a little reminder... on differences...

[brainpanhandler]

I did.

But apparently you need more.

No. There is not a move afoot to round people up en masse and imprison them indefinitely in concentration style camps. (although I suppose that depends on how you want to view the modern prison/industrial complex). At least not to my knowledge. Hence my explanation that I had chosen a logical extreme.

Can that fearmeme be used to further polarize? Of course. Does that mean I should no longer consider it a real possibility in the future? Of course not.

[Simulist]

I did.

But apparently you need more.

No. There is not a move afoot to round people up en masse and imprison them indefinitely in concentration style camps. At least not to my knowledge. Hence my explanation that I had chosen a logical extreme.

Can that fearmeme be used to further polarize? Of course. Does that mean I should no longer consider a real possibility in the future? Of course not.

Well, since that "fearmeme" can be used to polarize, both ends of the "pole" should be more aware of how it might be being used to play them!

(Even if it is a real possibility in the future.)

Because that's really what American politics is: playing both sides, for the benefit of a very few.

[JackRiddler]

.

Wow, Nordic, you managed to bring Nazis into this - as a parallel to the OP! Are you fucking kidding me?

And what is your upshot, Simulist? What kind of compromise is supposed to be possible on a political plane with the right wing in this country? It should be easy enough to promise that Christians won't be rounded up, since this is one of many insane notions prevalent on the right. Meanwhile, millions of people are in prisons and in deportation facilities, and they are overwhelmingly black, poor, and immigrant. Where is the equivalence here? Now how else do you compromise? Am I supposed to pretend pollution is only half of a problem, oil is halfway wonderful, half of gays should be persecuted while the other half get married, and if a woman wants an abortion we'll flip a coin? Tails she gets it for free, heads she's imprisoned for attempted murder. Should science classes teach Adam and Eve alongside Darwin? What are you practically saying? How are these artificial divisions? One side has artificial concerns, that is to be sure. Ever since the 1960s, when this country saw a revolutionary situation on the (distant) horizon, billions of dollars have poured out from the most reactionary rich people to construct abortion and gay rights into right-wing crusade issues. Otherwise the Republican Party would have disappeared by now. How do you compromise with idiots who are brainwashed into thinking they should mobilize around these issues instead of protecting themselves from the class war on THEM?

I call them idiots, but I refuse to infantilize them to the point where they are only idiots, however. Or "sheep." I'm not going to say, merely, that they are dupes. Fuck that. They chose their way, they are as responsible for the stuff they think as those who manipulate them for gain.

.

[Simulist]

And what is your upshot, Simulist? What kind of compromise is supposed to be possible on a political plane with the right wing in this country?

I'm not talking about compromise.

I am talking about not buying in to ginned up rhetoric that divides PEOPLE on the right from PEOPLE on the left, propaganda that divides US from OURSELVES.

Because when that rhetoric does its job, the only winners are the very few at the top, not the people. Not us.

(And it's done its job very, very well for decades.)

[Searcher08]

I felt very uncomfortable reading your response to eyeno.
A longstanding forum member has expressed that they don't feel safe and feel threatened - and you approach is to belittle and mock???? Sure this place gets feisty, and I include myself in that, but IMHO there is a red line around intimidation. You have no idea what colour eyeno is; you have no idea whether he/she has been affected by racism and your assertions that you do have no basis in sensory reality.

Since you have chosen to put legs on a baseless and clearly opportunistic allegation by a longstanding nuisance to this forum, I hereby alert on myself to the moderation team. Certainly if I am making threats to longstanding members I need to be disciplined, and if not, someone else should be for defaming me.

.

There's no justification to characterize Jack's remarks as a threat.

Also: let's take this discussion to a less personal level.

to JR and eyeno, both of whom I value very much

My first experience of "Hate" was while traveling on the top deck of a bus, going to school. I was about 11 and had my nose buried in a Latin textbook. The bus window just in front of me exploded. A halfbrick bounced onto the floor. Everything went in slow motion and I remember slowly turning round; there was a skinhead guy wearing DMs and denim and he was looking up and screaming - at me. I knew that if I had been on the pavement, he would have bodily ripped me apart. As the bus sped off, I looked at him, still apoplectic. There was only one thought in my childs's mind.

"but you don't know me..."

Perhaps this is just a case of a Venn diagram


1 There are many progressives/left on the one hand and libertarians/right on the other who do not want to speak to the other.
Each side will put forward their own reasons why they dont, but the main thing is - they do not. They fundamentally do NOT want to spend the resources of their time and energy and attention engaging with people with those views, which are views they detest and there is no common cause. By and large, the proximity to ones own views determines the people engaged with.

