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dukeofriven · 5 years

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America: A Prophecy

‘What God is he writes laws of peace, and clothes him in a tempest? What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs? What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself In fat of lambs? No more I follow, no more obedience pay!’ So cried he, rending off his robe and throwing down his sceptre In sight of Albion’s Guardian; and all the Thirteen Angels Rent off their robes to the hungry wind, and threw their golden sceptres Down on the land of America. - William Blake, 1793

America is becoming ungovernable.

It’s simply much too large, too varied, and much too polarized for any one candidate to garner even the plurality of support needed to effectively govern as a president, complicated by the weaknesses of America’s social/political system that demands a democratically-elected executive somehow stand for the nation as a whole.

This isn’t a ‘diversity’ problem or a call for ethnic of cultural homogeneity. I’m from a country with greater diversity than the United States and we manage just fine. (I mean we’re facing a rising tide of rightwing resurgence exacerbated by decades of failure by ruling parties to replace the antiquated first-past-the-post voting system so I wouldn’t call us “fine” but those issues are rooted in numerous social trends, not racial demographics.)

It’s more a condition of the scale of Unites States and the internecine conflicts of groups within it. I remember during the last election hearing a lot about letting perfect be the enemy of good: ‘yes this candidate might not understand your ethnic/social/cultural group particularly well or speak to your issues, but you ought to vote for them anyways.’ From a certain point of view that’s true - I think it hardly uncontroversial to say that the world generally and America specifically is demonstrably worse under Donald Trump than it would have been under Hillary Clinton.

But leaving aside the candidates as individuals for a moment and viewing them purely as symbols the President-As-Unifier and the electoral circus around it becomes faintly absurd. The more often you have say to one group or another ‘stop needing a candidate to be exactly like you and just give them your vote because they’re more like you than the other guy,’ the more you overlook centuries of pain and marginalization. Groups that never had voices before have voices now: loud voices, prominent voices, and they are finding that they don’t want to sit down and shut up in the interest of some mythical unity anymore. They can’t. And therefore these presidential primaries are only going to get worse as things go on. They’re already getting acrimonious again, and those groups who have been told to swallow their voices again and again if they don’t want things to get worse are realizing that they’ve been used as tools as the status quo for far too long. Things don’t get worse when they shut up and vote like they’re told - but they never get better, either. Not in meaningful ways, or not rapidly enough to be meaningful to most of them .(‘By supporting the status quo you achieved a social victory and it only took you 45 years and your entire youth to see it come to fruition.’) The ‘baby-steps’ of change have started to seem less like care and caution and more like infantilization.

When the only people who could vote in America were white, adult, male property-owners you could have two political parties: there really was more that united voters then divided them, such as all voters belonging to the same class, ethnicity, language group, social background, Enlightenment-moulding education praxis, and willingness to compromise on treating human beings as disposable tools for labour. The greater the franchise has expanded in America the farther and further from that ‘unity’ things have gotten.

Since the Trump election in particular the question is asked: “What’s caused the polarization of America?” The real answers are a multitude of factors: unhealed wounds in the body politic after the Second Indochina War; the malaise, complacency, and self-indulgent omphaloskepsis of being the so-called superpower in the 90s; post-colonialism and free market economics bringing the worst ravages of capitalism stateside and decimating the illusion of a stable middle class. There’s lot of reasons as things are rarely simple.

Perhaps the most critical cause, however, the one with the greatest impact, has been this widening of not just the franchise but the gradual realization by the newly-enfranchised that they vocalize social discontent and express it - or at least attempt to express it - through voting. The ‘silent majority’ can only exist when the majority of oppressed and marginalized groups suffer in silence. The divisions that exist now existed in the 1950s, but they are only now being vocalized in such a prominent way. Even the labour movement and the Great Depression in the thirties did not sufficiently create an impression of intractable internecine rivalries such as now can be seen dividing America.

Republicans have understood this for a long time. This is why their politics have grown more and more tribalistic as the years have gone on. So long as they can dominate amongst specific strata of demographics they don’t have to care about winning any kind of nation-wide majority. They can fixate on the plurality that rigidly shares its belief systems: a rigidity created by and continually reenforced by the rhetoric of Republican doctrine and dogma. Democrats coasted on this for years, thinking that if Republicans focused only on a handful of groups then they benefited simply by having everyone else by default.

But it didn’t really work out that way. Gerrymandering by Republican bureaucrats helped a lot here by segmenting voting districts so that anyone outside the Republican voting base got split across multiple voting districts and never coalesced into more than a handful of centralized sources of power that the Democrats could rely on, but there’s a bigger issue. This Republican plurality positioning has only short-term value: they’re a demographic time bomb and as far back as 2012 I can remember their saner members talking about this as a matter of some urgency. But they were ignored, and the GOP is on a death-cult rocket ride to eventual obsolescence, although they’ll pull as much of American down around them as they go in an act of spite.

