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tanadrin · 3 months

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I liked this video from Jamelle Bouie a lot, and I liked it even more because he delivered it as a floating eyes and mouth over an apple.

I'm going to respond to this comment as an apple because I kind of like doing it. It's fun. And I'm gonna respond to this comment by way of a story.

So, all Americans know about the anti-slavery movement, the abolitionist movement. And the way we're taught about the abolitionist movement or the anti-slavery movement, whatever you want to call it, is kind of that this was inevitable--that obviously slavery is terrible and obviously there are people against it and it was gonna end. We teach it as a thing that was bound to happen. So the Civil War comes and slavery is ended, and it's sort of a very neat story.

But I'm gonna ask you to put yourself in the perspective of an abolitionist or an anti-slavery politician in, say, 1840 or 1848; and if you are one of these people, you have a deep-seated opposition to slavery. If you're an abolitionist, you may have spent the previous 10 or 20 years traveling the country, giving speeches, rallying people, doing everything you can to stir up moral outrage at slavery. If you're a politician, you have been working, doing a grind of politics--somewhat dangerous, because people may not like slavery, but they're not super thrilled about black people either--but you are in legislatures, you are filing petitions, you are building coalitions, you are trying to make whatever headway you can to, if not challenge slavery, then at least challenge some of the racist and anti-black laws that are on the books. Both--whether you're an anti-slavery politician or ablitionist--you do not think in 1848 that slavery is gonna be over in your lifetime. You hope that it might be; but you have no particular expectation that it will be. You are not optimistic about the end of slavery. You may not even be optimistic about the world as it exists, because you look around and you see human bondage and horrible brutality that's been there for hundreds of years, and for all you know will be there when you're long dead.

So the question to ask is, why do these things? Why did these people bother? Why did they continue struggling against slavery, despite not really having any optimism about the end of the institution? And the answer--beyond a deep-seated sense of moral commitment--is that these people didn't need to be optimistic in the ultimate outcome, they just needed to be optimistic in the ability of humans, of people to make change; they needed to be hopeful about human agency. That's what they needed, and that's what they had. And so they did not know how far they would be able to take the baton, but they worked and hoped that when the end of their lives came, they'd be able to hand it off to people who could take it even further than they could.

The abolitionists and the anti-slavery politicians were essentially living out what Antonio Gramsci called the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. I think the exact quote is, "I'm a pessimist because of my intelligence, but I am an optimist because of my will." What this is is recognizing the reality of the world around you, not looking at the world as if it's any better--or any worse--but any better than it is; but not pinning your hopes for a better world on some sort of linear change, linear move towards something better; but pinning your hopes on one of the true constants of human society, which is the ability of human beings to work their will on the world, and the ability of humans to push and persevere.

So, this is all to say that I am not asking anyone to be optimistic about the world. That's very silly; the world's a very terrible place right now--not the worst it could be, but pretty bad--and I do not contest that. But I do think that people should have a bit of this optimism of the will, and this optimism about human agency, and our ability to build a better world. And this is sort of where my very strong distaste for doomerism comes from, because the sense that it is the worst, and nothing can be better, is just fundamentally incompatible with any kind of optimism of the will, any kind of belief in human agency and belief in our ability to change the world around us. And it's also why you will find me on this account often pushing back against the most negative renderings of what is happening in our society, for example. Not because I think everything is great--I do not--but because I do think that the path towards change requires one to have clear eyes about the situation in which you find yourself; and clear eyes both means recognizing the bad, but it also means recognizing those areas where you can make gains, and where you can find success; and where you can win minor victories.

And you may say, well, what's the point of a minor victory? But I think what the anti-slavery struggle demonstrates, what the civil rights struggle demonstrates, what the labor struggle demonstrates in this country, is that minor victories become fuel for modest victories, become fuel for major victories, and major victories can be the things that fundamentally change the entire field of play. So. Pessimism of the intellect, my friend, optimism of the will.

#i do not think i am very optimistic as a rule #but i'm still much more optimistic than bouie #nonetheless #i share his distaste for doomerism and for similar reasons #you cannot be clear-eyed about the world if you are consumed with pessimism

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stoweboyd · 2 years

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Selected excerpts from a compelling argument to eleiminate the US Constitution: The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed | Ryan D. Doerfler, Samuel Moyn

Aug. 19, 2022

Dr. Doerfler and Dr. Moyn teach law at Harvard and Yale.

When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong. But struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end.

The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.^[ #politics/constitutionalism ]

The idea of constitutionalism is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order.

Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day.

But constitutions — especially the broken one we have now — inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now.

Arming for war over the Constitution concedes in advance that the left must translate its politics into something consistent with the past. But liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.

even when progressives concede that the Constitution is at the root of our situation, typically the call is for some new constitutionalism.

our current Constitution is inadequate, which is why it serves reactionaries so well.

In a new book, the law professors Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath urge progressives to stop treating constitutional law as an “autonomous” domain, “separate from politics.”

Why justify our politics by the Constitution or by calls for some renovated constitutional tradition? It has exacted a terrible price in distortion and distraction to transform our national life into a contest over reinterpreting our founding charter consistently with what majorities believe now.

No matter how openly political it may purport to be, reclaiming the Constitution remains a kind of antipolitics. It requires the substitution of claims about the best reading of some centuries-old text or about promises said to be already in our traditions for direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands.

It’s difficult to find a constitutional basis for abortion or labor unions in a document written by largely affluent men more than two centuries ago.

After failing to get the Constitution interpreted in an egalitarian way for so long, the way to seek real freedom will be to use procedures consistent with popular rule.

In a second stage, though, Americans could learn simply to do politics through ordinary statute rather than staging constant wars over who controls the heavy weaponry of constitutional law from the past.

If legislatures just passed rules and protected values majorities believe in, the distinction between “higher law” and everyday politics effectively disappears.

One way to get to this more democratic world is to pack the Union with new states. Doing so would allow Americans to then use the formal amendment process to alter the basic rules of the politics and break the false deadlock that the Constitution imposes through the Electoral College and Senate on the country, in which substantial majorities are foiled on issue after issue.