2 There are some libertarians and some progressives who do.
For others it is important to engage with other people. There may be limits on this as engaging with Aryan Nations is different from talking to a Teabagger. Engagement is not seen as agreeing. A model for this might have similarities with the Quaker one which seeks to listen, and speak truth to power, while maintaining a strong sense of one's own principles.

[JackRiddler]

Because that's really what American politics is: playing both sides, for the benefit of a very few.

No. If we're going to generalize to such a short formula, then American politics (the show, not the policy making) is about constructing fake patriotism, right wing hysterias (a few of which are disguised as "PC") and foreign crises and wars to prevent the majority of people from uniting around their own economic interests.

.

[Simulist]

Because that's really what American politics is: playing both sides, for the benefit of a very few.

No. If we're going to generalize to such a short formula, then American politics (the show, not the policy making) is about constructing fake patriotism, right wing hysterias (a few of which are disguised as "PC") and foreign crises and wars to prevent the majority of people from uniting around their own economic interests.

.

I stand by my remarks.

What you have mentioned are tactics and merely components of a larger formula — one that works effectively to keep each "side" focused on "the other side" as a threat, while ignoring the obvious threat at the very top to the well-being (and mental health) of both sides being played.

[wintler2]

I don't read the OP as urging anyone to hate the tea party/republicans, it is just insisting that they are often motivated by hatred - and there is alot of evidence for this. Many people think one party is as bad as another, as displayed on this thread, and the OP is shaming that by naming a significant tangible characteristic of the Right in contemporary USA. How i or anyone responds to that hatred is personal choice, but don't burn the author for naming that it exists.



Yo Sim - don't you find it interesting that 'those at the top' support the Right wing much more often than they do the Left? hell, the Koch billionaires practically invented the tea party. Here in Aus Labor does okay in donations when they're in office, gets sweet f.a when not. And which party generally pushes policies of greatest benefit those at the top?

[Sounder]

JackRiddler wrote...

I call them idiots, but I refuse to infantilize them to the point where they are only idiots, however. Or "sheep." I'm not going to say, merely, that they are dupes. Fuck that. They chose their way, they are as responsible for the stuff they think as those who manipulate them for gain.

The rant before this was pretty fun and true.

I feel the need however to be a bit more charitable as I recall one of my own personal diktats, which is; don't blame the victim.

We all, historically speaking, have not been actively applying even pretenses to rationality for all that long, give us a break, our benighted elders overlaid an institution of slavery all over the place not so very long ago, and one of large estates and feudalism not long before that.

Some of my kind (humans not wingers) do in fact still carry quite retrograde ideas but the fact remains that the make believe Lords are the one with the motive and the means to impose death dealing designs, not that % of wingers that went to hate camp.

[Simulist]

Yo Sim - don't you find it interesting that 'those at the top' support the Right wing much more often than they do the Left?

Yes, I do. Interesting and significant.

But there's a problem even there: by manipulating both "sides" as they do, "those at the top" (through the media they own and control) create a neutered Left, which is what the Left in America has become — or maybe "neutered" is the wrong metaphor, lobotomized might be better.

To a very significant degree, this lobotomized entity, the American "left," actually seems to believe that its only recourse is the very system that enslaves it.

[Harvey]

To a very significant degree, this lobotomized entity, the American "left," actually seems to believe that its only recourse is the very system that enslaves it.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

[Searcher08]

Will you reverse the Overton Window leftwards so we end up reliving the Joy Of Stalinism?

Have you lost your mind? You conisder Stalin a leftist? C'mon man. You're smarter than that.

What do you propose to DO with these people you hate? Exterminate them? Put them in FEMA Camps? Bind them like demons, with ropes of Holy Law?

I keep waiting for them to die of natural causes myself but that doesn't seem to be working out.

In the real world, at the end of the day, it's like the IRA and the Loyalists. You either do an Israel and ignore / disenfranchise those you hate or you do a Northern Ireland and engage with them.
Engage doesn't mean agree or meet in some soggy middle. Engage can be the beginning of designing a solution.

I've spent decades trying to do that. Decades. At some point you gotta stop titling at windmills.

Frankly Eyeno is right about one thing... the impasse we find ourselves at now is different than we have ever encountered before. These are unique times. We all see the perfect storm approaching. Don't we?

