We're all rightwingers now. Now move along libs

[Sounder]

Cool thread, thanks all.

Whether left or right, i'm sure it's easier to get articles published that inflame partisan sentiments compared to ones that look for an 'evidence' based common ground.

[compared2what?]

Shutting up about them because an idiot might receive a message different to the one I'm sending is not something I'm prepared to do.

Amen.

Seconded. And can I hear a "THANK YOU, BILL OF RIGHTS!!!"?

Because I never said or suggested that anyone should shut up about anything. Which is a pretty good indicator that it wasn't a part of the message I was seeking to send, btw.

Nor did I say (or suggest) that anyone should suppress or alter their true beliefs and opinions, or forget that they know what they know for political purposes. Or whatever.

On the contrary, I said it wasn't unreasonable to think about whose water you were carrying before you picked it up, which logically suggests that I expect reasonable people to speak the truth after thinking about the various potential ramifications of doing so, in order to, you know, be prepared for them and stuff.

You guys supplied the censorious connotation all by yourselves, in short. I have no idea why, but if you do, I'd be interested in hearing it. Good communication among allies being a political asset. And everything.

[Wombaticus Rex]

THE STFU HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

Barracude, I apologize for poisoning the conversation. I was pissed because being told I'm helping out the right wing agenda by leaving comments on RI threads struck me as ridiculous, and it still does. Still, if you want to do long posts that conflate facts with beliefs and worldviews, that is definitely your right and I owe you more respect than dismissal. If I don't have the energy to engage properly, I should keep my snark to myself.

[barracuda]

Ain't no thing, Wombaticus. With me, it's more about getting a conversation going, and I used your comment as a springboard for that, probably in a callow fashion, as per my various character flaws. So for that, apologies right back to you.

[compared2what?]

It's just superficial, dismissive and an obstacle to insightful and/or original political thought. Which is much, much worse.

Well, exactly. Insightful political thought is what I'm all about, and for systemic reasons the people who identify as leftists in US discourse prefer to shut their eyes to events that I consider significant, when they feel that calling attention to these events could undermine their narrative. I refuse to go along with that.

And I'd fight to the death for your right to do so.

those ten issues [...] neither say nor explain anything about [...] the separation of powers; the defunding of social welfare programs; [...] the devaluation of very basic civil liberties

I agree with this about seven of the ten, but definitely not about 9/11. The attacks were used as a pretext for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act and a crackdown on civil liberties generally. The wars led to the current disastrous state of the US national accounts, and so indirectly to the arguments in favour of austerity measures (a cut in war spending being off the cards because of, you know, 9/11).

Two other conspiracies in the OP that I take quite seriously are FEMA camps and martial law (made possible by the terror of 9/11), because there are precedents for both and the legal justifications that Zaitchik talks about are in place. He doesn't mention the doctrine of executive impunity, which is part of the same authoritarian tendency. I know the tea partiers you so despise....

What????

I don't despise any person or group of people. I sometimes have different (and occasionally even incompatible) political goals and interests than another person or group of people do. And if it's in a context that calls for political action or expression of some sort on my part, I do my best to act or express myself effectively. That said, though, it's very important to me to be as clear as I can be on this point. Because to me, not despising classes of people is kind of essential to holding, as a self-evident truth, that all men are created equal.

...didn't care about the black people bussed to Utah after Katrina, but I do, and it's definitely not paranoid to fear that it will happen again.

No, it sure as hell isn't. I couldn't agree with you more.

I should have specified that the "at least as they're typically framed and discussed" that, for some reason, I seem to have decided to bury under a pile of verbiage in the seventh graph of my post applied globally to everything I was saying from start to finish. But I didn't. Which was my mistake. What I meant was:

"Within the landscape of American politics as it currently exists, strong opposition to unconstitutionally rounding up the citizenry and confining them in FEMA camps is (to put it mildly) not typically framed or discussed in a way that does much to raise awareness of it being an outrage that's already occurred, or one that poor black people (as well as immigrants in just about any tax bracket and poor people in general) definitely wouldn't be paranoid to fear happening again pretty much at any moment.

