The recent Saudi “reforms” aren’t coincidental. I think they’re buffing their image in preparation for the war on Iran.
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I’m trying not to rant about this on the BB threads because I’ll just piss people off for no purpose, but…
You get how not a single one of those things is a sign of good character?
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It’s a viral, interconnected world:
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Surprisingly interesting…
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I don’t know why anyone is surprised by this, it’s how the Whips work. They find out your secrets and use them as leverage to make you vote the way they want you to.
Politicians across the world are finding that what is “business as usual” to them is “justification for revolution” to others.
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Ranting here, so I don’t do it at BB:
- I do not believe that Trump will be deposed via impeachment or indictment.
- Even if that improbable event were to occur, it would not be good news. President Pence is not an improvement. Still fascist, now more competent.
- Whether or not the Mueller investigation is intended as a distraction, that is its functional effect. Middle-class America will not act while they have the hope of a return to pre-Trump status quo.
- Pre-Trump status quo was intolerably unjust and globally suicidal.
A revolution is required. Sarandon wasn’t wrong.
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I don’t think Pence is more dangerous than Trump. Pence is a proven incompetent in a position of leadership that wears his hatred of anything not a white man openly and has never once got anything past anyone. Trump at least uses a camouflage of constantly spewing bullshit, but open and straightforward fascism is much easier to confront especially when the GOP in congress (the actual seat of power in the US) relies on pointing to the distractions in order to stay in office.
Think about the stunt to walk out of the football game, Pence is such a rule following WASP that he pre-arranged with all the security and police that he would leave and pre-planned the early flight away too. Without Bannon in office too he cannot sway the population, and the alt-right media ship sailed long ago for the entire administration.
EDIT
And the Democrats know that Pence is (if anything) less popular than Trump.
EDIT2
And Trump won’t be impeached because he will resign and Pence would pardon him.
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Through all this, I’m not sure what you would have us want, though.
I mean – not that you need me to say so, you are undoubtedly more insightful on these things than me – but I can see this line is certainly true. Even if we could magically set back the last few years and have the President Morebama some have wanted, it would still mean a regime of rapine capitalism, constant warring abroad and grinding minorities at home, with policies that little resist the ever-rising menaces of r > g and climate change.
At the same time, I probably wouldn’t see friends pleading weekly for the health care keeping them alive, the EPA rendered non-functional, trans and Jewish people wondering just how far the proud Nazi rallies will go against them, the talk of all-out genocide of North Korea, quite the full dozens-to-hundreds of dead in Puerto Rico. Sure, we need a revolution, and all these things do underscore that. Do we then hope for nothing else to make them let up, thereby hastening the end, sort of like disaster capitalism but for a good outcome? I can see logic in that, in a greater good way, but have neither stomach nor heart for it.
So here my inclination is to see any check on Trump’s power, up to and including impeachment, as a good thing. I certainly don’t imagine Pence or Ryan as any kind of rescue, just the next boss. But the interim might be a sort of chaos that ties their hands for a bit, if not leaves them weaker, rather than Trump’s chaos that I see has been exhausting people. And I know that institutions will not save us, but still think it would be good to find the president is not yet wholly exempt from law.
Maybe that’s me being a Denethor, just wishing for a few more days of peace as the shadow rises, I don’t know. Like I said you are plainly more insightful than I am, and maybe this is all foolish rambling, which I hope you would forgive. But I have misgivings about brushing off things that still may help people as beside the greater point, even while it is desperate to address.
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Good Ta-Nehisi Coates Civil War collection:
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I have no idea if the person who made this was joking or serious… 
Again, the 21st century is a very strange place.
You could quibble with some details, but I’m there for the basic sentiment.
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Neither am I.
I didn’t post that to BB, in order to avoid ranting at people en masse. It wouldn’t help anything, and I don’t want to needlessly demoralise folks. Posting it here…well, this is my designated gloom thread, and airing this stuff helps me figure things out sometimes.
My frustration is more with the situation than the people.
Yeah, similar here.
That’s why I’m not an accelerationist, and why I was pushing for a Clinton vote. It wasn’t an uncomplicated choice, but I couldn’t justify sacrificing the American underclass to the “greater good”.
To borrow once more from Zinn:
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I don’t think that Sarandon is really an accelerationist either. What she said came from desperation, not recklessness.
To me, Sarandon wasn’t saying “ha ha, if we just boil the frog a little faster all my plans will succeed!”. It was “oh, God, we’re all fucked no matter who wins. The only way out is a revolution, and that will never happen without a dramatic change in the status quo; we’d better hope that those accelerationist loonies were right, because it’s the only chance we’ve got left”.
As mentioned, I don’t think that there is any realistic chance of Trump being removed from office by Constitutional means, so this is largely hypothetical to me.
From a purely tactical point of view, though, I do think that Pence is worse than Trump. Just as destructive, and much harder to get rid of.
Possibly a bit less dangerous on the military front (i.e. maintain the existing expansion of empire, but less reckless unpredictability), but likely much worse domestically for women, non-Christians and LGBT folks.
It’s a judgement call, and my judgement is no more infallible than anyone else’s.
But it feels to me as if the situation is analogous to climate change: every second of delay makes the situation worse. Each day, the solution becomes more costly, more difficult and less likely to succeed. And a revolution, even a peaceful one, takes a bit of time to get moving. If folks wait for the last moment before acting, it will be too late.
I certainly don’t advocate engineering or cheering on anything that causes harm to ordinary people; my mention upthread of the impact of the healthcare debate on the middle class was a post-facto analysis of consequences, not an advocacy of accelerationist tactics.
Accelerationism should not be required now. The situation is thoroughly bad enough already. That’s why I’m trying to focus on raising awareness of just how deeply fucked up things already are for the victims of the US empire, foreign and domestic.
I’m just anxious about a possible return to sheetcaking and popcorn. I thought we’d finally got past that. 
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https://twitter.com/amiraminimd/status/925649579554557952
It’s a shame that the Moose and Squirrel joke is already stale.
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