Does anyone really think we'll all huddle together and sing kumbaya when it arrives?

I hold out some small hope that I am wrong, wrong, wrong, but I can't help but feel that is just denial. I desperately want to believe differently. How could I not?

bph, I consider Stalin a 'leftist' in the same way that Obama is.
Centralised Collectivist Fascist?

If the context you hold for engaging with 'the Other' is a Quixotian quest, wont it produce similar Quixotian results?

Whatever and whenever 'it' arrives, I think it will require all our engagement, which is why I think RIGHT NOW is an incredibly important time for preparation in all aspects of ones life, from clearing up old 'stuff', to learning how to create a hydroponic vegetable garden to getting to know people in the local and wider community, cos I think that once 'it' arrives, the time for preparation and planning will stop. I feel an urgency even about these exchanges on RI, which are pretty intense. I get 'on it' - I see it, acknowledge it and try to move on as fast as I can.

[Harvey]

Whatever and whenever 'it' arrives, I think it will require all our engagement, which is why I think RIGHT NOW is an incredibly important time for preparation in all aspects of ones life, from clearing up old 'stuff', to learning how to create a hydroponic vegetable garden to getting to know people in the local and wider community, cos I think that once 'it' arrives, the time for preparation and planning will stop. I feel an urgency even about these exchanges on RI, which are pretty intense. I get 'on it' - I see it, acknowledge it and try to move on as fast as I can.

I'm not really afraid, it's all a shadow play. But I do feel the same urgency, though I can't be sure that the urgency is not my own, our own, deeper consciousness urging us forward to be all that we are. In cultivating our own garden we introduce beauty and a degree of self sufficiency. Everything benefits. If we merge our gardens and share our efforts we create a larger habitat and a greater social cohesion. So much the better. And if the centre cannot hold? Well, then we are all better placed to help each other.

I get the definite sense that the material world is perfectible (does this fly in the face of every creed?) and perhaps the only thing preventing this are our illusions. Illusions such as acquisition, ownership or seperation. Here we have a very fine discussion of such illusions and how we jostle for primacy within the game.

I like my black Nissan monster truck with blueberry. I like my red Ford Dragon with ketchup. Which illusion satifies more?

I couldn't say.

[Searcher08]

.

Wow, Nordic, you managed to bring Nazis into this - as a parallel to the OP! Are you fucking kidding me?

And what is your upshot, Simulist? What kind of compromise is supposed to be possible on a political plane with the right wing in this country? It should be easy enough to promise that Christians won't be rounded up, since this is one of many insane notions prevalent on the right. Meanwhile, millions of people are in prisons and in deportation facilities, and they are overwhelmingly black, poor, and immigrant. Where is the equivalence here? Now how else do you compromise? Am I supposed to pretend pollution is only half of a problem, oil is halfway wonderful, half of gays should be persecuted while the other half get married, and if a woman wants an abortion we'll flip a coin? Tails she gets it for free, heads she's imprisoned for attempted murder. Should science classes teach Adam and Eve alongside Darwin? What are you practically saying? How are these artificial divisions? One side has artificial concerns, that is to be sure. Ever since the 1960s, when this country saw a revolutionary situation on the (distant) horizon, billions of dollars have poured out from the most reactionary rich people to construct abortion and gay rights into right-wing crusade issues. Otherwise the Republican Party would have disappeared by now. How do you compromise with idiots who are brainwashed into thinking they should mobilize around these issues instead of protecting themselves from the class war on THEM?

I call them idiots, but I refuse to infantilize them to the point where they are only idiots, however. Or "sheep." I'm not going to say, merely, that they are dupes. Fuck that. They chose their way, they are as responsible for the stuff they think as those who manipulate them for gain.

.

No compromise, heck no engagement, because engagement is selling out and singing kumbaya with rich haterz who want to kill us, heck no speaking to them. They should not be spoken to, or acknowledged, they should be avoided. They have made their bed, they can lie in it, I'd rather sleep on the fucking floor. A persons only contact with them should be to shout the fuckers down or present rebuttals to their specious talking points. There are no conversations to have.

As I said, you are a progressive who doesn't want to talk to people on the right.
No one is saying you have to if you don't want to. Some other people do.

[Nordic]

Jack, NOBODY HERE IS TALKING ABOUT COMPROMISE.

Why the fuck can't you see that, and why the fuck are you still ranting about it??

Seriously. I really like you and have great respect for you, but you've been tweaked and are shouting at the sky.