Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

My Shitlist 2018 Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

This blog is a lot of things to me. It’s art. It’s therapy. It’s a bullhorn from which I can shout my radical diktats to a small horde of loyal followers whom I lovingly refer to as my dearest motherfuckers. Hopefully it’s a launching pad for a future revolution that will liberate poor people once and for all from the shackles of big government and big business (or do I repeat myself.) But when it all comes down to it, lets face it, I’m here to bitch. That’s why once a year I drop all artistic and political pretenses and simply make a list of all the people who piss me off the most. I call it my shitlist and 2018 has provided me with no shortage of shit. Now if I put everyone that chaps my ass on this list it would be longer than fucking Gravity’s Rainbow, so I’ll just pick a handful in no specific order to roast like pigs on a spit. So here it is, dearest motherfuckers, My Shitlist 2018.

John McCain–  After a lifetime as America’s most celebrated war monger, the one thing that John could do for the world, the only act of mercy that that rapacious murder junkie should have been capable of performing is to finally do us all a big goddamn favor and just fucking die already. But no, John McCain even has to die like a fucking dick. Over a week, a goddamn week of funerals and parades and tributes and memorials and animal sacrifices and imperial orgies, all of them carefully planned by that ego-drunken light bulb factory bomber, to celebrate his foul legacy of homicide advocacy like a goddamn pharaoh. By day five of this ordeal, I was screaming at the TV set “Just give me a goddamn shovel! I’ll bury the cunt myself!!” All I have left to say to the first dead man to make this list is bon voyage you putrid butcher of civilians. Tell Satan that Armageddon’s going great.

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Political Correctness Is Apparently Widely Unpopular Among All Americans Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Uncategorized

The recently released study indicating the deep unpopularity of political correctness, as well as the marginal nature of both PC partisans and the hard right, carries certain implications for the ATS strategy and program. First, there is no need whatsoever to capitulate or kowtow to PC, and that the strategy that I have been pursing for years now of bashing PC to the max is a winning strategy (in fact, it’s probably brought me a larger audience than anything else I have ever done). However, a second implication is that the far left and far right are only peripheral and unpopular elements that are soundly rejected by most Americans. But the catch is that the rival ruling class factions attempt to build a loyal base for themselves by pandering to far left and far right extremists. Therefore, those of use who are committed to an authentically revolutionary perspective must necessarily position ourselves as a radical center that not only rejects the ruling class in its entirety, but also rejects the marginal right and marginal left with equal fervor. When it comes to the Antifa, “anarcho”-Marxists, neo-Commies, PC progressives, Alt-Right/Lite, WN/NS,  neo-fascists, or religious theocrats, our attitude should simply be, “Fuck ’em. We don’t ’em.” Instead, our target audience should be the “exhausted majority” who are tired of both ruling class malfeasance, and the crap on the margins.

Should a Collapsing America Just Break Up? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Secession

By Umair Haque

Eudaimonia

America is ripping itself apart. So much so that I couldn’t help but notice another strange, gruesome, and bizarre turning point in American collapse today. On the heels of Trump mocking Dr Ford, many famous and powerful right-wing extremists were bellowing, for the first time I can remember, in unison, a shared, loud, and explicit support of real, physical violence — “I love fighting!! What kind of man hasn’t been in a fight? Not a real one, I’ll tell you that!” Violence is virtuous, healthy, ennobling, in other words. My friends, this is far, far outside the lines of discourse we should expect from a civilized society. These are the kinds of things the sneering thugs and grandees who become the proud lieutenants and captains in the armies of dictators tend to say just before a democracy collapses. So while all that might strike you as inconsequential, I think it’s indicative of a deeper and truer malaise — because, of course, on the heels of the Kavanaugh debacle, it is a justification for the idea that anything should go. But can anything go in a democracy?

Americans don’t agree on two things anymore. Personhood and violence. They don’t agree that all people are people, or should be, or even can be — and therefore, many Americans appear to believe in many or most of the following things. It’s perfectly acceptable to rape women if you can get away with it, it’s perfectly fine to put children in camps, it’s perfectly desirable to suggest, believe, “know that” some groups are inherently superior to others, it’s quite alright to want to ethnically cleanse a society, it’s perfectly healthy to “debate” ideas like authoritarianism and fascism (as if two world wars hadn’t settled the question). Need I go on?

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For a Less Divided America, Let People Pick Their Own Laws Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

By J.D. Tuccille

Reason

After last week’s hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, it became pretty obvious that the questions, answers, tears, and grandstanding had changed few, if any, minds. “Today felt very much like an update of the 1850s: 2 very distinct parts of US that no longer care to even fake that they respect or value the other,” tweeted Ronald Brownstein of CNN and The Atlantic.

The 1850s? We know how that ended: badly. Why not head off continued conflict by letting these “very distinct parts” of the U.S. be even more distinct—so much so that there’s less for them to battle over. We could even break with the past and try political solutions that let people live side by side without submitting to the authority of opponents they neither respect not value.

Brownstein wasn’t the only observer to notice the political breach—a breach that appears to be growing.

