Not Even A Mushroom Cloud Will Make Them Doubt The Narrative

 

It is hard to admit that you were wrong. It is harder to admit you were wrong on a very serious subject. Even harder to admit you were wrong when the group you belong to was wrong, because it means you will have to go against the crowd. It is harder still to admit you were wrong when doing so makes it obvious that a group you felt superior to was right. That is the kind of blow to the ego very few of us are willing to endure.

For the reasons stated above, people who fell in line with the Russiagate narrative are never going to admit they were wrong, not even to themselves. They will never permit themselves to consider that all their emotional energies were diverted from opposing Trump on any issues of substance into being unwitting dupes to the unelected deep state that has a self-admitted goal of complete global hegemony. Russia was the next nation on their list, and so the propaganda campaign had to be kicked into high gear. Democrats, this time, proved to be the subjects most useful for this purpose.

Hillary Clinton embraced the by-now debunked lie that Russia hacked her e-mails in order to save face and have someone to blame for her failure. Blame and Hillary do not coexist very well, so she was an easy sell. The Democratic Party cottoned to the Russiagate narrative because it meant they didn’t have to do a post-loss post-mortem to see what they had done wrong. A party every bit as beholden to moneyed interests as the Republican Party has no interest in contemplating what it might need to do for voters other than virtue-signaling. The media, perhaps, found it easiest of all to go along with the story of Russia interfering in the U.S. elections. For one thing, it absolved them from doing any actual journalism on their own: they just had to repeat the assertions from anonymous sources they were being flooded with on a daily basis. For another thing, they never had to take accountability for what they reported: They could take an accusation — say Putin having video of prostitutes peeing on Trump — speculate on what Putin might be making Trump do to keep the video hidden, and then move on to the next “bombshell” when the previous one had proven to be a dud. Lastly, Russiagate was a HUGE moneymaker for the establishment media. As Executive Chairman for CBS News said about Donald Trump — and which was doubly true for all establishment news outlets regarding Russiagate: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” For a while, Rachel Maddow was flying high doing nothing more than quoting from the Steele Dossier the way Joel Osteen quotes The Bible.

And of course, all the neo-cons went along with Russiagate because it advanced the agenda that they first put into practice with the invasion of Iraq. All those ghoulish demons from the pits of the Republican Party slithered over to join with the Democrats to blame Russia for what the American people and both their corrupted parties did to themselves. And the Democrats welcomed them with open arms like some prodigal son. This unification with what they once considered all that was evil they now called “bipartisanship”. “How could we be wrong when even our worst enemies agree with us?” In this way, George W. Bush was no longer a villain but became one of the good guys, like something out of a poorly written professional wrestling script.

People in an emotional state are easily manipulated. That is why those who were crushed by Hillary’s loss fell for Russiagate like a hungry trout for a well-tied fly. That’s why anyone who wasn’t emotionally invested didn’t. Anyone who was able to go to bed the night before the election because they didn’t think the survival of Western culture relied upon Hillary’s victory saw the Russiagate narrative for what it was: a lie, an excuse, a call for increased tensions against yet another country, a joke, pathetic.

Biden has had time to give us a good idea of what a Hillary Presidency would have looked like. Both being obedient servants to corporate power and the military, there is little difference one’s influence could have made. Hillary might have been more full-throatedly supportive of the military industrial complex, but without the 4-year buildup that was Russiagate, it would not have been as effective. Indeed, tying Trump to Russia was a stroke of (evil) genius on the part of those who dictate our international politics.

But like I said, it is hard to admit you’re wrong when you have so much emotionally invested in a narrative. I know I am not going to convince anybody to change their mind, let alone admit their complicity in a lie that quite possibly could be more damaging than any other lie told in human history. The only people who will read and relate to this are those who already know the truth. But that does not mean I can’t make the lie sit a little less easily in some people’s minds. I can still remind them that people other than Trump supporters, paid Russian trolls, and useful idiots can hold a position contrary to their own. I can still make self-delusion hurt a little bit.

