Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Alt-Right Showdown: We can do better than this… Hard times in USA 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right

It’s interesting to see people from the Communist Left like Caleb Maupin and Jason Unruhe saying the things that I have been saying for 20 years, e.g. that progressive liberalism is simply the self-legitimating ideology of imperialism, that “social justice” activists are just middle class and college student hobbyists, that the “Left” in its present incarnation views the traditional working class as its primary enemy, that the “far right” comes closer to being an actual opposition force, that the working class is being reproletarianized, that the “anti-fascist” left has become the new McCarthyites, that the antifa and anarcho-leftoids are the shock troops of the liberal establishment, etc etc.

First They Came For the Douche-Bags 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Censorship has never been more hip. All the kids are doing it, all the cool ones anyway. Someone tweets something spicy and they go running to Big Brother to set things straight. And why not? The adults are doing it too, or at least the people who call themselves adults in the legacy media do. After centuries of covering civil wars, Red Scares, and Nixonian scandals, our gilded Fourth Estate has rendered themselves to the status of a bunch of snot-nosed, apple snitching kids crying foul whenever some pedestrian steps on their feelings or questions their inalienable right to zeitgeist supremacy. I speak of coarse of the latest Stalinist purges being undertaken on social media juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter in the name of protecting our precious bodily fluids from a dastardly Slavic midterm conspiracy that everyone is apparently too terrified to prove exists.

So far the victims of this purge have mostly been douche-bags like that rambling boil with teeth, Alex Jones. But that’s how it starts and we’ve already gotten a taste of how it ends. After verbally spanking one too many corporate news jackass (some chickenshit stringer from the New York Times), State Department whistle-blower and fifth degree black belt smart-ass, Peter Van Buren was given the Twitter death penalty and permanently removed from the sites recorded history, just as easy as clipping Yezhov from a photograph. In a rampant spree of crypto-fascist overkill a couple of other fine upstanding civil libertarians, Scott Horton who still refuses to publish me at antiwar.com (not that I’m pissed about it!) and Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, where slapped in the purgatory penalty box just for coming to the poor bastards defense.

This all suites the virtue signalling martyrs of the “free” press just fine. Guys like Peter have devoted their lives to debunking their bullshit. At the time of his expulsion Peter was crashing the pity party being thrown by those self-fellating imbeciles in the wake of our techno-Tourette’s stricken president’s latest tweet lashing the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people” (Stalin’s wraith seems to be quite active these days). Peter was not-so-politely reminding these perpetual victims that our dear leader made one accurate point- that you motherfuckers start wars with your propaganda. The righteous indignation of these very war-whores, caught with their hand in the hypocrisy jar, was almost laughably absurd. As was their total stone-blindness to the fact that this kind of obnoxiously clueless behavior is precisely what allows morons like Donald Trump and Alex Jones to prosper from its blowback. I’d probably still be fucking laughing if a hadn’t read 1984 in 8th grade.

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Antifa Still Wants to Punch the Two Dozen Damp, Sad Nazis Who Showed Up at Unite the Right II 1

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

At this point, the Alt-Right is just the latest wave of “far right” loser groups in the tradition of the Klan and neo-Nazi groups from the 1980s as one of the antifa’s leading “intellectuals” admits. In the less than 10 years since it began, the Alt-Right has degenerated from a high-brow intellectual movement oriented toward meta-politics and influenced by thinkers such as Alain De Benoist, to becoming a retrograde 1920s style white nationalist movement, to becoming a collection of Internet trolls and Alex Jones-wannabes, to becoming a reworking of 1980s neo-Nazism.

The Alt-Right is dead, not so much through either public opposition or system cooptation, as much as through internal incompetence. For instance, the Antifa counter actions against the Alt-Right are largely the one thing that continues to legitimize the Alt-Right in the eyes of the Alt-Right’s own adherents by simply making Alt-Rightists think they are more important than they actually are.

In reality, far from serving  as a genuine counter force to the “far right” the Antifa-types would be faced with a literal massacre in a genuine showdown with, shall we say, “hard men” (which the Alt-Right are not). And far from coopting the Alt-Right, the Trump presidency has actually marginalized the Alt-Right by seemingly giving a voice to those with overlapping issues (such as immigration opponents) but who do not wish to be associated with the Alt-Right’s extremism. Strategically, it would have been in the Alt-Right’s best interests to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.