More aggressively, Congress could simply pass a Congress Act, reorganizing our legislature in ways that are more fairly representative of where people actually live and vote, and perhaps even reducing the Senate to a mere “council of revision” (a term Jamelle Bouie used to describe the Canadian Senate), without the power to obstruct laws.

In so doing, Congress would be pretty openly defying the Constitution to get to a more democratic order — and for that reason would need to insulate the law from judicial review.

Fundamental values like racial equality or environmental justice would be protected not by law that stands apart from politics but — as they typically are — by ordinary expressions of popular will.

the basic structure of government, like whether to elect the president by majority vote or to limit judges to fixed terms, would be decided by the present electorate, as opposed to one from some foggy past.

A politics of the American future like this would make clear our ability to engage in the constant reinvention of our society under our own power, without the illusion that the past stands in the way.

Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale are law professors.

#constituional law #eliminate the constitution #ryan doerfler #samuel moyn

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nedsecondline · 10 days

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Open Thread | About Donald Trump And His So-Called ‘New Stance’ on Abortion | 3CHICSPOLITICO

The Man Who Snuffed Out Abortion Rights Is Here to Tell You He Is a Moderate April 9, 2024 By Jamelle Bouie Opinion Columnist Donald Trump does not speak from conviction. He does not speak from belief or at least no belief other than self-obsession. He certainly does not speak from anything we might recognize as reason; when he’s holding forth from a podium, even the most careful students of…

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topreviewin · 5 months

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In Anthony Mann’s 1950 west “Winchester ’73,” an unusual and much-desired Winchester rifle brings distress and demise into the unfortunate souls whom are able to take it within their ownership. Within the western as delivered by Mann — along with his celebrity, a troubled and morally uncertain Jimmy Stewart — the weapon is not emblematic of freedom around it really is a curse, destined to destroy every person whom covets its energy. It had been a style echoed that 12 months into the Joseph H. Lewis noir “Gun Crazy,” a take of types regarding the tale of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Our protagonists within movie are a couple of young people so enamored regarding the energy of firearms — and freedom they apparently offer — they carry on a wanton spree of theft and murder. It concludes, predictably, making use of their very own fatalities. In both movies, firearms come to be undoubtedly dangerous once they come to be a fetish: an object worshipped because of its expected energy and symbolic definition. Firearms, Mann and Lewis apparently state, aren’t really totems of freedom or freedom or childhood; they have been devices of demise and really should be addressed consequently. I considered both films a week ago throughout the seek out Robert Card, the 40-year-old suspect in a mass shooting that killed 18 men and women at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine. Card is known to own utilized an AR-15-style rifle into the shootings. Introduced to civil purchasers in 1964, the Armalite Rifle 15 Sporter and its own offspring are now actually several of the most well-known rifles in the usa and a potent sign of just what firearms suggest to tens of scores of People in america. “It’s an icon,” one owner informed the newest York instances in a 2018 function regarding the AR-15 and comparable tools. “It’s a symbol of freedom. To me, it is America’s rifle.” That, actually, is just how weapon producers have actually marketed the rifle, much less something for hobbyists and sportsmen, but as a lifestyle accessory that means freedom, individualism and masculine self-sufficiency. “Stand out and blend in all at the same time,” checks out one 2011 ad for a camouflage-finished assault-style rifle. It’s not merely in regards to the AR-15, needless to say. For several People in america, the ability to possess a gun is freedom it self — the concept of just what it indicates to call home in a free of charge nation. Nevertheless concern raised because of the Maine shooting, and particularly the lockdown that observed, is merely just how no-cost that freedom is. It’s not too firearms can’t be of use, nonetheless they is resources, maybe not totems. They've been always secure freedom, needless to say, nonetheless they aren’t freedom in as well as on their own. To believe usually would be to fetishize. As People in america, we comprehend the ownership of firearms as someone right, however in numerous areas it really is an atomizing right. Whenever provided pleasure of invest our governmental resides, this specific right could cause the connections that bind culture to fray. It may also digest others legal rights we hold dear: the ability to talk, the ability to construct, the ability to worship and straight to stay. Jamelle Bouie is an innovative new York instances columnist. #Bouie #Americas #rifle #fetish #destroying #sense #freedom

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minotaurito · 1 year

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We're fast approaching the undying election season here in america. And it's so important that we resist fascism. But it's going to be so fucking hard to bear when the alternative is some limp dick democrat staring earnestly into a TikTok telling me how their heart bleeds. Asking me for money. Because they need to buy kneepads to suck the vast amount of corporate cock necessary to support their platform of propping up state capitalism. Call it progress that Disney and AB InBev and Pfizer all agree that trans and PoC money is just as green as everyone else's. Social safety net? How 'bout a sticker for your car with Sanders or RBG on it. We're just one more AoC tweet away, just one more Jamelle Bouie piece away from progress friends. Please give, won't you? When your children are ridden with bullets don't you want the soothing empty words of Kamala Harris or President turned media mogul Barry to be there for you?

#rant

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rosefest · 2 years

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Very short time at Malta

Although I had rested but a very short time at Malta, I left it with as much regret as though it had been a second home. For after a troublesome journey through Baden, Lombardy, the Homan States, and Naples, at an especially troublesome epoch, subjected besides to every annoyance and imposition that police, passports, and political quarantines could inflict on a traveller, the feeling was one of great comfort to catch the first sight of an English soldier on guard; to walk under a gateway with the familiar lion and unicorn—fighting for the crown as of old—boldly carved above it; to see well known names over the shops in every direction ; and to take halfcrowns and halfpence in change, in as matter of fact a manner as though the shops had been in Oxford Street. Above all, it was pleasant to hear “God save the Queen” played by English drums and fifes, calling up the echoes from the glowing rocks of our far off Mediterranean island.

