A lot of people on the liberal/left end of the spectrum have to psychologically assume the role of the “permanent victim” because their whole worldview involves fighting “oppression” or “social injustice” so there always has to be oppression or social injustice for them to fight. Therefore, 11 white nationalists in the army suddenly means the Fourth Reich is just around the corner.
Actually, liberals have won virtually every social or cultural issue of the last 50 years: civil rights, feminism, gay rights, abortion rights, abolishing the draft, 18-year-olds voting. The demography of the US is becoming more diverse. Institutions are becoming more integrated (the military is the most integrated institution of all except maybe prison). Organized religion is losing its influence. The transgender movement is growing. Weed is being legalized in more and more places. Support for social democratic economic policies is rising. Environmentalism is popular. Overt racism is socially unacceptable. The sexual revolution has become the norm. Republicans have lost the popular vote in every election in the past quarter century except 2004. Antiwar sentiment is high. The political left has taken over universities. Most of the media trends left of center.
I’m not going to lie to you, dearest motherfuckers. My life is kind of a dumpster fire right now. In fact, it’s been kind of a dumpster fire for the last few years. Even aside from my clinical crosses to bare: anxiety, depression, OCD, ADD, IBS, Lyme disease, dysphoria, bubonic plague, etc: The last few years have felt like a Macy’s Day Parade of Ballardian car crashes. My grandmother gets dementia and has to be moved through fifty different fucking homes because none of them can be bothered to treat her like a goddamn human being unless their paid in speed boats. My cat and loyal companion of nearly twenty years loses both thyroids, shits everywhere and slowly dies on me. Then my best humanoid friend since high school up and moves to a different goddamn continent. Then my father gets run over by a sleep deprived paper-man and finds out he has cancer in the emergency room. Then some sick fuck shoots a geezer and blows his brains out next door to my loony Nana’s latest nursing home. Then the cops murder another friend in cold blood for being autistic while black. And then and then and then and then…. More…
A great takedown of the old guard Communist parties AND the First World Left by Unruhe. The one thing I disagree with Unruhe on is that I don’t consider the old guard Commies to be moving toward fascism, much less “third positionism,” but toward bourgeois nationalism (in fact, they’ve already been there for a long time, with Putin and Xi being the most obvious examples). And the critique of the embrace of academic leftists gender studies ideology by Western Maoists is spot on as well.
These are the days, dearest motherfuckers. These are those days. These days. These days of rage. These do or die days. These all or nothing days. These days with the ice caps melting and the seas rising to drown their wayward children. These days with the empire collapsing all around us in heaps of flames like the glowing red spires of a thousand Notre Damme’s. Days of hysteria and blindness. Days of gnashing teeth and talking heads decapitated from the reality they pontificate upon. Days of drones strikes and indefinite detention. The end of days for the worlds most abominable superpower, exit stage right. But the actors in this epic tragedy are revolting. Swing low, sweet cherry, Helter Skelter is coming down with a fight. Nero’s finale is rapidly becoming a concerto. In days like these, truth has become a precious commodity. The kind of glimmering prize that even the better angels of our nature are tempted to horde. But sadly sometimes even horded prizes can be taken for granite. Washed away in the rapids of filth that can only be called “truth” in parentheses.
Former Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein returns to PRIMO NUTMEG to discuss a plethora of controversial subjects. Dr. Stein answers questions about Venezuela, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, third-party politics, the corporate media’s RussiaGate smears against her, the details of her appearance with Vladimir Putin at the 2015 RT dinner in Moscow, the Green New Deal, cancelling student loan debt, and whether or not she is running for President in 2020.
An immensely important new paper by Canadian academic Denis Rancourt on how on how “left-wing” ideas have been co-opted by neoliberal capitalism and incorporated into the ruling class ideological superstructure.
The report is entitled “Geo-Economics and Geo-Politics Drive Successive Eras of Predatory Globalization and Social Engineering: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as State doctrines.”
The Introduction / Abstract reads as follows:
The influence of geopolitical and global economic
conditions on the fabric of domestic societies and on individual
psychology is most frequently underestimated by civilian commentators,
especially regarding Western “free and democratic” societies. The
military, on the other hand, do not underestimate the importance of
broad trade and economic factors on the very fabric of a society and on
the psychology of its citizens, at least in targeted developing
countries.
