Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies
‘I Was In Three Riots In Four Months’ – A 30+ Year Anarchist Journey Reply
Pete invited Keith Preston to return to the show to talk about his 30+ year journey through anarchism.
Keith has devoted much of that time to anarchism’s historical study and hosts the largest pan-archist site on the web, Attack The System. Listen here.
Donate at the Libertarian Institute
Pete’s Link to Sign Up for the LP
Link to Richard Grove’s Autonomy Course
Episode 101 – Season 5 with Bellamy Reply
A great interview that covers many topics that are relevant to ATS such as the value of “pan-secessionism” as opposed to “world domination anarchism,”and left-wing authoritarianism. Listen here.
“Since Bellamy was here at the start of The Brilliant project it is great to check in where he is at regarding the things we are talking and thinking about. Obviously Bellamy and I have been having similar experiences in the Anarchist Space over the past few years. This episode is about some dissimilar experiences and what is next with each of us and our respective media projects.”
Trump’s travel ban imposed on nations not subservient to US Reply
US President Donald Trump’s travel ban is based on geopolitical reasons and imposed against countries that refuse to join America’s sphere of influence, says a political analyst in Virginia.
“I noticed that Belarus was included. Belarus is of course another nation that is widely considered to be the equivalent of a rogue state by the United States because they are not subservient to Washington’s objectives,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
“They have refused to be incorporated into the Washington consensus,” Preston told Press TV.
“So some of these nations, it’s likely that there are geopolitical reasons why they were included [in the travel ban list],” he added.Trump administration plans to add seven nations to travel ban list: ReportsThe administration of US President Donald Trump is planning to add seven countries to its travel ban list.
The Trump administration is planning to add seven countries – Belarus, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania – to its travel ban list, US media reports said on Tuesday.
Some countries will face bans only on some visa categories, the Wall Street Journal reported. The list of countries was not final and could yet change, website Politico said.
Trump said in an interview with the Journal that he was considering adding countries to the travel ban, but declined to state which ones.
The move is likely to sour ties between the United States and the countries affected under the expanded ban.
Nigeria, for example, Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, is a US anti-terrorism partner and has a large diaspora residing in the United States.
Under the current version of the ban, citizens of Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as some Venezuelan officials and their relatives are blocked from obtaining a large range of US immigrant and non-immigrant visas.
Citizens of the countries can apply for waivers to the ban, but they are exceedingly rare.
The travel ban to the US has been central to Trump’s immigration policy and his campaign promise to restrict immigration to the US.
During the 2016 presidential race, Trump campaigned for “a total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States on the pretext of preventing terrorist attacks.
Opponents say the ban violates the US Constitution because it discriminates against Muslims and certain nationalities.
Mike Gravel: I'd probably vote Present like Tulsi 1
My take on the Trump impeachment is the same as Mike Gravel’s and Tulsi Gabbard’s. There are many things that are objectionable about Trump (and virtually all other presidents), and calling him out on those things would be justifiable if Congress cared to do so. But the impeachment effort is just a grandstanding partisan exercise that is meaningless because Trump won’t be convicted in the Senate.
In this clip from PRIMO NUTMEG #207, former Democratic US Senator and 2020 Presidential candidate Mike Gravel explains that he would probably also vote “Present” on Donald Trump’s impeachment if he were still in the US Senate, as Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard recently did in the House of Representatives.
Democrats slam Republicans over Trump impeachment rules Reply
Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of the US Congress have slammed the rules of impeachment against President Donald Trump announced by Senate Republicans, saying the process is “rigged” and different from the impeachment of former Democratic President Bill Clinton.