The story of the Alt-Right is a case study in how NOT to build a revolutionary or radical oppositional movement.

By Joe Seyton

Reason

“I really think we should just ignore them,” counterprotester Glen Hellman told Reason outside the Vienna Metro station this morning, where Unite the Right II rally participants boarded a subway headed into downtown D.C. “We’re validating them, and that is a problem,” he added, describing himself as “torn” over whether to ignore the rally or protest it.

As expected, it was a chaotic scene outside the White House on this rainy Sunday, as white nationalists staged a rally in the nation’s capital.

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Neocons and Liberals Join Forces to Fight Populism Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Uncategorized

The liberal ruling classes circle the wages against revolts by the reactionary peasantry. Shades of the 19th century.

By Paul Gottfried

The American Conservative

For several months, an alliance has been forming between the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the neoliberal Center for American Progress (CAP). It’s the sort of kumbaya not witnessed since wartime Washington a decade ago.

A press release from CAP on May 10 blares: “CAP and AEI Team up to Defend Democracy and Transatlantic Partnership.” The same joyous tidings accompanied a public statement issued by AEI on July 31, which stressed that the alliance was meant to resist “the populist assault on the transatlantic community” for the purpose of “defending democracy.”

Although, according to Vikram Singh, a senior fellow at CAP, the two partners “often disagree on important policy questions,” they have been driven together “at a time when the character of our societies is at stake.” This burgeoning cooperation underscores that “our commitment to democracy and core democratic principles is stronger than ever.” Since both documents fling around the terms “democracy” and “liberal democracy” to justify a meddlesome foreign policy, we may safely assume that the neocons are behind this project. Neocons for some time now have prefixed their intended aggressions with “democracy” and “liberal democracy” the way the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs during the 16th and 17th centuries stuck the word “holy” into the names of their wartime alliances. Closer to our time, communist governments favored the use of “people’s democracy” to indicate that they were the good guys. Presumably the neocons have now picked up this habit of nomenclature.

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Charlottesville After A Year—As An Outsider, I Think the Alt-Right Far from Finished 1

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

By Paul Gottfried

Unz Review

ryan

We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the fateful Unite The Right Rally, at which the violence that took place was all blamed on the “Alt-Right”, leading to much persecution (deplatforming, firings, conferences cancelled) of people identified with that movement. It’s been said repeatedly that the Alt Right is dead or dying—but it can’t be, if Conservatism, Inc is still trying to kill it.

It seems that Jonah Goldberg has time left over from beating up on Trump and refurbishing his credentials as a leading “conservative” Never-Trumper to hobnob with House Speaker Paul Ryan at Jonah’s stamping grounds, AEI. The two of them agreed recently that the “Alt-Right is about “identity politics.” In what appears to be a mutual congratulation session, the interlocutors proclaimed that “conservatives must reclaim “hijacked” terminology.”

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The Maps That Show That City vs. Country Is Not Our Political Fault Line 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism

“Why the differences? I’ve long argued that United States politics resolves around the tension between advancing individual liberty and promoting the common good. The regional cultures we think of as “blue” today have traditions championing the building and maintenance of free communities, today’s “red” ones on maximizing individual freedom of action. Our presidential contests almost always present a clear choice between the two, and the regions act accordingly.

The 2016 election was an exception, largely because Mr. Trump did not campaign as a traditional laissez faire Republican. Rather, he promised government would rebuild infrastructure and the manufacturing sector, shield workers from imports and migrant workers, replace the Affordable Care Act with “something terrific” and protect Social Security and Medicare. This delivered critical dividends in rural parts of the communitarian-minded Midlands and Yankeedom, flipping scores of counties that had voted for Mr. Obama twice, most of them in the Upper Mississippi Valley, northern New England and upstate New York.”

11 Regions Underlying the 50 States

How rival colonizers spread across the continent and set patterns that influence modern politics and culture.