*Dearest reader: I admit I am guilty of using what Professor S.I. Hayakawa referred to as “snarl words” in this article. Snarl words are “highly connotative language that often serves as a substitute for serious thought and well-reasoned argument.” I further admit I have done so in order to provoke an emotional response rather than a substantive debate. If I felt substantive debate were possible on this issue I would have refrained from such behavior. I honestly believe there is no way of arguing this subject with believers without provoking an emotional response. Please note that I am at least upfront about this and that it is a form of arguing that I normally find offensive.

Two Paths Leading Backwards

Let me suggest that it is impossible to have just one bad political party for any length of time. If you had a good party and a bad party, everyone would vote for the good party and the bad party would be forced to be competitive if it wanted to survive. The good party would push the dividing line further towards the bad party, forcing the weaker of the two to incorporate stances held by the winning party. At some point, the dividing line would land roughly halfway between the will of the people.

One political party can move the line left or right, but it takes both of them, one standing at either end, to raise or lower the bar. What you are witnessing now is a limbo contest of epic proportions.

I used to vote for Democrats, not because they were what I wanted but because they were at least moving forward. As someone who defined himself as progressive, that was the logical choice. Or at least the justifiable compromise. But with the advent of Bill Clinton, it was pretty obvious that they were no longer even standing still, they were going backwards. All right, it wasn’t so obvious to me, since I voted for the man, at least the first time around. But doing so made me feel cheap and used the morning after, an effect he had on a few others, I imagine. I don’t remember the particular incident, but I truly remember in the first week after him becoming president, the regret sinking in. Sure, presidents once they’ve transitioned from candidate to office always disappoint, but this one really made me realize I had to change my behavior.

When someone can no longer identify with the party they have voted for all their lives, they typically switch to the other, but that is not a viable option in this case. Though Democrats have ceased to be Democrats and moved way further to the right, Republicans are still in the lead and running as if the devil himself was trying to overtake them.

You see, it doesn’t matter which side of the line you are on so much as where the line is. And if someone keeps dragging the line to the right and you follow along but do not cross it, that doesn’t make you a progressive. The very fact that you follow every time the line is positioned further to the right indicates you are not an answer nor an opposition.

But enough of the x axis, it is the y axis I’m more interested in. And the bar has been falling. It is continuing to fall. It is in the negatives now, retreating with no signs of abatement. And while each party is going backwards in its own special way, they are both doing so in tandem.

Conservatives are attempting to go back to the way it (never was but they believe it) used to be, for white and white-identifying people. Cultural myths are comforting, because they are both idyllic and simplistic. They want to go back to Mayberry, they want the little town that is not influenced by the outside world that is so corrupting (and different). They want a world that is black and white. Mostly white.

There would be a few modifications to the Mayberry blueprint, however. For example, the first time Sheriff Andy Taylor tried to take the bullets away from Barney’s gun, they’d call in the NRA and have him driven out of town, to be replaced by David Clarke or Joe Arpaio.

Better yet, the new sheriff would be played by Charles Bronson, and each episode he’d be sure to pop a cap in someone’s ass. Tax payers supporting Otis’ life of addiction? A bullet’s cheaper than the cost of putting him up for the night (unless, of course, the jail was privatized, in which case Otis’ stay would be indefinite).

But it would be justice, only the bad guys would get hurt. Of course, the definition of bad guys would be very liberal, encompassing anyone who was not a conservative.

Conservatives want to venerate and preserve the past, no matter how crappy it might have been for many Americans. Japanese Americans, African Americans, migrants in general. It was pretty bad for poor whites ignorant of their history too, but that’s a stratum of society that seems to repeat the same mistakes over and over. At any rate, conservatives want to keep the memory of America’s glorious past alive, they just don’t want to think critically about it or discuss it. It is not history they wish to remember, it is myth. But one has to wonder how people who cannot face the complexity and unpleasant truth of the past see the present for what it is. If you cannot see the racism in the past, what makes anyone think you see it for what it is now?