Trannies with Guns: Because Enough is Enough! 1
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
I need to buy a gun. I can’t state it any simpler than that. It’s something I’ve needed for sometime and I seem to feel like I need it a little more each day. The gun doesn’t have to be fancy or high tech. I don’t need some AR hunting rifle in drag or one of those phallic three digit magnum monstrosities. I need something basic and reliable. Maybe a .38 or .45 wheel gun. Something just powerful enough to put an irate cis-male down in two shots or less. I’ve always wanted a gun but I never felt like I really needed one until recently, about four years ago to be exact, right around the time I came out as a trans person. Now, as my fluctuating gender continues to veer further and further towards the feminine end of the spectrum, I’ve come to understand the stone-cold necessity for the Second Amendment more clearly than I ever have before. So I’ll say it once more with feeling, dearest motherfuckers, to really drive the point home, I need a fucking gun.
Those are the thoughts that swing through my dizzy skull every time I hear another horror story about some trans or gender-bending individual being slaughtered for the high crime of living outside the closet. I’ve been having these thoughts a lot lately, 22 times in the last year to be exact. That’s how many trans murders occurred in 2019 that we know of and that doesn’t even include the girls killed in police custody. I wish I could say that this is an anomaly, but it’s not. According to the American Medical Association, it’s a goddamn epidemic. At least 157 of my people have been slaughtered since 2013, right around the time the Christian White, I mean Right, switched gears from the now dated practice of fag-bashing to that new national pastime of tranny-stomping, and I say ‘at least’ before that staggering headcount because most transgender murder victims still go unreported or misgendered. The police can’t seem to help themselves, even in death they spit on us.
And this is why gun control is a steaming sack of elitist bullshit. When you tell people to give up their guns, you’re really telling them to trust the cops. This might work smashingly for billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and the bougie brats in March For Our Lives, but for marginalized people like myself, it’s a fucking slap in the face. As I mentioned above, pigs kill trannies. Just ask Layleen Polanco, who was found dead in her cell at Rikers this year. Or Johana Medina, who was only released from one of ICE’s fine concentration camps just in time to die in the ER from untreated medical problems.
Some People Who Actually Didn't Suck In 2019 1
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
I love holiday traditions, dearest motherfuckers, and every year since I started this blog several years ago, I’ve welcomed in the new year by compiling a short list of the few people on this goddess forsaken rock who actually managed the small miracle of not sucking, or at least not sucking much, this year. Naturally, it’s usually a pretty weird fucking list because, generally speaking, you have to be pretty fucking weird to earn the respect of a pretty fucking weird ass bitch like me. This year is no exception. It’s a regular rogues gallery of contrarian fire-starters and Molotov chucking iconoclasts like myself. You won’t like all of em. Hell, I don’t even like all of em. But if I’ve done my job right, and you’re not a total fucking asshole, you’ll at least respect them begrudgingly. So here’s a dastardly dozen (give or take) dearest motherfuckers who actually don’t suck. With one telltale finger in the air, I solute them.
Mike Gravel- The only oxygenarian bitch who should have taken the White House by storm, crazy Old Man Gravel, ex-Alaskan Governor, bitter old coot and lifelong evangelist for direct democracy, ran for all but a hot second this year. But what a fucking second! The last true anti-interventionist in my soiled former party, Gravel blitzed the DNC like Don Quixote on Geritol, with a guerrilla campaign that literally consisted of a handful of rag-tag college stoners using their spare pot money to make Mike the libertarian socialist Bernie. And they might just have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for those meddling adults in the suicidally self-assure Democratic establishment, who used their arcane debate regulations to fuck the old bastard out of a platform. Fuck it. Best laid plans. Thanks for the memories, Mike. We’ll build you a monument after the revolution. And, once again, thanks Geritol.
Joaquin Phoenix- Hollywood has long been a fucking wasteland for anything even mildly resembling the dangers of unfiltered creativity. But every once and a while, someone, somehow sneaks something truly subversive passed the censors and into the theaters, and the normies lose their proverbial shit. There hasn’t been a blockbuster as teemingly incendiary as this year’s Joker since Oliver Stone’s psychedelic opus, Natural Born Killers, and the maniacal performance of Joaquin Phoenix is the number one reason why. Like Woody Harrelson’s Mickey Knox, Joaquin hijacks that silver screen for 2+ hours of riving anarchy as Arthur Fleck aka the Joker.
