Saager nails it in this. Fortunately, I am neither a “cultural conservative” nor a “cultural progressive” so I don’t need to care about all this Supreme Court stuff.
Category Archives: Culture Wars/Current Controversies
INSANE First Day Voting Lines As Polls Show Voters Hardening Reply
This is funny. Brainwashed idiots taking the state’s coronation ceremony seriously.
Crisis Triggered By RBG Death Reveals DEEP POLITICAL ROT At Heart Of US System 1
The system keeps falling apart.
A Radical Alternative to Whiteness Reply
By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
Is it just me or do white people kind of suck lately? I mean more than usual. That’s not racist, I use to be one. I sort of still am, I guess. More on that later. It kind of seems like white folk have fallen into two equally obnoxious sub-species. There’s the White Alpha Douche, bitching like a 13 year old emo kid that he’s the real victim because everybody else is playing the fucking victim card and that’s his card. Then there’s the equally tiresome Squishy White Apology Addict, who’s just terribly terribly sorry about all the savagery his ancestors have dished out to minorities, but now he looks to the Noble Savages and Magical Negroes to show him how to walk and talk and censor people like me for not stepping in line. He’s probably banning me again from Facebook as we speak for self-identifying as a tranny and patting himself on the back for being part of the solution.
Both of these unbearable archetypes are offensively one dimensional and, lets face it, downright racist in their shallow world view. The first one blames all the world’s woes on people of color, and the second relies completely on this same coalition of minorities to save him from his ancestral evil ways. Black folks have enough trouble getting home from the grocery store without getting shot full of ketamine and chucked in the back of a police cruiser without having to choose between smacking us or holding our hand. Why can’t we just get our shit together? Well, believe it or not, it’s not all our fault. Not exactly anyway.
The Lockdown and the Power Elite Reply
Todd Lewis is joined by Keith Preston, Swithun Dobson and Terminal Philosophy to discuss what the lockdowns tell us about the nature and power of the Western Elites.
Understanding the Multifaceted Far-Right Movement 1
A pretty good overview fo the state of the far-right from a far-left perspective.
WORT Community Radio
The far-right movement isn’t monolithic—it’s a complex spectrum of organizations and ideologies. To help us break it down, today Allen is joined by Matthew N. Lyons, co-author of the landmark book Right-Wing Populism in America, to discuss the evolution of rightist trends and the rise of fascism in the U.S.
With the help of listener callers, they discuss white nationalism, the far right’s relationship to the Constitution, the politics that paved the way for Trump, the meaning of fascism, and the interplay between right-wing movements and systems of oppression.
Matthew N. Lyons is a writer and longtime observer of right-wing politics. He is the author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire (PM Press, 2018) and co-author with Chip Berlet of Right-Wing Populism in America (Guilford Press, 2000). He writes regularly for the radical antifascist blog Three Way Fight.
The Dystopian Age of the Mask Reply
How Ernst Jünger predicted the ubiquity of masks.
By Thomas Crew
The Critic
Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has Alphas, Betas, and Epsilon Semi-Morons – genetically engineered classes with uniform clothing and uniform opinions. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) has the Thought Police and Newspeak. While Zamyatin’s We (1921) has numbers instead of people – D-503, I-330, O-90: vowels for females, consonants for males.
If there is a single defining characteristic of dystopian literature, it is the eradication of all individuality. “Self-consciousness”, Zamyatin writes, “is just a disease”. For this reason, dystopias are invariably told by tormented outsiders: those who are well aware of the commodity-like standardisation of their fellow humans, yet either fear the consequences of speaking out or resent their own sense of self. After all, “no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour”, as Huxley writes.
Given their tyrannical preoccupation with uniformity, it is little wonder that, as a literary form, dystopias emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. The totalitarian regimes of Russia and Germany as well as their technocratic Western counterparts, inspired by the likes of F. W. Taylor and Henry Ford, were central sources of inspiration. For all their apparent differences, these competing ideologies are united by the utopian attempt to redraw not just society, but the human being himself. The increasing power of science and technology gave rise to the idea that nature itself, in all its messy complexity, could be finally put straight.
Besides these three canonical authors, however, this generation produced another equally impressive, if much less well known, dystopian writer: the enigmatic German, Ernst Jünger. Known primarily for his First World War diaries and steadfast opposition to Weimar liberalism, Jünger went on to live until the age of 103, writing on topics from entomology and psychedelics to nihilism and photography. In the second half of his career he produced three principal works of dystopian fiction: Heliopolis (1949), Eumeswil (1977), and, perhaps his finest, The Glass Bees (1957).