There was enough to interest one, before the steamer started, in the coati docile of the harbour—the noble ships of the line, and steam frigates, lying lazily at anchor; the impregnable fortifications; the clean stone houses, dazzling in sharp outlines in the clear bright air; and the odd mixture of all sorts of costumes from every corner of the Mediterranean, between Gibraltar and Beyrout. Besides this, there were two or three parties of dirty urchins-—cousins Maltese of the boys who seek for halfpence in the mud of Greenwich and Blackwell—who came up in singularly fragile boats, and petitioned for pieces of money to be thrown into the harbor, that they might dive after them. One of these little fellows was sufficiently clever to attract general attention bulgaria tour. His head was shaved all but a comical tuft over his forehead, giving him the appearance, in his parti-colored Caledonia, of a small unpainted clown.

When the piece of money was thrown into the water, and had sunk for a few seconds, he leapt in feet first after it, and he was never long in reappearing at the surface, holding it up in his hand, always overtaking it before it had reached the bottom. These lads were succeeded by a floating band of music, the members of which played the Marseillaise and the Girondins’ Hymn, out of compliment to the “French steamer. But a shelling brought them round in an instant to our National Anthem, and Bouie Britannia; and as we left the port we heard the last chords, inappropriately enough, of “ Home, sweet home.” They had evidently got up the latter to excite the people on their way home from India, in the quarantine harbor, but had immature notions of its application.

For the last month the Mediterranean had been as calm as a lake—much more so, indeed, than that of Geneva under certain winds—and the fine weather promised to continue. This was fortunate for several reasons; the chief one being that the Scamandre was a very old boat, not calculated to encounter heavy seas; and in fact was said to be making her last voyage before condemnation to short coasting or river service. With great exertion she could be propelled at the rate of something under eight knots an hour; but the engineer respected the age of her machinery, and did not tax its powers. She was also very dirty, and the crew did their best to keep her in countenance; at the same time, there were few places on deck to sit down upon, except such accommodation as the coils of rope, water-barrels, and chicken coops afforded.

Scunandre

It is far from my intention, however, in thus speaking of the old Scunandre, to run down the admirable service of French mail steamers plying between Marseilles and the Levant generally. On the contrary, their extreme punctuality, their moderate fares, and their excellent arrangements, entitle them to the attention of all tourists to whom time and money are objects. There is as little distinction observable between the appointments of their first and second class passengers, as on the foreign railways; and as there is, on the other hand, a great difference in the price, and no servants, nor persons considered by the administration to be in any way unfit society for educated and well-bred people, are admitted into the cabin, this part of the boat is the most extensively patronized. We mustered about twenty passengers, and the first class cabin had not above four or five, who looked so dull and lonely, that we quite commiserated them.

Indeed, one of them—a good-tempered American— preferred now and then coming to dine with us, “ to know what was going on,” as he said. There were two other classes still. The third, who had a species of cabin, still fore, to retire to at night; and the fourth, who bivouacked upon deck. And very pleasant was even this last way of travelling. I had come down a deck- passenger from Genoa to Leghorn ; from Leghorn to Civita Yecchia; and from Naples to Malta, with a knapsack (which comprised all my luggage, and which I had carried many times across the Alps) for my pillow; and I had learned to sleep as soundly upon planks as upon feathers. In the mild, warm nights, no bed-clothes were required; and in the finest palace in the world there was no such ceiling to a sleeping chamber as the deep blue heaven afforded, spangled with its myriads of golden stars, which gleamed and twinkled with a luster unknown to us in northern England.

#very short time at Malta

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travelmgznbg · 2 years

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Very short time at Malta

Scunandre

#very short time at Malta

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cunningminx · 3 years

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597 I had the best s*x of my life with another guy

SAF's first poly experience outside her marriage was the best sex she's ever had. How does she address the ho-hum sex with her husband?

0:00 Introduction and host chat

If you’re under 18, visit www.scarleteen.com

00:45 Poly in the news

Poly community builders Christopher Smith, Robyn Trask, Marina Reiko, Ruby Bouie Johnson and others did an impressive job for more than an hour on Areva Martin's influential online talk show The Special Report

2:00 Lusty Guy’s Politics Corner

Today’s politics corner is the argument for D.C. statehood. The over 700,000 inhabitants of Washington, D.C. pay their taxes and have no voting representation in Congress. The arguments against: it’s unconstitutional (it’s not); you could shrink the size of D.C. to encompass just the White House and government buildings. Others have pointed out the inherent racism, since D.C. has a large percentage of Black people, and there is the partisanship, as D.C. is likely to vote Democratic. When Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) pointed that out, his words stating the racism of the opposing view were against the rules of the house and had to be removed from the record. Please support D.C. statehood!

11:00 Feedback

If you have questions, comments, or feedback call 802-505-POLY or email [email protected] and attach an MP3 file with your questions. To book us or anything that involves a calendar, email [email protected].

11:30 Topic: I had the best sex of my life with another guy. Help!

After eight years of marriage, Stressed as Fuck and her husband opened up their marriage. Stressed quickly had sex with another guy. She says, “the problem is, when I had sex with this other guy it was fucking incredible. Most amazing sex I’ve ever had. It made me realize I haven’t enjoyed sex with my husband. I should also add that he doesn’t want anyone else for sex. But I’m feeling a lot of pressure and just am not feeling like being sexual with him. I feel a lot of guilt. Am I horrible? Is this normal?! Help!”

You can’t respect boundaries that aren’t yet defined, so keep that discussion ongoing.

It’s not unusual or surprising that the second person you’ve ever had sex with is good sex. It’s good because it’s different, so don’t assume it’s love. And if sex with your husband was mediocre, explore your emotional connection and sexual desires with your husband. And yes, it’s normal to feel guilty.

Poly doesn’t fix or destroy relationships, but it does shine a spotlight on issues. You can see as an opportunity to explore ways to improve your sex life. Tons of books will help you explore role play, BDSM, porn, public sex, or other fantasies that could help.

For the guilt, try the And then what exercise.

20:00 Join the conversation

Join the community on Facebook at https://facebook.com/polyweekly or Twitter at @polyweekly or @cunningminx, Instagram at cunning.minx or now on TikTok as @cunningminx.

20:45 Feedback

Cory, another fan of LustyGuy’s politics corner, writes in.

