Foolish, dim-witted, cowardly and morally bankrupt

by **moustache** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 6:28 pm

There is a need for a modern day "John Steinbeck".... any suggestions ?

by **sunny** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 9:20 pm

AnnaLivia, fabulous article, excellent articulation of just why the hell we find ourselves here and on other forums. So true about us not talking to our neighbors, we come here to talk to others about the deep dark things we know are going on and are afraid to say to the people next door. That is really so sad, because we are going to have to talk to them for their own sakes, and for the sake of democracy, as the author pointed out. As for Bagaent, I filed that article away myself because it spoke so clearly of the people I know, folks who are all around me, and to a certain extent, myself. I don't give a damn if they/we scare off the liberal elite, they can just eat quiche. We're here, we're pissed, and someday, elites are gonna have to deal with us.

by **rapt** » Wed Nov 16, 2005 12:02 am

Joe Bageant is a good writer no doubt. But I agree that he is dissing his neighbors in an unhealthy way, mebbe perhaps to drag in those "liberals" from the city that he assumes can only relate to these country folk in a derogatory way. Here's the problem with doing it that way: Firstly it sets up a hierarchy in which the critics from afar are superior (in their outlook & ideology) to the subject, the supposed hicks. Bageant joins with his readership in belittling his subject. This can't work, no matter how sincere he is in his effort to helps those people. Us against them - doesn't that remind you of something sort of putrid? Secondly, and of course part-of-the-parcel with #1, is that when presented the way Bageant does it, the folks that he is attempting to help, or the subculture that he sees as disadvantaged, is placed in a category that they can't in all pride accept. So the result is - or may well turn out to be - that the target audience, the city folk, are entertained while the hillbilly folks up in the woods are unwillingly cast as the unenlightened, the dummies. Does this help? I don't think so. Sure Bageant to his credit advocates communicating with this blue-collar community, and coming to grips with their true needs, but he can't be serious when he suggests to urbanites that they make the effort to actually do this. None of them will, whether it is likely to help or not. So few are so selfless to make the effort, even if it is urged in upper-case text. So after all that we are left with an entertaining piece by a guy who knows how to write entertainingly, and that is all. Still wondering why Bageant stays in Winchester. Is it the air? The proximiity to Washington at a nice low rent?

by **banned** » Wed Nov 16, 2005 1:48 am

...but I'm from Cleveland and went to school for awhile in Southern Ohiya (Ohio ends about 40 miles south of Cleveland, then you enter 'Ohiya') and I got PTSD from culture shock. Do not let anyone tell you that there are not some seriously backward butt ignorant knuckle dragging ridge runners out there. Beer and oxycontin is a bad combo if you want to make any sense to anyone with an IQ over that which is the cut off point for putting handles on brooms at the Goodwill. On the other hand, I lived in a trailer park in rural Michigan for awhile and the people I met were wonderful, the salt of the earth, all wool and a yard wide, and any one of them was worth a Carnival Cruise boatload full of supercilious yuppie liberals. Never been to Winchester, but I've been moved several times to write Joe to tell him how much I enjoyed one of his articles. Say, did you know it's legal to eat your road kill in West Virginia? I mean, it was always legal but you used to have to tell the Highway Patrol first. Now you can eat it first and then tell them about it, presumably with a mini-review ("Well, the Medallions of Possum was piquant, with just a hint of antifreeze cuz the sucker busted my radiator to give it pizazz. We washed it down with a wine spritzer made of Night Train and the rest of the antifreeze. Compared quite favorably to the Ragout de Racoon I had on my last trip to Snow Hill Holler from Wheeling.")

by **sceneshifter** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 7:09 pm

this is good - this is an eyeopener - this is a clarifier - this is hopeful -

by **Floyd Smoots** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 7:23 pm

banned last was a real hoot. How in the world did tired old, beer-swilling Floyd MISS THIS most interesting and uplifting thread???.......hey threre, sceneshifter, how's it goin' bro'? i do believe that's the "shortest post" you've ever typed. cool.......Anna, LOVED your rant. Can't apologize enough for missing it for so long here on this thread.

by **Floyd Smoots** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 10:02 pm