Federal study confirms racial bias of many facial-recognition systems, casts doubt on their expanding use 3
Drew Harwell
The Washington Post
Dec. 19, 2019 at 3:43 p.m. PST
Facial-recognition systems misidentified people of color more often than white people, a landmark federal study released Thursday shows, casting new doubts on a rapidly expanding investigative technique widely used by law enforcement across the United States. More…
The Real Reasons Tulsi Gabbard Did Not Vote to Impeach Donald Trump 7
BINGO!
Sputnik News
” She also introduced a resolution calling on the House to censure Trump on five issues she implied were far more substantial. Those include carrying out wars without congressional approval, illegally “occupying and pillaging” Syria, “recklessly enabling” Turkey to invade Northern Syria and ethnically cleanse Kurds (a U.S. ally), continuing to support Saudi Arabia’s “genocidal war” in Yemen and scrapping nuclear agreements with Iran and Russia, thereby strongly increasing the risk of nuclear proliferation.”
Does The Conservative Win In The UK Foreshadow What's To Come In The US? Reply
Trump misconduct threatens US democracy 1
The Panarchist Solution to a World Divided Reply
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
In these days of epic collapse, with the established order rapidly disintegrating before our very eyes, mankind seems to be tearing apart at the seems and resorting to the bipolar extremes of the far-left and the far-right. And why the hell not? Poor people across the globe have grown weary of the false promises and bald faced lies of the so-called moderates. The one thing the warring camps of extremes seem to agree on is that the mass democracy of neoliberal globalism is an epic wash. A rigged shell game that only pays out to the house, and now the house is on fire.
So we witness the spectacle of populism on both the left and the right. Record numbers of young people embracing the once tainted label of socialism while the kind of xenophobic nativism which was once only uttered in hushed tones at the far corners of church potlucks has now become mainstream fodder, openly brandished like Hermann Goering’s revolver. These are the times that we live in but we’ve seen them before. Whenever empires crumble and the fixed markets of state capitalism find themselves in peril. The people who stand to gain the most from the cataclysm find themselves divided on the opposite ends of the barracks. Stalinists and Brown Shirts. Antifa and the Alt-right. It’s times like these when the call of Samuel L. Jackson’s prophetic DJ in Spike Lee’s classic dissection of urban upheaval, Do the Right Thing, rings like tinnitus through my eardrums. “Can we live together?! Together, can we live?!!” I’ve spent my life in search of an answer to that existential question. I believe I’m getting closer.
I’ve always found myself on the far-left end of the barracks, even while the proletariat was still drunk on the delusions of progress that came with a first black president and Apple Store commodity fetishism. I discovered Marx young and Chomsky shortly after. I spent the lion share of my teens flirting with a caraselle of Libertarian Socialist ideologies, Chomsky’s Syndicalism, Red Rosa’s Council Communism, Subcomandante Marcos’ Zapatizmo. All set to a hard driving soundtrack of Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer and Zack de la Rocha.
Sorry Lefties, Your Impeachment is Bullshit 1
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
The ongoing impeachment of one Donald J. Trump is bullshit. There, I said it and I’ll say it again just to make sure you heard me right. This impeachment is fucking bullshit, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise. I don’t care if this makes me a bad leftist or a bad libertarian or whatever, its the stone cold honest truth and I stand by it.
The left has poured so much of their identity into apposing Trump for the very sake of apposing Trump that they’ve lost all touch with reality. Their entire identity has become as defined by this moronic ass-wipe as his unblinking supporters. The Resistance has become a mirror image of what they despise, a pack of hyperventilating paranoid deplorables who have lost themselves 5 miles up their own asshole after crashing the Hybrid in their own fucking shit. They’re a bunch of inconsolable babies and they desperately need a good slap on the ass to clear their throats.