Hard work is what built this nation, that’s the rallying cry of the conservatives, neglecting to mention whose sweat and labor that was. It was the labor of immigrants and slaves, of children as young as 8 working 60-hour weeks as breaker boys, sometimes losing their limbs and even their lives to the dangerous machinery they were more familiar with than their own beds.

Work hard and don’t expect to be given anything. That’s the advice I would give to my child if I were a wealthy capitalist. Work hard and don’t expect to be given anything. That’s the advice I would give to my employees if I were a wealthy capitalist too, but for entirely different reasons.

Conservatives want to go back to the era of fewer restrictions for business, without ever looking back at that era and the misery created by it. The thinking of conservatives is that they are going to succeed because they are hard-working and things will work out for them. They figure since they were the one sperm out of a million that fertilized the egg that they are special, not realizing everyone alive was created that way.

If conservatives have regressed into a sort of tribalism, then liberals have regressed into infantilism. They don’t want to build mass movements to take power into their own hands, they want Daddy Deep State to make the Big Bad Trump-Monster go away. They want Mommy Media to hold them in her arms and tell them she’ll keep them safe from the Russian hackers under their bed.

Never in my life have I experienced a doe-eyed child whole-heartedly swallow a story an authority figure has told them the way liberals have the Russian hacking story. And I’ve been around to witness the Benghazi conspiracy theories.

The liberals believe because they want to believe. No, they believe because they need to believe. They need to believe that our nation has not come to this, even though it has quite clearly come to this. They need to believe that Donald Trump was not at the end of the road we’ve been walking for a generation and more. DAMN IT ALL, ALL WE HAD TO DO WAS ELECT HILLARY AND EVERYTHING WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE IT USED TO BE!!! And how it used to be was pretty good for those not losing their jobs, watching their paychecks get stretched further and further, or being incarcerated for minor drug offences. Or dying on foreign soil.

Liberals are looking for a quick fix to make life the way it was before. Not a hundred years ago, just last year. Somehow the idea that the present flowed logically from yesterday doesn’t seem to occur to them. There was no natural progression from the world they helped shape to the reality they now experience. Trump came out of nowhere, a deus ex machina to a cheaply written novel. It is a story involving one-dimensional villains wearing black but always white. If only there was a Condoleezza Rice or Collen Powell to stand up for truth, justice and the American way.

We needed a villain to blame, since we weren’t in the mood for looking in the mirror. Blaming terrorists was getting old, and more than a little awkward since Hillary was helping them overthrow nations. Besides, it’s politically incorrect to blame people of Middle East descent for all that has gone wrong, though oddly enough it seemed permissible to kill them and take their oil to fuel our SUVs. We needed to tie Donald Trump to the most reprehensible people imaginable, those forces that from our earliest memories were the symbols of all that is evil in the world. Let’s see, who could we get?

Putin! Yes, the leader of the Evil Empire.

Never mind that Russia is not the Soviet Union and Evil Empire was Ronald Reagan’s term, not one those on the left ever used. Ronald Reagan and Joseph McCarthy. The Republicans liberals used to hate are their friends now, at least those who are willing to dis on Trump. And while we’re dipping into the well of our deepest subconscious stereotypes, let’s add fascists to the list. Never mind the mixed metaphor, never mind the fact that there is nothing so abominable in the collective memory of Russians as fascism or Nazism. Never mind that the U.S. is supporting far-right regimes on Russia’s borders.

And so liberals simplified the narrative enough that they need not do anything beyond hate everyone that disagrees with them as they await further instructions from anonymous sources from intelligence agencies we’ve never heard of.

