The Liberals Thread

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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon Jan 16, 2017 3:46 pm

brekin » Mon Jan 16, 2017 2:39 pm wrote:
MacCruiskeen » Mon Jan 16, 2017 2:31 pm wrote:^^Why did you post that in this thread?


Yeah, really. Where's the hate?


The hate is in his petty and vindictive spamming of this thread. The hate is also in your spiteful and gratuitous one-line jibe in response to my simple and polite question, which was not addressed to you.

_______________________________________________________________________


The question was addressed to you, Iamwhomiam. Why did you post that? It has absolutely nothing to do with the thread topic.
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Re: The Liberals Threaded

Postby brekin » Mon Jan 16, 2017 4:36 pm

MacCruiskeen wrote:
brekin » Mon Jan 16, 2017 2:39 pm wrote:
MacCruiskeen » Mon Jan 16, 2017 2:31 pm wrote:^^Why did you post that in this thread?


Yeah, really. Where's the hate?


The hate is in his petty and vindictive spamming of this thread. The hate is also in your spiteful and gratuitous one-line jibe in response to my simple and polite question, which was not addressed to you.

_______________________________________________________________________

The question was addressed to you, Iamwhomiam. Why did you post that? It has absolutely nothing to do with the thread topic.


Woah, here a hate, there a hate, everywhere a hate, hate.
Oops, sorry. Where were we?
Oh, yeah, "Why'd ya post that, kid? Come on explains yourself, kid. You know the boss don't like ambiguity in his song lyrics".
If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue Jan 17, 2017 4:38 pm

MacCruiskeen » Mon Jan 16, 2017 3:31 pm wrote:^^Why did you post that in this thread?


It's a prediction. Once Trump assumes and I do mean 'assumes' presidential office, he will be married to ISIS. Give him till May. Like the 5th.
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 17, 2017 4:42 pm

That doesn't answer the question. This is not a thread about Trump or about ISIS.

So why did you post it here, in The Liberals Thread?
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue Jan 17, 2017 4:54 pm

Sorry my honest answer was not enough to satisfy you Mac.

Have you suddenly become concerned that some RI member, some fellow of ours, might post something off-topic? Or is it just what you perceive I posted as being off-topic, (but really isn't) in your thread. Or is your real complaint that it was I who posted it?
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 17, 2017 4:56 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:02 pm

Iamwhomiam » Tue Jan 17, 2017 3:54 pm wrote:Sorry my honest answer was not enough to satisfy you Mac.

Have you suddenly become concerned that some RI member, some fellow of ours, might post something off-topic? Or is it just what you perceive I posted as being off-topic, (but really isn't) in your thread. Or is your real complaint that it was I who posted it?


It was not an honest answer. It was not an answer at all. It was an evasive and shifty non-answer. But forget it, really. You am whom you am and therefore you do what you do. But enough.I'm now sure I answered the question correctly myself one page back, with the link in this post.

Back on-topic. The topic is Liberals. (Not ISIS, not Trump, and not Bob Dylan.)
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:32 pm

I really feel sorry for you Mac. I was being honest. How about you take Rory's word to Jerky back on page 1 to heart. "Jerky - wind your neck in. You're running around trying to pick fights. Just stop being a dick." Let's not forget who brought me into the conversation by changing the topic to one about my honesty by most falsely claiming I was being hateful towards you. I have no such feelings towards you or towards anyone at all. If anything I find your bullying others here intolerable and in the past I have taken on the task to attempt to put you in your place for such poor behaviour. We all remember how that turned out. Rex thought I was feeling victimized by you, but the truth is I was trying to use your own tactics toward others on you. I was trying to victimize you, to be just like you we both were banned! (my second - how many for you?) If anything at all, I feel pity for you; truly, I do.

Please do not expect another reply from me should you respond to this comment. I really have no desire whatsoever to converse with you and won't, until you better learn to control your childish behaviour. I was trying to be polite to you by answering your questions. You call me a liar.

I believe you may be incorrigible; but for your sake, I hope you're not.

Carry on my wayward son...
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:38 pm

Why did you post the lyrics of a Dylan song called ISIS in The Liberals Thread?

Third time I've asked the question, and last chance for you to answer it honestly. Stop spamming this thread and stop wasting my time.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 17, 2017 5:44 pm

wasting time????

how can someone that hunts nits have any time to waste?