Or one that it's essential strongly to object to on principle, irrespective of both circumstances and the segment of the population effected by it every damn time it or anything like it occurs.

And ditto for door-to-door gun confiscation, indefinite detention without even a nod in the direction of due process, and all other similarly martial-law-ish abuses and crimes committed in some, any, and every form by the state.

Because basically, per my personal politics, that an injustice against anyone anywhere is an injustice against everyone everywhere is a key foundational principle.

Therefore, I regard political rhetoric that has a very high potential to promote personal fears of extreme persecution among classes of persons that aren't yet (and may never be) affected by it, without emphatically either informing or reminding them both of its past and its ongoing occurrence among other classes of persons (as well as all the implications that attach to that) is (at best) counterproductive to my goals and interests and (at worst) inimical to them.

IOW:

My point was not that it's paranoid to think that things along those general lines will happen again in the future. I fully agree with you that it's not. Nor was it that there's no reasonable basis for thinking that the threat of martial law (or the institution of some equivalently authoritarian and repressive form of governance) has been increasing at an alarming rate for at least a decade. I fully agree with you that it has.

The point that I thought I was making, albeit in completely unelaborated shorthand, was:

As typically framed and discussed, the specter of that threat and the proposed response to it all but totally omit any reference to (or even any suggestion that) very large numbers or people are now and long have been being rounded up and forcibly incarcerated by armed representatives of the state, often on wittingly false premises and even more often on very, very slight ones, as with, for example, the Rockefeller drug laws.

So to me, it's worth bearing in mind whether or not the way in which you voice your opposition to the (real) possibility that martial law might formally be declared and that the (systematically disarmed) American population in general will then be shuttled off to FEMA camps does anything effective to illuminate the extent to which it is now and long has been a matter of routine domestic and foreign U.S. policy to do pretty much exactly that -- excepting systematic disarmament, which isn't really necessary when the state has and always will have superior strength of arms -- to particular and sizable segments of the American population, including particular and sizable numbers of American citizens.

Or, obviously, on the flip side of the same coin, whether it does anything effective to obscure the extent to which [blah, blah, blah]...."

______________

So please retroactively consider me to have said that in the first place, if possible. Because it is genuinely what I meant.

So the ten issues in the OP aren't "either at or near the top of [my] agenda or roughly representative of it", but I fail to see why that means I should ignore them all. My bigger and more mainstream preoccupation, economics, increasingly shows signs of the kind of serious crisis that has facilitated the rise of authoritarian regimes over the last 150 years, and looking at the social and political factors that will contribute to that is necessary, if you want to think about the future at all.

Again, I never said or suggested that you or anybody else should ignore any of the issues in the OP, let alone all of them. In fact, I at least thought that I was suggesting that you and everybody else think about them seriously and in detail in the context of both theory and praxis if you're thinking about them in political terms.

how absolutely intolerable we the people consider torture, indefinite detention without charges, or the commission of quasi-genocide via the prosecution of illegal wars, all of which are currently foreign-policy SOP.

No. Two years ago 97% of you people, or the ones who bothered to vote, voted for quasi-genocide via the prosecution of illegal wars.

Yep. And quite a few of them were systematically bamboozled into thinking they were voting against it. Which is also absolutely intolerable politically speaking, but not easy meaningfully to address without going gazillion miles off-topic.

So.

Yep. In a word.

I really don't think that it's even a little bit unreasonable to ask yourself whose water you might be carrying before you pick it up, politically speaking. I mean, the message you believe you're sending very well might not be the one that's being received. [...] You gotta educate both yourself and others as well as agitate and organize if you ever want to make any excruciatingly slowl progress.

The two parts of this paragraph contradict each other for me; and if you can try and see why you might get where I'm coming from. I wholly agree with the bit I bolded. Education means pointing to actual events to try and show people what I see, and what I see is a shift toward authoritarianism that will get worse under worsening economic conditions. Parts of this shift are of concern to people I find distasteful, but that is incidental. They are also of concern to people I admire. Shutting up about them because an idiot might receive a message different to the one I'm sending is not something I'm prepared to do.