22:30 Happy poly moment

Kristen writes in to share a happy poly moment of the first weekend she, her husband, and metamour spent together.

25:45 Thank you!

Thanks to new Poly Weekly Playmate Ben ($1.99)!

Thanks to our Poly Weekly Playmates for your financial support! We also love when you review us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcatcher (including Spotify!) and when you share us with your friends directly. Thanks also to Pacemaker Jane for letting us use their song Good Suspicions as our intro and outro music and to you for listening and sharing.

Check out this episode!

#poly #polyamory

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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In our previous report on Never Trump State Department official George Kent, Revolver News drew attention to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United States government employs in so-called “Color Revolutions” and the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.

This follow-up report will focus specifically on how the “contested election scenario” we are hearing so much about plays into the Color Revolution framework — indeed, sowing doubt about the democratic legitimacy of the target and coupling it with calls for massive “mostly peaceful” demonstrations comes straight out of the Color Revolution playbook. And this is precisely the messaging we’ve seen from by those same key players in media, government, and the Democrat Party machine, most prominently from a shadowy George Soros-linked group known as the Transition Integrity Project — more about them soon.

First, a quick note on Color Revolutions. A “Color Revolution” in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be “authoritarian” and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press.

It would be disturbing enough to note a coordinated effort to use these exact same strategies and tactics domestically to undermine or overthrow President Trump. The ominous nature of what we see unfolding before us only truly hits home when one realizes that the people who specialize in these Color Revolution regime change operations overseas are, literally, the very same people attempting to overthrow Trump by using the very same playbook. Given that the most famous Color Revolution was the “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, and that Black Lives Matter is being used as a key component of the domestic Color Revolution against Trump, we can encapsulate our thesis at Revolver with the simple remark that “Black is the New Orange.”

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Pifer’s interlocutor here, McFaul, just happens to have been the Senior Ambassador to Russia under Obama during the period of the Maidan protests. McFaul is yet another Color Revolution specialist who played an active role promoting the impeachment of President Trump. In fact, after Revolver’s story exposing State Department official George Kent, McFaul took to Twitter to denounce the term “color revolution” in favor of the more palatable “democratic breakthrough.”

…

Here is a passage from one of the key books on Color Revolutions, literally called “The Playbook.” The reader may find some of the highlighted passages relevant to the domestic situation unfolding before our eyes.

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The author of this book, conveniently titled “The Democracy Playbook” just happens to have also participated in the Transition Integrity Project.

Now that we are armed with the Color Revolution framework, and the specific role that electoral legitimacy plays in that model, we are in a strong position to evaluate the true agenda behind the Transition Integrity Project’s “War Game” scenario suggesting that Trump won’t concede the election. The title of Rosa Brooks’s Washington Post piece is suggestive, prompting us to wonder whether it is a prediction or a threat: “What’s the Worst that Could Happen: The Election Will Likely Spark Violence and a Constitutional Crisis:”

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One does not “vote out” an authoritarian regime, or they are not authoritarian. Dictatorships are only overthrown, and Bouie’s statement is an explicit call to do exactly that. The actually-peaceful process of voting must be supplemented–or supplanted–with “mostly peaceful protests” if the result isn’t correct.

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So they are setting things up in such a way as to almost ensure that a clear winner will not exist on Election Day, and framing any refusal of President Trump to concede as grounds for military removal. This final stage of the Color Revolution is something that Rosa Brooks of the Transition Integrity Project has entertained for quite some time. The following excerpt is from a piece Rosa Brooks wrote shortly after the 2016 election, suggesting a fourth way to remove Trump from office before 2020.

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And this is how the Color Revolution operation against Trump and by extension against all of his supporters evidently concludes—with the possibility of a military coup.

After 2016, a critical mass of ruling class factions in the national security apparatus, state bureaucracies, Big Tech, and media decided that they would never allow the American people to meddle in their own elections again. And as a result of this contempt for the will of the people, our country is closer to an existential crisis than it has been at any period since the Civil War.

#revolver.news #color revolution #read the whole thing

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racism-criticism · 4 years

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A Key Reason Racism Remains Present

Hey everyone! For this post, we shall explore some reasons why racism is a problem that goes unnoticed by many. One particular factor was discussed and elaborated in the previous post, so feel free to check that one out if you’d like! I will be explaining more contributing factors to the permeating racism.

An article from the New York Times, written by Jamelle Bouie, stated that the solutions to racism does mean stepping up and expanding campaigns, but “the first step is to shake ourselves of the idea that explicit racial discrimination is yesterday’s problem”. From this statement alone, we can come to the understanding that we often neglect the problem of racism, believing it is solved. However, is that really so?

I’m sure we’re all aware of more well-known examples of racism being a part of America’s history as well with the story of Rosa Parks in 1955. To think that around 50 years ago, people of colour in America were thought so lowly of in society, that they were not worthy of retaining a seat on a bus showed the extent of racism that existed since then. The President of America at the time, Obama, called Rosa Park’s “singular act of disobedience” on that day, standing up for her own rights and not standing up to let a white passenger have her seat, influencing and launching many civil rights movement that have continued to thrive until this day. Then this begs the question, how much progress has been made?

Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have been bringing these issues to light once more, with many countries around the world, including America, becoming racist to the Chinese population, associating the virus with them. And this is all due to a lack of education and awareness. Those who were being racist and harassing the Chinese on the internet, would not have realised how hurtful and racist their comments are until they are called out. Those who have assaulted the Chinese during this period of time, have misconceptions that the Chinese were always being the ones to start the spread of the virus in their country. The fear of this pandemic and irrational train of thought that is aroused only serves to show racism that was already there, being exacerbated.

If more people remained mindful of their words, actions, thoughts and behaviours, discrimination would not have become as large of a problem as it remains to be today. Organisations that seek to eliminate racism would have to first and foremost, work to uncover racism within people, and show them how racism can go unnoticed. From then on, after being more aware how simple thoughts and ideas people subconsciously harbour in their daily lives may be considered racist, the importance of everyone putting in effort to tackle it will naturally come through. People need to stop brushing this problem and should not have a “I’m not racist, so this does not concern me” attitude. Raising more awareness of this fact amongst people, will spur them to support the movement against racism even more. With such collective effort from everyone, only then can racism be potentially resolved.