What Would a Contested Election Look Like? 1
It’s Going Down
There is a growing consensus across mainstream political and media circles that Trump will contest the upcoming 2020 election and throw the United States into a Constitutional – and potentially violent crisis – in order to hold on to power.
But what does this potential chaos mean for working-class and poor communities? While non-profits and organizations tied to the Democratic Party are already organizing, what do everyday people do in the face of such uncertainty? The following editorial offers some ideas as to what we may expect to see play out over the coming weeks and months.
It has become increasingly clear, even to the ruling elite, that the November election will present the American political system with its most serious crisis in well over a century. The choices presented―Donald Trump and his fascist clique versus right-wing neoliberal Joe Biden―offer essentially nothing to either autonomous social movements or the working-class caught up in the hellscape that is 2020. Nevertheless, this spat between two factions of billionaires threatens to devolve into a blood feud. In this environment, people must be organized to keep themselves and their communities safe from both the looming threat of dictatorship and paramilitary violence.
What Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Death Means for America 1
The tribal civil war is about to intensify. Btw, if anyone thinks Old Hag Ruthie was a friend of freedom, liberty, rights, etc, then check out the Bennis v. Michigan case.
By Russell Berman
The Atlantic
A furious battle over a Supreme Court vacancy is arguably the last thing the United States needs right now.
The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today represents a devastating loss for feminists who held up the 87-year-old as an icon of women’s rights, and as a bulwark protecting abortion rights and a wide range of other progressive ideals on a conservative Supreme Court. The Brooklyn-born jurist became one of the nation’s foremost advocates against gender discrimination as a lawyer for the ACLU, decades before President Bill Clinton appointed her to be the second woman to sit on the high court.
But her passing less than two months before the presidential election also tosses one more lit match into the tinderbox of national politics in 2020: It will surely inflame a deeply polarized country already riven by a deadly pandemic, a steep economic downturn, and civil unrest in its major cities.
Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Wife Reportedly Called 911 About ‘A Lot of Blood’ on Husband amid Sex Scandal Reply
That Jerry. Still the same party animal he was 40 years ago. You haven’t seen wild living until you’ve been an evangelical.
People
Becki Falwell reportedly told police that her husband Jerry Falwell Jr. said he fell down the stairs and was bleeding “a lot.”
Why Biden May Win 1
By Paul Gottfried
Intellectual Takeout
Last week the Cotto-Gottfried podcast interviewed New York financier and widely read blogger Adam Townsend. He strongly believes Biden will win the presidential race.
Townsend did not seem to relish his analysis and kept returning to this desperate defense of the president: “For all his faults, only Trump will take on the mega-corporations.” Nonetheless, he presented the following reason for why Biden’s side would triumph on election day.
For starters, attempts by the Trump campaign to stress the personal and moral weaknesses of the Democratic presidential candidate will not get them a win. That’s because Biden’s political fortunes do not depend on what he says or doesn’t say, but on the reach of those who have spent the last three-and-a-half years working to drive Trump from office.
It makes no difference in terms of Biden’s electability, according to Townsend, whether the Democratic candidate stays in his basement bunker or ventures into the political arena. So far it hasn’t hurt Biden that he makes one verbal gaffe after the other in carefully orchestrated non-interviews, or that he makes up his “facts” about any subject he addresses in his limited public appearances.
The Ruling Class Strikes Back Reply
I disagree with aspects of the ideological flavor reflected in this article. But its core thesis seems to be cogent enough. A multi-dimensional insurrection (consisting of distinct but overlapping sectors such as the lumpenproletariat, middle-class radicals, ordinary hooligans, the far left, and sectors of the far right) is being co-opted by the state and the ruling class, which fears an insurgency by the nationalist right and the authentically anti-capitalist left to an even greater degree.
By Pedro Gonzalez
American Greatness
There is no proletarian,” wrote Oswald Spengler, “not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money―and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.” What the German prophet of pessimism meant was that revolutions generally boil down to the whip passing from one hand to another equally or even more eager to exercise the lash.
The idealists tend to be blind to this and serve their new masters just as well as the ones they endeavor to throw off.
Three Ways Trump Is To The Left Of Joe Biden Reply
Kim is always refreshingly independent.