I'm in total, complete and utter agreement with you about every part of that.

I merely note for the record that in reality, as typically framed and discussed, most of those issues do little in the way of pointing to actual events comprehensively or in terms that have more of an educational impact than they do an emotional impact.
____________

NB: Please understand the words "as typically framed and discussed" to mean "as typically framed and discussed when canvassed at a public level for political purposes."
____________

ON EDIT: I hereby stipulate that I wrote this in a hurry and am probably never going to get all the typos out of it, being now on my fourth pass at trying.

[stefano]

I have no idea why [you guys supplied the censorious connotation], but if you do, I'd be interested in hearing it.

When you said "think about whose water you are carrying before you pick it up", I understood that if there's a chance that arguing about certain things advances, or could advance, the agenda of people with a bit of a fascist viewpoint, then you should let it go.

it's worth bearing in mind whether or not the way in which you voice your opposition to the (real) possibility that martial law might formally be declared and that the (systematically disarmed) American population in general will then be shuttled off to FEMA camps does anything effective to illuminate the extent to which it is now and long has been a matter of routine domestic and foreign U.S. policy to do pretty much exactly that

This is clearer, and it's good advice. I'd like to think the way I present my argument does that, but I suppose it can't always. I reckon we're pretty much in agreement. Except:

What???? I don't despise any person or group of people.

I do. I don't like racists and I don't like the wilfully ignorant. I try to be sympathetic about circumstances but some people are just small and mean, and they can fuck off. But on the occasions when they're right, I'll happily say so.

The right created the bailouts giving themselves access to all the money they could ever desire in order to buffer themselves from the consequences of their own conspiracy, but once all that is done, now they are correct?

I should have said "radical right". I wasn't thinking of the right-wingers in the Democratic and Republican Parties, more of these chaps:



They had no hand in creating the bailouts and didn't see any of the flow.

"Guy Montag Doe"... I like that.

[OP ED]

OP ED despises all of you.

[mostly for having more free time than it does]

[freemason9]

Are you under the delusion that you're talking about me?

i am under no such "delusion." i was certainly talking about you, i tell you true, but don't take it personally.

peace

[82_28]

Are you under the delusion that you're talking about me?

i am under no such "delusion." i was certainly talking about you, i tell you true, but don't take it personally.

peace

Dude. I heard you're about to get banned. Is this true?

[freemason9]

Are you under the delusion that you're talking about me?

i am under no such "delusion." i was certainly talking about you, i tell you true, but don't take it personally.

peace

Dude. I heard you're about to get banned. Is this true?

i have heard this, yes, i tell you true; it is an intuitive sense that warns me.

[freemason9]

Are you under the delusion that you're talking about me?

i am under no such "delusion." i was certainly talking about you, i tell you true, but don't take it personally.

peace

Dude. I heard you're about to get banned. Is this true?

i've been banned from nicer dumps than this though

[Jeff]

Are you under the delusion that you're talking about me?

i am under no such "delusion." i was certainly talking about you, i tell you true, but don't take it personally.

peace

Dude. I heard you're about to get banned. Is this true?

i have heard this, yes, i tell you true; it is an intuitive sense that warns me.

FWIW, I'm not picking up anything on my crystal radio set.

[82_28]

Are you under the delusion that you're talking about me?

i am under no such "delusion." i was certainly talking about you, i tell you true, but don't take it personally.

peace

Dude. I heard you're about to get banned. Is this true?

i've been banned from nicer dumps than this though

I hear what you're saying. These fucking fucks banned me last year.

http://www.thecatsite.com/forums/

It wasn't a dump though. More a litter box. I really offended them about some comment I made about flea control. I still miss some of the camaraderie. But overall, every time I visited that site I just got more and more pissed. So it it was either I quit the site or got banned. Guess which one happened first. You got it, BANNED.

[barracuda]

Banned from a cat forum? You must have seemed overly dogmatic.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Man, I loved this....



Are they talking about the Iraq War? TARP? Afghanistan? The Department of Homeland Security? Social Security? It's so perfectly ambiguous...

Also: mega bonus points for the t-shirt.