Further Reading Materials:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/opinion/racism-housing-jobs.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/stories-of-innovation/what-if/rosa-parks/

https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13595508/racism-research-study-trump (an article that touches on the importance of empathy)

#general #racism-criticism #racism #say no to racism #raising awareness #equality #make a change

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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How Not to Plot Secret Foreign Policy: On a Cellphone and WhatsApp https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/us/politics/giuliani-cellphone-hacking-russia-ukraine.html

How Not to Plot Secret Foreign Policy: On a Cellphone and WhatsApp

American officials expressed wonderment that Rudolph W. Giuliani was running his “irregular channel” of diplomacy over open cell lines and communications apps penetrated by the Russians.

By David E. Sanger | Published Nov. 18, 2019 | New York Times | Posted November 19, 2019 |

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor at the center of the impeachment investigation into the conduct of Ukraine policy, makes a living selling cybersecurity advice through his companies. President Trump even named him the administration’s first informal “cybersecurity adviser.”

But inside the National Security Council, officials expressed wonderment that Mr. Giuliani was running his “irregular channel” of Ukraine diplomacy over open cell lines and communications apps in Ukraine that the Russians have deeply penetrated.

In his testimony to the House impeachment inquiry, Tim Morrison, who is leaving as the National Security Council’s head of Europe and Russia, recalled expressing astonishment to William B. Taylor Jr., who was sitting in as the chief American diplomat in Ukraine, that the leaders of the “irregular channel” seemed to have little concern about revealing their conversations to Moscow.

“He and I discussed a lack of, shall we say, OPSEC, that much of Rudy’s discussions were happening over an unclassified cellphone or, perhaps as bad, WhatsApp messages, and therefore you can only imagine who else knew about them,” Mr. Morrison testified. OPSEC is the government’s shorthand for operational security.

He added: “I remember being focused on the fact that there were text messages, the fact that Rudy was having all of these phone calls over unclassified media,” he added. “And I found that to be highly problematic and indicative of someone who didn’t really understand how national security processes are run.”

WhatsApp notes that its traffic is encrypted, meaning that even if it is intercepted in transit, it is of little use — which is why intelligence agencies, including the Russians, are working diligently to get inside phones to read the messages after they are deciphered.

But far less challenging is figuring out the message of Mr. Giuliani’s partner, Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, who held an open cellphone conversation with Mr. Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine, apparently loud enough for his table mates to overhear. And Mr. Trump’s own cellphone use has led American intelligence officials to conclude that the Chinese — with whom he is negotiating a huge trade deal, among other sensitive topics — are doubtless privy to the president’s conversations.

But Ukraine is a particularly acute case. It is the country where the Russians have so deeply compromised the communications network that in 2014 they posted on the internet conversations between a top Obama administration diplomat, Victoria Nuland, and the United States ambassador to Ukraine at the time, Geoffrey R. Pyatt. Their intent was to portray the Americans — not entirely inaccurately — as trying to manage the ouster of a corrupt, pro-Russian president of Ukraine.

The incident made Ms. Nuland, who left the State Department soon after Mr. Trump’s election, “Patient Zero” in the Russian information-warfare campaign against the United States, before Moscow’s interference in the American presidential election.

But it also served as a warning that if you go to Ukraine, stay off communications networks that Moscow wired.

That advice would seem to apply especially to Mr. Giuliani, who speaks around the world on cybersecurity issues. Ukraine was the petri dish for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the place where he practiced the art of trying to change vote counts, initiating information warfare and, in two celebrated incidents, turning out the lights in parts of the country.

Mr. Giuliani, impeachment investigators were told, was Mr. Trump’s interlocutor with the new Ukrainian government about opening investigations into the president’s political opponents. The simultaneous suspension of $391 million in military aid to Ukraine, which some have testified was on Mr. Trump’s orders, fulfilled Moscow’s deepest wish at a moment of ground war in eastern Ukraine, and a daily, grinding cyberwar in the capital.

It remains unknown why the Russians have not made any of these conversations public, assuming they possess them. But inside the intelligence agencies, the motives of Russian intelligence officers is a subject of heated speculation.

A former senior American intelligence official speculated that one explanation is that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Sondland were essentially doing the Russians’ work for them. Holding up military aid — for whatever reason — assists the Russian “gray war” in eastern Ukraine and sows doubts in Kyiv, also known as Kiev in the Russian transliteration, that the United States is wholly supportive of Ukraine, a fear that many State Department and National Security Council officials have expressed in testimony.

But Mr. Giuliani also was stoking an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Mr. Putin has engaged in, suggesting that someone besides Russia — in this telling, Ukrainian hackers who now supposedly possess a server that once belonged to the Democratic National Committee — was responsible for the hacking that ran from 2015 to 2016.

Mr. Trump raised this possibility in his July 25 phone call with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. It was not the first time he had cast doubt on Russia’s involvement: In a call to a New York Times reporter moments after meeting Mr. Putin for the first time in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Putin’s view that Russia is so good at cyberoperations that it would have never been caught. “That makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asked.

He expressed doubts again in 2018, in a news conference with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. That was only days after the Justice Department indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers for their role in the hack; the administration will not say if it now believes that indictment was flawed because there is evidence that Ukranians were responsible.

Whether or not he believes Ukraine was involved, Mr. Giuliani certainly understood the risks of talking on open lines, particularly in a country with an active cyberwar. As a former prosecutor, he knows what the United States and its adversaries can intercept. In more recent years, he has spoken around the world on cybersecurity challenges. And as the president’s lawyer, he was a clear target.

Mr. Giuliani said in a phone interview Monday that nothing he talked about on the phone or in texts was classified. “All of my conversations, I can say uniformly, were on an unclassified basis,” he said.

His findings about what happened in Ukraine were “generated from my own investigations” and had nothing to do with the United States government, he said, until he was asked to talk with Kurt D. Volker, then the special envoy for Ukraine, in a conversation that is now part of the impeachment investigation. Mr. Volker will testify in public on Tuesday.