“It is hard to believe that Democrats and Republicans were watching the same hearings,” the YouGov polling firm marveled while reporting that Democrats disbelieved Kavanaugh and believed Ford, his accuser, in almost exactly the same numbers that Republicans disbelieved Ford and believed Kavanaugh.

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Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

As I have long suspected, PC is primarily the domain of the left-wing of the upper middle class (roughly the same socioeconomic demographic that Jacobinism and Communism came from).

By Yascha Mounk

The Atlantic

Demonstrator at pro-Trump rally for free speech

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture.

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Voluntary Tribalism: Why Not? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

I’ve always found it absurd that white nationalists bitch the loudest about identity politics when they’re the winy snowflakes who fucking invented the goddamn concept. White isn’t even a race for Christ sake. There is no Whitestan. There is no traditional white tribe. It’s a class concept designed to justify an oligarchy without a royal bloodline. I’m pretty sure that the first “white” guys were just a bunch of slave owners who settled on the superiority of their lack of melanin after they finished taking inventory on eye color and penis size and came to the conclusion that skin was the one thing they had in common that the field hands couldn’t lay claim to. In today’s divided states of America identity politics are mostly used to keep different genres of poor people at each others throats while the one percent rapes their wives (often literally) and pollutes their land.

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What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Education, Uncategorized

By Yascha Mounk

The Atlantic

James A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the scholars behind the hoaxJames A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the scholars behind the hoax.

Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.

We’ve been here before.

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The Kavangaugh Debacle Was a Shit Show All Around 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags: ,

The best take on the Kavanaugh mess I’ve seen to date.

By Avens O’Brien

I haven’t commented much on the whole Kavanaugh issue. I have so many thoughts, and they aren’t perfectly organized or suitable for an article. I wrote this rant out last night while really exhausted, I made minor edits this afternoon and I’m just posting it, because it’s burning a hole in my mind and I’m actually like… angry/sad/disappointed, which isn’t very common for me. And yeah, I’m bothered by his confirmation, but more so about the entire process. About how we got here.

Here goes…

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Taiwanese authorities arrest Cody Wilson, intend to deport him Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags:

A friend writes concerning the Cody Wilson case.

“I’m sure feminists and left libertarians are now focused on the character flaw of his paying for sex. Christians have no interest in defending his vice. Southern Nationalists and the alt right suddenly checked out because “LOL, another damn libertarian”. The NRA isn’t likely to even discuss the issue. It’s like someone knows the chatter of all of these groups and picked an option most likely to sever his base of support.”

This is why radicals fail. Solidarity against the common enemy, whether you prefer to call it globalism, capitalism, imperialism, Wall Street, banksters, NWO, ZOG, the Illuminati or the lizard people, is completely absent among most radicals.

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Keith Preston: Trump and “Moderate Dog” Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

Press TV. Watch the interview here.

Image result for trump mattis

Trump considering dismissal of Mattis There had been speculations for long that US President Donald Trump does not see eye to eye with his Defense Secretary James Mattis on a series of issues.

They include US ties with NATO, US military presence in South Korea and Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.

The media in Washington are now quoting informed sources as saying that President Trump is considering a decision to fire his defense chief.

Keith Preston: Trump’s opposition include ‘inside’ members Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

Press TV. Listen here.

US President Donald Trump has many enemies among fellow members of the Republican Party and his own administration, an American journalist and analyst says.

Keith Preston, the chief editor of AttacktheSystem, told  Press TV in an interview on Thursday that Trump has many enemies, not only among media and the Democrats, but also, in his own party and his staff.

The media depicted Secretary of Defense James Mattis as one of the senior members of the Trump administration who opposed the president and called him an “idiot”.

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The Establishment Hates a Sloppy Imperialist 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Regardless of how you feel about the son of a bitch (or his apparently abortion-shy bitch mother), it’s becoming pretty hard to ignore the fact that the establishment, personified by both major parties, the legacy media, and the so called intelligence community, fucking hates President Donald J. Trump. With the New York Times latest revelation of an inter-administration resistance and Bob Woodword’s latest tabloid airport flyswatter, the movement to remove or contain our red-headed stepchild of an Electoral College despot has never been more vibrant. This puts me in a pretty weird position, not just because I’ve devoted my life to bitch slapping bigots like the Donald and upsetting the fanged mandarins of the establishment who so oppose him but because I find it strange that these fellow swamp critters despise each other so damn much.

Some of this is obviously theater. Donald Trump ran a successful campaign largely on trashing the Fourth Estate that Middle-America has come to despise for their impressive track record of fooling them into unwinnable wars and shitty trade deals. And the Fourth Estate made this campaign possible with their round the clock coverage of the free-wheeling MAGA circus. Every time the press attacks Trump he gets to play the role of the anti-establishment victim that his fans identify with. And every time Trump makes some vaguely fascist empty threat against the mass media they get to play the role of the embattled crusaders for truth. In both cases, Trump sees his approval numbers go up and the press sees their ratings go up with them. It’s a mutually abusive, codependent relationship straight out of a Dr. Phil rerun.
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A Politically Incorrect Guide To Not Being a Dick 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Land

Political correctness is a fucking bust. It may have started with the best of intentions but so was the Russian Revolution and both ended in bourgeois tyranny. Political correctness has been more or less the law of the zeitgeist since the early Eighties when the radical feminists teamed up with the puritanical Reaganites to poop the raucous party of the Seventies, after the CIA unleashed AIDS to kill all the fun faggots (I’m only half-kidding). And in the proceeding decades the PC revolution has achieved absolutely nothing. Black and brown people are still poor as dirt. Women and femmes are still roundly violated on a daily basis. And the prison state has never been stronger.