This article has two main goals.
The first is to demonstrate the large extent to which the global
financial system determines national and regional reality in people’s
lives and security, including in the USA itself and in the Western world
in general, with an emphasis on the two main post-World-War-II
transformations, which were initiated in 1971, following the
cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement, and in 1991, following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The second is to describe the on-going tectonic shift that followed
the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union in broader terms than is
usually envisioned, and how this driven and coordinated shift was
chronologically accompanied by: a dramatic acceleration of trade and
finance “globalization”, and an unprecedented campaign of social
engineering of the Western uppermiddle-classes, aimed at facilitating
USA and world-elite opportunistic exploitation of the new global
circumstances, in turn leading to the present Gilets jaunes, Brexit,
Trump… backlash. (In a sense, “the Russians did it.”)
California man sentenced to 20 years in fatal “swatting”, calling the cops is always a bad idea, New Zealand democracy turns against itself, perceptions of risk, New Zealand gang leaders refuse to turn in guns, Hell’s Angels and street gangs vow to defend mosques in New Zealand, Kentucky governor signs bill outlawing sex between people and animals, lawmakers introduce bill to make Puerto Rico a state, man steals $122 from Facebook and Google by sending random bills, 1 in 4 young Americans didn’t have sex last year-record high, don’t blame the teenagers, Facebook to ban white nationalism and separatism, YouTube radicalization and the rabbit hole, apparently Beijing is the world’s food delivery empire, age checks to watch online porn in the UK, synthetic alcohol without the dangers?
Retired Florida cop punches old lady in the face over a parking spot, Florida woman accused of shoplifting and masturbating in front of teen on way to jail, why are there so many wild crime stories in Florida? The hidden costs of drug prohibition, nearly half of Americans have a close family member that has been incarcerated, the normalization of jail, 61% of Americans want weed to be legalized, New Zealanders have surrendered 37 out of 1.2 million private firearms since the Mosque shooting, Russia investigation concluded, Italy bans unvaccinated children from schools, artificial meat: UK scientists growing ‘bacon’ in labs, killing some chickens, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard, how the National Enquirer got Bezos’ texts: it paid $200,000 to his lover’s brother.
This is a fairly low-brow article from a mainstream “conservative movement” site (as opposed to high-brow conservatives like the H.L. Mencken Club or The American Conservative). It’s interesting how these types think that somehow “conservatism” is going to make some big comeback even as the Left is winning or gaining ground on virtually every issue, certainly every social and cultural issue. Gen Z is no more going to embrace a return to Reaganite “fusionism” than they’re going to embrace rotary dial telephones. But the point this article makes about the “Oppression Olympics” is on point.
The ATS philosophy of freely associating voluntary “tribes” and decentralized local communities offers an alternative to the conventional right-wing, the statist orientation of most of the Left, the “culture war” paradigm and to the “Oppression Olympics.”
By Rachel Alexander
Townhall
As the left becomes
more intolerant, its various factions are encountering more conflict
with each other. Black Lives Matter and other minorities create “spaces”
where white people aren’t allowed — which exclude sympathetic white
liberals. Transgenders and feminists get into vicious fights over whether transwomen are really women. Radical immigration groups crash
LGBT marches. Feminists on college campuses broadly paint male co-eds
as rapists — even liberal men. Comedians who routinely mock
conservatives are finding themselves chased away from college campuses by snowflakes who don’t like their LGBT and race jokes. Bernie Sanders’ supporters are investigating the mysterious death of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, while Hillary Clinton supporters ridicule them as conspiracy theorists.
