rigorousintuition.ca

Oh My! Look what Arthur Silber wrote!

Silly me, I've finally seen the light... I'm now going to vote for someone who has no chance at all of becoming President, I mean I wouldn't want Jill Stein to become the leader of such an evil empire.

Of course Silber makes no mention of whom he'll vote for or if he isn't going to vote. We'll have to await his next posting to learn how to fight the empire:

"(There remains much more to be said, including how one stops supporting evil. I will begin to deal with that in the next article on this subject.)"

Thank you again, Fresno_Layshaft, for twice now pointing out how very foolish my nonsense postings have been. Without you setting me straight, whatever would I do.

The ONE Campaign requested that the Obama and Romney campaigns send us a brief statement about "what you, if elected, would do to combat extreme poverty and preventable disease?" Statements printed here are final documents presented to the ONE Campaign. ONE has not edited either document for content or length.



Last December, on World AIDS Day, I addressed a ONE Campaign event called "The Beginning of the End of AIDS." I spoke about building on President Bush's historic work with the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. I announced new commitments to fight the pandemic at home and abroad. I urged our allies to join us as we work toward a once seemingly impossible goal - an AIDS-free generation. Thanks to the work of organizations like the ONE Campaign, this goal is now within our reach.

Some of the policies I announced that day were new. But the values behind them were ones I've held my entire life. My mother was an anthropologist who worked to improve the lives of poor people around the world. She taught me that no matter who we are or where we come from, we have an obligation to not only embrace our shared humanity but also our shared responsibilities. I ran for president in part because I believe our country should reflect a common creed that says, "I am my brother's keeper. I am my sister's keeper."

That's why, even as we faced the worst financial crisis in generations, we didn't forget those who live in the shadow of disease, hunger and poverty. We stayed true to our commitments and our values. We rebuilt our alliances. And millions of people are better off because we did.

Living up to these ideals and obligations is in our national security interest. Hunger, disease and poverty can lead to global instability and leave a vacuum for extremism to fill. So instead of just managing poverty, we must offer nations and people a pathway out of poverty. And as president I've made development a pillar of our foreign policy, alongside diplomacy and defense.

It starts with the fight against global hunger. Spikes in food prices are dangerous, and will grow if a surging global population isn't matched by surging food production. I've announced a new alliance to lift 50 million people out of poverty by supporting locally directed food security programs. We're recognizing the important role played by smallholder farmers, especially women, in building thriving economies. And we're focusing on maternal and child nutrition.

We're also working with Africa's people and leaders to responsibly invest in agriculture and increase productivity. Together, we're mobilizing private capital to fast-track new agricultural projects. We'll speed up innovations such as better seeds and better storage. We're helping African farmers gain access to agricultural data, from satellite imagery to weather forecasts to market prices, right on their mobile phones.

And we will continue the fight against HIV/AIDs and other pandemics. My administration increased our commitments to the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria to record levels. We're on track to help 6 million people get HIV/AIDS treatment by the end of 2013 - 2 million more than our original goal. Over the next five years, we aim to reduce vaccine costs, immunize more than 250 million children, and prevent 4 million premature deaths. We've lifted the so-called global gag rule that restricted women's access to family planning services abroad. And we're doing more than ever to combat human trafficking, which threatens public health across borders.

The next four years will be full of tough choices. Some will argue that as we continue to grow our economy by investing in a strong middle class we must put our other commitments on hold. That choice is false - and it's not one we have to accept. As long as I am your president, I will not write off "the least of these." What makes us strong is reflecting our most cherished values - making sure America remains not only the place where if you work hard, you can get ahead, but also that last, best hope of Earth.

That's how we'll move forward, and build a better future together.



I commend the ONE campaign for bringing more attention to the plight of global poverty. Although many Americans rightly are concerned about our current difficulties here at home, our nation never turns a blind eye to human suffering abroad. As president, I will retool and refocus our foreign aid, so we can lift more people out of poverty and make our world more secure.

The biggest problem with our foreign aid strategies is that many of them are ineffective. Too often, our aid supplants work that is more effectively done by private enterprise and investment in other nations. Our aid should instead focus on building the institutions of liberty that will create lasting development and change.