By Colin Woodward

New York Times

FREEPORT, Maine — Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most significant and abiding divide in American politics isn’t between city and countryside, but rather among regional cultures. Rural and urban places certainly have distinct interests and priorities, but in our awkward federation their differences have taken a back seat to the broader struggle between our constituent regions.

Sectionalism isn’t, and never has been, as simple as North versus South or an effete and domineering East against a rugged, freedom-minded West. Rather, our true regional fissures can be traced back to the contrasting ideals of the distinct European colonial cultures that first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States, and then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive settlement bands, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into.

Understanding this is essential to comprehending our political reality or developing strategies to change it — especially as we approach a momentously consequential midterm election.

The Elite Fixation With Russiagate Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

By Aaron Mate

The Nation

Helsinki Summit: Handshake between Putin and Trump

No single act of Donald Trump’s presidency has engendered more criticism than his performance at the Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin. For declining to endorse US intelligence claims that the Kremlin meddled in our election and faulting both countries for the poor state of US-Russia relations, Trump was roundly accused of “shameful,” “disgraceful,” and “treasonous” behavior that has sparked a full-blown “national security crisis.”

But does the American public at large share the prevailing elite assessment? Save for a White House vigil led by two longtime Hillary Clinton staffers and a few scattered rallies—and in stark contrast to mass protests over Trump’s misogyny, Muslim ban, and zero-tolerance immigration policy—Americans have not poured into the streets to confront the “crisis.” A poll by The Hill and the HarrisX polling company found 54 percent support for Trump’s now-scuttled plan for a follow-up summit with Putin at the White House. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump’s post-Helsinki approval rating slightly increased to 45 percent. While the uptick does not necessarily signal an embrace of Trump’s behavior, it is not difficult to see why his numbers did not plummet. In a recent Gallup poll on problems facing the country, the “Situation with Russia” was such a marginal concern that it did not even register. While an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 64 percent believe Trump has not been tough enough on Russia, it also saw a near-even split on whether Putin is a foe or an ally, and 59 percent support for better relations.

The gap between elite and public priorities highlights an endemic problem that long predates Trump. Since his election, however, the elite fixation on alleged Russian meddling and the president’s suspected collusion has exacerbated that divide.

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“The New Seven Dirty Words” Reply

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

A writer from the New York Times describes how while the Right controls the foreign policy, economy and legal system of the United States, the Left controls the culture, with offenses to PC taking the place of traditional forms of obscenity.

This speaker’s perspective is interesting given that she seems to be a conventional urban professional class liberal with standard center-left Democratic Party politics, i.e. the primary constituency for PC. Increasingly, I am noticing that more people from the various PC constituencies are starting to have second thoughts about it all.

Anyone who wishes to be a critic of the existing society, and does not recognize the role that the totalitarian humanist ideology of what Joel Kotkin calls the “new clerisy” plays in legitimizing the system is already of the game before it starts.

Bari Weiss “The New Seven Dirty Words” Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater Speaking during Week Five 2018, “The Ethics of Dissent” July 26, 2018 Bari Weiss is a writer and editor for The New York Times opinion section, where she writes about culture and politics. Before joining the Times a year ago, Bari was an op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal and an associate book review editor there. For two years, she was a senior editor at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish news, politics, and culture, where she edited the site’s political and news coverage. Earlier this month, Bari won the Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which annually honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” The judges cited “her brilliant, incisive journalism defends that cornerstone of individual liberty and civil society: freedom of speech.” Bari is a proud Pittsburgh native and a graduate of Columbia.

Trump’s Working Class, Conservative, Populist Realignment Reply

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

One of the best and most thorough analysis of Trump voters I have seen to date. Trump ran a Ross Perot-like campaign, and was able to take the Rust Belt away from the Democrats. That’s how he won. The question is how sustainable will that be over time in light of demographic and cultural change?

By Robert W. Merry

The American Conservative

Bonnie Smith is a 63-year-old bakery entrepreneur in Jefferson, Ohio, in Ashtabula County. She begins her day in the bakery at 2:30 a.m., making doughnuts, then moving on to breads and pies “or whatever I have going out.” Married with three grown children, she started her business two years ago after more than three decades at the county sheriff’s office, where she rose from cook to dispatcher and then to deputy. Like nearly all her neighbors throughout Ashtabula County, she is a lifelong Democrat. Her parents were Democrats. She married a Democrat. She worked exclusively for Democratic county sheriffs.