But that’s not the problem (or, rather, it is a problem but it’s not what I’ve come here to talk about today). Democrats got so used to coasting on being the party of the default that they lack any ability to talk to groups specifically. Nobody likes being taken for granted and they’ve started pushing back. Clinton’s failure to secure a margin of victory overwhelming enough to overcome the limiters of the Electoral College showed that two years ago: plenty of groups stayed home, an act of protest against a party that expected their vote for no other reason than 'not being the other guy.’

Nobody seems to have learned that lesson very well. Imagine two, three presidential elections from now, when the GOP is a spent force whose membership lists are now covered with dead people. (The oldest baby boomers are over 70, and when age brackets start to die in numbers it becomes a cascade. I can remember going from parades of WWII vets to a handful of wheelchair veterans in about a decade, and from some WWI vets to none in the same length of time.) For the younger among you two, three elections might seem like a long time, but it isn’t: years rush by faster than you think. So picture that world with a GOP in terminal decline and a Democratic party witnessing the prophesied triumph of demographic inevitability.

That’s essentially a one-party state, but a party that already struggles to be enough things to enough people now is going to buckle under pressures the American political system simply wasn’t built to handle. America was built around being a two-party state - of being a country in which the majority of people fit comfortably enough into two broad binaries and vote accordingly.

But they don’t, and they can’t, and America as it presently exists may be quite literally ungovernable. The centuries of appalling violence within America only complicate the picture further - it’s the sort of mixture of history, population, and anger that lead to the Balkan Wars, the conflicts between former members of the Warsaw Pact, and more recently the creation of South Sudan. America already had one civil war, there’s no reason to think that a re-fragmenting of America isn’t possible, especially given how contentious the language seems to be among different groups.

America has a scale problem, and I think Americans don’t really understand this. I live in the second largest country in the world by area but nobody actually lives here. See this?

It’s about fifteen years out of date, but the population hasn’t expanded beyond those yellow borders: just make the red bits much redder and you’re golden. Yet even this is still not getting the full picture. Let me show you with my photoshop skills: Everybody in the green bit:

Does not equal the population of the blue bit. If Canadian politics ran purely off of direct voting the entire country would be dominated by a group of people who live in about 0.14% of the country. What this means in practice is that for all that Canada has different grouping of cultural diversity (i.e. the political/social/cultural makeup of PEI as distinct from Vancouver as distinct from Iqaluit), should a civil war of either literal or abstract nature break-out the power of bodies is still located in one place. This is the population density of America:

Look at all those different concentrations of people and power. Like I said Canada does, of course, have other centres of power outside of old Upper/Lower Canada: despite what it thinks Toronto is not the entirety of the universe. But the multiplicity of metropolitan spaces and concentrated population centres such as you have in America don’t exist here. What am I getting at with this? America has spaces of intensely regional identity on an enormous scale. In Canada, for example, even Quebec separatism seems to be dying a slow and painful death. We’ve all got our our local identities, but Canadians are still mostly Canadian first, something else second. America by contrast, have fought a bloody civil war over slavery that afterwards was reshaped (falsely) into a war about regionalism, which mutated later into tribalism. This is why right-wingers in Union states spout Confederate flags. The flag doesn’t represent the literal loyalties of the Confederacy but its values: racism, white power, using human being as disposable tools for personal enrichment, and racism. (Anyone wanting to argue is welcome to read the Constitution of the Confederacy, which is nothing but the US Constitution with extra bits about slavery and river trade stuck in: it’s not subtle, and the character of the Confederacy is not up for debate.) Americans - or at least a worrying percentage of Americans - tend to link their national and tribal identities quite strongly: all you have to do is watch a Trump rally to work that out. To be an American is to be like me - thus, anyone unlike me is unAmerican. That is the sickness, the rot that is chewing up America from the inside. The right wing seized hold of the idea that the only Real Americans are those just like them, and other groups have started to adopt the same mindset out of self-defence, and these fractures are only going to deepen. Take that and add to it the way that political tribalism is fusing with regional identity and you begin to see the scope of the problem: you’re reaching the point where nobody from Region A can ever be thought of having any authority over Region B because Region A people are the Other. (Trump will probably be the last New Yorker City dweller to ever hold sway in the GOP: his successors will bind themselves to the base not merely through the tribal shibboleths of hating brown people and the poor who believe in improving their lot through anything other than force of will, but also through regional identity. No Californian Republican is likely to ever see front-billing again: you’ll prove your loyalty by only living in the ‘right’ places - solidly red, with no compromising purple of ideological weakness.)