It's War on Nits!
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby Morty » Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:18 pm

This belongs here:
It’s Not About Trump, But Us
January 17, 2017

The looming inauguration of Donald Trump has led many on the “liberal/left” to vow eternal resistance but this fury has obscured the need for self-reflection on how “progressives” have lost their way, as John Pilger explains.

By John Pilger

On the day President Trump is inaugurated, thousands of writers in the United States will express their indignation. “In order for us to heal and move forward …,” say Writers Resist, “we wish to bypass direct political discourse, in favour of an inspired focus on the future, and how we, as writers, can be a unifying force for the protection of democracy.”

And: “We urge local organizers and speakers to avoid using the names of politicians or adopting ‘anti’ language as the focus for their Writers Resist event. It’s important to ensure that nonprofit organizations, which are prohibited from political campaigning, will feel confident participating in and sponsoring these events.”

Thus, real protest is to be avoided, for it is not tax exempt. Compare such drivel with the declarations of the Congress of American Writers, held at Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1935, and again two years later. They were electric events, with writers discussing how they could confront ominous events in Abyssinia, China and Spain. Telegrams from Thomas Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out, reflecting the fear that great power was now rampant and that it had become impossible to discuss art and literature without politics or, indeed, direct political action.

“A writer,” the journalist Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, “must be a man of action now . . . A man who has given a year of his life to steel strikes, or to the unemployed, or to the problems of racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted time. He is a man who has known where he belonged. If you should survive such action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and real, and it will last.”

Her words echo across the unction and violence of the Obama era and the silence of those who colluded with his deceptions. That the menace of rapacious power — rampant long before the rise of Trump — has been accepted by writers, many of them privileged and celebrated, and by those who guard the gates of literary criticism, and culture, including popular culture, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out, regardless of who occupies the White House.

Clinton’s Contempt

Today, false symbolism is all. “Identity” is all. In 2016, Hillary Clinton stigmatized millions of voters as “a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.” Her abuse was handed out at an LGBT rally as part of her cynical campaign to win over minorities by abusing a white, mostly working-class, majority. Divide and rule, this is called; or identity politics in which race and gender conceal class, and allow the waging of class war. Trump understood this.


“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident poet Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

This is not an American phenomenon. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.”

No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among today’s insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.”

There is something both venal and profoundly stupid about famous writers as they venture outside their cosseted world and embrace an “issue.” Across the Review section of the Guardian on Dec. 10 was a dreamy picture of Barack Obama looking up to the heavens and the words, “Amazing Grace” and “Farewell the Chief.”

The sycophancy ran like a polluted babbling brook through page after page. “He was a vulnerable figure in many ways …. But the grace. The all-encompassing grace: in manner and form, in argument and intellect, with humour and cool ….[He] is a blazing tribute to what has been, and what can be again … He seems ready to keep fighting, and remains a formidable champion to have on our side … … The grace … the almost surreal levels of grace …”

I have conflated these quotes. There are others even more hagiographic and bereft of mitigation. The Guardian’s chief apologist for Obama, Gary Younge, has always been careful to mitigate, to say that his hero “could have done more”: oh, but there were the “calm, measured and consensual solutions …”

Idolizing Obama

None of them, however, could surpass the American writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the recipient of a “genius” grant worth $625,000 from a liberal foundation. In an interminable essay for The Atlantic entitled, “My President Was Black,” Coates brought new meaning to prostration. The final “chapter,” entitled “When You Left, You Took All of Me With You,” a line from a Marvin Gaye song, describes seeing the Obamas “rising out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity.” The Ascension, no less.

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. This was given expression and reinforced during the two terms of Barack Obama. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama, who expanded America’s favorite military pastime, bombing, and death squads (“special operations”) as no other president has done since the Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 alone Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people on earth, in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday — reported The New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by mostly hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.”

A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, “but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.”

Like the fascism of the 1930s, big lies are delivered with the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent media whose description now fits that of the Nuremberg prosecutor: “Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically … In the propaganda system … it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

Destroying Libya

Take the catastrophe in Libya. In 2011, Obama said Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was the known lie of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan government forces. It became the media story; and NATO – led by Obama and Hillary Clinton – launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”

Under Obama, the U.S. has extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa. Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the late Nineteenth Century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master’s black colonial elite whose “historic mission,” warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.”

It was Obama who, in 2011, announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia”, in which almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront China,” in the words of his Defense Secretary. There was no threat from China; the entire enterprise was unnecessary. It was an extreme provocation to keep the Pentagon and its demented brass happy.