And where are the adults in all of this? At the margins, the far end of the right and the left who seem to have more in common with each other than they do with those closest to them. They sit on the margins not because they are that distant from what the majority of Americans want so much as they are there because the story they tell is not the one the mainstream media wants. At the edges sit those who 40 years ago would have been mainstream Democrats and Republicans, but have been kicked to the curb by a cancer that has grown in between them. It is a cancer that both margins see clearly, though each from its particular vantage point. The right sees a bloated government trampling on the rights of the individual, while the left sees bloated corporate power that needs to be reined in. But that bloated cancer in the middle is what is paying the big money to get those in the middle elected, those politicians willing to allow that festering bag of corruption into the hallowed halls of our government.

Thus there is no dividing line between the two parties anymore, not in any true sense. They have both been absorbed by that pulsating evil at the center of our society, the big money that controls the big government. To squabble about the minor differences as seen from the left perspective or the right perspective is foolish.

And thus we have two paths, both leading downward through their unrealistic desire to revert rather than advance. But even while there are differences in the two political approaches of the liberals and conservatives, there are many similarities. Both have chosen hatred, division and self-delusion as their responses to the problems we now face. The irony being that the most dangerous problems we now face are hatred, division and self-delusion.

Germany And The Rise Of Hitler

Comparisons have been made of late between contemporary United States and the rise of Nazi Germany. As I am currently studying that era, I figured I would share remembrances from those who were actually there. I’m not trying to make a value judgment, just passing along quotes that somehow seem applicable to the times. All quotes are taken from How Democracy Failed, published in 1975, so no comparisons are attempted from the book’s author to today’s events.

“People knew that there was a sort of Hitler underground, that kids were being indoctrinated, that democratic teachers were getting fired, that the Nazis were better organized than the newspapers ever told us. And there was a quality of political anger.”

“Of course, hate didn’t really explode suddenly in 1930. Hate for Jews, for ‘traitors”, for the liberal press (which as the bearer of bad news was often regarded as the cause of all the disasters), and for politicians who seemed to promise a better life but couldn’t deliver even a few more jobs, had been smoldering in Germany ever since the end of World War I.”

“Students graduated from college into a world that had no place for them. After working hard to get into the university and then spending many years cramming for tough, ever-recurring competitive examinations, many of these students felt betrayed by their country, as did the thousands of shopkeepers whose businesses failed.”

“By reinforcing all the prejudices of the men whom life had apparently failed, telling them that their inability to find work, to lead a decent life, to support their families, was a planned plot by their old enemies, the liberals, the Jews and the scheming politicians, the Nazi party added thousands of new, fighting mad members to its ranks every month.”

“Few realized that the whole world, America included, was going through a depression. They thought that their country had been singled out for misery by “those foreigners”, who were, of course, becoming rich through Germany’s poverty.

On reading over German papers for the months of June, July, and August, it becomes obvious that the vast majority of political reporters, columnists and editors still considered Hitler and his band of conspicuous followers a very minor menace. There were about thirty daily papers in Berlin, and only those that were specifically oriented toward the Nazi party predicted any significant gains in Hitler’s parliamentary delegation.

Hitler attempted to be all things to all men. To a group of students he could appear as a moderate, rather mild politician. In public he preferred to be seen as a gentle man, who loved children and cared so much for animals that he became a vegetarian. His speeches were often so irrational that politicians flatly refused to take him seriously.

By 1933—still appearing to an objective observer to be an irrational, spiteful, rather unintelligent and uneducated little man—he had become one of the most powerful rulers in history. A lost war, a disastrous inflation, disorder and crime, and many lost German illusions had helped to put him in power. But so had some other rather special German problems: an educational system that emphasized obedience over independent thought; a series of orators who taught the public to distrust a free press; an overwhelming longing for order and stability, even at the expense of freedom and justice.

There were those who had always believed that freedom leads to license, that patriotism means an uncritical attitude toward the state, and finally, that the leadership of that state should not be subjected to public scrutiny.