The time listing of THIS post should tell you all that it is MUCH later, and I have been reading the substantive content of this whole thread. Here's my posit/question. Why don't ALL of us who actually RESIDE in these fifty untied states and, who actually own guns and have brains, email our Senators & Congresspersons and let them in on a "New" paradigm (Gee, I HATE that word)??? Here's the gist of it: Considering what happened in New Orleans, LA after hurricane Katrina, when "mercenaries" from Blackwater Security were "deputized" (WTF?) by FEMA to go house-to-house and unconstitutionally "confiscate" the legally-owned firearms of every householder in the "Emergency Disaster Zone" (see prisonplanet.com); WE THE PEOPLE Hereby Declare the following: We, The Registered/Voting, Tax-Paying, Home-Owning (or renting) citizens of THESE "UNITED" States, do formally vow, here and NOW, that if THIS kind of activity is attemped ANYWHERE ELSE in our beloved Nation, ANYWHERE in ANY City, County, or Parish from This Day Forward, WE WILL meet it with every Freedom-Loving "God Blessed" BULLET in our posession Until DEATH Do Us Part!!!!!!!! DO WE MAKE OURSELVES CLEAR HERE??? Did you get ALL of THAT, Spookboyz down at de NSA, CIA, FBI??? If you check my "dossier", which, at the bottom, used to say, "Mostly Harmless", you may now FEEL FREE to change it to, "MOSTLY PISSED"!!! And........THIS is from an old ex-Navy America-Loving PACIFIST who Once Held a God-Forsaken TOP SECRET, CRYPTO Clearance!!! WHAT A FRAGGIN' JOKE THAT WAS, "SPOOKBOYZ"!!!!!!!! I'd invite most of you "spies" to just kiss my ASS, but the problem there lies in the "suspected fact" that most of the males in "your" audience would JUMP AT THE CHANCE!!! If not you people personally, I KNOW that your "Commoner-In-Chief", and his "suck-pal", Karl Rove, WOULD!!!!!!!! FRAG-ALL-SPIES Floyd, and you already KNOW who I AM!!!