So look at the Democratic party two, three elections from now: the party of everyone in the country who isn’t the GOP. How is that a functioning political group? What could it stand for that would effectively cover such a diverse collection of people? You cannot be the party of the centrists and the progressives and the leftists and the disaffected rightists and the communists and the socialists and the ethical capitalists and the neo-Marxists and the socially-liberal libertarians and the left-leaning rich and the remaining middle class and the working class and the vested corporate interests unwilling to directly support fascism and on and on and on. Democrats can run on the ‘Not Trump’ platform for the moment because the GOP will likely be the party of Trumpism from here on out. (The GOP had enough sense of self preservation to distance itself from Nixon back in the day, but ever since it refused to repudiate Reagan after Iran-Contra it’s shown that it is only ever going to double-down on its bets from here on out: it’ll be riding this train until the very bitter end.) But ‘not Trump’ is barely sufficient even now - because people want to know what the party is for, not just what it’s against. And it can’t be for everything but Trumpism - it’s too broad a field. So America is rapidly become ungovernable, because one party wants to serve a demographic facing extinction, and the other wants to be the Big Tent of literally everyone else no matter how different they may be. Which looks great on a poster about tolerance that you’d hang in a kindergarten class but is untenable when trying to unify 18-year old queer anarcho-syndicists of colour and 50-year old suburban capitalism-apologist whites: their goals are too divergent for harmony to make political sense. (And yes, ‘suburban’ is an antonym of ‘queer.’ Trust me on this.) They want fundamentally different things; just because they mutually do not also want a third thing does not mean they make stable, good, or even plausible allies. The Waffle Guardians and The Crepe Defenders can come together and agree that Pancakes are garbage but that is the end of their common cause, not the start of meaningful co-operation on a variety of issues mattering to both groups, because those don’t really exist. So America is becoming literally ungovernable because its institutions are incapable of operating outside of a narrow binary between two relatively close points. It was not designed, and cannot handle, the intense tribalism of the moment, nor the future that will contain a multitude of independently-minded political groups who are no longer willing to engage with big tent politics that ultimately never forward their own causes. We talk right now about a battle for the ‘soul’ of the Democratic party, but that’s bull. The fight is for who gets to keep the branding and the cachet of the name ‘Democratic Party’ - the next step is party secession, first when the centrists realize the progressives really do mean to literally destroy them and the status quo they hold dear, and then further fragmentation from there. I could go on and on down various laneways here about how increasing tribalism is straining the American system on a structural level. Take the Supreme Court, which only functions without a heavily politicized judiciary because otherwise democratic desires are stifled by entrenched judicial positions that judge issues only on their political merits. Or take how binary elected government in general only works with the understanding that every time power swaps between two groups the next group doesn’t instantly undo everything the last group did out of spite. (We’re seeing that in Ontario right now, actually, as a serious of ‘fortunate’ events brought into power a man so craven he makes Donald Trump seem downright generous in comparison. Our new premiere realized that if he just stops caring about re-election he can do whatever he wants to enrich his corporate buddies in the short-term, so he’s doing things that are enraging even his base, like removing anaesthetic coverage from colonoscopies. He, like Trump, is a ‘political outsider’ but unlike Trump his ego doesn’t need people telling him they love him - he’s perfectly happy being a vindictive thug, so even though he used populist anger to get into power he feels no reason to do anything for anyone who put him there. This is what happens when you elect a suburban drug dealer whose only goal is to revenge himself on an entire province for not taking his brother the crack-smoking mayor seriously. Ontario is so, so screwed.) Fundamentally, presidential republics are a disease. The American republican system has damaged every country its ever been exported to as its central structural weakness - an ability to be easily subsumed by autocrats - has been taken advantage of in basically every case, not to mention its tendency to fall into political deadlock. America’s own legal experts don’t recommend the country’s constitution to other - RBGs herself said that she would not use the US Constitution as a model to any country creating one today. The fractures that so ruined South America and the emerging African states that took the Us as their role model are finally happening in American itself. This feeling of paralyzation will only worsen in the years to come: it was practically baked-in to the political system from the start, the inevitable breaking point of planned obsolescence. America must either change - such as adopting a parliamentary model better-suited to handle the diverse social, ethnic, cultural, and regional demographics of such a large country, or taking an axe to existing institutional binaries and demolishing the two-party state - or die. I recognize the irony in saying that there is a binary choice about handling the inability to handle non-binaries, but there is a third option: sticking with the status quo. A status quo that is groaning under the strain of modern America, a status quo for which simple, minor modifications are unlikely to be enough to relieve the pressures the system is under. You could try that. You’ve been trying it for decades. How’s that choice working out? Two to three elections from now the idea that you can neatly divide political extremes into Liberal and Conservative, and that harmony can only be found in collaboration, will be so dead that not even the most committed advocate of the status quo will be able to ignore the smell - though he will, of course, say that the onus is on other people to come back from their ‘extremist’ positions, because it’s never centrism’s fault when people reject it as insufficient to the crises of the present. To the Americans who read this, you’re going to have to choose - and it really is a choice, surprising as that may seem. You can choose to let America end. To let it die. Countries die all the time. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Say you’re from a blue state: do you still want a future of sharing a country with a red state? America stays together because ‘more unites us than divides us’ - but is there a point where that truism can no longer be consider true? And at that point is there still value in remaining a union? Meaningful value, and not just a sense of duty or obligation to an ideal that doesn’t seem to have any real-world resonance? What is the point at which political compromise becomes something you can no longer stomach - when working together goes from making deals with the opposition to making deals with the devil? When do hyperbolic statements like the other side being 'the devil’ stop sounding like hyperbole? For all that I talked about the Founding Fathers and their immediate voting heirs being ‘the same’ one point on which they disagreed was slavery - but they found themselves able to compromise on the use of humans-as-property for labour. That I one of the founding pacts of America: some of us don’t like slavery, but we can live with it in the interest of unity. Could you, a time-traveler-turned-Founding-Father, make the same choice? On what are you willing to compromise to keep the union a union - what agreements could you make and still be able to meet your own gaze in a mirror? Keep in mind that choosing ‘change’ is no guarantee that the change will be successful, or that the post-America that emerges from that change will be any more a place you want to live in than if you had chosen to keep America alive. I merely want the full and total weight of those decisions to be clear. American compromised on slavery at the moment of its birth: it has lived with the consequences of that compromise ever since. America continues to exist because matters were compromised on - some benign, some heinous, all done in the interest of a greater good. Are you willing to make such compromises future - and are you willing to accept the consequences of what might happen if you are not? There is no ‘going back.’ The post-Trump America will not be a ‘return to normal.’ It can’t. Too many lines have been crossed for there to be a simple return to ‘normality’ when all this is done: that normal is dead. If you choose to try and reinstate it - if you choose neither change nor death but the old status quo - then the problems that birthed this current crisis will remain. Is that status quo strong enough to withstand a second round with such events? That’s something you’ll have to decided. Until then, American will remain ungovernable.