I will focus U.S. assistance programs on encouraging free enterprise and promoting human rights. If developing nations build strong economies and durable institutions, this will foster enduring prosperity, and their ties with the United States will only strengthen.

In my administration, we will institute a new Prosperity Pact program that will use development dollars to channel the transformative power of increased trade and investment. Working with the private sector, we will identify barriers to foreign investment and trade in developing nations. And in exchange for removing them, we will offer those countries aid packages focused on developing the rule of law, property rights, and other institutions of liberty.

In addition, my administration will restore the promotion of free trade as a key priority of America's foreign policy. By negotiating more trade pacts with developing nations, we will create jobs here at home, reduce poverty abroad, and develop deep ties with our friends and allies. We will also build on the work of microfinance initiatives and support new financing structures for small- and medium-sized enterprises. Empowering SMEs will allow developing nations to reach the global market and create an enduring cycle of growth.

I will also reform what has become the antiquated organizational structure of our diplomatic and assistance agencies. The current structure of government that is charged with utilizing our soft power is spread across numerous agencies—a scheme that scrambles lines of authority, blurs priorities, and creates accountability gaps through which failures go unpunished and successes go unrecognized. I will begin a process of reorganization that will establish unified budgetary and directive authority under one official responsible for all diplomatic and assistance programs within a particular region. These will be designed to mirror the regional military combatant commands. This would improve coordination between our military and diplomatic agencies so that their missions reinforce each other, instead of working at cross purposes as is currently the case.

Finally, we will answer the call for humanitarian assistance. The PEPFAR program has saved millions of lives. And we must recognize that many of America's most effective development groups are faith-based. They will have no stronger partner than a Romney Administration, one that will not throw up roadblocks to their participation in important initiatives abroad to assist those in need.