by **sceneshifter** » Sat Feb 11, 2006 10:25 pm

My two cents' worth Trying to gather all the threads in this thread together My take Americans are people, same as everywhere - Maybe the average IQ is a bit lower than some other places, because America opened its arms to the poor and downtrodden, the oppressed and impoverished, the religious extremists, the radicals, the ones who got suckered by the better brains in the old countries - I dont think anyone will quarrel with the theory that the poor have a slightly lower IQ than the rich exploiters, the more cunning thieves - People who got transported to America were the unsuccessful thieves - It was the successful thieves who transported them - Generally, the people of America are no more bloodthirsty, no more easily fooled than elsewhere - America has one handicap other countries dont have - And every nation would have the same handicap in the same circumstances - That is, being topdog leads to sitting on laurels, leads to selfcongratulation, complacency - Every people in the world will get more relaxed and laidback about working when they are topdog - Even the idealism that America had will contribute to the temptation to think that America and Americans are better - to think that prosperity has everything to do with quality of people and nothing to do with resources and nothing to do with ignoring the unprosperity - While the rest of the world is getting lean and mean and keen, trying to compete with the topdog, the topdog is going to be under the handicap of spending part of its time basking in the sweet glow of its topdoggery - Everybody's got egos, everybody's a sucker to some extent to flattery, to buy and pay for pleasant news about oneself, and not for bad news about self - Humanity hangs between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, between sweet dreams and maturity/realism Every topdog empire has plundered the world with sadism, with hypocrisy and selfdeception - [And every topdog nation has become the most attractive place for the world's poor, and the world's criminals - And the plunder has MADE the poverty and crime mentality that is most attracted to the richest country - Pity the conquerors! They make their enemies, and they make themselves 'most attractive nation' to their enemies - America being conquered by Sicily was predictable - The greatest wretchedness makes the toughest crims, who go where the pickings are best, and pick, pick, pick their way from bottom to top - the Mafia bigger than the 5 biggest corporations put together - conquering their way through the working class, the middle class and the superthief class] America ran away from tyranny and called where they arrived: freedom - But they didnt know the iron rule of freedom - Like all people everywhere, they said in their hearts: The landlords oppress the peasants, may I be a landlord, not a peasant - Being stolen from, conditioned them to stealing - Being robbed, they learned to rob in return, in revenge, in justice - A sense of justice spurred them on to a theft ethic - The Mafia were just the most extreme example of a pattern that was to poison the well of freedom in every American heart: The greater the having been stolen from, the stronger was forged the will to steal - Too many caught the disease - Too many sought their revenge for years and lifetimes of poverty and slavery and indignity in pursuit of riches, in pursuit of unlimited fortunes - Both wealth and poverty taught people to love wealth - So everyone climbed over everyone else to get to the top - Exacerbating wealth and poverty, tyranny and slavery - Making the crests and troughs of history further and further apart, the ride rougher and rougher and rougher for all - Making the power and corruption and sadism greater - Racing to revolution's repeated rough-handed, partial and temporary adjustment towards justice and fairpay to all - Racing to atomic war's much rougher, and not-to-be-repeated equality, the equality of the dead, the extinct human species - When you read of the fortunes made in Jamaican sugar, we should all read thieves - Stealing labour, stealing lives, stealing money from everyone, stealing peace from everyone - Some poor guy has to die in the slave rebellions - But we dont read thieves - The history books we are given do not teach 'Thief' - The history books defer to the ruling class, and avoid moral judgement - People work on average 50 hours a week, and no one can work more than 100 hours a week average longterm - So anyone with income more than double the average is definitely a thief - A thief of the national wealth, and a thief of the national peace and survival - None of the reasons for paying a higher-than-average hourly payrate stand up to scrutiny by good sense - And inequality of hourly payrate can only grow - Can only grow to greater and ever greater wealth and poverty [injustice, theft], and social disturbance, waste, grief and cost - And now, thanks to e=mc2, to a crescendo of atomic bombs, followed by an everlasting silence - A temperature drop 3 times more severe than an ice age - And just us chimanzee-brains to wake ourselves up and stop it - We think slavery is at an end - That is what we are taught - that is what our teachers, suffering from ignorance - ignore-ance - tell us, or let us think - Yes, a moral triumph, the end of slavery - Today, 90% of people are paid between a 10th and 1000th of the world average pay - 90% of people are full slaves - Can you wonder that the German people, with state terrorism, were fooled, when we are fooled without state terrorism? - The German rulers were responsible for the killing of 100,000 Germans who were brave enough to stand up to state terrorism, and then for killing 6 million people - But they believed [quite wrongly of course, but more or less sincerely, if bigotry can be sincere] that Communism/Jewry were trying to destroy them - They had experienced hyperinflation after the Russian revolution - All the savings of a nation were wiped out - They had some excuse for desperate remedies for such desperate times - Whereas we destroy 50 million a year in the same way, without believing that the people we destroy are planning to destroy us, without any such stimulus to fear and panic as hyperinflation, and without any inhibition of our kindness by state terrorism - We just have to write a decent-sized check, say, 1% of net income - Which would provide $0.75 trillion a year - We, the people, are protestless at the locking up of people in countries and letting them starve to death - A sui-genocide of 1% of humanity every year - Forget compassion - It is very rare and cannot be manufactured - What about good sense? - What would being permanently put on a 100th of your present income do to you in terms of turning you into a desperate desperado, a dynamo of hatred and revenge and violence, a handler of explosives? - As a citizen, and as a voter, as a person who is one of the people who rule, have you been keeping an eye on your nation's behaviour, making sure your nation was not breeding superpowerful, superrich, superarrogant, supercorrupt, who were making enemies for you by stealing? [The 1% overpaid, the 0.001% superoverpaid, take 90% of world income.] Were you teaching and practising the good sense of not making enemies by not allowing unlimited overpay/underpay? [Both the overpaid and the underpaid being thieves of liberty, safety, happiness and peace.] Were you thinking that an increase of fortune by $18 billion in one year was possibly overpay, and possibly causing underpay, and thereby causing social disturbance? Was anyone alerting you to the wide-open legal ways in which money moves automatically and ceaselessly from earners to nonearners? Or were you forgetting that in a democracy you are a ruler, and just putting your head down and going for gold? - Were you unhesitatingly concurrring in the 'accepted idea' that any amount of money that comes to you legally is all yours, and need bear no relation to your contribution to the social pool of wealth by wealth creation by your work? - Were you thinking that the social pool of wealth, consisting of the wealth made by work, would not be made too shallow for others if you took out more than you put in? - If so, you were making enemies, making violence, attacking the foundations of the state, you were hammering your head, hammering the heads of your descendents, you were not using your brains, you were driving to extinction with the top down, you were unwittingly betraying the dream of freedom from tyranny, you were breeding evil and evils - Is honesty the best policy? Certainly the grab-all-you-can of world human society has caused super hyper extreme overpay and underpay, from a million times to a 1000th of the average hourly pay. Certainly the world has been growing war and weaponry for the same 1000s of years it has been growing overpay-underpay. Certainly the bombs we have can destroy all the world's lifeforms 60 times over. Is honesty, taking out no more than you put in, a good policy? Is goodness good? Is honesty good? Is theft good? Or is theft the gross misery of unnecessary violence and danger crescendo-ing to extinction? Are we lovers of selfdestruction? Are we head-in-the-sand fools? Are we the flattered and pre-extinct?