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v4viola · 6 years

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AHS: CULT Season 7, Episode 1 Election Night [unpublished review]

Tuesday, September 5th, 2017, just days before Stephen King’s IT hit theatres worldwide, the anticipated clown-centred new season of Ryan Murphy & Brad Falchuk’s anthology series, American Horror Story, premiered its seventh season, Cult, on FX.

The past six seasons of American Horror Story (AHS) have catapulted viewers into the depths of the horror genre; every season tells a different story at a different time with different characters and themes. The popular show features returning and seasoned actors like Angela Bassett, Sarah Paulson and Kathy Bates, as well as guest stars like Gabourey Sidibe, Lady Gaga and Cuba Gooding Jr.

Countless characters have left lasting impressions on AHS and every fan has their favourite: Lana Winters of Asylum (Season 2), Fiona Goode of Coven (Season 3), Elsa Mars or Twisty the Clown of Freakshow (Season 4), The Countess of Hotel (Season 5), or The Butcher of Roanoke (Season 6). The sinister list goes on and on.

American Horror Story may stand alone but it is no stranger to acclaim as it’s been nominated for an impressive 300+ awards. Jessica Lange and Lady Gaga both won Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television at the 2012 and 2016 Golden Globe Awards for Murder House and Hotel. The Primetime Emmy’s have awarded the show as well.

Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have managed to garner a cult following. Pun intended. Together, they’ve created “Teen TV” juggernauts like Glee and Scream Queens, and are the executive producers of the critically acclaimed first season of American Crime Story: The People VS. O.J. Simpson, starring AHS alumni, Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr. The series sweeped award shows and the second season (The Assassination of Gianni Versace, starring Penelope Cruz and Ricky Martin) is slated to air in the early months of 2018. Last but not least, who can forget the return of Jessica Lange (alongside Susan Sarandon) earlier this year in Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Bette & Joan. The debut season of another anthology series (also produced by Brad Pitt) reimagines the tensions between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on the set of the movie What Ever Happened to Mary Jane? in 1962. Murphy and Falchuk are clear forces to be reckoned with when it comes genre television. When they hit, they hit big.

So when the countdown to Season 7’s premiere was over, fans erupted. Some loved it, some hated it, and some threatened to boycott it because of an irrational fear of tiny holes. Yes, tiny holes. The unique fear is called trypophobia: an intense fear, distress or anxiety caused by irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps. The term is believed to have been coined in 2005 on an online forum and AHS has decided to showcase its abilities to make your skin crawl in a way we’ve never seen before. Hence the trigger warnings. Seriously, people are freaking out!

The title of this premiere episode is Election Night and the opening scene takes viewers back to the night of November 8, 2016, flashing some of the most viral and ludicrous presidential campaign snippets of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, one after the other.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” an actual clip of Donald Trump flashes, reminding viewers how screwed the United States is with this clown in office. It’s clear that AHS is using the real-life 2016 election as the focus for this year’s horror tale, set in Michigan.

“FUCK YOU WORLD! USA! USA! USA!”

Kai Anderson (played by AHS heavy-weight, Evan Peters) shouts this as the 45th president of the United States of America is announced. Kai is a blue-haired loner celebrating Trump’s win in a dingy basement, dry-humping his big screen TV like a fanatic. “Freedom!” he yells, and his glee for Trump’s victory is a tough pill to swallow.

Evan Peters is a returning AHS all-star and his acting chops shine brighter from season to season. In the opening of this new season, Cult, Peters grips us from the get-go, and throughout the hour-long first episode, we begin to see why his character is so happy with Donald Trump’s victory.

Kai emulates the far-right narrative with precision. Scenes throughout the premiere (where he blatantly disrespects women and Mexicans) reveal a very real and twisted perception that men are superior to women and that “white is right.” Kai is indicative of what Trump spews to the public, and what makes it so uncomfortable to watch is that this series is a lot more than a just a scary TV show now. It’s about our social and political climate, today. This is art is imitating life, in real time.