This isn’t to say I’m defending Trump. Not by a long shot. If it were up to me, he’d be in shackles at the Hague, answering for the cold-blooded murder of little Nora al-Awlaki and his putrid children’s concentration camps on the border. Trump can burn in hell. What I hate is this Ukrainegate nonsense. Just like Russiagate, it’s little more than a hodgepodge of rumors and second-hand gossip being trafficked by the only class of people more deplorable than Trump. What’s worse is that the entire spectacle is so obviously a complete and total farce designed to self-destruct just in time for that other complete and total farce known as the 2020 Election.
The Democrats know full well that this media circus will die on the vine once it reaches the GOP packed Senate, but they also know that it will drive the campaign conversation away from anything mildly resembling the radical change that their loverboys Joe Biden and Mayor Pete have zero intention of delivering on, while keeping the irate electorate distracted by empty partisan shit-slinging. This suits Trump just fine as well. He gets to play the anti-authoritarian martyr that Middle America relates too, even while he robs them blind and sends their sons and daughters to die in a dusty oilfield.
"Liberal CIA" and New Left Foundations, Media, and Activist Groups Reply
The involvement of the CIA and other state security services in the US Left is a topic that is all-too-frequently ignored. This would certainly explain why so many “left-wing” and “anarchist” groups in the US take positions that amount to anarcho-Democratic Partyism, anarcho-MSNBCism, or anarcho-State Departmentism.
By Joel van der Reijen
NGO Study Center
An interesting collection of articles and links.
Why Hate Speech Laws, Gun Control, and Vigilantism Will Not Prevent Fascism 1
On the free speech question, it’s interesting to consider that the Weimar Republic actually had hate speech laws, along with stricter laws against obscenity and libel than what is the norm in most Western countries today. Weimar also had gun control laws, along with anti-fascist vigilantes that were regularly engaged in not only brawls but also gangland-like shootouts with the NSDAP-affiliated groups. Both the KPD and the SPD had their own private military armies just like the brownshirts, and the KPD was receiving support from the Soviet Union. None of that prevented the Nazi coup. As the CATO Institute explains:
“In my research, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic and found that, contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate-speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective pubicrelations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate.
In the decade from 1923 to 1933, the Nazi propaganda magazine Der Stürmer — of which Streicher was the executive publisher — was confiscated or had its editors taken to court no fewer than 36 times. The more charges Streicher faced, the more the admiration of his supporters grew. In fact, the courts became an important platform for Streicher’s campaign against the Jews.
Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, points out that cases were regularly brought against individuals on account of anti-Semitic speech in the years leading up to Hitler’s takeover of power in 1933. “Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law,” he writes. “Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech… As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it.”
The maintenance of civil society, the vigorous defense of all civil liberties across the board (the ones outlined in the Bill of Rights and beyond), maintenance of a social and cultural consensus in favor of at least some bare minimum of democratic, libertarian, or egalitarian values, sanctioning those who engage in political violence (whatever their ideology) is the best way to prevent totalitarian/authoritarian groups (right, left, religious) from gaining genuine political power.
Communism, Open Borders, and Natural Law Reply
By Libertarian Heathen
Libertarianism is Natural Law Enshrined In Politics
I have a variety of people on the social media pages associated with this website. I generally do not ban contrarians as they provide fodder for good debate.
Most Libertarians/Conservatives have encountered a common fallacy offerred by Marxists who still cling to the idea “Communism would work if it was only done right” or “There was never actual Communism”. The argument is made in varying forms, but this is the essential premise.
Here is a recent example from Facebook:
Sean Gabb – Corporate Censorship: a Libertarian View Reply
On Monday 21st October 2019, Sean Gabb gave a talk on “Corporate Censorship: a Libertarian View” to the Libertarian Alliance in London.