Usually, the distrust produced indifference. Most Germans simply didn’t want to become involved. They considered all politicians as corrupt or corruptible, newspapers as biased, political speeches as empty promises…

Hilda, of course, didn’t understand that Hitler, himself, was well aware of the drama that the fights created, and that they got for him much needed free space in the press. Hitler was also aware of the distrust of politics and government by most Germans, like Hilda’s parents…

He (Hitler) had come to the simple conclusion that a speech would be remembered more vividly if accompanied by violence. He therefore welcomed violent interruptions, because they gave his bodyguards an excuse to wade through the crowd and engage in savage fighting.”

If the average German was disgusted with the fighting and chaos, Hitler was getting his name in the papers, and his followers were proud of him.

Early in his career, Hitler had learned that his audiences were not interested in closely reasoned ideas. What they liked was pounding repetition : the same attacks against the liberals, the Jews, the press and the pacifists, using the same frightening and passionate phrases, with the same promises of a great and bright future.

“One man, who looked like a student, asked at the meeting I attended why the Communists and the international bankers were working together,” a man who is now a banker reported. “That seemed like a fairly intelligent question to me, but one of Hitler’s guards just walked up to him and hit him in the mouth.”

The Abuser Has Two Faces

I am not going to tell you who you should vote for, since I have no idea what issues are most important to you. I will, however, suggest how you should vote. You should vote with an attitude of love and hope, just as you should do all things with an attitude of love and hope. For love and hope grow stronger and spreads to others the more we practice it, just as fear and hatred tends to spread like some contagious disease.

If you vote with hate and fear as your motivations, you will create a system that furthers hate and fear, it really is that simple. If you believe that you cannot support either of the major party candidates in a spirit of love and hopefulness, then walk away from the system because the system does not offer the solutions you or society needs. When we can no longer bring the better angels of our nature into the voting booth with us, it is the system that is broken. And when the system is broken, working within the parameters of that system is supporting that system. To support either of the two-party candidates is to support the two-party system. That is what we’ve been doing for generations now and it has led us to where we are now. There is no logical reason to assume it will be different this time, that voting for the lesser of two evils will bring about the change we really need. It will at best delay the inevitable, permitting all that is wrong to become further entrenched.

Of course, if you are comfortable with the situation as it is, then there is no problem. If you believe that the vote you cast will make for a better tomorrow, by all means do so. But if you vote in fear of what will happen should you not do as you are told by those who know better than you, then you are not behaving as an autonomous adult in touch with your human potential and ability. You are alienated from what makes you a truly independent and powerful human being. You are, in fact, behaving like an abuse victim.

It is a trap nobody expects to fall into. One day you suddenly realize you are reacting in fear all of the time. You feel helpless and you feel stupid and you feel like a bad person no matter what you do. You find yourself timidly acquiescing in hopes of receiving the lesser punishment, hope to deal with the less threatening face of the abuser, but his abusive behavior will continue as long as you continue to play the abuser’s game. If you ever want to break out of that prison, that box that has Democrats as the left wall, Republicans as the right wall, a front wall that has the corporate media as your window to the world, and the ever present wall of fear at your back, you will have to refuse the parameters that have been set for you. You cannot permit yourself to give into the fear and the hatred. You have to have faith that there is something better and transcend the walls that have you imprisoned. You must trust in others and in yourself.

We have lost faith in our fellow humans and in ourselves, handing over that faith instead to institutions and figures of authority. To abusers. We see all too clearly our shortcomings and do not permit ourselves to see what we as individuals and a society are capable of. We give our inalienable rights away to abusers who promise to make things better and always end up making things worse. Why else would we vote the way we do except that we let ourselves see the worst in others and in ourselves? We fear true democracy, afraid that we will have to make real decisions. Why else would we tolerate the political advertising that pollutes our airwaves and our souls and allow ourselves to believe there is no better way? There is a better way but it is up to us to find it.