The left’s dominant factions are even more likely to run into
conflicts with each other as a result of the left taking over much of
society. Since conservatives are increasingly blocked out of areas like
education, the left is free to run rampant. For example, there is no
longer a debate over whether to teach children encouraging messages
about being LGBT in school. Instead, the debate is whether to include
transvestites, polygamists and more controversial aspects of gender and
sexuality in the discussion. CARTOONS | Henry Payne View Cartoon
White liberal professors are finding themselves under siege in upper academia. Michael Rectenwald, a professor at NYU, said in February that he was leaving the left after becoming fed up with the snowflakes, trigger warnings, safe spaces and other hostile behavior he was subjected to. He explained on Facebook, “today’s ‘Left’ is rife with the most obscene, abusive, nasty, spiritually ugly and utterly unethical, hypocritical and fanatically horrible people I’ve ever encountered in my 58 years on earth.”
Given that Trumpism seems to represent dying WASP America’s last stand, I think it is pretty safe to say that we are now moving into a time where the circle of neocons, right-libertarians, exiled social democrats, frustrated centrists, heterodox academics around Dave Rubin constitute the far right, the Clinton/Biden corporate liberals constitute conservatism, the Sanders/AOC progressives constitute liberalism, and the SJWs/Antifa constitute the far left. I guess that would make ATS the far, far left or “ultra-left.”
It is true that the neoconservative/neoliberal/deep state/power
elite ruling class doesn’t like populists. Not Trump from the right or
AOC from the left. They’ve mostly been able to co-opt or at least
control Trump, who was always (at best) a hit and miss anyway. They seem
to promote AOC as an acceptable “celebrity leftist” (probably because
she’s also anti-Trump and doesn’t talk much about foreign policy, and
her message isn’t immediately threatening to
basic ruling class interests) while attacking her at the same time, as
opposed to Tulsi whom they try to sweep under the rug and Omar whom
they’re totally flipping out over. But ultimately the political class
itself is a problem and anyone who enters the state should automatically
be viewed with suspicion.
Here’s the basic deal: They can co-opt or control anyone who goes along with the general foreign policy and state/corporatist paradigm, but someone who steps out of that box like Tulsi Gabbard is a real threat, particularly if they are Israel-critical, like Ilhan Omar. In which case, they will immediately move against such an individual.
They
can concede free colleges, single-payer healthcare, transgender
restrooms, gay marriage, etc. None of that threatens ruling class power
itself. The EU countries have all that and the European ruling classes
get by just fine. It may even be helpful as it is a means of expanding
the state while co-opting new constituencies and paying off politically
connected private interests. I’m sure there are lots of capitalist
interests looking to get in on AOC’s Green New Deal. But attacking the
empire itself is a big no-no as would be a genuinely radical domestic
policy (like abolishing intellectual property law, free banking, or
repealing laws of incorporation).
For decades, I have considered Democratic Party neoliberals to be the future conservatives, and SJW leftists to be the future liberals, and that seems to be finally coming into fruition nowadays. What ATS has always been intended to be is a blueprint for a far left anarchist movement that’s so far left that is crosses over with the right (horseshoe theory and all that) on issues that are or ought to be within the anarchist paradigm but are rejected by many liberals and leftists (right to bear arms/self defense, anti-Zionism, freedom of association, anti-PC/free speech, secession, authentic economic freedom, etc) plus authentic anti-imperialism and class struggle so that an-coms and sovereign citizens end up under the same umbrella.
Regarding your piece today on the First World Left (as well as the Truthout article you shared re: Ilhan Omar), one silver lining to the ascendance of progressives — whatever their many fundamental shortcomings, as you rightly note — is the current opening up of dialogue surrounding (previously unquestioned) bipartisan support for Israel. Something that was long-verboten a few months ago has suddenly been forced into mainstream discussion.
From what I’ve seen just hopping around online, this is indeed a huge rift that’s developing within the Democratic Party. I see progressives shocked at and creeped out by the Democratic establishment’s thuggish attempt to silence dissent, with some clearly beginning to regard them not simply as a stodgy old guard to be dragged into becoming more progressive, but as just as monstrous as the Republicans. This is purely anecdotal of course, but I’ve seen some ostensibly progressive commenters use words like psychotic and evil to describe them.
Irrespective of anything else that may happen, this seems like an important development, and something that perhaps had to come from the Left. It’s easy to dismiss paleocons and far right figures as anti-Semites (especially since some of them obviously are); it’s a lot harder to get away with the same accusations here. I imagine this will ultimately combine with the growing sentiment to throw Saudi Arabia under the bus as well. It’s only natural after all, if they are indeed serious about opposing authoritarian, right-wing governments as a matter of foreign policy.