by **Floyd Smoots** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 12:04 am

No, brother sceneshifter, I sadly believe that We Americans, Are Already EXTINCT!!! We just don't KNOW IT yet! I know I'm gettin' "all religious" here, but you should sorta, kinda check Christian sites out here on the World Wide Web (ever wonder WHY "they" call it a Web?). You may see why many Scholars/Bible Commentators "opine" WHY America is not mentioned in Bible prophecy. Many of them posit that it's because we're no longer here when Armageddon ends. If they are in any way correct, you may feel free to thank George Walker Bush, his daddy, his grandaddy, Albert Pike, and ALL of the NeoCons, Satanists, Pedophiles, SRA Practitioners, British Royals, Masons, Zionists (choose your favorite label for the "Illuminati" here) for the final destruction of our once proud nation.

by **sceneshifter** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 4:56 am

You are quite right, Floyd. We are the dead. But the dead are the pre-alive. And Christ, who was there when Moses hit the rock [as Paul says], who is always present, is here now, and raising the spiritually dead. Once you are dead, there is nothing ahead but 'more abundant life'.

by **sceneshifter** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 5:44 am

Some reject 'Christ'. Some accept 'Christ'. But what are they rejecting or accepting? Their own notion of what Christ is! They are neither accepting or rejecting Christ, if their notion of Christ is tainted by error. And whose concept of Christ is certainly free of error? Only the person who repeatedly, constantly, continuously and continually rejects their own notion of Christ and, knowledgeless and soulless, appeals to Truth to reveal itself, knows Christ. The Satan of our egobound notions must be rejected, so that truth can enter the empty cup of the soul. The soul must be repeatedly made empty so that untainted truth can fill it. St Augustine, a 'great' 'father' of the church, who got many things wrong, no doubt, said that the Christian religion, which started to become known as Christianity when the Christ started to be called Christ, was eternal religion and had existed from the beginning. Is that our concept of Christ? Can we be sure our concept of Christ is correct as long as ego, Satan, pride, stubbornness can influence our processes of understanding? Our notion of Christ must be recleaned every moment by our submission to Truth, or Reality. By our pouring out our cup, by our constant renewal of our emptiness, so that truth can come in, so that we can have true-hearing ears and true-seeing eyes. All that we have learned can and must be poured out daily, for it is always limited, and always being tainted every moment in the air of our ignorance and folly. Every notion of Christ is but a stage in an eternal progress through greater and greater concepts of Christ. Christ is growth, life, new souls, new garments, because Christ is unlimited, and all our concepts are limited by our limited brains and hearts and minds. Satan is: Thinking Christ is what we think Christ is. But who are we to know the inexhaustible treasures of infinity in our notions? True religion is constant growth, constant openness to a larger experience, constant pouring out of the attained, and an eternally repeated creating of room for the attainable unattained - evermore abundant life, ever greater knowledge/experience of truth. Satan, the mind, says, You have attained all, you have arrived at the limit of Christ, your notions are without error, without limitation, you do not need to have growth, openness, eyes and ears any more - Satan is that in us which never remembers that there is always more to true religion than that we have mastered so far - Satan is that in us which is sure that we are correct, that we know everything about Christ, that we have exhausted Truth God is a road, not a truckstop God is a road paved with notions of Christ

Foolish, dim-witted, cowardly and morally bankrupt

Political Literature

Re: Political Literature

Bageant

Dunno where you're from, rapt my friend...

Read annaLivia's posts here

How'd I MISS THIS Thread???

Hope I Don't MISS This Time........

trying to tie the threads of this thread together

Changing the "Scenery"

Re: Changing the "Scenery"

Re: Changing the "Scenery"

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