That’s the way abusers work, by getting us to stop seeing any beauty or goodness in life. For them it is about keeping you in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. But if you are ever going to make things better, you will have to walk away from the games, the threats, the controlling behavior. You must first see yourself as more than helpless if you wish to be something more than a mere extension of the abuser.

An abuser has two faces. A victim of abuse always tries to curry favor with the more peaceful side of the abuser so that he or she doesn’t have to face the violent side. Donald Trump is the ugly, violent side of the abuser. Hillary Clinton is the side that says: “I’m sorry I hit you, baby, it won’t happen again. I love you. I know I voted for that war in Iraq and I was for all those trade agreements that took your job, but I changed.” Of course the implied threat is that if you don’t deal with the Hillary side of things, the Trump side is going to bang your head against the wall.

It takes courage to leave an abuser, courage and a plan. For too long you have convinced yourself that if you just go along with him you can make him change. You constantly compromise what you feel is right so that you don’t displease him. Then the violence occurs, followed by the apologies and the promise that it will never happen again.

But he won’t change, he will never change. The abuser has you in his power and power is the one thing he loves more than anything. He will never really love you, he will merely seek to control and possess you. This is a sad reality that most victims of abuse are slow to realize because they cannot imagine anyone is actually capable of thinking this way. But this I promise, he will never change and it is up to you to get out from under him.

In the meantime he will cut you off from everyone who tries to tell you he’s no good for you. He will cut you off from your family and friends, anyone who is not within his thrall. He will make you feel utterly helpless and at the same time blame you for everything that goes wrong. “I lost because you didn’t support me enough. You didn’t believe in me. I wanted to pass a health-care bill that would cover everyone but everyone is out to get me.”

The abuser wants to make you feel ignorant, that he has all the answers and you better not try to question him. He will tell you the most absurd lies imaginable, and he will demand that you believe him. He wants to make you feel helpless to do anything on your own to make things better. He wants you to believe that you are worthless without him and that you are lucky to have him.

The abuser wants you to see one of his two faces as the real one. He wants you to think that if you love him enough that the other, uglier face, will just go away. But it has kept getting uglier, hasn’t it? The violence more intense and often. Some day you’re going to have to realize exactly who it is your dealing with. It’s time to start working on your courage and your exit strategy, because he is never going to change. It’s time to reach out to all of those who he said was bad for you, time to start making connections with the outside world again. They may be Republicans or Democrats, but they’re abuse victims just like you. And we all need to be strong and support each other if we’re going to ever be free.

I might not have all the answers—I suspect nobody is that smart—but I know the kind of fertile soil from which a healthy society grows, and it is rich in love and hope. Nothing good will come of hatred and fear. If that is all you have within you, stay away from a polling station. No, that is not good enough. That is the abuser in me talking. Instead, find the love and hope that is in you and find a way to make a positive difference. You’ve been inside the box too long.

Random Political Thoughts Part 2

If failing government institutions are privatized, shouldn’t any failing private institution be seized by the state?

If a law is made so complicated that the average citizen cannot understand it, it is likely made deliberately so.

The difference between politicians and crime bosses is that politicians don’t own crime bosses.

You would think that the one thing a capitalist society would be able to teach people would be the value of thrift, the idea that in a world where nobody owes you anything that you shouldn’t spend what you don’t have. But in fact it teaches you the exact opposite. Billions of dollars are spent in advertising in order to entice you to buy what you do not need and cannot afford. The message is driven into your head that “you’re worth it”, “you deserve a break today”. You are repeatedly told not only on television and radio advertisement that your value as a human being is reflected in the kind of car you drive, the kind of clothes you wear, and the size of your television set. Your lawn cannot look adequate unless you spend on the proper tools and chemicals, your skin is repulsive if you do not use the proper acne cream and moisturizers, your gym membership means nothing if you aren’t dressed in Under Armor. Furthermore, you do not adequately care for your child if you do not dress him in the stylish clothes, nor do you love your dog if you do not buy the stuffed toys in the form of the latest licensed television or movie characters. And yet there are those who blame the government for society’s sense of entitlement.

The difference between the market crash of 1929 and 2008 was that in one you had rich investors jumping out of windows and in the other you had them going to the government for bailouts.

We’ve gone from a nation of bakers, grocers, farmers, etc. to a nation of temp workers.

No politician pushes a law without a general clamor for such a law. And if he does, he’s up to no good. The one thing conservatives and liberals can probably agree upon is that we have enough laws. Laws should only be passed when politicians are responding to voters’ concerns.

Capitalism favors the rat that deserts a sinking ship over the captain who goes down with it.

Debt is good…for bankers, for the IMF, for employers who hold their workers by their economic short and curlies.

The two political parties are like Coke and Pepsi, and they are not against each other so much as they are against a plentiful supply of clean drinking water.

The media is socially liberal, economically conservative, and always pro-war.

The Luddites sought to destroy the machines the developed during the industrial revolution because they resulted in even greater misery for those who did the work, rather than take ownership of them. Today the Tea Party seeks to do the same thing with the government. Rather than take ownership of it, they seek to destroy it. It did not work in the time of the Luddites, nor will it work now.

Politics these days are all about looks, the right smile and the perfect hairstyle. Why it is unlikely today that anyone would vote for a candidate who had wooden teeth.

The invention of money was the creation of a system that decides who has enough food to throw away and who starves. And those with enough of it laugh and say the only alternative to the system we have is for all of us to starve. They see astutely enough that everyone can be guilty of being greedy, but then assume society should be based upon greed since there can be no other human motivation as powerful.

If auto companies are willing to install software to cheat emission standards, what makes you think they don’t spend money to promote junk science?

If you don’t think people should live off the work of others, you should support a 100% inheritance tax.

Politics that appeal to your emotions rather than your intellect are always dangerous. If you feel your pulse start to pound and the anger rise within you, step away.

We are all living in a third world nation now. No country is safe from having its natural resources stripped bare by foreign corporations and sold overseas.

Libertarianism: The mystical belief that corporations care about fairness and the free market.

If patriotism is a scoundrel’s last refuge, then the concept of freedom is his first sales pitch.

Our job creators need to be held accountable. If they are unwilling to create jobs unless the entire country bows down to them as though they were gods to be worshipped, perhaps it is time to take their job creating power away from them and place it into the hands of those who are less selfish and self-serving

How did immigrants assimilate into American culture in the past? It happened when they moved into a neighborhood and the neighbors stopped by to introduce themselves, bringing with them a dish to share. In this way bridges were crossed, and whatever cultural divides that existed were broken down by simple human kindness. We've lost that ability, lost the idea of community based on proximity, and that is a pity.

The problem with capitalism is the problem with anything else: the belief that if some is good then more is better.

Cognitive Dissonance

There are some thoughts that, if held together in the same skull, should simply cause one's brain to fizz over like they were baking soda and vinegar. Or explode, like combining dynamite and a flame. And yet some people are able to carry around within their minds these incompatible, deeply volatile opposites without causing apparent harm, to themselves at least:

 Because welfare is abused, we must make it harder to acquire

                                            Vs.

Because guns are abused, we must not make it harder to acquire them.

It’s not the government’s role to tell me how to live my life.

                                           Vs.

America should have a federal law that says everyone should speak English.

Belief that we are living in the end of times without proof.

                                           Vs.

The need for absolute proof before acting on global warming.

There have been some alleged voting regularities, therefore we should impose somewhat upon people’s right to vote by mandating voter ID.

                                          Vs.

There have been a lot of mass shootings lately, but you better not interfere with my sacred Second Amendment rights.

Politicians know nothing about business and should stop trying to regulate it.

                                          Vs.

Politicians know nothing about education but should hold schools to be accountable.

People who are given everything never learn to work for themselves.

                                          Vs.

We should do away with the inheritance tax.

We believe in American exceptionalism, that it is our nation’s role to lead the way.

                                         Vs.

Why should we be the ones to do something about climate change when China is polluting more than we are?

Climate scientists are being alarmists in order to make money.

                                        Vs.

Oil industry execs are only interested in the unbiased truth.

Wisconsin Republicans should change civil service laws to make it easier to fire people not doing their job.

                                       Vs.

Wisconsin Republicans should get rid of the option to recall the governor.

Slavery happened 150 years ago and blacks should get over it.
                                       Vs.
Don't take my rebel flag away from me!

P.S. If this list is skewed liberal, let it be known I intend a Part 2 of Cognitive Dissonance. 

Random Political Thoughts

On one of my other blogs, The Amazing Morse, I have been posting random thoughts, and they seem to go over well. So I thought I'd post some random thoughts on politics here, items I thought more appropriate for here than there:

The free market is indifferent to democracy just as it is indifferent to the issues of slavery and child labor. It is only in government that democracy exists.

Do not shop at a store where you would not like to work.

The capitalist model presents the choice between mainstream news which tells us nothing and the right wing press which tells us how bad the mainstream media is.

If political ads cause people to turn off their TVs, then they have accomplished something worthwhile.

Forget for a moment all other indicators, economic, etc. If we look at the recent trends (say, the last 20 years) we can clearly see a shift in power. Consistently shifting from the common man to the elite few. Our vote cannot be trusted to us. Our political candidate must be shielded from even the softest of questions from real live people. And if a hard question is dealt a politician, the most banal answers can be given by the politician without the media calling them on it.

Our foreign policy must be conducted in secret by agencies and people beyond the reach of voters or public opinion. In short, the citizenry has been removed from the political process and with it any power that the populace had over their government. And where can freedom exist where there is no leverage or power? In the economic sphere, where we can individually compete against each other, or against giants such as Microsoft, General Motors or McDonald Douglas. Our best course here it to bow before these giants, to serve them that they may show favor on us.

If unions had the power some suggest they have, there never would have been a NAFTA, GAT, or any other free trade agreement, at least not in the forms they were written. In the years since they were instituted, wages have stagnated, and union power has fallen precipitously. But of course unions do not have that kind of power, even with the Democratic Party, as they have been behind most of those trade agreements.

The genius of the right wing media is that they have inoculated their audience against phrases such as “drunk the kool-aid”, “sheeple” and “useful idiots”.

Every major religion understands the concepts of charity, compassion and helping one’s fellow man. Every religion except capitalism, of course, which states that not only is greed a virtue rather than a vice, but that it is the only motivating factor we should trust. And to its god, the market, it would offer the sacrifice of human life. To curry its favor and avoid its wrath, we would evict widows from their homes, send children into factories, our young soldiers to war.

Too often we take for granted our freedoms, forgetting those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for them. So let us today thank the children of Sandy Hook who paid the price for our right to bear arms.

The political debate is neatly divided into two camps, the liberals and conservatives, and any attempt to speak from a different perspective makes you appear to whoever is listening as belonging to the other camp.

I don’t care about your politics so much as your commitment to facts.

The free market is nothing more than the transference of the law of the jungle to the human sphere.

The answer to job creation is simple: open up our borders so the increase in workers lowers the cost of labor, making it more affordable to hire workers. If this is not the answer you want to hear, then maybe we should be asking a different question.

As in a communist system, where most who live under it are not philosophically true communists, so too in a capitalist system most of the citizens are not capitalists. Most merely wish to live their lives and pursue their professions, whether it be teacher, electrician, etc. Most care more about family and friends, religion or passions, such as film, music, cars, what have you.

Being liberal has always been the fashionable choice of those in the media, but when push comes to shove, they know who writes their checks.