Studying the demise of historic civilisations can tell us how much risk we face today, says collapse expert Luke Kemp. Worryingly, the signs are worsening.
Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.
DEEP CIVILISATION
This article is part of a new BBC Future series about the long view of humanity, which aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote.
That’s why the Deep Civilisation season will explore what really matters in the broader arc of human history and what it means for us and our descendants.
So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations. More…
ATS friend Antony Sammeroff will be debating Presidential candidate Andrew Yang on the question of the UBI in New York City on September 19. Tickets available here.
Andrew Yang is running for president in 2020 and believes the only solution to the speeding onset of Automation and AI is a Universal Basic Income. Antony Sammeroff examines his ideas in episode 123 of the Scottish Liberty Podcast. Listen here.
Monday, September 9, 2019
Andrew Yang vs. Antony Sammeroff
Resolution:
Robotics will soon lead to widespread joblessness and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
A reader offers the following observations on Tulsi Gabbard, the crime of retroactive wrongthink, and liberal imperialism.
As someone who grew up deeply enmeshed in the Fox News Republican / “Christian conservative” milieu of the 90s/00s — and who then doubled down on the belief in war and American hegemony as a solution to the world’s problems as an explicit, self-described neocon in my mid-teens (I read Irving Kristol, Douglas Murray, Robert Kagan, etc.) — there are few (maybe no) things in contemporary American politics more disappointing to me than the lack of a principled anti-war left.
Imagine my dismay as I slowly realized over the course of Obama’s first term — as a newly-minted libertarian/anarchist, now strongly anti-war — that the idealistic, wimpy peacenik Left I had heard so much about and made fun of as a little Republican shit, didn’t really exist in America anymore, and that the anti-war protests I remembered from the Bush years were basically its last gasps of relevancy in the American political scene.
Everything since then (from Obama, etc.) has been lip-service to an inherited legacy they no longer deserve to be associated with.
Of the current crop of 2020 Dem candidates, it’s nice to hear Sanders speaking out against intervention in Venezuela (bringing up the history of American intervention in Latin America during the CNN town hall recently) or to speak out against America’s support of the Saudi regime’s war in Yemen. But can we really trust Sanders not to buckle if he were to become President, like Obama (and now Trump) before him?
And the one candidate who actually makes a less interventionist (not even completely non-interventionist) foreign policy a central plank of her campaign platform, Gabbard, faces either media criticism or blackout for those views (from the establishment Left) — or, perhaps even more crippling to her chances — absolute hatred and disavowal over anti-LGBT baggage from her past — such as her support for conversion therapy, and her calling civil union (not even gay marriage) advocates “homosexual extremists”.
Despite Gabbard’s views changing since then, it is telling that that cannot be forgiven (despite her totally reasonable excuse that she grew up in a very socially conservative household and, several steps further, was the daughter of a loony family values-type activist father). Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton style warmongering is not even something that needs to be forgiven or given much thought at all; in fact, liberal interventionism is now the default, respectable position of the Democratic mainstream.
Anyway. It’s a real shame. And it makes me sad.
Maybe something unexpected will happen once the debates start, and war will end up becoming a central question of the race as a whole (similar to how Trump essentially forced the topic of illegal immigration into center focus for the 2016 Republican primaries, which then forced the other candidates to either differentiate themselves from Trump’s anti-immigrant positions, or become more Trump-like themselves on that issue). I’m not going to hold my breath though.
A growing number of
Americans are becoming aware of the destructive influence of the Israeli
and Saudi lobby in the United States, which has led to anti-Muslim
sentiment in some sectors of the country, an American analyst in
Virginia says.
“More and more people in the United States are becoming increasingly
critical of American foreign policy and these policies involving
constant wars to overthrow the governments of other countries,” said
Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.
“Also, more and more Americans are becoming aware of the role that
the Israeli lobby has over American foreign policy and over the American
government … and more people are becoming aware of the influence that
the Saudi Arabians have over the American government, particularly after
the murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” Preston told Press TV on Sunday.
