#321
American exceptionalism is splitting into its constitutive parts.
#322
[account deactivated]
#323
yes, much of our social ill may be blamed on the P in WASPs
#324
in boston where everything is run by catholics they have replaced most social ills with drunk guys named "sully" on the T getting in fist-fights on tuesday mornings, a fair tradepff
#325
"america doesn't assassinate journalists or opposition politicians" yes, indeed, russia is a few decades behind and is stuck on the messy old techniques of neutering civil society
#326
[account deactivated]
#327
we don't usually need to kill people so we usually don't, but if the first thing changed so would the second
#328
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media-destruction-gary-webb/
#329

Urbandale posted:

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media-destruction-gary-webb/


was also thinkin about webb goin through this page

The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.

#330
*extremely liberal voice* there is no moral equivalency to be made between russia and the us. also we just elected a fascist
#331
the current cult of the liberal left states that the current russian government installed the u.s. president, then paid him and his friends in stock because otherwise he wouldn't want to hold an office he'd been seeking for decades, then forced him to say nice things about russia by threatening to reveal supposed compromising information about him from a document that was already "revealed" last month, was obviously fake, and was clearly manufactured by people who had no ties to russia. This Is What Liberals Actually Believe
#332
this is why i don't really "get" this particular gripe:



Either a) what's being criticized here has little relation to the critiques i'm actually seeing from the left, which are directed against liberal talking heads for the positions they held and continue to hold, and thus saying "we must not do this thing" will excite no one except left-hating, concern-trolling liberals, or b) what's being criticized here absolutely must continue in full force because it's being directed at Democratic party luminaries, media boosters and their frantic attempts to revise history to erase their own complicity, providing constant and necessary reminders to the rank-and-file that Democratic politicians and media darlings are bloodthirsty warmongers, during a time when they are inclined to criticize this behavior in all leaders and engage in soul-searching over world events that many of them suspected weren't being relayed to them in a straightforward or honest manner.

Otherwise we will have about six months here, at best, before the Democratic leadership turns millions of dollars into a constant wave of attacks against the political left for failing to properly support every single Democratic candidate in 2018, as that will be presented, again with millions of dollars donated by the bourgeoisie, as the only allowed demonstration of resistance against the current administration. The emerging left will be attacked as not only secretly rightist and pro-Trump, but as secret employees of the Russian government, in a literal sense. This is guaranteed by very recent history where this exact thing has happened.

I feel that the above complaint underestimates both the intelligence and the resolve of rank-and-file Democrats and greatly misapprehends their current position. To me, there is absolutely no way that criticizing Democrat hypocrisy will somehow convince Democrats to "do nothing" in response to Trump, because as of right now all of the Democrats' own leadership is urging them to "do something" against Trump, because the Democratic Party elite very much want to harness the energy in popular struggle right now for their own purposes, invoking ties to labor and the disenfranchised that were always more rhetoric than truth and have in recent years been materially destroyed by that very same elite class.

What the left can't allow is for those Democratic Party leaders to dictate who the rank-and-file should oppose, or who they are allowed to oppose, because those leaders have already designated the emerging left as one such target. They will not show the left any mercy themselves. Attacks on Democratic Party hypocrisy must continue, with redoubled efforts, to peel off whatever class-conscious portion of the rank-and-file can be pulled away in a time when many of them are correctly disillusioned and angry with their own leaders, and many more than are saying it out loud, I suspect. And yeah, that's going to piss off some of the rank-and-file, mostly those whose circumstances would never recommend them to the left in the first place and will greedily devour the anti-left propaganda to come in 2017-2018.

Edited by cars ()

#333
holy shit that's dumb
#334
the time has come to look forward, not backward - Barack "Henry Krinkle" Obama
#335
the point of criticizing liberals who didn't say shit during obama is to posit a systemic critique which the really-existing democratic party could not survive if engaged with honestly
#336
I think Krinkle is reacting to critiques of regular people you aren't seeing, I don't read that as applying to elites (certainly not politicians)
#337
i am not really able to entertain the idea that the liberals i know are too stupid to understand how a factually correct left line tracing continuity from Obama to Trump implicates some of their behavior over the past eight years. I can't accept either that they are too weak-willed to adjust their own politics either right or left as the influences in their lives, most pointedly their relative position within the economy, suggest. My hope would be to help some of them, at least, correct to the left, which requires an honest criticism of the Democratic Party and its policies and those who have supported them or failed to question them.