If America does not lead, other countries will—and they may not share our interests or our values. Our assistance to developing countries, if used wisely, can encourage growth, promote freedom, and keep us safe. Our aid policy will be a priority in my administration, because I believe in a strong America. Our strength comes from many sources, and foreign assistance is one of them. As president, I will ensure that our aid programs are effective and that America remains strong.

~~~~~~~~~~

No difference at all, between these two men, right?

Fresno_Layshaft wrote:Voting to sustain the legitimacy of the ruling class is something you have full control over, however.

The ruling class would consider itself equally legitimate if only 10 percent of the electorate voted and 80 percent of them voted Republican. That was the original set-up, back when only free white male property-holders could vote (in most states). Since then, at most times, most of the ruling class has fought against the attempts to expand the vote. When they were denying the vote to women, for example, they never thought that they were illegitimate. All that mattered was whether they could impose their will. The 60 men who wrote the constitution of 1787 thought they possessed full legitimacy. They wrote the rules so that popular challenges to it would be difficult.

The "legitimacy" of this system does not derive from popular will, or from the staged expression of popular will as enacted in elections. It is based on the divinity of the property rights of the wealthiest. (As the abuse of eminent domain shows, the less wealthy are often deprived, in cases where their property rights run up against the future property right of the wealthy.) Internationally, it is based on the ability of the nation to project power through force, as both candidates made clear in last night's debate.

Law, money and the use of state force are used to defend and favor the property rights of the wealthiest. Elections are a pain in the ass, as the technocratic ideology (the one that predominates outside election years) implies: There is only one way to run the machine. You can run it competently or incompetently. You can make the economy "grow," or you are a loser.

I expect even most of today's operative ruling class, trained in the rhetoric of liberal democracy, would prefer elections wherein 90 percent didn't bother to vote. This would be cheaper, less wearisome, more predictable. All that matters is that the 90 percent remain silent. Therein lies the real difference: Popular organization vs. general apathy. That makes a difference. How many people vote makes a relatively small difference.

In the absence of popular organization and movement, voting per se has nothing to do with enabling or challenging legitimacy. The main difference that voting makes is not in which front-man is chosen for the technocratic administration of the same basic program, but in what the political weather is going to be. I choose the weather that I believe favors popular organization over general apathy. Which is to say, I prefer the chances for popular organization when the majority think they're democratic.

Arthur Silber instead chooses a blind fanaticism that condemns voters as murderers. That's fine. He would prefer that everyone who now votes either D or R become comfortable with the idea they are "complicit in murder" due to their vote. You know what? That's hardly impossible. Thanks to cognitive dissonance, and as history has shown, rather than shame majorities can choose to be openly bloodthirsty. Which has happened in this country (see: 1972). Which would be disastrous.

Rather than think of themselves as willing remote-control murderers (who nevertheless will find a way to sleep at night) I prefer that they instead simply think they've taken one of the inevitable choices offered to them, and that they believe they have a say afterwards. Afterwards is what matters. Silber thinks voting surrenders one's ability to do anything. That's bullshit. Voting can be a first step to actually doing something, as opposed to nothing, during all other times. The 365 days and 20-plus hours when you are not voting (on leap years).

Fresno_Layshaft wrote:I'm tired of reading that if you use roads and running water then you're supporting the 'empire', paying for bombs with the sales tax on your winter boots. What non-sense! Using the roads is hardly something one can avoid in life, unless your a shut-in. If you don't pay your property tax, you lose your house. That is state coercion, its not voluntary. No one has any say on what their taxes pay for (another good reason not to participate). It could go to a hospital or it could go to the military.

Well, I've been doing that more than anyone. I apologize for tiring you. I have done so in response to the ludicrous proposition, represented here with fanaticism by the likes of Arthur Silber and Nordic, that voting is somehow the central enabling act for the empire and the system. It's not. The system would do just fine if it could dispense with democratic elections altogether, as long as the public chose general apathy over self-organized social movement.

The lowest turnout of eligible electorate in a modern presidential election was in 1988 - a majority were among the non-voters. I was among the non-voters, disgusted with the Dukakis response to the war criminal Bush. But the non-voters were not an organized movement, so it didn't matter at all. There was no legitimacy crisis, whatsoever. No protests, no problems. The winner went on to implement new radical banking and energy deregulations. His administration consolidated a major plunder of many billions of dollars for his cronies, known in the media as the "S&L crisis." They murdered hundreds of thousands of people in a war with a former satrap that the Bush-shaped CIA and the Reagan-Bush regime had helped to empower. No problem. No legitimacy crisis.