“So what seems to be happening is that there are various elements in
the United States that are aligned with Israel and that are aligned with
Saudi Arabia and ironically they’re trying to fan the flames of
anti-Muslim sentiment to justify the kind of imperialist foreign policy
paradigm that the United State has traditionally adhered to,” he added.
US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has condemned Republicans for linking her
to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, saying it’s “no wonder”
she is on the “hit list” of a domestic terrorist.
Recently, a poster linking the Muslim lawmaker to the 9/11 attack was
reportedly hung in West Virginia’s state legislature by Republican
lawmakers.
Omar, is a Democrat member of the US House of Representatives who
represents Minnesota’s 5th congressional district in the lower chamber
of Congress. Along with Rashida Tlaib, she was one of the first two
Muslim women elected to the lower chamber of Congress and the first
woman of color elected from Minnesota.
Some pro-Israel US politicians have accused Omar of anti-Semitic
comments because she has been a staunch critic of Israel and its
anti-Muslim policies in the Middle East. She has also repeatedly slammed
the main Israeli lobby in the US, the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee.
Speaking on Wednesday night at an event in Washington, DC with fellow
Muslim Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Omar dismissed
anti-Semitic charges against her, saying everything they say about
Israel is interpreted as anti-Semitic because they are Muslim.
U.S. cancels large scale military exercises in South Korea, Trump’s defense of Kim Jong Un leads to discord with parents of Otto Warmbier, the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath, federal lawsuit takes aim at Nevada’s brothels, lawmakers push to legalize prostitution in New York, federal officials won’t pursue charges against cop who shot unarmed black man, 200 empires have come and gone in world history the US will be the same, the United City-States of America, man delivering food arrested after dipping his testicles in salsa over low tip, Florida man threw old toilet through window of school board building in East St. Louis, lobbying powerhouse Ron Book charged with DUI after Lamborghini crash, Starbucks’ music is driving employees nuts, nudists plan roller-coaster world record attempt, person shot after stealing a leaf blower, Walmart Is eliminating greeters and so workers with disabilities feel targeted.
It was in late 1998/early 1999 that “American Revolutionary Vanguard” was founded by a small coalition of left-wing and right-wing anarchists, plus assorted others, for the purpose of moving past the standard left/right paradigm and toward a more radical position. In the Spring of 1999 we started a local public access TV show that ran for about three years and subsequently started Attack the System in early 2001. The following three articles date back to the early years of ATS and summarize the ATS “philosophy” as thoroughly as anything I have ever written.
The first article was written circa 2000/2001 during the peak of the anti-globalization movement. The other two were written circa 2003/2004 following the beginning of the Iraq War. While some of the content may be slightly dated, these core ideas remain the foundation of our outlook.
It is interesting to reconsider these old essays in light of things that have happened in subsequent years.
Orania is a South African Afrikaner commune that is economically self-sufficient and has no police or prisons. Predictably, they are attacked by the Left with the usual “racist” and “fascist” labels.
But if racists want to escape a non-racist society, they should go for it, just as if communists want to escape a capitalist society, they should do so. One of the biggest points of contention that I have with most conventional leftists, including apparently left-anarchists, is over the issue of freedom of association. Freedom of association means the right to associate in a racist way, a communist way, an atheist way, a religious way, etc. It means the right to exclude redheads, meat eaters, television watchers, short people, or rock music fans. It means everyone involved can be required to be gay or required to use drugs.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political analyst described US efforts to send the “so-called humanitarian aid” to Venezuela as a pretext to conduct regime change in the Latin American country, calling on Washington to help Yemenis and Palestinians instead.
“The US claim of wanting to provide humanitarian aid to Venezuela is simply a pretext for efforts to engage in the domestic subversion of the country in order to sponsor regime change. Claims of wanting to provide humanitarian assistance cannot be taken seriously. At present, there are many humanitarian crises around the world that the US has either largely ignored, or has provided assistance to states that are responsible for carrying out humanitarian catastrophes such as the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen or Israel’s war against the Palestinians,” Keith Preston, the chief editor and director of attackthesystem.com, told Tasnim.
