'Liberals'/'Leftists' in America

[Elvis]

"No feature of American politics is so certain as the tendency of politicians to become first the captives, then the agents, of their opposition."

—John Kenneth Galbraith

[DrEvil]

Carlin says the Earth will be fine—it's just humans beings who won't be able to survive on it.

Hang on, I'm human. And selfish. Can we at least not fuck things up too bad for the next, say, thirty years? After that I'm probably dead or uploaded and won't care.

[stickdog99]

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Tragically/frustratingly accurate.

@JeffWellsRigInt

Simply coding globalism, fascism and racism as progressive took 90% of the left out of play. Diabolically brilliant.

7:59 AM · Feb 23, 2024

[Belligerent Savant]

@NellyTells

Maybe we should just start referring to globalists & puritanical wokists as ‘far right’?

Want to police hate speech? Far right.
Enforce pronouns? Far right.
Carbon taxes & credits? Far right.
Surveillance, digital ID, CBDCs, social cred scores?

FFFFRRRRIIIGHHHT. Yup, sounds right.

@KirMt5491
·
Works for me.

Trudeau is far right. Extreme ideologue. Doesn't believe in bodily autonomy. Crony capitalist in bed with pharma. Authoritarian. Censors. Takes political prisoners. Doesn't allow opposing views. Launders money. Sounds far-right.

https://x.com/KirMt5491/status/1770494778255241649?s=20

[Belligerent Savant]

@JohnCleese
·
I've been told recently that a lot of young people think I'm right-wing

I'm not sure if this is ignorance or stupidity, but I hope it's the former, as something can be done about that

…

@PeteParada
·
Oh nobody told you? Here I’ll do it: everyone who says or believes anything that somebody (real or imagined) disapproves of - is immediately branded right wing - as that’s currently the worst label one can be given. Welcome.

…

Philip Morris
@Phi1m0z
·
Classical liberals and old lefties are now considered right wing. Anything to the right of far left is far right.

https://x.com/JohnCleese/status/1774457 ... 31957?s=20

[stickdog99]

[SonicG]

Aamer Rahman
@aamer_rahman
Joe Biden: Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.

https://twitter.com/aamer_rahman/status ... 0449617958

ETA:
For funsies. I think our intrepid founder is completely wrong here in light of what the above vid discusses regarding the War on Drugs hyped by Biden in the '90s being a war on the poor and mostly Blacks and Latinos. It was an incredibly racist period.
https://twitter.com/JeffWellsRigInt/sta ... 7335916547

Clifton Duncan
@cliftonaduncan
America was way less racist in the 90s than it is now.
***
Jeff Wells
@JeffWellsRigInt
Unarguably.
And this cultural shit show of prog racism was created and sustained by predators who needed something to deflect from the crisis of class division.

Not that I think that IDPol is a solution and much less any corporate instituted DEI whitewashing
I have grown tired of Knowles, although I think he right about some things and fairly spot on here (he is responding to Jeff's tweet)

The Secret Sun Speaks
@SecretSunBlog
I really wish the so-called right would wake up to the class warfare being waged on them every minute of every day. But I guess that's verboten because class war means Marxism means drag queen story hour or something.

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Good observations SonicG.

————

This intro paragraph is almost satirically stereotypical. Reads like a screenplay from a Christopher Guest mockumentary. An interesting development, nonetheless, even though it plays into several tropes.

’I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.

Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.

April 9 2024

You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.
I fit the NPR mold. I’ll cop to that.

So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we’ve covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI.
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.

If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.

But it hasn’t.

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.
….

More at link.

https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how- ... icas-trust

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Modern-day Pravda (as in: the NYT is now little else than an overt [un-masked] propaganda arm for the U.S.; this applies to essentially all major newspapers in the U.S. at this point). It's not "Communist" or "Socialist" as there are a subset greatly benefiting from such blatant propaganda. It's far closer to totalitarian-fascist, however.

@MurielBlaivePhD

The liberal left used to fight against dystopian government surveillance programs, calling them "fascist", "authoritarian", and/or "creepy." Now, to resist any such program you have to be a "civil libertarian", at least according to the New York Times.

Well, no, dear New York Times. Those who are betraying the liberal left are not the people who keep a semblance of common sense and decency; it is those like you who embrace increasingly authoritarian measures that you would have been the first to denounce had they stemmed from a right-wing dictatorship. Or a communist one. This could be straight out of Stalinist Russia. The irony.

https://x.com/MurielBlaivePhD/status/17 ... 7880307715

OPINION
GUEST ESSAY

Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe

April 21, 2024

By Matthew Waxman and Adam Klein

Mr. Waxman served in senior national security roles in the George W. Bush administration. Mr. Klein served as the chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2018 to 2021.