Breaking Hate: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism 3
An ex-skinhead discusses how to combat “hate.” While most if not all “far-right” groups would fail to create a better society than the one we have now, a problem with the “anti-hate” outlook is that it is only focused on illiberal forms of “hate.” Left-wing extremism, no matter how malevolent, is typically not considered to be “hate” by the anti-haters. Even worse, supporting the establishment is not considered “hate.” Notice that this book even receives the endorsement of Iraq War fraudster and surveillance state apologist James Clapper.
From a onetime white-supremacist leader now working to disengage people from extremist movements, Breaking Hate is a “riveting” (James Clapper), “groundbreaking” (Malcolm Nance), “horrifying [but] hopeful” (S.E. Cupp) exploration of how to heal a nation reeling from hate and violence.
University of Wisconsin graduate student resigns from teaching role, admits she falsely claimed Black identity Reply
Transracialism is apparently becoming a thing. So be it.
By Kaelan Deese
The Hill
A University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) graduate student resigned from a teaching position after they admitted on social media to falsely claiming to be a person of color.
CV Vitolo-Haddad apologized for the claims in two posts on the writer platform Medium last week and and said that they were leaving their post as co-president of the university’s Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA), according to CNN.
“So deeply sorry for the ways you are hurting right now because of me,” Vitolo-Haddad said in a post Sept. 6. “I have let guesses about my ancestry become answers I wanted but couldn’t prove. I have let people make assumptions when I should have corrected them.”
Vitolo-Haddad published a second post on Sept. 11, stating they were of southern Italian/Sicilian heritage.
“It was my choice and error to identify any differently,” they wrote.
Militias Defending the System? Reply
These folks who travel from city to city for the purpose of escalating left/right conflict need to stay at home and mind their own business. If all of the different political factions worked toward the purpose of turning their local communities into their ideal model of a startup society, then they would have something. Naturally, places like Portland and Seattle will have a more “left-wing” orientation just as rural counties would presumably have a more “right-wing” orientation (with suburbs being the center?). Unfortunately, too many people are ignorant enough of history that they do not understand that tribal warfare is always a dead end. But they’re Americans, so I suppose we should expect some handicaps in this area.
The Cuties Controversy in Focus 4
Breaking Down Controversy On Whether Netflix ‘Cuties’ Hypersexualizes Young Children Reply
Trump Says He Will ‘Negotiate’ Third Term Because He’s ‘Entitled’ To It Reply
The true power elite is likely to say otherwise. Trump’s ego notwithstanding, US presidents are merely managers, not dictators.
By Andrew Solender
Forbes
President Trump said Saturday that he plans to “negotiate” to run again in 2024 if he wins reelection in November, his latest in a series of comments that have alarmed critics who say he has little regard for constitutional boundaries.
Billionaires and the Far Left Are Trying to Create a New Soviet Union Reply
The Soviet analogy really isn’t appropriate. Neoliberals are proponents of globalized technocratic state-capitalism, which uses feminism and multiculturalism to meet its human resources needs and construct a self-legitimating ideology. That has nothing to do with Communism.
The Coming Crisis of Legitimacy Reply
By Yascha Mounk
The Atlantic
In normal times, it would seem outlandish to worry that an American president might refuse to concede defeat upon losing his bid for reelection. This year it is not. Even though he won in 2016, Donald Trump falsely claimed that he was the victim of voter fraud. And when he sat down for an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace this July, he said: “I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.”
Visibly alarmed, Wallace asked whether Trump would accept the outcome of the election if he should lose.
“I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no. And I didn’t last time either,” Trump responded.
The prospect that Trump will lose but try to remain in office has spooked analysts. The question on their mind is how many Americans would go along with such a blatant attack on democratic institutions.
Is Black Lives Matter Marxist? No and Yes. 2
This is a fairly nuanced discussion of BLM from a right-libertarian perspective. The gist of the discussion is that it is necessary to distinguish between the BLM movement and the organization bearing its name.
By Brad Polumbo
Foundation for Economic Education
On Monday night, Terry Crews was grilled over his criticism of Black Lives Matter by CNN host Don Lemon. As Gina Bontempo pointed out on Twitter: “Don Lemon did everything he could to talk over Terry and silence him as soon as they started approaching what the BLM organization is *really* about.
So what is Black Lives Matter really about?
Many conservatives insist Black Lives Matter is a Marxist, anti-police, radical organization that wants to tear down America. Meanwhile, most liberals simply view Black Lives Matter as a heroic movement and powerful slogan signaling support for racial justice and opposition to police brutality.
Both are right. There is Black Lives Matter™️, and there is “black lives matter.”