It's not that you have a choice or that you shouldn't consume, drive, pay taxes, work for an income and so forth. It is a simple fact, however, that these acts of participating in the system are materially significant to its sustenance, while your vote is (almost) irrelevant to its sustenance. I don't want you to feel guilty about that. I do hope you find a way to minimize these forms of participation, or, more importantly, to take part in a popular movement for change that actually succeeds. You don't really have a fair choice, or a necessarily effective alternative to consumption, driving, taxes, work and so forth. (I wouldn't go as far as c2w? with the claim that Americans can just leave, since most people clearly are not equipped let alone willing to do so. They should stand and fight where they are.)

I only want you to see through the fanaticism of a Silber, who would make voting into the special enabling evil.

You don't get to control what comes over the prison radio, and you can't switch it off. Your wardens have conceded your right to adjust the volume within a narrow range. Why wouldn't you choose the lower volume, so that you and your fellow inmates have more ability to communicate on how to take over the prison and transform it into a democratic house? From the perspective of organizing popular movements it's no act of defiance but merely of self-sabotage to choose the maximum noise -- the ideological confusionism, the up-is-down world of the Republicans.

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JackRiddler wrote:

Nordic wrote:I never thought I'd see this inhuman level of amorality on this board.

You mean that someone would be slinging propaganda for the Republicans? Nah, seen it before.

Not to belabor the point here, but:

Putting aside for the moment what some feel about Nordic's argument tactics in this thread, one point that has been discussed in this board a number of times is the very real possibility of votes being manipulated/tampered with to obtain the desired outcome, regardless of how The People actually voted.

I believe [and by no means am I presuming to speak for Nordic] that he's simply surprised quite a few in this message board seem to be pushing hard for voting as if the potential of fraud isn't there at all.

Sure, if all our votes are actually, legitimately counted -- and all attempts for voters to tally a vote not obstructed in any way -- then there is a point to be made to 'strategically' vote for Obama over Romney.

But the pundits and the media are already throwing it out there that it'll be a close one, making it that much easier to manipulate tallies/outcomes however "they" deem fit. Don't take much fixin' when it's a close one; a few hundred/thousand here or there in key districts...

Of course, that shouldn't stop anyone from going out there and moving forward however they choose to do so.

jingofever wrote:I watched most of the four debates and don't recall anything specific about the environment coming up. After Deep Water Horizon, Fukushima, accelerating melting in the arctic, and a summer of extreme temperatures I thought somebody might bring it up. All I know is we are going to drill more oil, burn more coal, and hopefully have a good time doing it.

Climate Change Not Mentioned In Presidential Debates For First Time In A Generation

Elvis wrote:Not voting for Obama might make one feel righteous, but it won't lessen death, destruction, poverty or the power of Big Money.

Allowing Romney to win will almost certainly increase death, destruction, poverty and the power of Big Money.

Your choice.

Speculation. Odds are you are partially correct. It seems there's somewhat of a consensus here on this board that the only real difference is that we'll decline slower under Obama. We're already pwned by the power of Big Money. Death, destruction, and poverty are built-in, regardless of the outcomes.

So the real choice before us all is a crap shoot (pun intended).

As stated before, I'll be boycotting the vote or voting Green. And it has never been about feeling righteous. It's about having a conscience. One of the few things they don't own yet.

But, as I also stated above, I'm now calling a truce on the blame game, and although I don't agree with those who have decided to vote for Obama, I do respect that decision and understand their reasons.

But forgive me lord, I just cannot handle the Romney voters. My neighborhood is a mixed bag of left and right. Unfortunately, the main home for neighborhood gatherings now has a Romney sign in the front yard. I find this despicable, given that they know how alienating this has to be for the rest of us. And we partied with them quite a few times in the 10 years I've lived here -- and they know we're an openly gay couple, and have shown support and even anger at the recent voter decision to outlaw gay marriage. It's really hard to see these people as allies when they decided to display their ignorance, like dirty laundry, right out on the lawn of their otherwise charming home. It feels like a slap in the face. We won't be going back. Divide and conquer worked here -- at least on a superficial level, which is all those gatherings and parties were anyway. If and when TSHTF and we need to work together as neighbors, I'll be civil with them, but will necessarily keep my distance otherwise.