But in 2016 she voted for Donald Trump. “I’ve seen the job losses here,” she says, “the rise in crime, the meth and heroin problem, society essentially losing hope; something just gave in with me.”

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An Anarchist Survey of Amazon: Crashing the Party and Amazon Go Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Uncategorized • Tags: , ,

It’s Going Down

Since the conclusion of our previous survey, two interesting events occurred in various Amazon facilities. In one instance, a fulfillment center was torched in the British Midlands. In another instance, coordinated strikes hit Amazon in Germany and Northern Italy. All of this preceded the holiday sales blitz and threw Amazon into internal chaos. At the end of the holiday season, all Amazon could tout was its toxic accomplishment of shipping one billion commodities and selling “tens of millions” of talking Alexa units. When the shopping extravaganza was over, the corporate employees of Amazon were rewarded with a lavish spectacle to sooth their overworked souls.

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Gallup Shows How Much Americans Really Care About The “Situation With Russia” 2

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

When the ruling class tries to work up hysteria over bullshit, and the people don’t buy it or don’t care, that’s a sign the elite have lost or are losing their legitimacy.

“Gallup recently did a poll of what Americans say is the most important problem facing the country. One finding: the percentage of Americans saying “Situation with Russia” is the most important problem is literally too small to represent with a number. ”

Zero Hedge

If Putin Did It: A Hypothetical Defense for a Hypothetical Crime 1

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

Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

What if Putin did it? That’s the question I’ve been getting a lot of lately. The proverbial ‘it’ being the oft-repeated accusation that the Russian government, under the direction of Czar ubermensch Vladimir Putin, colluded with Donald Trump in the 2016 election. I happen to be one of a handful of people on the left who has never bought into this half baked conspiracy theory, cooked up by Democrats to explain how they lost the White House to a reality TV monster and picked up by the so-called intelligence community to justify their purse shriveling budgets. But still I get asked, usually by some limp-wristed Whole-Foods progressive, what if Putin did it?

Since I’ve grown blue in the face trying to explain to these well intentioned morons that after 18+ months the worst thing that the biggest investigation since Watergate has managed to uncover is a mercenary Slavic clickbait farm and the kind of casual run-ins with Russian oligarchs that are sadly de rigueur for existence in the Washington swamplands, I figured I might as well just answer the goddamn question, which has developed a vibrant new layer of cacophony in the wake of Robert Mueller’s latest wave of baseless indictments against Russian nationals who will never stand trial. So what if Putin did it? I would have to shrug my shoulders and say Karma’s a bitch.

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Reflections on Idiocracy 1

by • American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized

A Facebook reader comments:

“The original Black Panthers were pretty awesome too. I haven’t seen any leftist groups that are even on their level either these days. Even the 70’s radical groups were more respectable. I rate The Weathermen who were the most notorious toilet bombers of that time more highly. Granted, I think they may have had more malevolent intentions than they claim now, for instance, Cathy Wilkerson trained FALN members how to make bombs and they actually did blow up people. But also George Jackson, Raymond Levasseur. I am sure I can think of others. Those guys were not effete pussies. Granted, their violence did more harm than good imo, they caused the government to pass more restrictive laws and since people don’t tend to like extremists and violence, they pushed voters to the right resulting in that scumbag Reagan being elected.

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Lauren Southern vs Larken Rose – Open Borders 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration

A Facebook commentator recently added this response to this debate:

In any polarised debate, seek the excluded middle! What neither position here seems to address is the question of commons, which historically acted as a mediator between private property and collectively owned resources. Meanwhile, the allocation of commons necessitates the definition of those who manage those commons, which will be to the exclusion of those who are not. This is, in a sense, a border, albeit on a much smaller scale than that of a nation state. Here are Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons (or common-pool resource(s) = CPR) – note the first point.