Kai is maniacal from the opening scene where - in celebration of Trump’s victory - Kai makes a cheeto smoothie, rubbing the orange paste all over his face, mirroring Trump’s infamously orange glow. His mannerisms are reminiscent of the legendary comic villain, The Joker, with his creepy stare and smudged cheeto “face paint”. Perhaps the sub-theme of coulrophobia (fear of clowns) influenced a nod to the king of crime. After all, The Joker is one of the ultimate clown villains of the last century. It is rumoured that DC Comics is looking to solidify Leonardo DiCaprio as The Joker in an upcoming origin story set in the 1980’s. If that doesn't work out, Evan Peters would be perfect!

Across town, we see Ally Mayfair-Richards (Sarah Paulson), and her wife, Ivy (Alison Pill), in what reads as a parody of a wealthy, white, lesbian couple. They’re hosting a viewing party with their neighbours, a liberal heterosexual couple, Mr. and Mrs. Tom and Marylin Chang (Tim Kang and Nanrissa Lee). When Trump is announced president, Ally has the complete opposite reaction from Kai Anderson, and that familiar AHS Sarah Paulson shriek fans grew to love in Asylum and Roanoke tears through her living room, directed at the flatscreen television. She’s absolutely mortified, as many of us were that night, but the results trigger Ally in a way that leaves her out of breath and panicked. Soon afterwards, we understand why.

Ally suffers from multiple phobias, high anxiety, and hallucinations. “Ever since the election, it’s been getting worse,” she says to her therapist, Dr. Rudy Vincent (Cheyenne Jackson).

“The coulrophobia?” He asks.

“Yes. The clowns...” she trails off, “but also,” she continues, “confined spaces, and blood... Particles in the air, the dark, that coral thing that's been staring at me since I came in here!” Ally appears to be dizzy. Nauseas even.

“You have a fear of coral?” Dr. Vincent asks.

“No. I-I… Its the holes,” she takes a deep breath, “it’s repulsive!”

Ally tells Dr. Vincent that coping with the election results has triggered all of her old phobias. It’s almost as if AHS is mocking the right-winged notion that those on the left are automatically fragile and plagued with political correctness, but by bringing these unconventional yet very real phobias to the table, we see that this season’s theme isn’t just about the current events in American politics, clowns, or tiny holes. No, this season is about the fear in politics and what it can do to people on both ends of the political pendulum. Ally Mayfair-Richards’ character shows us how these conditions and phobias can provoke mental health breakdowns with a raw and in-your-face delivery.

The premiere also marks the return of Freakshow’s Twisty the Clown, but only as an imagined character in “The Twisty Chronicles” comic book. Oz Mayfair-Richards (Cooper Dodson), Ally and Ivy’s son, secretly admires the clown’s comics and he is nothing more than a fictional character in Cult. So far, anyway. The gruesome Twisty scene unfolds, reminiscent of the clown’s murderous debut in Season 4, and we think we’ve seen the actual return of Twisty until Ally interrupts and it’s realized that this was just a scene in Oz’s comic book. Since Ally has an irrational fear of clowns, the cover illustration of the savage Twisty prompts her to have a full-on panic attack. If you have any inclination of what Twisty looks like, it's understandable for a coulrophobe to freak out. Twisty is what nightmares are made of and fans are patiently awaiting the mayhem Twisty might be getting up to this season. Another character that’s sparking intrigue is Winter Anderson (Billie Lourd), Kai Anderson’s younger sister. In the beginning of the episode, when Kai covers his face in the cheeto mask, he storms into his younger sister’s room and jumps on her bed, staring her down as CNN announces that Hillary Clinton will not be speaking after conceding to Donald Trump. She looks up from her laptop into her brother’s eyes, his orange face smudged with tension, and begins yelling at him to get out, hitting him repeatedly. He starts laughing at her screaming, uncovered by the blows. She's lost some sort of bet and now she has to follow through with some elaborate scheme after admitting that children are her worst fear. [Unfinished first rough draft]

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patriotnewsdaily · 4 years

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New Post has been published on PatriotNewsDaily.com

New Post has been published on http://patriotnewsdaily.com/bernie-sanders-worries-that-bidens-play-for-the-middle-isnt-working/

Bernie Sanders Worries That Biden’s Play for the Middle Isn’t Working

Joe Biden is doing his best to convince American voters that he’s a good ol’ boy Democrat in the tradition of your grandfather’s progressivism, a fig leaf that obscures the fact that he’s worked with the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders to craft his agenda. We’ve been skeptical for some time that Biden can actually pull off this illusion, but Sanders appears to be worried that the former vice president actually has the opposite problem: That by tacking to the middle, he will alienate and demoralize the young, leftist army that can actually help him defeat Trump in November.

Sanders has “told associates that Biden is at serious risk of coming up short in the November election if he continues his vaguer, more centrist approach, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive talks,” reported the Washington Post.

