issues.
I’m having trouble understanding how this is a clash between left and liberal. It’s usually the left which has picked up the principles and aspirations, if not the sheer hypocrisy. It’s usually the left defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, against wars, Stasis, immigration crackdowns, etc.
Holy fuck.
Devil’s advocating a touch: most of the effect is probably people choosing not to have children in a toxic environment rather than a direct biological impact on fertility.
Mildly paranoid read on the Russian fake antifa story: it was deliberately manufactured by the right, because they knew that liberals would gleefully seize on it as a tool to slander antifa.
The antifa crowd spotted that as it was happening, but were unable to stop the Libs from taking the bait.
Same story for the Russian BLM thing and the Black left.
I’ll get back to this later, but yeah: Twitter is not a medium that lends itself to subtlety and nuance. It’s a hugely powerful meme factory, but it ain’t a textbook.
For some context on Oz/US relations…
Despite its musical shortcomings, this was quite a popular song in Australia:
And that was during the Clinton years.
Believe it or not, I’m actually an Americaphile by local standards.
webpage says this:
probably changed it right quick after criticism.
and
A version of this article appears in print on October 1, 2017, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Mayor Known for Her Bluntness Stood Up to a President Over His Storm Response.
Trump is arresting faster but deporting slower. And the slowness in deportation is probably not accidental; ICE is busy focusing on other things, like expanding and militarising.
Krang’s argument is not that Trump is better than the Dems, or even that Trump and the Dems are equally bad. He isn’t saying “there’s no danger now”; he’s saying “we’ve been living with extreme danger for our entire lives”.
His argument is that both established parties are intolerable, and that rapid, radical change is essential. Negative peace and incrementalism are not enough.
These are the sorts of arguments that US leftists have traditionally bit their tongues on, for the sake of maintaining the left-liberal alliance. But the left has decided that continuing to ally with liberals is suicidal, so they are now trying to discredit and neutralise them. The gloves are off.
It isn’t a total rejection of the Democratic party; the Berniecrats will take Dems who are willing to abandon neoliberal economics and collaboration with fascists. But the Pelosi/Schumer right wing of the Dems are (accurately) seen as treacherous dead weight; they’re trying to wipe them out.
This isn’t a war started by the left, though. The US libs have never stopped trying to destroy socialism. The Red Scare was a bipartisan thing. The new factor is that the left has had enough and are now fighting back.
Just the nature of the beast when it comes to Twitter, unfortunately. Think of it as political jazz. The music is in the gaps between the notes.
The left vs liberal contest is a classical socialist vs capitalist fight. The liberals are biased towards middle class whites; the left are biased towards a more racially diverse and working class set of supporters.
If we lived in a sensible world, they would be joining together to fight fascism. The left has been trying to make that happen ever since the election. However, unfortunately…
I understand that many folks don’t appreciate Chapo, but this bit is only four minutes long and it’s bang on point about Korea and Iran.
I’m feeling introspective, so a bit of meta-discussion of propaganda tactics.
Opening caveat: I’m talking about tricks of political manipulation here. So, obviously, it’s going to make me look manipulative as all fuck. These aren’t things I do in ordinary conversation. These are not ordinary times.
Y’all are probably aware that I’m on the radical fringe of BB, and that I occasionally make posts that evoke strong reactions. This is a good example of that:
Sometimes, that’s just me being a clueless Aspie.
But most of the time, it’s me taking a deliberate whack at the Overton Window. As the GOP figured out, if you want to move it, you need to attack the edges rather than the middle.
What I believe, and what I have been arguing for, has remained consistent the whole time that I’ve been posting. But I have been deliberately ramping up the degree to which I am explicit about what I’m talking about.
Interrupting caveat: relax, I’m not a deranged Stalinist. MLK/Gandhi/Klein peaceful revolution is what I’m going for, and Nordic DemSoc is what I’d like to see in the aftermath. And what happens is up to you folks, anyway. I’m just an advocate.
Back to the main thread: anyway, it will often be the case that I want to say something that I know is too radical to be easily accepted by the audience. It’s usually something that I feel needs to be said, but I know that if I post it as a response to a regular I’ll upset people.
So, I wait.
And, usually, within a day or two, a troll will snatch some bait and give me an opportunity to say it to someone I don’t care about offending. It may still create a bit of a stir, but nowhere near as much if I hadn’t waited for the right context.
Whenever I can, that’s what I do. But, occasionally, the opportunity doesn’t arise and I need to bounce off a regular instead. In that case, I’ll wait for something thematically close enough, then use that as a springboard to what I want to say.
@emo_pinata: that’s what happened with the “red granny” post.
I’m sorry about that; I get that it probably irritated you, and I’m grateful for the restraint of your response.
It’s not something I’d do normally, but like I said: not normal times. I try to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.
BTW: this story smells dodgy to me. May be fascist disinfo. Don’t trust until confirmation.
Right, leftists don’t care who gets hurt so long as they get their way. CHIP expires this week. I posted about it on Facebook, and the only Bernie-or-Buster I know who didn’t gloat at me about the loss of this program is my husband. They’re happy to see it go because it’s not berniecare. They’re happy to see sick kids die for lack of care now in the hope of getting what they want sometime in the future. That’s why Bernie didn’t join Kamala Harris in calling for a vote - what’s a little child suffering to a rich white dude!? He knows his base wants to see children feel the bern.
As someone who could only insure her kid through CHIP until my jobs’s benefits (first job with real benefits! I’m in my 30s!) kicked in Oct 1, fuck that. Fuck purity that says “children have to die now so I can get my namesake legislation.” I’m interested in Medicaid for all, abortion on demand from federal funds, nationalizing colleges with massive pay raises and a hiring binge funded by looting the military and ending DHS. But I will never get on board with rich, enititled Berniecrats telling me what they know about suffering and loss and then inflicting suffering and loss on 9 million kids.
Edit: float -> gloat
On disinfo, the far right-- specifically, the Gateway Pundit-- has fingered the wrong people for the main Charlottesville attack and for the Las Vegas attack, in order to blame the left.
And the centrists have already accepted the far right’s alt-facts to condemn anti-fascists. I never knows how far that goes-- if the fasc want to kill us, do the centrists condemn us? Having read the Turner Diaries, the fasc want to kill most of humankind.
Read this?
Summary of the recent disinformation campaigns. Long, but worthwhile.
No. itsgoingdown won’t work on my browser, with my animation-blocking tools.