Mr. Giuliani said that he never “conducted a shadow foreign policy, I conducted a defense of my client,” Mr. Trump. “The State Department apparatchiks are all upset that I intervened at all,” he said, adding that he was the victim of “wild accusations.”

Mr. Sondland is almost as complex a case. While he is new to diplomacy, he is the owner of a boutique set of hotels and certainly is not unaware of cybersecurity threats, since the hotel industry is a major target, as Marriott learned a year ago.

But Mr. Sondland held a conversation with Mr. Trump last summer in a busy restaurant in Kyiv, surrounded by other American officials. Testimony indicates Mr. Trump’s voice was loud enough for others at the table to hear.

But in testimony released Monday night, David Holmes, a veteran Foreign Service officer who is posted to the American Embassy in Kyiv, and who witnessed the phone call between the president and Mr. Sondland, suggested that the Russians heard it even if they were not out on the town that night.

Asked if there was a risk of the Russians listening in, Mr. Holmes said, “I believe at least two of the three, if not all three of the mobile networks are owned by Russian companies, or have significant stakes in those.

“We generally assume that mobile communications in Ukraine are being monitored,” he said.

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

Republicans Are Following Trump to Nowhere

There’s an impeachment lesson hiding in the president’s failure to produce the political results he wants.

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist |

Published Nov. 19, 2019, 6:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Nov 19, 2019

Americans have gone to the polls four times this month to vote in major, statewide races. In Virginia, they voted for control of the state Legislature; in Mississippi, Kentucky and Louisiana, they voted for control of the governor’s mansion. In each case, President Trump tied himself to the outcome.

“Governor @MattBevin has done a wonderful job for the people of Kentucky!” Trump tweeted before Election Day. “Matt has my Complete and Total Endorsement, and always has. GET OUT and VOTE on November 5th for your GREAT Governor, @MattBevin!”

Trump sent a similar message ahead of the Virginia elections. “Virginia, with all of the massive amount of defense and other work I brought to you, and with everything planned, go out and vote Republican today,” he said.

“The people of this country aren’t buying” impeachment, Trump said at a rally in Louisiana last week. “You see it because we’re going up and they’re going down.”

“You gotta give me a big win please,” he said later. “Please.”

Trump thought voters would repudiate impeachment and vindicate him. Instead, they did the opposite. Virginia Democrats won a legislative majority for the first time since 1993, flipping historically Republican districts. Kentucky Democrats beat incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin in a state Trump won by 30 points in 2016. And Louisiana Democrats re-elected Governor John Bel Edwards in a state Trump won by the more modest but still substantial margin of 20 points. Democrats in Mississippi made significant gains even as they fell short of victory — their nominee for governor, Jim Hood, lost by five-and-a-half points, a dramatic turnaround from four years ago, when Republican Phil Bryant won in a landslide.

It’s true that Democrats didn’t run on the issue of impeachment. These races were centered on more quotidian issues like health care, transportation and education. If anything, this was the second consecutive election cycle where health care made the difference. In Kentucky, the Democratic candidate, Andy Beshear — whose father, also as governor, implemented the Affordable Care Act in the state — promised to protect Medicaid and hammered Bevin on his plan for work requirements. Edwards ran for re-election on his implementation of the Medicaid expansion in Louisiana, which gave coverage to more than 400,000 state residents. Medicaid was a key issue in the Mississippi race as well, where an estimated 100,000 residents would be eligible for coverage under the expansion.

But just because no one ran on impeachment doesn’t mean it wasn’t in the air. Voters could have shown they were tired of Democratic investigations. They could have elevated the president’s allies. Instead, voters handed Trump an unambiguous defeat. And that is much more than just a blow to the president’s immediate political fortunes.

To start, it confirms recent polling on impeachment. A new ABC News poll shows majority support for impeachment and even removal. Fifty-one percent say that “President Trump’s actions were wrong and he should be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate.” And an overwhelming 70 percent of Americans say that the inciting offense — Trump’s attempt to coerce Ukraine into investigating a political rival — was wrong. A similarly fresh Reuters poll has lower numbers for removal (44 percent of Americans say they want the House to impeach and the Senate to convict), but also shows that most Americans want Congress to investigate Trump if he “committed impeachable offenses during his conversation with the president of Ukraine.”

Worried about backlash and committed to restraint, House Democrats have limited their impeachment inquiry to the Ukraine scandal. You could read these numbers and election results as vindication — proof that Democrats were right to take a narrow, focused approach to the president’s wrongdoing.

But it’s also possible that Democrats are leaving political advantage on the table — that there’s still opportunity for an even broader investigation that tackles everything from White House involvement in Ukraine and the president’s phone calls with other foreign leaders (the records of several of these, not just the one involving Ukraine, have been inappropriately placed on a classified server) to his deals with authoritarian governments in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. These wouldn’t be fishing expeditions — given the president’s refusal to divest from his businesses or separate his personal interests from those of the state, there’s good reason to suspect inappropriate behavior across a range of areas — but they would mean a longer process. Democrats couldn’t wrap up impeachment before the end of the year. They would have to let it move at its own pace, even if it stretches well into 2020. (Watergate, remember, took more than two years to unfold.)

I don’t see the downside. A long inquiry keeps impeachment out of Mitch McConnell’s hands until there’s a comprehensive case against the president. Yes, there’s the chance of a late campaign acquittal, but if the past month is any prediction, Trump will have sustained a large amount of political damage over the course of a long investigation. It would keep him off-balance, especially if further investigation uncovers even more corruption. It would also allow the six Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate to campaign through the primary season instead of returning to Washington for a trial. But most important it would show a commitment to getting to the full truth of what’s been happening in the White House under the guise of making America great again.

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

There’s an aphorism I like, that we are entirely new people from one day to the next, let alone a year or a decade. Whether, say, a novelist writes their critical scene on Tuesday or Wednesday could make a world of difference. Our minds change by absorbing images and things people say. We float back and forth between what choices are best — the human race wears a shade of gray most of the time.