The only thing political correctness really achieved was making it easier for bigots to hide behind the facade of good manners. Based on policy alone, the Clintonian Democrats clearly despise brown and queer people as much as those knuckle-draggers in the alt-right, they just know how to cover their ass with careful newspeak like “super-predators” and empty gestures to people who disgusted them three weeks ago when they weren’t politically viable. Personally, I’ll take an open bigot like David Duke over some squishy closet-basher like Alec Baldwin any day of the week. At least that silicone supremacist will call me faggot to my face.

So the current backlash against the malign influence of political correctness in not only totally natural, it’s also totally necessary. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a fucking dick. The reality is that marginalized individuals such as myself do have plenty of reasons to be pissed off and straight white cis-folk could strongly benefit from learning why and realizing that their mainstream cache does afford them some privileges that the rest of us don’t have. I’m willing to bet that most of you can enter a public restroom without having to seriously consider the possibility that somebody might set you on fire for having the wrong genitalia. But nothing gets solved without conversation, so I’ve decided to put together a few suggestions on how to be politically incorrect without being a total dick.

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Keith Preston: Trump’s opposition include ‘inside’ members Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

US President Donald Trump has many enemies among fellow members of the Republican Party and his own administration, an American journalist and analyst says.

Keith Preston, the chief editor of AttacktheSystem, told  Press TV in an interview on Thursday that Trump has many enemies, not only among media and the Democrats, but also, in his own party and his staff.

The media depicted Secretary of Defense James Mattis as one of the senior members of the Trump administration who opposed the president and called him an “idiot”.

The journalist cited a new book by renowned investigative journalist Bob Woodward in which Mattis was quoted by his unnamed co-workers as describing Trump as an “idiot’ who “acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader’.”

Following the Tuesday release of excerpts of Woodward’s book “Fear: Trump in the White House,” there were speculations that due to the insults addressed to the president, Mattis would be forced to resign from office.

Preston, who has been interviewed on numerous television, radio and internet programs, said it remained to be legally confirmed whether Mattis had truly insulted Trump.

“At this point there is no way of knowing how the situation with Mattis would play out … it’s never been confirmed that Mattis made the comment.”

Earlier this year, Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson amid reports saying the former top diplomat had described the president as a “moron”.

‘Officials working to frustrate Trump agenda’

An op-ed in the New York Times (NYT) reveals that senior members of the Trump administration are so worried about the president’s impulsive behavior that they actively make efforts to undermine his threatening agenda.

The Wednesday report entitled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” is based on the information relayed by an anonymous source.

The anonymous source in the report claims that Trump’s own staff see him as a national threat and take it upon themselves to safeguard the republic against the president.

“We believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic,” the anonymous source said in the NYT op-ed.

“Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Trump described the article as a “gutless editorial”. He said the NYT newspaper was a “dishonest” medium used for fake news dissemination

Fear of Russia and the rise of the Left Birchers 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

By Caleb Maupin

imagesrace mixing communism2

In being defined merely by its opponents and fixating on a fear of Russia, a large chunk of the far-left has usurped the role held by the far-right during the Cold War.

In 1963, folk singer Bob Dylan, whose left-leaning lyrics seemed to define the liberal politics of the era, composed a song which was a  mockery of the right-wing anti-Communist organization known as the John Birch Society. He wrote:

Well, I was feelin’ sad and feelin’ blue

I didn’t know what in the world I was gonna do

Them Communists they was comin’ around

They was in the air

They was on the ground

They wouldn’t gimme no peace

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Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation? Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized

By Matthew Lesh

By Quillette

A review of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press (September 4, 2018) 352 pages.

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes. Demands for speakers to be disinvited. Words construed as violence and liberalism described as ‘white supremacy’. Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds. Controversial speakers violently rebuked – from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators. Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus ‘safe’ from threatening ideas.

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Keith Preston: Trump may face impeachment if Democrats gain majority Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

 

US President Donald Trump may face impeachment proceedings in Congress if the Democratic Party gains the majority after November’s midterm congressional elections, an American analyst in Virginia says.

“The crucial issue is the degree to which the Democrats are going to be able to maintain or obtain a substantial majority in the Congress,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“If the Democrats are able to gain a lot of seats in the Congress, it’s possible that they could move towards the impeachment of the president,” Preston told Press TV on Tuesday.

“That would of course be extremely controversial,” similar to the impeachment efforts against former US President Richard Nixon in 1974, which led to his resignation, Preston said.

About half of Americans want the US Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump, according to a new poll.

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