In 2014, the Obama’s administration oversaw and paid for a fascist-led coup in Ukraine against the democratically elected government, threatening Russia in the western borderland through which Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, with a loss of 27 million lives. It was Obama who placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and it was the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any administration since the Cold War — having promised, in an emotional speech in Prague, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons”.

Obama, the constitutional lawyer, prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president in history, even though the U.S. Constitution protects them. He declared Chelsea Manning guilty before the end of a trial that was a travesty. He has refused to pardon Manning who has suffered years of inhumane treatment, which the United Nations says amounts to torture. He has pursued an entirely bogus case against Julian Assange. He promised to close the Guantanamo concentration camp and didn’t.

A Smooth Operator

Following the public relations disaster of George W. Bush, Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision was part of this: the kind of cloying reverse racism that beatified the man for no reason other than he was attractive to liberal sensibilities and, of course, American power, if not to the children he kills in impoverished, mostly Muslim countries.

This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded, especially “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics,” as Luciana Bohne put it. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

William I. Robinson, professor at the University of California, and one of an uncontaminated group of American strategic thinkers who have retained their independence during the years of intellectual dog-whistling since 9/11, wrote this last week:

“President Barack Obama … may have done more than anyone to assure [Donald] Trump’s victory. While Trump’s election has triggered a rapid expansion of fascist currents in U.S. civil society, a fascist outcome for the political system is far from inevitable …. But that fight back requires clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of 21st century fascism were planted, fertilized and watered by the Obama administration and the politically bankrupt liberal elite.”

Robinson points out that “whether in its 20th or its emerging 21st century variants, fascism is, above all, a response to deep structural crises of capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and the one that began with the financial meltdown in 2008 …. There is a near-straight line here from Obama to Trump … The liberal elite’s refusal to challenge the rapaciousness of transnational capital and its brand of identity politics served to eclipse the language of the working and popular classes … pushing white workers into an ‘identity’ of white nationalism and helping the neo-fascists to organise them”..

The seedbed is Obama’s Weimar Republic, a landscape of endemic poverty, militarized police and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under his presidency, prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street.

Perhaps his greatest “legacy” is the co-option and disorientation of any real opposition. Bernie Sanders’ specious “revolution” does not apply. Propaganda is his triumph.

The lies about Russia — in whose elections the U.S. has openly intervened — have made the world’s most self-important journalists laughingstocks. In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honorable exceptions.

The obsession with Trump is a cover for many of those calling themselves “left/liberal”, as if to claim political decency. They are not “left,” neither are they especially “liberal.” Much of America’s aggression towards the rest of humanity has come from so-called liberal Democratic administrations — such as Obama’s. America’s political spectrum extends from the mythical center to the lunar right. The “left” are homeless renegades Martha Gellhorn described as “a rare and wholly admirable fraternity.” She excluded those who confuse politics with a fixation on their navels.

While they “heal” and “move forward”, will the Writers Resist campaigners and other anti-Trumpists reflect upon this? More to the point: when will a genuine movement of opposition arise? Angry, eloquent, all-for-one-and-one-for all. Until real politics return to people’s lives, the enemy is not Trump, it is ourselves.

John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: http://www.johnpilger.com.
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:37 pm

how do you get away with cut and paste..I really need to know for the next time Mac comes at me for doing the same thing
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby norton ash » Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:38 pm

Thanks for the Pilger piece, it's very good.
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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:43 pm

seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 17, 2017 8:37 pm wrote:how do you get away with cut and paste..I really need to know for the next time Mac comes at me for doing the same thing


Oh jesus wept. He "gets away with cut and paste" because:

1. he cares what he cuts and pastes,

2. he reads it before he cuts it and pastes it,

3. he cuts and pastes it because he knows who he's quoting and why it's a piece worth sharing,

4. unlike you and American Dream, he does not spam this Discussion Board with acres of cut-and-pasted garbage he is not prepared to discuss or defend.

The objection is not to cutting-and-pasting as such. A five-year-old could understand this. I am sick and tired of your nonsense, and I don't understand why you are still being allowed to get away with it.

________________

Morty, thanks again. Great piece, and it does absolutely belong in this thread.
Last edited by MacCruiskeen on Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The Liberals Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:46 pm

oh
as such
...like when I do it :P

I have posted Pilger over 60 times starting in 07

and I do read everything I post ..stop lying about that

your excuses don't hold water

I do not break any rules around here that's why

have you noticed all the war mentions in the other thread or are you avoiding them?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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