1. The CPR has clearly-defined boundaries (effective exclusion of external unentitled parties)

2. There is congruence between the resource environment and its governance structure or rules

3. Decisions are made through collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate

4. Rules are enforced through effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators

5. Violations are punished with graduated sanctions

6. Conflicts and issues are addressed with low-cost and easy-to-access conflict resolution mechanisms

7. Higher-level authorities recognize the right of the resource appropriators to self-govern

8. In the case of larger common-pool resources: rules are organized and enforced through multiple layers of nested enterprises

…and I suppose the reason they fail to mention commons is that as far as I’m aware, in European-American settler culture, they didn’t play the role that they have in most other societies.

 

Reflection on the Condition of U.S. Politics Reply

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

Recently, a reader asked for me for an assessment of the present condition of the Alt-Right due to my past associated with that particular milieu. Here is my response:

Regrettably, the Alt-Right has become a mirror image of the Left in the sense of operating as a self-marginalizing freak show.

As I see it the entire range of domestic US politics-far left, far right, center left, center right-is largely just a collection of tribes motivated by ressentiment and victimology, and which are increasingly oriented toward self-parody. The public persona that many Alt-Right leaders have created for themselves is essentially that of wrestling heel characters, which fits well with the cartoonist nature of US politics generally, and the blending of political and celebrity entertainment culture that we see going on right now. And the same is true of the public persona of leading figures of all the other tribes.

The Alt-Right/Lite configuration and the Antifa/SJW/Left configuration are merely the self-parody wings of the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe respectively, with the two established tribes largely being a self-parody of themselves.

US politics is basically just a glorified version of the WWE, and it’s perfectly appropriate that the US head of state is a guy is who actually in the WWE Hall of Fame. And the hardcore partisans (i.e. folks who take all this shit seriously) are like wrestling fans who think it’s all a real sport as a opposed to a theatrical production. In many ways, the blissfully ignorant like the folks in this Mark Dice video are the most sensible (and probably the largest) political faction, because they at least have the inclination to be indifferent to it all.

What’s Really Going on with Family Separation at the Border? 5

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration

Repost from a credible source :

If you’re horrified by news of families being separated at the borders, here’s a bit of news you can use.

First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying.

There are two different policies in play, and both are new.

First is the new policy that any migrant family entering the U.S. without a border inspection will be prosecuted for this minor misdemeanor. The parents get incarcerated and that leaves children to be warehoused. The parents then typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor and are given a sentence of the few days they served waiting for trial. But then when the parents try to reunite with their children, they are given the runaround—and possibly even deported, alone. The children are left in HHS custody, often without family.

Second is a new and apparently unwritten policy that even when the family presents themselves at a border-entry location, seeking asylum—that is, even when the family is complying in all respects with immigration law—the government is snatching the children away from their parents. Here, the government’s excuse seems to be that they want to keep the parents in jaillike immigration detention for a long time, while their asylum cases are adjudicated. The long-standing civil rights case known as Flores dictates that they aren’t allowed to keep kids in that kind of detention, so the Trump administration says they have to break up the families. They do not have to break up families—it is the government’s new choice to jail people with credible asylum claims who haven’t violated any laws that is leading to the heartbreaking separations you’ve been reading about.

So that is what is happening.

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‘Enforcing the Law’ Doesn’t Justify Separating Migrant Children from their Parents 9

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties

By Ilya Somin

Reason

The Trump administration recently adopted a “zero tolerance” policy under which undocumented immigrants apprehended by federal officials are forcibly separated from their children. In April and May alone, almost 2000 children were torn from their parents and detained separately, often under cruel conditions likely to cause trauma and inflict longterm developmental damage. Attorney General Jeff Sessions claims that separation of families is justified by the need to enforce the law, and even asserts that the administration’s policy is supported by the Bible. I will leave the Biblical issues to theologians and cardinals, who have addressed them far better than I could. But Sessions’ secular argument is no better than his religious one. There is no law requiring family separation at the border. And even if there was, that still would not be enough to justify the administration’s cruel policy.