According to the Post, Sanders is worried that younger progressives – his base, in other words – are not getting the attention they “deserve” from Biden. He wants Biden to jump back to the left in the final weeks of the race and bring those progressives back into the fold.

“The senator has identified several specific changes he’d like to see,” the Post reports, “saying Biden should talk more about health care and about his economic plans, and should campaign more with figures popular among young liberals, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).”

This is, of course, ludicrous advice (unless you’re a socialist who cares more about building a cult following than actually winning elections). Biden isn’t going to defeat Trump by appealing to kids on college campuses or impressing Woke Twitter. He isn’t going to win the election by getting another two million votes in California. His only chance is to do better than Hillary Clinton in the Midwest, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and the other swing states. Going out there and talking about the Green New Deal may make AOC happy, but it isn’t going to improve his chances of winning.

That said, we do sort of understand where Sanders is coming from. He’s looking at the electorate and noticing that there’s really no pro-Biden excitement out there. This election is a referendum on one man: Donald Trump. People coming out to vote are doing so for only one reason: To vote for or against the president. And yeah, if you’re the other guy in the election, it’s a problem that basically no one cares about you one way or the other.

But at this point, it’s not a problem Biden can solve by tacking left. That’s only going to make matters worse for him.

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thewebofslime · 5 years

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As the Texas Democrat enters the race for president, members of a group famous for “hactivism” come forward for the first time to claim him as one of their own. There may be no better time to be an American politician rebelling against business as usual. But is the United States ready for O’Rourke’s teenage exploits? By JOSEPH MENN in SAN FRANCISCO Filed March 15, 2019, 3:30 p.m. GMT (This article is adapted from a forthcoming book, “Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World”) > Some things you might know about Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas congressman who just entered the race for president: • The Democratic contender raised a record amount for a U.S. Senate race in 2018 and almost beat the incumbent in a Republican stronghold, without hiding his support for gun control and Black Lives Matter protests on the football field. • When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges and played in a punk band. Now 46, he still skateboards. • The charismatic politician with the Kennedy smile is liberal on some issues and libertarian on others, which could allow him to cross the country’s political divide. One thing you didn’t know: While a teenager, O’Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview, he belonged to the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history. The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work. Members of the group have protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. Now, in a series of interviews, CDC members have acknowledged O’Rourke as one of their own. In all, more than a dozen members of the group agreed to be named for the first time in a book about the hacking group by this reporter that is scheduled to be published in June by Public Affairs. O’Rourke was interviewed early in his run for the Senate. YOUNGER DAYS: Beto O’Rourke, left, in a photo of his band, Foss. Texas Republicans also tweeted out what appears to be a police mug shot of the Texas Democrat. Handout via Texas GOP Twitter There is no indication that O’Rourke ever engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity, such as breaking into computers or writing code that enabled others to do so. But his membership in the group could explain his approach to politics better than anything on his resume. His background in hacking circles has repeatedly informed his strategy as he explored and subverted established procedures in technology, the media and government. “There’s just this profound value in being able to be apart from the system and look at it critically and have fun while you’re doing it,” O’Rourke said. “I think of the Cult of the Dead Cow as a great example of that.” An ex-hacker running for national office would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. But that was before two national elections sent people from other nontraditional backgrounds to the White House and Congress, many of them vowing to blow up the status quo. Arguably, there has been no better time to be an American politician rebelling against business as usual. Still, it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money. > ‘Footloose’ for the hacker set O’Rourke was a misfit teen in El Paso, Texas, in the 1980s when he decided to seek out bulletin board systems – the online discussion forums that at the time were the best electronic means for connecting people outside the local school, church and neighborhood. “When Dad bought an Apple IIe and a 300-baud modem and I started to get on boards, it was the Facebook of its day,” he said. “You just wanted to be part of a community.” O’Rourke soon started his own board, TacoLand, which was freewheeling and largely about punk music. “This was the counterculture: Maximum Rock & Roll [magazine], buying records by catalog you couldn’t find at record stores,” he said. He then connected with another young hacker in the more conservative Texas city of Lubbock who ran a bulletin board called Demon Roach Underground. Known online as Swamp Rat, Kevin Wheeler had recently moved from a university town in Ohio and was having problems adjusting to life in Texas. Like O’Rourke, Wheeler said, he was hunting for video games that had been “cracked,” or stripped from digital rights protections, so that he could play them for free on his Apple. Also like O’Rourke, Wheeler wanted to find other teens who enjoyed the same things, and to write and share funny and profane stories that their parents and conservative neighbors wouldn’t appreciate. It was good-natured resistance to the repressive humdrum around them, a sort of “Footloose” for those just discovering the new world of computers. SWAG OF THE DEAD COW: Promotional material from the hacking group. Handout via REUTERS Wheeler and a friend named the Cult of the Dead Cow after an eerie hangout, a shut-down Lubbock slaughterhouse – the unappealing hind part of Texas’ iconic cattle industry. Most CDC members kept control of their own bulletin boards while referring visitors to one another’s and distributing the CDC’s own branded essays, called text files or t-files. At the time, people connected to bulletin boards by dialing in to the phone lines through a modem. Heavy use of long-distance modem calls could add up to hundreds of dollars a month. Savvy teens learned techniques for getting around the charges, such as using other people’s phone-company credit card numbers and five-digit calling codes to place free calls. O’Rourke didn’t say what techniques he used. Like thousands of others, though, he said he pilfered long-distance service “so I wouldn’t run up the phone bill.” Under Texas law, stealing long-distance service worth less than $1,500 is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine. More than that is a felony, and could result in jail time. It is unclear whether O’Rourke topped that threshold. In any event, the state bars prosecution of the offense for those under 17, as O’Rourke was for most of his active time in the group, and the statute of limitations is five years. Two Cult of the Dead Cow contemporaries in Texas who were caught misusing calling cards as minors got off with warnings. O’Rourke handed off control of his own board when he moved east for boarding school, and he said he stopped participating on the hidden CDC board after he enrolled at Columbia University at age 18. Hana Callaghan, a government specialist at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, said that voters might want to consider both the gravity of any candidate’s offenses and the person’s age at the time. Among the questions voters should ask, she said: “What was the violation? Was it egregious? What does it say about their character – do they believe the rules don’t apply to them?” If substantial time has passed, she added, voters should decide whether the person “learned the error of their ways and no longer engages in those kind of behavior.” “When Dad bought an Apple IIe and a 300-baud modem and I started to get on boards, it was the Facebook of its day. You just wanted to be part of a community.” BETO O’ROURKE When he was a teen, O’Rourke also frequented sites that offered cracked software. The bulletin boards were “a great way to get cracked games,” O’Rourke said, adding that he later realized his habit wasn’t morally defensible and stopped. Using pirated software violates copyright laws, attorneys say, but in practice, software companies have rarely sued young people over it. When they do go after someone, it is typically an employer with workers using multiple unlicensed copies. Software providers are more interested in those who break the protections and spread their wares. CDC wasn’t of that ilk. Although some CDC essays gave programming and hacking instructions, in the late 1980s, the group was more about writing than it was about breaking into computer systems. But its focus on creative expression didn’t mean there were no grounds for controversy. Like many an underground newspaper, the Cult of the Dead Cow avidly pursued it. A CDC member who joined in the early 1990s had previously used real instructions for making a pipe bomb to joke about shedding pounds by losing limbs. Three teenagers in Montreal found the file, and one lost two fingers after he tried to follow the formula, prompting outrage. Rather than remove similar posts and hide the group’s history, the CDC warned readers not to take the files literally and added a disclaimer that survives on its current web page: “Warning: This site may contain explicit descriptions of or advocate one or more of the following: adultery, murder, morbid violence, bad grammar, deviant sexual conduct in violent contexts, or the consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs.” > Grabbing media attention O’Rourke and his old friends say his stint as a fledgling hacker fed into his subsequent work in El Paso as a software entrepreneur and alternative press publisher, which led in turn to successful long-shot runs at the city council and then Congress, where he unseated an incumbent Democrat. Politically, O’Rourke has taken some conventional liberal positions, supporting abortion rights and opposing a wall on the Mexican border. But he takes a libertarian view on other issues, faulting excessive regulation and siding with businesses in congressional votes on financial industry oversight and taxes. His more conservative positions have drawn fire from Democrats who see him as too friendly with Republicans and corporations. His more progressive votes and punk-rock past helped his recent opponent, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, portray O’Rourke as too radical for socially conservative Texas.