This is an extraordinarily dangerous time for the United States and our allies. Israel’s unpreparedness on Oct. 7 shows that even powerful nations can be surprised in catastrophic ways. Fortunately, Congress, in a rare bipartisan act, voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key intelligence power that provides critical information on hostile states and threats ranging from terrorism to fentanyl trafficking.

Civil libertarians argued that the surveillance bill erodes Americans’ privacy rights and pointed to examples when American citizens got entangled in investigations. Importantly, the latest version of the bill adds dozens of legal safeguards around the surveillance in question — the most expansive privacy reform to the legislation in its history. The result preserves critical intelligence powers while protecting Americans’ privacy rights in our complex digital age.

At the center of the debate is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally passed in 1978, it demanded that investigators gain an order from a special court to surveil foreign agents inside the United States. Collecting the communications of foreigners abroad did not require court approval.

That line blurred in the digital age. Many foreign nationals rely on American providers such as Google and Meta, which route or store data in the United States, raising questions as to whether the rules apply to where the targets are or where their data is collected. In 2008, Congress addressed that conundrum with Section 702. Instead of requiring the government to seek court orders for each foreign target, that provision requires yearly judicial approval of the rules that govern the program as a whole. That way, the government can efficiently obtain from communication providers the calls and messages of large numbers of foreign targets — 246,073 in 2022 alone.

Since then, Section 702 has supplied extraordinary insight into foreign dangers, including military threats, theft of American trade secrets, terrorism, hacking and fentanyl trafficking. In 2022 intelligence from 702 helped the government find and kill the Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, one of the terrorists responsible for Sept. 11. Almost 60 percent of the articles in the president’s daily intelligence briefing include information from Section 702.

Although Section 702 can be used only to target foreigners abroad, it does include Americans when they interact with foreign targets. Not only is such incidental collection inevitable in today’s globalized world; it can be vital to U.S. security. If a terrorist or spy abroad is communicating with someone here, our government must find out why.

Some of what is found via Section 702 is therefore sent from the National Security Agency to the F.B.I. The F.B.I., which investigates threats to national security in the United States, can then check that database for Americans under investigation for national security reasons.

We agree that those queries raise legitimate privacy concerns. And those concerns are especially acute for public officials and journalists whose communications with foreign officials and other potential intelligence targets may be sensitive for political or professional reasons.

It is also true that the F.B.I. has broken the rules around these 702 database checks repeatedly in recent years. Agents ran improper queries related to elected officials and political protests. The wiretaps of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, also involved numerous violations of FISA rules. The Page wiretaps involved traditional FISA orders, not Section 702, but the bureau’s many errors there raised understandable doubts about whether it can be trusted to comply with other FISA rules.

Fortunately, there are ways to prevent abuses of Section 702 without compromising its critical national security value. The bill passed by Congress contains numerous reforms that will dramatically improve compliance. It sharply limits the number and ranks of F.B.I. agents who can run 702 queries, imposes strict penalties for misconduct and expands oversight by Congress and the courts.

Some of the bill’s critics argued that the F.B.I. should be required to obtain a warrant from a special FISA court before using the information collected under 702 when investigating Americans who may be involved in terrorism, espionage or other national security threats. But requiring such a warrant would have been unnecessary and unwise.

Getting a FISA court order is bureaucratically cumbersome and would slow down investigations — especially fast-moving cybercases, in which queries have proved especially useful. It would cause agents to miss important connections to national security threats. And because this information has already been lawfully collected and stored, its use in investigation doesn’t require a warrant under the Constitution.

Another problem is that the probable cause needed for a warrant is rarely available early in an investigation. But that’s precisely when these queries are most useful. Database checks allow an agent to quickly see whether there is a previously unnoticed connection to a foreign terrorist, spy or other adversary.

Balances struck between security and privacy need continual refinement. Recent years have shown Section 702’s great value for national security. But they have also revealed lax compliance at the F.B.I. The latest reauthorization boosts privacy without blinding our country to threats in today’s dangerous world.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opin ... ital%20age.

post-satire.

[SonicG]

During Covid, the "left" supported authoritarian tactics against lockdown/mandate protestors. Now, the "right" is supporting the same tactics for protestors of a US-backed foreign war. The neoliberals and the neocons are about to make a BIG comeback and the results will be dire

https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb/status ... 0876969144

Dick Cheney and the Ghost of John McCain are ready to fight the Spectre of Looming Fascism. Make it make sense...