“What About the Children?!”: Youth Rights Before Parental Police States Reply
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
What about the children?!” Some haggard disembodied voice wails from my flickering TV set, jerking me awake from the Ambien-grade slumber that any more than 15 minutes of C-Span inevitably delivers. It’s happened a thousand times before. The voice almost always belongs to some sobbing middle-aged white woman, overdressed like June Cleaver for some senate hearing on the dangers of one victimless crime or another, online prostitution or E-cigarettes or satanic Portuguese techno, always something new, always something to be terrified of. Part of me feels for the woman, I really do. She’s usually lost a child to something or other. She’s clearly in pain. But another disgraceful part of me wants to tell her to shut the fuck up and take some goddamn responsibility for your own life. Because, beneath the theatrics, 9 times out of 10, this pearl-clutching stock character is really saying “I couldn’t find the time to parent my dead child, so now the police state has to pick up the slack!” And the Wall Street whores of Washington take their cue and start passing more pointless legislation.
I know, I know, I’m a cunt. In today’s era of 24/7 stage 4 late capitalism, many parents are too busy working 80 shifts for peanuts to so much as even check in on their kids. But the wailing woman on C-Span is rarely a blue collar casualty. She and her ilk, who fill the ranks of an endless barrage of parental guilt trip lobbies like MADD are almost always well connected, upper middle class, office drones, who’s kids dropped dead while they were busy paying off the Beamer or banging the European tennis instructor. And now they’re busy boycotting Juul or Marilyn Manson or whatever suburbia’s chosen monster of the week happens to be, while the rest of their brood are at home with some over medicated nanny, experimenting with dryer sheets or some such nonsense. This army of rambling soccer moms call themselves children’s rights advocates and “What about the children?!” is the manic war cry they shout just before decapitating your, as well as their own damn children’s rights.
Lyceum Round-Table #1: Autopsy on the Alt-Right Reply
Todd Lewis is joined by Keith Preston, Right Ruminations and Swithun Dobson in a rebooted round-table series. We will be discussing the Rise and Fall of the Alt-Right.
Lyceum Round-Table #4: Problems with Liberalism: Cultural Liberalism Reply
Todd Lewis is joined by Keith, Swithun and Right Ruminations we will finish our discussion of liberalism by analyzing cultural liberalism.
Trump’s impeachment inquiry may help his re-election campaign Reply
Press TV. Listen here.
The rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry against US President Donald Trump may backfire and increase the Republican president’s chances of getting re-elected in 2020, says an American political analyst in Virginia.
Staunch Democrats “want to get rid of Trump by any means they can” but are “concerned that if Trump is impeached, that may have the effect of rallying his base, which may actually help him win re-election next year and discredit the Democratic candidate,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
“There are some people who really dislike the president and just want him out of office, period, but there are other people who see this as a safety valve; they think that perhaps he won’t actually be impeached but this will have the effect of strengthening his base and strengthening his re-election potential, ” Preston told Press TV.
Democrats in the US House of Representatives launched an impeachment inquiry in September after an unidentified whistleblower alleged Trump had unlawfully used his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former US Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
The rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry against Trump is the latest and perhaps most serious threat to his presidency, and the White House is failing to contain the crisis.
On Friday, House Democratic lawmakers demanded that the White House provide documents related to allegations that Trump pressured Ukraine for political favors.
PressTV-Democrats subpoena White House in impeachment probeHouse Democrats issued a subpoena to the White House Friday evening for documents relating to the President Donald Trump’s contact with Ukraine.
During a July 25 call, Trump asked Zelenskiy to speak with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani about whether Ukrainian officials improperly dropped an investigation of a company that hired Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Trump’s aggressive new strategy to thwart the Democrats’ impeachment offensive is already breaking down under the weight of new revelations.
Text messages released on Thursday between US diplomats and a senior Ukrainian aide reveal that Zelensky was told he should open an investigation against Biden if he wanted an invitation to visit Washington.