Belligerent Savant wrote:But the pundits and the media are already throwing it out there that it'll be a close one, making it that much easier to manipulate tallies/outcomes however "they" deem fit. Don't take much fixin' when it's a close one; a few hundred/thousand here or there in key districts...

True enough. There is another motivation behind that, however. The pundits and the media aren't in on fixing the election, insofar as they are not effectively party operatives (at least a third are? or more). They are very low-information themselves when it comes to election fraud and fight tooth and nail to be obstinate and learn nothing about it, since it's "conspiracy theory." But they are absolutely dependent on the close horse race narrative. The immediate, obviously pre-planned declaration of Romney as the "winner" of the first prize-fight cum debate boosted media spending by both campaigns by hundreds of millions of dollars. The Romney purse was actually straining, when he was still being considered DOA, and the Obama campaign was holding off to keep reserves. A lot of richies weren't seeing the return on support for Romney, or looking to statehouses and local elections. Immediately after the Romney TKO by CNN, he got the biggest haul ever and threw it right into TV spending, and the Obama side responded in kind. Keeping it "close" -- which also has the effect of enabling election fraud and the big steal, if the Republicans can pull it off -- is an economic necessity for an ailing big-media industry.

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ninakat wrote:Climate Change Not Mentioned In Presidential Debates For First Time In A Generation

Now this is how you know it's fully arrived as an issue, as well as a reality -- like war and empire, the power of the deep state, the surveillance state, the great frauds of Wall Street, the drug war, and widespread poverty. Only the things that are tacitly acknowledged as the most important life-or-death issues become unmentionable.

Blood is Their Argument: The Real Campaign Trail
Written by Chris Floyd
Monday, 22 October 2012 22:55

"...for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument?" -- Shakespeare, Henry V

Even as the presidential candidates meet in ersatz agon to spew their self-serving lies and scripted zingers in a "debate" on foreign policy, the real campaign -- the campaign of blood and bone, of death and terror, being waged in Pakistan by the American government -- goes on it all its horror.

This week, the Mail on Sunday -- one of Britain's most conservative newspapers -- published a story outlining, in horrific detail, the true nature of the drone killing campaign begun by George W. Bush and vastly expanded by Barack Obama. Coming on the heels of a recent report ("Living Under Drones") by teams at Stanford and New York universities on this ongoing war crime, the Mail on Sunday story brings the humanity of the victims -- and the inhumanity of perpetrators -- to the fore. The story concerns legal action being taken in Pakistan on behalf of families of drone-murder victims by Pakistani lawyer and activist Shahzad Akbar and the UK-based human rights group, Reprieve. As the MoS reports, two court cases have been filed that could "trigger a formal murder investigation into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes."

. . . (sordid, horrific, heartbreaking details left out for brevity -- see original post) . . .

This is another aspect of the drone campaign that I noted in a recent post here about the drone campaign: it is not just an illegal military operation, it is -- and is designed to be -- a terrorist campaign. It is meant to terrorize the population of the targeted regions, to keep the people there enslaved to fear and uncertainty, never knowing if the buzzing drone flying high and unreachable above their heads will suddenly spew out a Hellfire missile on their house, their school, their farm, their hospital, and blow them or their loved ones into unidentifiable shreds. It is a terrorist campaign -- not a random attack here and there, not an isolated spasm of violence -- but a continual, relentless, death-dealing campaign of terror designed to poison the daily lives of innocent people and force their cowed acquiescence to the dictates of domination.

II.
It goes without saying that this story, or the Living Under Drones report, or the abominable implications of the terrorist campaign were not discussed during the "debate" Monday night between the two clowns who are fighting for the chance to drench themselves in human blood for the next four years. (For the most thorough -- and harrowing -- consideration of these implications, including the electoral implications, see this powerful piece by Arthur Silber.) The fact that the drone campaign is actually one of the greatest threats to the national security of the American people will not impinge upon the "debate." Why should it? Neither candidate is the least bit interested in the security of the American people. In fact, both are firmly committed to imposing the drone terror campaign on the American people themselves (as Silber, again, notes here).

In a recent article, Daniel Ellsberg -- a courageous and worthy dissident for many decades -- shocked many by cataloging the many war crimes and moral atrocities of the Obama Administration, then ending with a fervent rallying cry for us all to .... support Obama. (Vast Left has more on this.) Here, Ellsberg echoes a familiar argument during this election cycle, voiced more vehemently not long ago by another honorable campaigner, Robert Parry. My response to Parry then applies equally to Ellsberg now, and to all those good progressives who advocate a 'reluctant' but 'realistic' vote for Obama:

• Parry believes he is preaching a tough, gritty doctrine of "moral ambiguity." What he is in fact advocating is the bleakest moral nihilism. To Parry, the structure of American power -- the corrupt, corporatized, militarized system built and sustained by both major parties -- cannot be challenged. Not even passively, not even internally, for Parry scorns those who simply refuse to vote almost as harshly as those who commit the unpardonable sin: voting for a third party. No, if you do not take an active role in supporting this brutal engine of war and injustice by voting for a Democrat, then it is you who are immoral.
  
  You must support this system. It is the only moral choice. What’s more, to be truly moral, to acquit yourself of the charge of vanity and frivolity, to escape complicity in government crimes, you must support the Democrat. If the Democratic president orders the "extrajudicial" murder of American citizens, you must support him. If he chairs death squad meetings in the White House every week, checking off names of men to be murdered without charge or trial, you must support him. If he commits mass murder with robot drones on defenseless villages around the world, you must support him. If he imprisons and prosecutes whistleblowers and investigative journalists more than any other president in history, you must support him. If he cages and abuses and tortures a young soldier who sought only to stop atrocities and save the nation’s honor, you must support him. If he "surges" a pointless war of aggression and occupation in a ravaged land and expands that war into the territory of a supposed ally, you must support him. If he sends troops and special ops and drones and assassins into country after country, fomenting wars, bankrolling militias, and engineering coups, you must support him. If he throws open the nation's coastal waters to rampant drilling by the profiteers who are devouring and despoiling the earth, you must support him. If he declares his eagerness to do what no Republican president has ever dared to do -- slash Social Security and Medicare -- you must support him.
  
  For Robert Parry, blinded by the red mist of partisanship, there is literally nothing -- nothing -- that a Democratic candidate can do to forfeit the support of "the left." He can even kill a 16-year-old American boy -- kill him, rip him to shreds with a missile fired by a coddled coward thousands of miles away -- and you must support him. And, again, if you do not support him, if you do not support all this, then you are the problem. You are enabling evil.

I confess I cannot follow such logic. But in his article, Ellsberg compounds the puzzlement when he tries to clinch his case by citing Henry David Thoreau, of all people. Ellsberg writes:

• I often quote a line by Thoreau that had great impact for me: “Cast your whole vote: not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” He was referring, in that essay, to civil disobedience, or as he titled it himself, “Resistance to Civil Authority.”

In other words, Ellsberg is using a call for resistance to civil authority to justify supporting a civil authority which he himself acknowledges is committing war crimes and destroying American democracy. Again, I find this "reasoning" unfathomable.

But I too often quote a line by Thoreau that has had a great impact for me. In fact, I would say that it encapsulates my entire political philosophy in this dirty, degraded Age of Empire:

• “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

If only more of our compatriots would say the same.

Response to Daniel Ellsberg's call for swing-state lefties to vote for Obama
Friday, October 19, 2012
Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

. . .

The simple fact is, there aren't pretty choices on Election Day 2012.

Nothing you do that day will lead to a good outcome, nor a reliably less-awful outcome than the alternatives.

Pick the less-ominous sociopath if you will. Boycott if you will. Or vote for a 3rd-party candidate, as I will. Regardless of those who say "you have no choice," the choice is yours.

My view: if your eyes are open, and your heart is empathetic, do what you think is right.

Alas, that is not what progressive eminence Daniel Ellsberg is telling us.

He discourages voting one's conscience, or at least advocacy to that effect. He deems his peers' principled choice—among the multiple futile ones on offer—to be the stuff of madness.

Nothing we do on election day will change America from its present, disastrous course.

I'm just putting my chit in for a little more honesty and thoughtfulness about where we're heading and why. To express a wish that we can somehow do something positive before calamity forces radical change—of a nature unknown—upon us.

Your mileage may vary. Because, however symbolic and futile it may be, you have a choice.

JackRiddler wrote:

ninakat wrote:Climate Change Not Mentioned In Presidential Debates For First Time In A Generation

Now this is how you know it's fully arrived as an issue, as well as a reality -- like war and empire, the power of the deep state, the surveillance state, the great frauds of Wall Street, the drug war, and widespread poverty. Only the things that are tacitly acknowledged as the most important life-or-death issues become unmentionable.

or, more likely imo,...campaign polling has shown the subject has lost traction with the voters at this juncture.

This is a really tough call. Should one vote for Hart Intercivic, or for Hart Intercivic?

'I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.'

-Stalin, as quoted by Bazhanov