Otherwise the Democratic Party will simply tweak its strategy to do what Obama's campaign was able to do in the wake of Bush: nod in furious, dishonest agreement to any criticism of imperialist policy, then present itself as the peace party that is definitely going to let you, the Democratic voter, place kick Guantanamo into the stratosphere. This time. As long as you really, really believe it'll happen, and act that way in full denial of the evidence to date.
#338
i just see this as tilting at windmills, and worse, pretending that the fearsome giants are to your left. it's useful only for liberals, almost as useful as the people who right now see leftists scaring nazis out of public spaces while good liberals whine that nazi incitement must be protected, and start complaining how this or that deep intellectualized critique of capitalism is somehow being ignored or that all of this fits some grand liberal master plan simply because the universe allowed it to happen, as though the events i just described weren't a perfect example of exposing the contradictions of ideology.
#339
#340
we hope to one day bring you a system which is based on only a 40 times difference between you and your employer, as opposed to a 200 times difference.

yes, our ideal system is one where the rich are 40 times wealthier than people on average. doesn't that sound good?

the idea that we should have capitalism but with just *these specific laws and regulations* reeks of ritual sacrifices and weird dogmatic beliefs about "mystical" things (capitalism) ... its no wonder that John K Galbraith, Robert Reich and P Krugman are all less known among rank and file Americans than any basic libertarian drivel.
#341
#342


fuck liberals man fuck this shit. i can already hear this coming out of their quivering little pieholes
#343


do they not realize how incompetent they are at messaging? popular outcry coincides with the temporary death of putin conspiracy theory in the headlines, so uh bring back putin conspiracy for some reason. remind everyone that trump hates the craven idiot news media, which helps trump. mention street demonstrations but add some bullshit about "town halls" to make sure it sounds like a bunch of elderly vermonters discussing sod. liberals are so fucking stupid
#344
I hate them sooo much.
#345
i also wish trump were stronger and more effective
#346
[account deactivated]
#347
[account deactivated]
#348
Criticism of liberalism has become a faux pas in certain radical circles just at the moment when the contradictions of the present world system are reaching a tipping point. Sad !
#349
http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/anti-Trump_arrest/
Attorney Kane, who also represents Clement, said Clement ran because a police dog “lunged at him.” She said officers chased him and pepper-sprayed him three times. She said she has video — which she doesn’t want to release yet — of a state police dog snarling at protesters and of cops knocking over an elderly woman. She called it “a police riot.”

In the confusion, state police dogs got “rambunctious” and ended up biting two city cops and a state cops, according to New Haven Assistant Police Chief Tony Reyes.
#350
#351

Keven posted:

I hate them sooo much.



Love trumps hate

#352
*will ferrell voice immodulation character voice* My opponent is flailing. He is flailing and desperate. I am in the town hall. Bowling Green Massacre
#353
http://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-trailguide-updates-rep-adam-schiff-trump-administration-1485895271-htmlstory.html

Dems: "Did we lose because we were too far to the left?"
#354
You know I've been saying for a little while that the dems and liberals in general are above all invested in normalizing trump, because that's what middle and upper class American liberalism is really about--normalization as such, not having to worry about politics because the system works and i don't have to read about black people being mass terrorized, which i'd rather not have to deal with rationalizing. that's what the "normalizing trump" discussion was really about and why there was this bizarre insistence on what an achievement it was that there was a peaceful transition of power. it is very important to the dem establishment to not employ criticisms of trump that would reflect back as demands that they themselves change, which is why their oppo talking points are ones that you could copy paste to *any* party’s opposition to *any* figure.

i still think that's true but I’m coming close to saying that they actually want trump to stay in power. They want all of his ultra-right neoliberalization to happen but would rather it be someone else’s responsibility. it seems like the only explanation.
#355
more than one person has pointed out that "normalization" of trump will inevitably occur soon anyway because a planetary system made of money orbits the White House. i think they might be able to drag out this corporate angel/Democratic Congress faux-resistance trip all the way up until the Democrats fail to make substantial gains in the 2018 elections but i'm an optimist.
#356
#357
what happened exactly to the far right Online people who thought that putin paid to frame dylann roof. do they have a complex line about how that's still true but the new russia conspiracy is not true and also russia's good now. whats the story!!
#358
i have no mouth and i must tell that to nemtsov
#359
#360

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:


lol if you think trump writes all his own tweets.