The federal law criminalizing “improper entry” by aliens does not require family separation. The law also provides for the use of civil penalties, as well as criminal ones. While it states that the application of civil penalties does not preclude application of criminal ones, it also does not compel federal prosecutors to pursue both. Until the administration’s recent policy change, civil proceedings were in fact the usual approach in case of families with minor children, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The use of civil proceedings generally does not require pretrial detention, and therefore obviates the need to detain either parents or children; some civil defendants were detained, nonetheless, but in facilities where families can stay together. The Trump administration, by contrast, has sometimes even forcibly separated children from migrants who have not violated any law, but instead have legally crossed the border to petition for asylum in the United States.

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Trevor Noah thinks Kim Kardashian would make a better president than Donald Trump 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Uncategorized

Kanye and Kim 2024. Make it happen.

By Eileen Rivers

USA Today

Is America going to cheer for Kim Kardashian for president in 2020?

After the Keeping up with the Kardashians reality TV star took a photo with another reality TV star in the Oval Office, late-night comic Trevor Noah couldn’t help but think about who appeared more presidential. His conclusion? The Kardashian beat the Donald.

Kardashian met with President Trump at the White House this week to talk about prison reform and to request that the president pardon Alice Marie Johnson, a great-grandmother in her 60s who was sentenced to life after a first-time nonviolent drug offense.

Noah also takes a look at various Oval Office photos and deems several others more presidential than Trump. Take a look at today’s Best of Late Night, above, to find out who they are.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t ready to accept that the meeting between Kardashian and Trump actually happened. He’s wondering if we’ve all been Ambiened.

Take a look at our favorite jokes from last night’s late-night lineup, then vote for yours in the poll below.

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Image result for kim and kanye 2024

Image result for kim and kanye 2024

Revisiting a Transformational Speech: The Culture War Scorecard Reply

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

Michael Barone assesses the state of the culture war 26 years after Pat Buchanan’s famous speech at the 1992 Republican convention where the term “culture war” entered public discourse. I tend to concur with Barone’s analysis. The Left has won on sexual and religious issues, and for the most part on abortion (with some exceptions). But the Right has done better on guns, welfare, education and crime.

By Michael Barone

The American Conservative

On Monday, August 17, 1992, Patrick Buchanan took the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan had run against incumbent President George H. W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination and in the first primary, in New Hampshire in February, had won 37 percent of the vote to Bush’s 53 percent. That turned out to be Buchanan’s high point: overall he won just 23 percent of primary votes to Bush’s 73 percent, and under Republicans’ winner-take-all delegate allocation rules he had only a handful of delegates at the convention—the official roll call credited him with just 18. In contrast, the last challenger of an incumbent Democratic president, Edward Kennedy, held the loyalty of about 40 percent of the delegates at the party’s 1980 national convention.

Buchanan, unlike Kennedy, warmly endorsed the president who defeated him. He credited Ronald Reagan, not Bush, with “leading America to victory in the Cold War,” but noted that “under President George Bush more human beings escaped from the prison house of tyranny to freedom than in any other four-year period in history.” But he had little else to say about foreign policy. And on the economy—thought then to be in a recession which, the official arbiters ruled later, had bottomed out in March 1991—Buchanan was emphatically downbeat, devoting long stretches of his speech to people he’d met on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Georgia, and California who were terrified of losing their jobs. This was hardly helpful to an incumbent seeking a second term.

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How the Internet Has Created a Swamp of Very Loud Sheep Reply

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

Losers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose because you’re already losers.

By Ann Sterzinger

If you’re a digital native, you probably have no idea what genuine loneliness is. Before you get off my lawn, let me finesse that (oh, god, Ann, finessing anything on the Internet is always your first mistake): back during the analog age, if you were a freak or a weirdo, you were a freak or a weirdo. Period. That was it. No way out. No online community of equally gothy souls. Even if you went to some big nice suburban high school, you weren’t going to do much better than being Duckie from Pretty in Pink.

The downside of this is that you were sad.

The upside of this is that you learned to live with the various feelings you get when no one else will back up or even understand your thoughts and opinions.

Weirdos got used to being weirdos. And after a while, we liked it. When we finally escaped home and found the other oddballs in a slightly larger town, we tended to cobble punk rock scenes or the like out of whomever happened to be in the immediate area. Which meant that restricting your social life to people with your own politics or taste or thoughts was fucking impossible; you settled for hanging out with anyone who thought anything at all instead of shuffling through life like quiet sheep.

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