Iamwhoiam wrote:No difference at all, between these two men, right?

Right. Thanks for asking. What you say is true, of course: they're both equally despicable, and both their speeches were equally despicable. Two pieces of laughably corny, evasive, manipulative, sanctimonious wank, not written by but rubber-stamped by two celebrity bores, one of whom enjoyed the world's adoration four years ago and still laps up its approval. ( I mean the one who was praised for the Ciceronean splendour and sheer fucking awesomeness of his language.) Both speeches were an entirely predictable standard-issue insult to the poor and to the sick, everywhere in the world.

"extreme poverty and preventable disease" = AIDS. Did you get that? AIDS. That's right: AIDS. Obama is against it, i.e. AIDS.

But crafty, crafty. Observe how Obama['s speechwriting team] turned a question about extreme poverty and preventable disease into one about 1) AIDS, 2) AIDS, and (last not least) 3) AIDS.

Certainly there are more votes in AIDS (did I mention AIDS?) than in diarrhoea or leprosy or malnutrition or land-theft or child labour or factory drudgery or homelessness or any of the other million varieties of death by slow attrition. But it would be cynical even to notice that, so I didn't actually notice it, for I am a happy little person. Still, I can't help imagining the ambitious opportunistic shits on his Speechwriting Team shouting and cackling and chewing their pencils and calling each other assholes till they got that speech simply perfect. ("AIDS! AIDS, goddammit!") Liberals one and all.

Iamwhoiam wrote:No difference at all, between these two men, right?

They wear different-coloured ties, I presume. But I'm not sure which one of those two happy gents will turn out to be the World's Boss. Time will surely tell. Exciting, isn't it? It deserves all our attention, or at least all yours. Whatever happens, it's nice to know they're the best of pals. It is, after all, the main thing.

Climate Change Not Mentioned In Presidential Debates For First Time In A Generation

Well, They Wouldn't Mention It, Would They? I Mean, It's Something Real.

(Why Does The Huffington Post Capitalise Every Word? Why Does Arianna Huffington Count As A Leftist In America? Questions, Questions.)


A victory for the Modern Cicero should empower the Left even more than his first term has already done. Boy, is that Left ever empowered right now. God forbid the Bad Guy should get in, this time. It might make the Left less empowered.

JackRiddler wrote:

Belligerent Savant wrote:But the pundits and the media are already throwing it out there that it'll be a close one, making it that much easier to manipulate tallies/outcomes however "they" deem fit. Don't take much fixin' when it's a close one; a few hundred/thousand here or there in key districts...

True enough. There is another motivation behind that, however. The pundits and the media aren't in on fixing the election, insofar as they are not effectively party operatives (at least a third are? or more). They are very low-information themselves when it comes to election fraud and fight tooth and nail to be obstinate and learn nothing about it, since it's "conspiracy theory." But they are absolutely dependent on the close horse race narrative. The immediate, obviously pre-planned declaration of Romney as the "winner" of the first prize-fight cum debate boosted media spending by both campaigns by hundreds of millions of dollars. The Romney purse was actually straining, when he was still being considered DOA, and the Obama campaign was holding off to keep reserves. A lot of richies weren't seeing the return on support for Romney, or looking to statehouses and local elections. Immediately after the Romney TKO by CNN, he got the biggest haul ever and threw it right into TV spending, and the Obama side responded in kind. Keeping it "close" -- which also has the effect of enabling election fraud and the big steal, if the Republicans can pull it off -- is an economic necessity for an ailing big-media industry.

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Great points. The debates are certainly about finish-line fundraising too, something which almost never gets said. The media's interest in abetting the closeness of the horse race is obvious, yet because they control the on-air narrative this too almost never gets said.

An additional point: if the punditry were to acknowledge the power of election fraud to 'move the needle' a few percentage points (by which I mean: the electronic voting-enabled vote-counting fraud and vote manipulation of all sorts), it would require a similar acknowledgement that the way they carry on most of their on-air lives is pretty much entirely meaningless. Pundits like Chuck "conspiracy garbage" Todd already have to understand at some level that they're really just glorified sports commentators: they're paid to build and attach grand narratives of explanation to tiny, practically random bits of polling data for a living, and their jobs literally depend on convincing the electorate that they they alone can distill wisdom from it. Admitting that election fraud can produce far greater variances than those their trained eyes detect within the mass of polling and focus group data they pour over from "undecided", "non-motivated", or "suburban women" voters would mean acknowledging an ironic the truth: reality is far messier than the punditry will allow, not the conspiracy theorists.

If the election goes 51-49 Obama, Todd and his irksome ilk will be ready with their narratives: "America just doesn't fire sitting presidents without a very good reason for doing so!" "Ohio voters belioeved their relative prosperity they're enjoying wasn't due to the policies of a Republican governor so much as those of a Democratic president" blah blah blah.