That piece of wisdom has come to top of mind lately as I cover the 2020 presidential race. The beginning of this decade was also the still-early days of the tenure of America’s first black president. Barack Obama’s victory was made possible in large part by winning the Iowa caucuses; by clinching an early victory in the lily white state, his campaign proved to the rest of the party, and to black voters in particular, that white America was ready to vote for a black man. The decade is ending as a Democratic presidential primary begins, and though the field has been historically diverse, the contest looks more and more likely to produce a white nominee. Democrats seem to have changed their minds about something in the last decade. They absorbed new words and images (often pretty ugly ones) that made them think the country isn’t in the place to have a person of color in the White House. (Or at least none running in 2020.)

In the summer of 2017, seven months after President Trump was sworn into office, I wrote about something I’d observed among Democrats since his election. While there was talk about promoting candidates that share the life experiences of the voters of color who anchor the Democratic base, the politicians who were actually seeing real momentum were youngish white men. Among the rising stars that I singled out was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, who had made waves with his run for DNC chair in the months following Trump’s election. There seemed to be two distinct sides to the debate over how to win back the presidency: appeal to whites who voted for Obama and later Trump, or turn out those who stayed home in 2016, namely black voters. The former strategy seemed to be winning out, given the “safeness” of the young male candidates. They had fashioned themselves rhetorically after Obama, but their whiteness made them inherently less threatening to Trump voters. For what it’s worth, black turnout in the 2018 midterm elections was up 11 points from where it was in the 2014 midterms.

Two years later, it strikes me that Democrats are in the midst of an even deeper moment of preoccupation with white America. The party’s voters have expressed a preference for the most “electable” candidate, which has become a euphemism for a moderate who could win back Obama-Trump voters, many of whom are white. And you can see why.

Wisconsin, the tipping point state in the 2016 election, is 86 percent white. Whites make up over 76 percent of the country’s total population. And the Democratic Party bled white voters during the Obama years: In 2007, Pew Research found that whites were just as likely to identity as Democrats as they were to identify as Republicans. By 2010, a year into Obama’s tenure, whites were 12 points more likely to call themselves Republicans. The inflection point is hard to miss. Democrats have looked to states with large minority populations like Georgia and Arizona as a way to change their Electoral College fortunes, but forging a new path is never a sure bet; the old “blue wall” states filled with white voters must seem within grasp to many Democrats, if only they could find the right candidate with the right kind of campaign.

Sen. Kamala Harris was not that candidate and did not have that campaign. Her exit from the race last week was met with some surprise; in the wake of her announcement, Sen. Cory Booker and Julián Castro, imperiled but still in the running, raised the alarm about the potential for an all-white field.

In other words, it’s been another moment to talk about electability and who the best candidate to beat Trump might be. The good feelings about diversity and social progress that the initial field evoked — more women than ever before, more nonwhite faces — have soured. Candidates of color have struggled in the field, including with voters of color. Perhaps that’s because Democrats are worried that candidates of color might put off white swing voters.

And yet, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out last week, there has been a narrative that “wokeness” — often pejoratively used these days to mean an excessive focus on political correctness — rules the roost of the Democratic electorate. Candidates of color, with their very presence, seem to evoke this sentiment. By Bouie’s judgement, though, the “wokest” candidates have left the race (Sen Kirsten Gillibrand, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, now Harris) and the left-leaning Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders focus their progressivism on economic justice rather than social justice.

That the woke narrative has taken hold is unsurprising, though. First and foremost, there has been an actual movement of activists on the left seeking to shove the party to align with more progressive values on race, immigration and all manner of social reform. But there’s perhaps another reason for all the attention paid to wokeness, and it might have to do with another shifting political aspect of white identity: the increasingly leftward tilt of college-educated whites. And not just any college-educated whites — the ones that dominate the media.

A year into the primary race is as good a point as any to pause and reflect on the surprise we in the media have seemed to express about the strong showings of moderates like former Vice President Biden and Buttigieg. The media was prepped for a new kind of candidate — a woman or a person of color perhaps — but Democratic voters seem consistently behind white men. (Though Warren has seen her own strong showing at times in the race.)

Perhaps that’s because the media is so white — and so well educated. In 2018, Pew Research found that 77 percent of newsroom employees across newspapers and digital outlets were white. The overwhelmingly white industry is also largely college educated (though poorly paid).

If we use education as a proxy for social class (even though class is far more complicated than that), white Americans are in the midst of a radical political realignment along class lines. The conventional wisdom for much of the 20th century was that whites with a college education were more apt to vote Republican, and whites without a college education were more apt to be Democrats. But things have changed. Pew Research surveys show that as recently as 2009, white voters with a high school degree or less were evenly divided between Democratic and Republican affiliation. But in 2017, that same group was 58 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic.

That realignment is discussed in “Identity Crisis,” John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavrek’s book about the 2016 election. In it, they talk about the shifts of white America and argue it was informed by a greater awareness of the Democratic and Republican parties’ views on race. Trump’s campaign, which centered around nationalistic immigration views, only helped accelerate white Americans’ ideas of which party their views on race fit into. Pew Research shows that in the past decade, white Democrats are far more likely to call themselves liberal than black Democrats, and that whites in general have rapidly gotten more liberal on issues of race. They got woke, in the non-pejorative, original sense of the phrase: They were awakened to the way racial disparities play out in American life.

Add all these factors together, and the media’s surprise at the prominence of moderate white candidates in the race seems to make more sense; the changing world views of college-educated whites hold outsized sway because they occupy positions of power.

The 2020 Democratic primary won’t be the end of voters’ and the media’s preoccupation with what appeals to white Americans. The shifting racial consciousness of white Americans will perhaps dominate the next couple of decades of American political life. This may not be the 2020 primary that many in the Democratic establishment wanted, but it is the one that their voters have presented them with. A lot has changed since 2008.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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17 July 2019

Donald Trump extended his fascist attacks on four freshmen Democratic congresswomen yesterday, tweeting that Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley are “horrible anti-Israel, anti-USA, pro-terrorist.” Denouncing the “Radical Left” and calling the congresswomen “communists,” Trump added, “If you hate our Country, or if you are not happy here, you can leave!”

On Sunday, Trump initiated the provocation by tweeting that the four congresswomen—all of whom are US citizens—should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” Equating social opposition in general and socialism in particular with support for “terrorism,” he tweeted, “We will never be a Socialist or Communist Country.”

In an editorial board statement yesterday, the New York Times called Trump’s statements a “gambit to distract from his policy fiascoes, his court losses, his political failures.” At a press conference Monday afternoon, the four targeted congresswomen made similar remarks, referring to Trump’s rant as a “distraction.”

This was contradicted by the fact that photographers captured images of written “talking points” Trump used during a Monday press conference. “It’s actually DANGEROUS—because it seems like they hate America,” the prepared notes read. “They want America to be SOCIALIST.”

Extrapolating from these notes, Trump referred to the “love they have for Al Qaeda” and claimed that the congresswomen “hate Jews.” When asked by a reporter whether it concerned him that “white nationalists” are ecstatic over his tweets, Trump replied, “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me.”

Trump is proceeding according to a deliberate political strategy worked out with the White House’s fascist brain trust, including Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s crackdown on immigrants. He is attacking the four congresswomen with a high level of consistency, repeating political themes common to fascist and far-right political movements.

He equates opposition to his administration and criticism of his personal rule with support for terrorism, paving the way for the criminalization of free speech and critical thought. Trump states that his opponents are “dangerous” and “hate” the nation, suggesting that “complaining” about the policies of the government is treasonous. He presents socialism and communism as foreign ideologies directed against the American people.

These are ideas developed by Nazi theorists such as the jurist Carl Schmitt, who authored the conception of a “state of exception” to justify Nazi totalitarian rule. Lurking behind Trump’s assertion that those who are “not happy” and “want America to be socialist” should “leave” the US is the suggestion that if they fail to do so voluntarily, the government will be justified in rounding them up by force.

The calculated, strategic character of Trump’s statements is underscored by the context in which they are being made. Yesterday, Trump denounced the “far left” for asserting that the administration is detaining immigrants—including children—in unsanitary concentration camps. “They’re not concentration camps, they’re really well run,” he said.

Millions of immigrants—significant portions of the working class in 10 targeted cities—are living in fear of impending raids announced by Trump earlier this month. Last week, he threatened to violate a Supreme Court decision barring him from including a question on citizenship status on the 2020 census. On Monday, the administration imposed a new federal regulation effectively barring Central Americans from seeking asylum in the US—a clear violation of international law.

These actions follow his deployment of thousands of active-duty troops to the US-Mexican border and his declaration of a state of emergency to override Congress and allocate Pentagon funds to build his border wall.

With each of these measures, Trump has used anti-immigrant xenophobia as the tip of the spear to violate basic constitutional norms and establish rule by decree.

Trump and his advisors are attempting to build an extra-constitutional movement linking fascist elements within the state—including tens of thousands of agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—with the minority of voters who support his reactionary policies.

The Democratic Party’s response combines its typical fecklessness with a race-based appeal that blows wind in the sails of Trump’s strategy. The Democratic leadership announced yesterday that it opposes calls from within the caucus to formally censure Trump for his remarks, opting instead to chide Trump with a mild, non-binding resolution upholding Ronald Reagan as an icon of American democracy.

The Democratic Party has mounted no serious opposition to Trump’s dictatorial moves, and voted last month to give him an additional $4.6 billion to fund his war on immigrants.

The Democratic Party-aligned press has responded to Trump’s diatribe by viciously denouncing “white people” in general and working class whites in particular. In an article titled “White identity politics drives Trump, and the Republican Party under him,” the Washington Post yesterday blamed “white grievance” for Trump’s recent statements.

The Post asserted that “a majority of white Americans express some racial resentment in election-year surveys,” citing a Duke University professor to argue that “the feeling of white identity is much stronger among non-college-educated whites than those who went to college.”

In a Monday New York Times column titled “Trump’s America is a ‘White Man’s Country,’” Jamelle Bouie demanded that the Democrats punish racist white voters by distancing themselves entirely from any appeals to white workers.

“What’s more striking than the president’s blood-and-soil racism,” he wrote, “is how Democratic Party elites—or at least one group of them—are playing with similar assumptions. No, they haven’t held out the white working property owner as the only citizen of value, but they’re obsessed with winning that voter to their side.”

Such comments, saturated with hatred for the working class, provide fertile soil for the fascists to argue that the racial politics of the Democratic Party require a racial response from the far right. As Stephen Bannon said in 2017, “[T]he longer [the Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got ’em.”

The Trump government is a government of perpetual crisis, hated and despised by a large majority of the population. It fears above all the growth of working class opposition within the US, initially expressed in the wave of teachers’ strikes and other struggles.

That does not make it less dangerous. Its main asset is its nominal opposition—the Democratic Party. The Democrats are no less petrified over the potential for mass social protest and have devoted all their efforts to containing and diffusing opposition to Trump and his pro-corporate, war-mongering policies.

The Socialist Equality Party fights for a class response to the threat of fascism. Billions of people across the world are horrified by recent developments in the United States. There is no mass support in the US for jailing children in cages and rule by executive fiat. The majority of Trump’s own voters did not seek to elect a fascist.

The chief task is to harness the social power of workers of all races and nationalities in a common, international fight for social equality. Establishing the unity of the working class requires a relentless struggle against the poison of racial and identity politics, the reactionary ideology of the upper-middle class.

The president’s fascist vitriol does not originate in the mind of Trump the individual. It is the outlook of a significant section of the capitalist class, which is looking to dictatorship to protect its wealth. The fight against fascism requires a fight against its root source—the capitalist system.

Eric London

#trump #fascism #ice #us politics #us government #us concentration camps #democratic party #republican party #racism

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metrotravels · 2 years

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Very short time at Malta

Scunandre

#very short time at Malta

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xtours · 2 years

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Very short time at Malta

Scunandre

#very short time at Malta

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