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theconservativebrief · 5 years

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Everyone likes to bash millennials. We’re spoiled, entitled, and hopelessly glued to our smartphones. We demand participation trophies, can’t find jobs, and live with our parents until we’re 30. You know the punchlines by now.

But is the millennial hate justified? Have we dropped the generational baton, or was it a previous generation, the so-called baby boomers, who actually ruined everything?

That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.

I spoke to Gibney about these claims, and why he thinks the baby boomers have wrecked America.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Who are the baby boomers?

Bruce Gibney

The baby boomers are conventionally defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. But I focus on the first two-thirds of boomers because their experiences are pretty homogeneous: They were raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time and that helped produce the New Deal.

But it’s really the white middle-class boomers who exemplify all the awful characteristics and behaviors that have defined this generation. They became a majority of the electorate in the early ’80s, and they fully consolidated their power in Washington by January 1995. And they’ve basically been in charge ever since.

Sean Illing

So how have they broken the country?

Bruce Gibney

Well, the damage done to the social fabric is pretty self-evident. Just look around and notice what’s been done. On the economic front, the damage is equally obvious, and it trickles down to all sorts of other social phenomena. I don’t want to get bogged down in an ocean of numbers and data here (that’s in the book), but think of it this way: I’m 41, and when I was born, the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent. It’s roughly 103 percent now — and it keeps rising.

The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a financial disaster for their children.

We used to have the finest infrastructure in the world. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks there’s something like a $4 trillion deficit in infrastructure in deferred maintenance. It’s crumbling, and the boomers have allowed it to crumble. Our public education system has steadily degraded as well, forcing middle-class students to bury themselves in debt in order to get a college education.

Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, which they’ve done almost nothing to solve. But even if we want to be market-oriented about this, we can think of the climate as an asset, which has degraded over time thanks to the inaction and cowardice of the boomer generation. Now they didn’t start burning fossil fuels, but by the 1990s the science was undeniable. And what did they do? Nothing.

“Time after time, when facts collided with feelings, the boomers choose feelings.”

Sean Illing

Why hasn’t this recklessness been checked by the political system? Is it as simple as the boomers took over and used power to enrich themselves without enough resistance from younger voters?

Bruce Gibney

Well, most of our problems have not been addressed because that would require higher taxes and therefore a sense of social obligation to our fellow citizens. But again, the boomers seem to have no appreciation for social solidarity.

But to answer your question more directly, the problem is that dealing with these problems has simply been irrelevant to the largest political class in the country — the boomers. There’s nothing conspiratorial about that. Politicians respond to the most important part of the electorate, and that’s been the boomers for decades. And it just so happens that the boomers are not socially inclined and have a ton of maladaptive personality characteristics.

Sean Illing

It’s interesting that Ronald Reagan is elected right around the time that boomers become a majority of the electorate. Reagan himself wasn’t a boomer, but it was boomers who put him into office. And this is when we get this wave of neoliberalism that essentially guts the public sector and attempts to privatize everything.

Bruce Gibney

Right. Starting with Reagan, we saw this national ethos which was basically the inverse of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” This gets flipped on its head in a massive push for privatized gain and socialized risk for big banks and financial institutions. This has really been the dominant boomer economic theory, and it’s poisoned what’s left of our public institutions.

Sean Illing

So what’s your explanation for the awfulness of the boomers? What made them this way?

Bruce Gibney

I think there were a number of unusual influences, some of which won’t be repeated, and some of which may have mutated over the years. I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good job for everyone who wanted it.

This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.

Sean Illing

I’ve always seen the boomers as a generational trust-fund baby: They inherited a country they had no part in building, failed to appreciate it, and seized on all the benefits while leaving nothing behind.

Bruce Gibney

I think that’s exactly right. They were born into great fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left behind?

“This was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve prosperity for future generations.”

Sean Illing

Something that doesn’t get discussed enough is how hostile so many of these boomers are to science. It’s not hard to connect this aversion to facts to some of these disastrous social policies.

Bruce Gibney

This is a generation that is dominated by feelings, not by facts. The irony is that boomers criticize millennials for being snowflakes, for being too driven by feelings. But the boomers are the first big feelings generation. They’re highly motivated by feelings and not persuaded by facts. And you can see this in their policies.

Take this whole fantasy about trickle-down economics. Maybe it was worth a shot, but it doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work. The evidence is overwhelming. The experiment is over. And yet they’re still clinging to this dogma, and indeed the latest tax bill is the latest example of that.

Time after time, when facts collided with feelings, the boomers chose feelings.

Sean Illing

What’s the most egregious thing the boomers have done in your opinion?

Bruce Gibney

I’ll give you something abstract and something concrete. On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they’ve done is destroy a sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens. That ethos is gone and it’s been replaced by a cult of individualism. It’s hard to overstate how damaging this is.

On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they’ve only grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks, it’s a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just maintain it all along.

Sean Illing

So where does that leave us?

Bruce Gibney

In an impossible place. We’re going to have to make difficult choices between, say, saving Social Security and Medicare and saving arctic ice sheets. We’ll have fewer and fewer resources to deal with these issues. And I actually think that over the next 100 years, absent some major technological innovation like de-carbonization, which is speculative at this point, these actions will actually just kill people.

Sean Illing

I hear you, man, and I’m with you on almost all of this, but I always return to a simple point: If millennials and Gen Xers actually voted in greater numbers, the boomers could’ve been booted out of power years ago.

Bruce Gibney

I think that’s fair. But given how large the boomer demographic is, it really wasn’t possible for millennials to unseat the boomers until a few years ago. And of course there are many issues with voting rights. But that’s not a complete excuse.

More than voting, though, millennials have to run for office because people have to be excited about the person they’re voting for. We need people in office with a different outlook, who see the world differently. Boomers don’t care about how the country will look in 30 or 40 years, but millennials do, and so those are the people we need in power.

“The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it.”

Sean Illing

I guess the big question is, can we recover from this? Can we pay the bill the boomers left us?

Bruce Gibney

I think we can, but it’s imperative that we start sooner than later. After 2024 or so, it will get really hard to do anything meaningful. In fact, I think the choices might become so difficult that even fairly good people will get wrapped up in short-term self-interest.

So if we unseat the boomers from Congress, from state legislatures, and certainly from the presidency over the next three to seven years, then I think we can undo the damage. But that will require a much higher tax rate and a degree of social solidarity that the country hasn’t seen in over 50 years.

That will not be easy, and there’s no way around the fact that millennials will have to sacrifice in ways the boomers refused to sacrifice, but that’s where we are — and these are the choices we face.

This article was originally published on December 20, 2017.

Original Source -> How the baby boomers, not millennials, screwed America

via The Conservative Brief

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