If it's 51-49 Romney, the narrative will reverse, and all on the alleged difference of 2 voters out of 100! The tenuousness of the whole project requires the complete denial of election fraud or anything else that could gum up the sanctity of the numbers, because above all else Todd and the rest of the loathsome lot of them are playing a numbers game.

Forgive me if you saw this on the "2016" thread, but since it sunk like a fucking rock the day I posted this, and since it took for fucking ever to write, and since it cost me what would be a month's salary in the third world in lost billable hours while writing it, and since it's literally keeping me up at night pondering it, and since, despite the issues having been raised in this thread already, I'm still not satisfied that the whole point has been adequately addressed amid all the shit-slinging, I thought I'd cross-post it here just in case anybody has anything else interesting to say in response to it here:

psynapz wrote:So I'm troubled by Rory's point about disenfranchised human beings bound to be affected by slashing federal funds for social programs if the Republican machine of inhuman blithe ruthlessness regains executive power. I don't want that. But I also don't want to act based on fear. I mean, In the short term, real measurable damage is done to so many things when these fuckers seize and wield executive control, but in the long term, that's just going to keep happening unless there's a populist challenge to the de-facto binary system by fielding third-party candidates. Every time a third-party candidate gains momentum, undeniable grassroots support and overall campaign visibility, an incremental step is indelibly taken towards mounting a challenge to the two-party paradigm. It's like the peak indicators in a graphical EQ on a stereo -- every time a note or a beat exceeds the highest level previously attained in that frequency range, the high point is marked by, say, a red LED. Hunter S. Thompson famously wrote about the high water mark of the 60's, attained just before the energy crested and receded. It was framed tragically in his context, but over the long term, every attempt at popular revolution, every time an opportunity to create uncontrolled situations and take advantage of the chaos to create new forms and push the envelope of given assumptions, the range of possibility for the outcome of all future actions along those lines is widened. Eventually it's going to include some incremental but fantastic goal, like a governorship or senate seat. And someday, who knows.

But even if Jill Stein doesn't get elected (and I'm told by an elector from another state that she's on the ballot in enough states to win the electoral college), which I'm gonna say, not to be defeatist, but she straight up won't (because we'd have to have seen a much broader and energetic build-up already), the very act of fielding a third-party candidate that grabs a not-insignificant percentage of the votes (like Ron Paul) does push the Overton window a bit more, and embolden politicos into more vigorous campaign work next time around, and emboldens potential third-party voters into overcoming the pack-mentality fear of taking an unpopular action or converting from bystander to responder. Every time that envelope is pushed, it not only becomes more possible to elect a third-party president who can not only attempt, but be in the best possible political position to enact some radical systemic improvements. All it takes is popular will. And more of it.

Speaking of popular will, what happened to the Occupy project to create a constitutional convention in the US? That sounded like a great idea for expediting some world-saving radical changes. You know, Occupy showed a lot of us that we're not alone in our righteous outrage and that there is definitely, undeniably a sleeping giant that's more savvy and psyops-resistant (not -proof, but definitely -resistant) than perhaps most of us could have conceived of from our perspective here in the beach bar on Wells Island, and there is this sense of freshly-realistic-seeming potential for the application of real, actual popular power in what has otherwise seemed to be an unmovable, entrenched, criminal power structure. We owe this to scholarly experts (young and old) who applied their expertise within Occupy (and the Indignados, and others, but I'm using Occupy as shorthand here) to non-violently create crisis to which the system must respond wherever and whenever they could on whatever scale, which is of course using the criminals' own Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis method against them ingeniously and effectively.

But in the meantime, does raising the bar on the acceptable number of viable presidential candidates while knowing it's handing over another piece of that precious DMZ of non-robot-voters between an Obama re-election and a Romney victory, plus the free cookie it earns (yum!), actually worth the short-to-medium-term risk to what's left of all the social and environmental safeguards upon which the people and planet rely, ultimately for survival? Or is that like the needs of the many (the long-term need for it to be really possible to vote a third-party in) outweigh the needs of the few (those relying upon the next four years being a non-Republican term), and a bitter medicine we must risk having to swallow in order to create possibility for our childrens' lives by confronting the binary system with a creative crisis to which it must respond?

On edit: