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nicholasohrnberger · 1 year

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American Institutions That Need to GO

This past weekend we were yet again subjected to another worthless display of self-aggrandizing television. A worthless contest, full of insignificant bloviation and a complete lack of what people really want to see and hear. Millions of people tune in from all around the country, but not because they care or feel like its valuable. These people tune in because at this point, the sad truth is that it has become a laughable gaffe of living walking failures and no matter what side or who you root for, we can all agree that it’s pointless, subjective, and ultimately not worth our time.

The Pro Bowl? Well yes, that hot mess of Superbowl no-shows is certainly disserving of these distinctions and the Manning brothers somehow made it even more unwatchable this year. I have an idea, let’s take all the talent in the league that wasn’t good enough to play for a championship, and have them play a backyard/family reunion style flag football game coached by America’s most annoying (Peyton) commercial salesman and television’s most personality-less personality (Eli). Not only that, but let’s a skill competition that barely translates to the game at large, but no I am not talking about the Pro Bowl.

The Grammy’s? Equally as useless and better than that, you get a chance to feel bad about yourself for anything you’ve ever said, done, or thought. Why? Well, because there are issues in the world and if you aren’t doing something as important as making near unlistenable music and virtue signaling so hard that America’s TVs all explode, then you aren’t doing enough. I know when I’m looking for entertainment, I look no further than musicians I’ve never heard of, accepting awards on the behalf of the mediocre accomplishments of their ghost writers and producers complete with an appearance from the First Lady to remind us that no broadcast is complete without a political message. The incredible extent of “look at me”ism in this ceremony is staggering and I know that I was wishing that Ricky Gervais would show up, pull a Kanye and snatch the mic from one of these one of these major record label stand-ins and remind them like he did at the 2020 Golden Globes that, “you are in no position to lecture the public about anything.” Still, this isn’t the worst of the weekend.

I wrote this article Monday, February 6th, 2023. The reason I waited so long to release it is because I thought, “maybe. Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe on Tuesday, there will be something worthwhile to watch, and we won’t all be wasting our time.” I was obviously wrong. Yet again, the yearly crown for most worthless institution and television event America belongs to the Presidential State of the Union Speech. Last night, we watched a man who is barely sentient and aloof as the day is long, stumble through another speech that holds democrats up to be the peak of civil responsibility and condemn republicans for all the problems facing America right now.

I should let it be known that I’m as liberal as they come and a supporter of democratic values and governance in this country and to be fair every Trump, Obama, Bush Jr., Clinton, and so forth, SOTU was the exact same way. Gone are the days when you’d have someone like Gerald Ford, as imperfect as he was come out and say something we didn’t like or as bluntly honest such as, “the state of the Union is not good: Millions of Americans are out of work...We depend on others for essential energy.” Sound familiar? That would be because we find ourselves in similar crisis’ today. Stagnation, gun violence, drugs, a woman’s right to choose, homelessness, war in Ukraine, sourcing energy from our enemies, tax increases, energy bill increases, joblessness, the list goes on and somehow, it’s always the other guys fault. Not only that but we still seem fine with both Republicans and Democrats alike, putting forth cancer survivors, Gold Star Families, the families of victims of gun violence or police brutality, and so on as images that we can look at, acknowledge, and perhaps think they did so out of decency and not for a self-serving purpose.

The system is broken and that’s no shock. Perhaps what’s most shocking is that we still tune in expecting something to change. Perhaps that’s the beauty of Americans. Perhaps the beauty is the idea that despite being fed the same tact and nonsense, election cycle after election cycle, we still tune in and turn out hoping for change and doing our part. Maybe, willful ignorance is a virtue but as far as I’m concerned, the State of the Union Address is officially a worthless institution that needs to leave the American consciousness and so I ask President Biden with all due respect. Please, next year, just send the congress a letter.. It’d mean as much to them as it does the people. Just about nothing.

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feelingbluepolitics · 3 years

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We Must Handle the Truth

There's no question that the management of Donald trump will be an issue of on-going global importance. Knocking him from his (alleged) official perch is only the first step.

The more crucial steps must follow, because trump will retain his influence and his supporters, and they will do whatever he hints that he wants, even up to treasonous attacks, assassination attempts, and mass murders.

We must be clear. There is no cozy "look to the future and heal" pretence of an option in our present situation. This is aside from the fact that taking that Pollyanna path repeatedly --from Watergate to Reagan to Bush-- helped to criminalize and radicalize the Republicon Party into the danger they are today.

Shame, honor, and true patriotism have become vestigial on the Right. Their criminal administrations and elected representatives keep getting away with what they do because we embolden them each time with a blind eye.

That is not how justice works. The blind eye of justice means that no one, no matter how powerful, is exempt. The time to work on that is January 20, 2021, and we are far overdue. Politicians, corporations, tax cheats, polluters: we still have laws, for all of trump's and his administration's destructive efforts.

We sully our government offices and endanger our nation by not requiring accountability to the office and to the people, over and above any present occupant. Where we are blocked by pardons we must still have thorough public investigation. That is not a waste of time for lack of a prosecutorial path. It is existential. It's the accountability we cannot do without. It's the foundation of the future laws we need to draft and pass to safeguard this country.

Pardons become entirely corrupt when we acquiesce to them blocking investigation. Democracies survive on information and truth, combined. We are where we are now in part because we still have corrupt actors left-over from Watergate active in our politics.

What are we to do about trump? That isn't initially, or perhaps ever, all about pardons, or state versus federal charges, or orange jumpsuits. In this instance, ironically, the potential solution is all about trump. This is where an examination of how trump interacts with the rest of the human world can guide us.

He forms specific categories of relationships which are actually invariable, because he is permanently shallow and unperceptive. Because trump the consumate narcissist is always the center of every relationship, and because he is, without introspection, forever fixed in all his defects, all of his various relationships fall into the same patterns within their categories. Here they are:

1) The Strongmen. Shades of daddy Fred trump, these are aspirational relationships teaching the type of utter control the core pathetic trump would like to wield. But because of daddy, trump is conditioned to the "love me, admire me, and be useful and loyal or I will harm or destroy you" format, but on the weaker side.

This is why we have seen trump pushing the United States of America into eagerly obsequious deference with respect to Russia, North Korea, and Turkey, and also pandering to Saudi Arabia's power which is additionally derived through vast transactional wealth.

But we cannot and do not want to transform America or Biden into this Strongman mold, because then it will have been pointless to remove trump.

2) The Assets. This category comprises trump's immediate family members and all Republicons in office, from Mitch McConnell to Kevin McCarthy, and from Michigan’s Republicon Senate members to, potentially, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. This category also extends to trump's supporters, mostly as a collective.

These are the flipside of the Strongman category, where trump gets to play the opposite role. These people are tools, who work constantly to remain in good standing with trump, rendering obsequious deference and servitude as a matter of advantage but also, essentially, as a matter of status survival.

trump is a horrible antagonist or enemy.

This, by the way, is exactly the relationship this country cannot continue to allow with trump, as a matter of national security.

3) The Targets. We know who they are. They caught trump's wrathful attention. Some of the targets are personal to trump to varying degrees, while some are a matter of expediency, or are demonstrated examples, or are, so far, peripheral.

But everybody knows trump will never stop -- that is the personna he cultivated-- unless a Target person has something of value to make them an Asset again. (This is why trump is called purely transactional, in combination with having no beliefs, no morality, and no honesty.)

Fauci, and Birx, (who for a while pulled off a mommy-style interaction with trump as he tried to impress her with nifty genius like injecting bleach), are in a no-man's land, transitional between Asset and Target, in part because trump doesn't like attention on covid if he can help it.

We don't know exactly what trump will try to inflict on Mary trump for writing her book, but we've already seen a variety of attacks against Bolton, Kelly, and Michael Cohen, along with innumerable others. (It isn't just books. It's that these people did not keep flattering, and obey.)

He ousted from political power Jeff Sessions, Jeff Flake, Bob Corker (White House as "an adult day care center"), and Mark Sanford, of "the Appalachian Trail." He can do the same to any other individual Republicon, because as a group, they are all too backstabbing, dishonorable, greedy, and cowardly to unite against him.

Certainty we have seen trump's behavior with respect to Fox Gnus, the Clintons, and Obama.

This is the relationship this country cannot allow itself to fall into with trump. But how possibly to prevent it?

For that, we look to another category of trump's relationships.

4) The Survivors. Of those not in the Strongman category, there are few people who have survived relationships with Donald trump and who can get trump to do favors for them -- to do what they want.

It is dangerous idiocy to call them trump's "friends," by way of explaining their leverage and longevity. The key is leverage.

Rudy Giuliani :

- A "very, very good relationship" with trump.

- "I've seen things written like he's going to throw me under the bus. When they say that, I say he isn't, but I have insurance."

- "I do have very, very good insurance."

Giuliani's insurance is knowledge; some knowledge about trump gives him leverage. The leverage has to represent knowledge that trump fears exposure of or consequences for. Giuliani doesn't fear being otherwise loose-lipped, or even crazy, and his relationship with trump is currently letting him pull in $20,000 a day for "legal work."

Roger Stone :

"[trump] knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn't."

This leverage allowed Stone to openly demand clemency from trump regardless of any amount of political capital it could potentially cost.

The succession of wives, too, possess whatever personal knowledge, likely far more powerful than negotiated pre-nups and settlements, which ensure the notorious litigious deadbeat abides willingly by contractual terms.

As a nation, we need to survive trump. We have observed what works. But as a nation, we must address the issue of trump just a bit differently. Unlike Giuliani, Stone, or even Putin’s special holds over trump, we must:

1) Investigate trump extensively. Entirely. Turn him inside-out. And then,

2) Make the findings public. This is where a nation, a government of, by, and for the people in a country ruled by law and not kingdoms or cults, differs from defensive black-mailers or manipulative foreign spies.

This part, making public everything that doesn't actually threaten our national security to reveal, is necessary to harden both our resolve and our democracy, and to peel off whatever of trump's support that we can, and to deter the next trumpian assaults, whether by trump or the people who will try to follow the path trump has scorched into the fabric of our nation.

Public reveals are also a safety measure. There is vast potential for corruption otherwise. But then,

3) Keep every single trump-related criminal prosecution -- legitimate, of course, because we are not trump -- on the table. That is the leverage.

That's how to survive trump. There must be no more talk of how investigating a former *resident will turn us into a "banana republic." In a so-called banana republic, powerful government officials pressure others, either to carry out vendettas, or favors of protection by "looking the other way". Government is bent toward personal exploitations. Been there. Done that these past four years under trump and Republicons.

They have actually installed what can be termed "a deep state," notably for the first time, and sane Americans must know its extant. Fcuk their cries of victimization and oppression of the Right. The only difference is, when we investigate, there are actual violations, crimes, and scandals, with evidentiary proofs; when conservatives investigate, it's fundamentally bullsh*t-and-paranoia based.

A "banana republic" is exactly what we are attempting to rescue our nation from. With all the recognition that the Right has systematically unmoored from truth, and the terrible dangers that threaten as a result, from a stupid civil war born of propaganda, to climate devastation, as much truth as we can discover is what we need.

Knowledge is power. With trump out of the White House, we can get it. We must have it.

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jordanianroyals · 3 years

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The plot against Jordan's King Abdullah

By David Hearst. 14 April 2021 08:15 UTC

Abdullah fell foul of the axis of Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu after refusing to go along with the Trump plan to push West Bank Palestinians into Jordan

For once, just for once, US President Joe Biden got something right in the Middle East, and I say this conscious of his abysmal record in the region.

In accepting the intelligence he was passed by the Jordanians that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was up to his ears in a plot to destabilise the rule of King Abdullah, Biden brought the scheme to a premature halt. Biden did well to do so.

His statement that the US was behind Abdullah had immediate consequences for the other partner in this scheme, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.

While bin Salman was starving Jordan of funds (according to former Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher, the Saudis have not provided any direct bilateral assistance since 2014), Netanyahu was starving the kingdom of water.

This is water that Israel siphons off the River Jordan. Under past agreements, Israel has supplied Jordan with water, and when Jordan asks for an additional amount, Israel normally agrees without delay. Not this year: Netanyahu refused, allegedly in retaliation for an incident in which his helicopter was refused Jordanian airspace. He quickly changed his mind after a call from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to his counterpart, Gabi Ashkenazi.

Had former US President Donald Trump still been in power, it is doubtful whether any of this would have happened.

Without Washington’s overt support, King Abdullah would now be in serious trouble: the victim of a two-pronged offensive from Saudi Arabia and Israel, his population seething with discontent, and his younger half-brother counting the days until he could take over.

The problem with Abdullah

But why were bin Salman and Netanyahu keen to put the skids under an ally like Abdullah?

Abdullah, a career soldier, is not exactly an opposition figure in the region. He of all people is not a Bashar al-Assad, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Abdullah was fully signed up to the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring. Jordan joined the Saudi-led anti-Islamic State coalition, deployed aircraft to target the Houthis in Yemen, and withdrew its ambassador from Iran after the Saudi embassy in Tehran and consul in Mashhad were sacked and Saudi Arabia consequently cut diplomatic relations.

He attended the informal summit on a yacht in the Red Sea, convened to organise the fight against the influence of Turkey and Iran in the Middle East. That was in late 2015.

In January 2016, Abdullah told US congressmen in a private briefing that Turkey was exporting terrorists to Syria, a statement he denied making afterwards. But the remarks were documented in a Jordanian foreign ministry readout passed to MEE.

Jordan’s special forces trained men that Libyan general Khalifa Haftar used in his failed attempt to take Tripoli. This was the pet project of the UAE.

Abdullah also agreed with the Saudis and Emiratis on a plan to replace Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with Mohammed Dahlan, the Emirati- and Israeli-preferred choice of successor.

Why then, should this stalwart of the cause now be considered by his Arab allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, an inconvenience that needs to be dealt with?

Insufficiently loyal

The answer partly lies in the psychology of bin Salman. It is not good enough to be partially signed up to his agenda. As far as he is concerned, you are either in or out.

Under Abdullah, Jordan never quite managed to be fully in. As one former Jordanian government minister told me: “Politically, Mohammed bin Salman and his father were never very close to the Hashemites. King Salman does not have any affinity to the Hashemites that his other brothers might have had. So on the political front, there is no affinity, no empathy.

“But there is also a feeling [in Riyadh] that Jordan and others should be with us or against us. So we were not completely with them on Iran. We were not completely with them on Qatar. We were not completely with them on Syria. We did what we could and I don’t think we should have gone further, but to them, that was not enough.”

Abdullah’s equivocation certainly was not enough for the intended centrepiece of the new era, Saudi Arabia's normalisation of relations with Israel.

Here, Jordan would have been directly involved and King Abdullah was having none of it. Had he gone along with the Trump plan, his kingdom - a careful balance between Jordanians and Palestinians - would have been in a state of insurrection.

In addition, Abdullah could not escape the fact that he was a Hashemite, whose legitimacy stems in part from Jordan’s role as custodian of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy sites in Jerusalem. This, too, was being threatened by the Al Sauds.

The importance of Aqaba

But the plan itself was regarded by both bin Salman and Netanyahu as too big to stop. I personalise this, because in both Saudi Arabia and Israel, there are experienced foreign policy and intelligence hands who appreciate how quickly this plan would have destabilised Jordan and Israel’s vulnerable eastern border.

The plan has been years in the preparation and the subject of clandestine meetings between the Saudi prince and the Israeli leader. At the centre of it lies Jordan’s sole access to the Red Sea, the strategic port of Aqaba.

The two cities of Aqaba and Ma’an were part of the kingdom of Hejaz from 1916 to 1925. In May 1925, Ibn Saud surrendered Aqaba and Ma’an and they became part of the British Emirate of Transjordan.

It would be another 40 years before the two independent countries would agree on a Jordan-Saudi border. Jordan got 19 kilometres of coastline on the Gulf of Aqaba and 6,000 square kilometres inland, while Saudi Arabia got 7,000 square kilometres of land.

For the new kid on the block, bin Salman, a prince who was always sensitive about his legitimacy, reclaiming Saudi influence over Aqaba in a big trade deal with Israel would be a big part of his claim to restoring Saudi dominance over its hinterland.

And the trade with Israel would be big. Bin Salman is spending $500bn constructing the city of Neom, which is eventually supposed to straddle Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Sitting at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, the Jordanian port would be firmly in Saudi sights.

This is where Bassem Awadallah, the former chief of Jordan's royal court, comes in. Two years before he definitively broke with King Abdullah, and while he was still Jordan’s envoy to Riyadh, Awadallah negotiated the launch of something called the Saudi-Jordanian Coordination Council, a vehicle that Jordanian officials at the time said would “unblock billions of dollars” for the cash-starved Hashemite kingdom.

Awadallah promised that the council would invest billions of Saudi dollars in Jordan’s leading economic sectors, focusing on the Aqaba Special Economic Zone.

Awadallah was also close to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed, who had his own agenda in Jordan. He wanted to ensure that the Muslim Brotherhood and the forces of political Islam were permanently eradicated from the country, something Abdullah has refused to do, although he is no supporter.

The money, of course, never materialised. Saudi support for the kingdom diminished to a trickle, and according to an informed source, Muasher, Saudi funds stopped almost completely after 2014.

The price for turning on the tap of Saudi finance was too high for Abdullah to pay. It was total subservience to Riyadh. Under this plan, Jordan would have become a satellite of Riyadh, much as Bahrain has become.

Netanyahu had his own sub-agenda in the huge trade that would flow from Neom once Saudi Arabia had formally recognised Israel.

A confirmed enemy of the Oslo plan to set up a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, Netanyahu and the Israeli right have always eyed annexation of Area C and the Jordan Valley, which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Under this new Nakba, the Palestinians living there, denied Israeli citizenship, would be slowly forced to move to Jordan. This could only happen under a Saudi-oriented plan, in which Jordanian workers could travel freely and work in Saudi Arabia. As it is, remittances from the Jordanian workforce in Saudi Arabia are an economic lifeblood to the bankrupt kingdom.

The money pouring into Jordan, accompanied by an essentially stateless workforce of Jordanians and Palestinians, would finally put to bed grandiose visions of a Palestinian state, and with it the two-state solution. On this, Netanyahu and bin Salman are as one: treat them as a mobile workforce, not citizens of a future state.

Hussein's favoured son

That Prince Hamzah should be seen as the means by which Jordan is enlisted to this plan represents the final irony of this bizarre tale.

If the Hashemite blood runs deep in any veins, it is surely in his. He was King Hussein’s favoured son. In a letter sent to his brother Prince Hassan in 1999, King Hussein wrote: “Hamzeh, may God give him long life, has been envied since childhood because he was close to me, and because he wanted to know all matters large and small, and all details of the history of his family. He wanted to know about the struggle of his brothers and of his countrymen. I have been touched by his devotion to his country and by his integrity and magnanimity as he stayed beside me, not moving unless I forced him from time to time to carry out some duty on occasions that did not exceed the fingers on one hand.”

Abdullah broke the agreement he made with his father on his death bed when he replaced his half-brother with his son, Hussein, as crown prince in 2004.

But if Hashemite pride in and knowledge of Jordan’s history runs deep in Hamzah, he of all princes would have soon realised the cost to Jordan of accepting bin Salman’s billions and Netanyahu’s tacit encouragement, just as his father did.

Hamzah’s friends ardently dispute they are part of this plot and downplay connections with Awadallah. Hamzah only owns up to one thing: that he is immensely concerned at how low Jordan has fallen under years of misrule. In this, Hamzah is 100 percent right.

It is clear what has to happen now. King Abdullah should finally see that he must completely overhaul the Jordanian political system, by calling for free and fair elections and abiding by their result. Only that will unite the country around him.

This is what King Hussein did when he faced challenge and revolt by Jordanian tribes in the south of the kingdom; in 1989, Hussein overhauled the political system and held the freest elections in the history of the kingdom.

The government that emerged from this process led the country safely out of one of the most difficult moments for Jordan: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War.

The real villains

Biden, meanwhile, should realise that letting bin Salman get away with the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has a cost.

Bin Salman did not learn anything from the episode and carried on in exactly the same way, reckless and swift, against an Arab neighbour and ally, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The new foreign policy establishment in Washington should wean itself off the notion that US allies are its friends. It should learn once and for all that the active destabilisers of the Middle East are not the cartoon villains of Iran and Turkey.

Rather, they are the closest US allies, where US forces and military technology are either based, or as in the case of Israel, inextricably intertwined: Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel.

Jordan, the classic buffer state, is a case in point.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was The Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

#King Abdullah II #prince hamzah #article

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eretzyisrael · 3 years

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Has Joe Forgotten Joseph?

Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph – Ex. 1:8

Ever since the day there arose a Pharaoh in Egypt who “did not know Joseph,” the dialectic of the Jewish people in diaspora has been the same. The Jews are first welcomed and treated well, but in time they grow numerous, and acquire wealth, influence, and position in society. They do exceedingly well. The reason for that is fraught with controversy, but the fact is undeniable.

And then the locals become unhappy with them. Perhaps they feel threatened, perhaps envious, perhaps greedy for the possessions amassed by the Jews. Perhaps they simply are repelled by the stubborn otherness of the Jews. Then the majority rises up, places restrictions on them, persecutes them, impoverishes them, expels them, murders them, or all of these.

It happened in Egypt, in the Roman Empire, in England, Spain, Byzantium, the Russian Empire, Iraq, and of course 20th century Europe. Over and over. Finally the Zionists realized that the only way to break out of this dialectic was to return to Jewish sovereignty, create a Jewish state of, by, and for the Jewish people. After a difficult struggle and a particularly horrific episode of large-scale mass murder, they succeeded to build a state in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

But then the dialectic did not disappear. Rather, it raised itself to a higher level of abstraction, with the whole world playing the role of the diaspora nations and the Jewish state that of their Jewish communities; hence the expression “Israel is the Jew among nations” (usually attributed to Golda Meir).

Just like the various kings, princes, and sultans who adopted or spurned the Jews, the nations of the world took positions about the Jewish state. But as she became stronger and wealthier, and her people happier and more successful, resentment against her rose up throughout the world. Just as the Jews were accused of murdering Christian children to obtain their blood, the Jewish state was accused of horrendous crimes against Palestinians. A notorious parallel, called a 21st century blood libel, was the allegation that the IDF had murdered young Mohammed al-Dura, which became a cause célèbre for Israel-haters worldwide. Just as Jews were seen in medieval Europe as evil creatures for their refusal to accept the doctrines of Christianity, today Israel is called a racist and apartheid state.

What has happened is that while traditional Jew-hatred (although growing strongly under the radar, especially among lower economic classes in the West) has become at least publically unfashionable, misoziony, hatred of Israel no less extreme, irrational, and obsessive than Nazi antisemitism, is burgeoning. International institutions like the UN have adopted it as a pillar of their “moral” edifices, and it has become a litmus test for ideological purity on the left.

This didn’t happen by itself. It was a deliberate consequence of Soviet cognitive warfare. Starting in the 1960s, the KGB deliberately amplified anti-Israel sentiment, and worked to create it with every means at its disposal. The Soviets, well understanding the power that misoziony inherited from its Jew-hating roots, emphasized the demonization of Israel in its propaganda, contributing greatly to its strength and spread. In particular, the false identification of Zionism with racism and apartheid was a KGB creation.

Official American policy has been relatively non-misozionist since Harry Truman played the role of Cyrus the Great to the Jewish state in 1948. Elements in the State Department have always been biased against Israel to some extent, but in general US policy was rational, even friendly unless American interests (mostly connected to oil) dictated otherwise.

With the Obama presidency, America’s Mideast policy became driven by more than strict considerations of US interests. Barack Obama saw himself as motivated by moral concerns, but his moral principles were those of the contemporary Left (with a contribution from black liberation theology). He absorbed the Soviet conception of Israel as a colonialist exploiter of people of color, and saw Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a personal foe.

But he knew that the American people, especially including Evangelical Christians, weren’t ready for a president who would explicitly denounce Israel as a state that ought not exist. So he employed a dual strategy. On the one hand, he repeatedly assured Americans that he was committed to the security of Israel (“an unbreakable bond”), and he supported military aid to Israel, which sent a message of support while it provided leverage to control her, and weakened her domestic military industries.

On the other hand, he worked to weaken Israel and strengthen her enemies, including the PLO but especially Iran. The nuclear deal (JCPOA) with Iran, which had the effect of protecting Iran’s nuclear program instead of dismantling it, was a direct threat to Israel’s continued existence. And yet, the tortuous explanations of how this arrangement would benefit the US didn’t hold water. What is there about “death to America” that he didn’t understand? What is there about Iranian-sponsored drug trafficking that is in America’s interest? Had the Iranian regime ever done anything in response to the gifts it received from the US other than increase its support of terrorism and push harder to expand its sphere of influence, so as to surround its intended victims (Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt)?

The answer is that Obama had replaced the traditional interest-based policy with one based on his understanding of morality. Unfortunately his ignorance of history and skewed ideology produced an equally skewed morality, in which there is no room for a Jewish state. American policy had sometimes been less than supportive of Israel when the perception was that US interests required it. But for the first time, it became ideologically anti-Israel.

Obama was replaced by Donald Trump in 2017. Whatever his motives, Trump’s actions in both the symbolic and the concrete realms were consistently pro-Israel. In particular, he took the US out of the dangerous JCPOA and increased pressure on Iran, both by means of sanctions and by assisting the targets of Iran’s aggression, Israel and the Sunni Arab states. Trump’s policy severely weakened the highly unpopular regime in Iran (Obama had supported the regime when it was challenged domestically by the Green Movement in 2009).

Trump and his movement were defeated in a remarkably rancorous and brutal election struggle that left the US bitterly divided. The Joe Biden administration has chosen its foreign policy team almost entirely from former Obama Administration officials, and has appointed some particularly anti-Israel individuals to key positions, including those that will be concerned with Iran. In his first days, Biden has reversed several of Trump’s actions relating to the Palestinians, restoring aid to the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency, reopening the Jerusalem consulate that was the unofficial US embassy to “Palestine,” and pledging to allow the PLO office in Washington to reopen.

But it is in connection with Iran that the intention to continue Obama’s policies are the most concerning. Although Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (the “good cop” in the administration) has said that Iran will get no sanctions relief until it “returns to compliance” with the JCPOA, Biden has already given Iran several important gifts: he has said he will remove the Iran-sponsored Houthi guerrillas in Yemen from the list of designated terrorist organizations; he will no longer sell arms to Saudi Arabia in support of its war against the Houthis; and he has suspended the impending sale of F35 aircraft to the UAE, an Iranian enemy and recent ally of Israel.

Israel has been waiting for Biden to call PM Netanyahu, because Netanyahu wants to present evidence about Iranian nuclear development, and argue that rejoining the JCPOA as it stands or with minimal changes would be a serious error. Biden apparently would prefer not to have this conversation, which might result in an open break with Israel. So far he hasn’t called.

I don’t know where Biden himself is at, or indeed if he is at anyplace at all. But it seems certain that the new administration has returned to Obama-era policies on issues of concern to Israel. I wonder if any of them have questioned the rationality of helping the misogynist, homophobic, dictatorial, terror-propagating, expansionist Iranian regime get nuclear weapons?

Does the existence of a Jewish state bother them that much?

Abu Yehuda

#Jew Hatred #US-Israel Relations #Zionism

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) surprised even many of its harshest critics this week when it strongly defended coercive programs and other mandates from the state in the name of fighting COVID. “Far from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” its Twitter account announced, adding that “vaccine requirements also safeguard those whose work involves regular exposure to the public."

If you were surprised to see the ACLU heralding the civil liberties imperatives of "vaccine mandates” and "vaccine requirements” — whereby the government coerces adults to inject medicine into their own bodies that they do not want — the New York Times op-ed which the group promoted, written by two of its senior lawyers, was even more extreme. The article begins with this rhetorical question: “Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties?” Noting that "some who have refused vaccination claim as much,” the ACLU lawyers say: “we disagree.” The op-ed then examines various civil liberties objections to mandates and state coercion — little things like, you know, bodily autonomy and freedom to choose — and the ACLU officials then invoke one authoritarian cliche after the next (“these rights are not absolute") to sweep aside such civil liberties concerns:

…

The op-ed sounds like it was written by an NSA official justifying the need for mass surveillance (yes, fine, your privacy is important but it is not absolute; your privacy rights are outweighed by public safety; we are spying on you for your own good). And the op-ed appropriately ends with this perfect Orwellian flourish: “We care deeply about civil liberties and civil rights for all — which is precisely why we support vaccine mandates.”

What makes the ACLU's position so remarkable — besides the inherent shock of a civil liberties organization championing state mandates overriding individual choice — is that, very recently, the same group warned of the grave dangers of the very mindset it is now pushing. In 2008, the ACLU published a comprehensive report on pandemics which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics.

The title of the ACLU report, resurfaced by David Shane, reveals its primary point: "Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health – Not a Law Enforcement/National Security – Approach.” To read this report is to feel that one is reading the anti-ACLU — or at least the actual ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation. From start to finish, it reads as a warning of the perils of precisely the mindset which today's ACLU is now advocating for COVID.

In 2008, the group explained its purpose this way: “the following report examines the relationship between civil liberties and public health in contemporary U.S. pandemic planning and makes a series of recommendations for developing a more effective, civil liberties-friendly approach.” Its key warning: “Not all public health interventions have been benign or beneficial, however. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have encouraged abuses of state power. Atrocities, large and small, have been committed in the name of protecting the public’s health.”

…

The ACLU issued its 2008 report to warn that the worst possible way to respond to a deadly pandemic was through coercion and mandates. Instead, the group argued — as one would expect from a civil liberties organization — persuasion and voluntary compliance were both more effective and less likely to erode core liberties.

…

Much of the report is devoted to an examination of how the U.S. government has historically treated pandemics. As it reviews each pandemic — including horrifically lethal ones such as the plague and smallpox — the ACLU concludes over and over that American health authorities excessively relied on coercion rather than education and persuasion, fueled by media-aided fear porn and alarmist narratives:

…

Amazingly, the model that the ACLU identifies as the one that must be avoided is precisely the one that it is now urging be used for COVID. Compare, for instance, the ACLU's defense of coercive mandates in its New York Times op-ed this week (vaccine mandates “rarely run afoul of civil liberties”) with this ringing endorsement of the need to preserve freedom of choice in its 2008 report:

This model assumes that we must “trade liberty for security.” As a result, instead of helping individuals and communities through education and provision of health care, today’s pandemic prevention focuses on taking aggressive, coercive actions against those who are sick. People, rather than the disease, become the enemy.

What most worried the 2008 version of the ACLU was that authoritarian power vested in the hands of public health officials in the form of mandates and coercion will become permanent given that we will always live with such threats and endless pandemics. That was why, urged that iteration of the ACLU, we must opt for an approach that relies on education programs and voluntary compliance rather than state mandates.

…

The ACLU did not merely warn with words of the dangers of excessive pandemic coercion. They also legally represented at least one client who they viewed as the victim of public health hysteria and tyranny. In 2006, “a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient named Robert Daniels was involuntarily quarantined in Phoenix, Arizona for disobeying an order by Maricopa County health officials to wear a face mask in public at all times.” Even once Daniels was released and it turned out he had a less severe case of TB than originally assumed, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio publicly threatened him with prosecution for the pre-quarantine events.”

The ACLU's lesson from that case, and similar ones it had handled, was clear: these cases “are cautionary tales that illustrate the counterproductive nature of a punitive, law enforcement approach to preventing the spread of disease.” Most important of all, said the civil liberties group, coercive steps — such as mandates and quarantines — not only endanger civil liberties but are less effective in improving the public health, because they convert the public from cooperative allies into enemies that must be controlled and punished:

These efforts require working with rather than against communities, providing communities with as healthy an environment as possible, health care if they need it, and the means to help themselves and their neighbors. Most importantly, to protect public health, public health policies must aim to help, rather than to suppress, the public.

A separate ACLU report from 2015, issued during the ebola epidemic, contained a similar message. It warned “against politically motivated and scientifically unwarranted quarantines, which the report found violated individuals’ rights and hampered efforts to end the outbreak.” Hysteria over ebola became so intense that the ACLU “found that people were illegally deprived of their right to due process under the 14th Amendment because the quarantines and movement restrictions were not scientifically justified.”

…

How the ACLU fell from those traditional and vital civil liberties positions to urging this week in The New York Times that “far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” is anyone's guess. But what is beyond doubt is that it is a far fall indeed. And most of all, hearing the ACLU invoke the standard rationale of authoritarians — we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions, but these rights are not absolute — is nothing short of jarring.

Update, Sept. 7, 2021, 6:58 p.m.: Shortly after publication of this article, a former ACLU lawyer, Margaret Winter, noted in response: “It was NOT just ‘prior to covid’ that ACLU denounced vaccine mandates: Read ACLU's 2020 position paper passionately and correctly arguing that vaccine mandates ‘exacerbate racial disparities and harm the civil liberties of all.’” Winter was referencing this ACLU report, from May of 2020, that warned of the serious dangers of “immunity passports," under which citizens who already got COVID and thus had immunity would enjoy rights not available to others:

We at the ACLU have serious concerns about the adoption of any such proposal, because of its potential to harm public health, incentivize economically-vulnerable people to risk their health by contracting COVID-19, exacerbate racial and economic disparities, and lead to a new health surveillance infrastructure that endangers privacy rights. . . . This division would likely worsen existing racial, disability, and economic disparities in America and lead people struggling to afford basic necessities to deliberately risk their health.

While such a scheme is different in degree from vaccine passports let alone vaccine mandates — which the ACLU is now championing — its rationale for opposing such a system is fully applicable: “there are serious civil liberties and civil rights harms from making workplace decisions on that basis,” adding: “any immunity passport system endangers privacy rights by creating a new surveillance infrastructure to collect health data.”

#glenn greenwald #aclu #substack

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things2mustdo · 3 years

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We are all too familiar with the SJWs’ “muh feelings” pose. We are also familiar with the Leftists’ manipulative stance, be it through their sanctimonious bullying, guilt-tripping, appeals to a pseudo-consensus, veiled threats, or constant emotional blackmailing. The maelstrom of emotions the Left plays with makes tempting to withdraw emotionally. We might be led to think that the higher good lies in “cold, hard facts” alone. But if we do so, we easily forget that cold facts do not prompt for any action, and if we merely describe while trying to get emotionally disconnected, we cut ourselves off the game.

Passions are part of the game

When the infamous Karl Marx wrote that modern capitalism “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation,” he had a point. The bourgeois world of classic modernity is emotionally lacking, and both the bohemian artistry and Communist radical politics stepped up to fulfill the void. This historical point is still relevant today. Conservatives fail to make stands because they are much more passionate about their personal interest than about defending anything they pretend to stand for. SJWs, on the other hand, went very far into shrieking and bullying because they are usually passionate for their points. Different motivations lead to different outcomes. And a strong motivation, not to say a deep or passionate commitment, greatly helps to build a strong character.

The far-left was able to pick up people’s passions because the bourgeois would not, and perhaps could not, do that. The bourgeois idea of progress was about people becoming farm animals, individuals reduced to the status of producers and consumers in a world where nothing really new or interesting could appear anymore. In such a world, there is no need for passions and no need for politics, isn’t it? Well, the individuals would not let themselves get boiled down to the status of mere economical agents, and many preferred embracing some ridiculous strand of new-age spirituality, worthless artistry or even becoming Communists than living through the bourgeois-conservative nothingness..

Rejecting the passions and emotions, or at the very least trying to put them aside as to ignore them, made men weak and unable to take a stance. It has also made women unhinged, shameless, and willing to do anything for short-term pleasure, as no men were able to give them a proper sense of boundaries. Plus, passions being powerful motivators, the far-left mastery when it comes to stirring some made it tremendously powerful as well.

We must face passions, not as an annoyance, but as a resource that has to be mastered. This is true for ourselves and others. First, when we are aware of our emotional states without being directly prompted (“triggered”) by them, we gain the ability to choose consciously what we do and want to do, and can follow our own intuitions instead of getting framed by an alien narrative. Second, when we are also aware of others’ emotional states, we can steer them in a specific direction.

The latter is especially true for women: today, they follow fashions and MSM approval, when not following their own sluttiness and attention-whoring… but if men were able to reward, shame, and inspire proper passions in them, they would follow us instead. If we want this to happen, we have to take over the empire of passions and stir up some emotions in the public’s hearts, be it through discourse, artwork, or daily conversations. Here are three emotions I think we should be keen to stir.

1. Empathy

According to Dr. Neel Burton,

Empathy can be defined as a person’s ability to recognize and share the emotions of another person, fictional character, or sentient being. It involves, first, seeing someone else’s situation from his perspective, and, second, sharing his emotions, including, if any, his distress. (Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.21, p.153)

As empathy fits well with maternal instinct and motivates nurturing tendencies, women are naturally prone to it. Up until a very recent time, they took care of babies and small children, participated to local charities, worked in shelters for the homeless or went through menial but important tasks as nurses. They did so because their natural empathy motivated them to act this way.

By contrast, a striking feature of feminism is that it destroys womanly empathy and nurturing tendencies. From a feminist point of view, men are enemies or at the very least potential oppressors and children are a burden. Feminism reverses the empathy, turns it into defiance or even hatred. Worse: after women have lost their ability to feel positively towards the men they should at least respect, cultural Marxism stirs their natural empathy towards “minority” identities. Thus we see grrls caring about thugs, invaders, or weirdos, who are all positively portrayed in the media, more than they care about what should be their community.

The lack of empathy is also a problem among white men. Though black men often exert violence against each other, the majority of them always bonds when it comes to attacking the depleted white majority. The same goes for any community out there: they empathize with each other more than they would ever empathize with us. We, white men, are the only ones who do the exact opposite by being hypercritical against each other when we should actually be supportive and look at the positive rather than the negative.

There should be a lot more empathy towards us than there currently is. Others should be more sensitive to our plight, suffer when we suffer, or at least feel compelled to suffer when we do. We are the proximate [prochain?], not the Big Other. We, too, should have more empathy among ourselves: nice guys, for example, should not be considered as “jerks” or “bastards,” as say some red-pilled guys who seem to have internalized a negative framing, but as misled victims who proved some nobility by trying to conciliate “respect” for women with the healthy desire to get a deeper relationship. Along the same lines, the working- or middle-class average Joe who got disenfranchised should be painted on a positive and humane light so that wealthy liberals cannot ignore or merely sneer at him.

2. Hope

Here is an emotion the Left has really abused from. Remember 2007-8, when the first “black” president was supposed to end the racial tensions in the US as well as the neocon foreign wars? Democrat activists at that time wrote without batting an eyelid about their hope for a world without losers, for an outcome where everyone would win. Then, the racial tensions have never been so high, the white majority is more dispossessed than ever, and the same liberals who were trumpeting about a world without losers have no shame calling us losers—from their choices and politics. Hope has been abused from, and we have to take it back. In fact, we have already started to.

Hope can be defined as the desire for something to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening. It is the anticipation of something desired… To hope for something is to desire that thing, and to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the probability of it happening, though less than 1, is greater than 0. (Neel Burton, Heaven and Hell, chap.14, p.103)

Trump is a wild card who comes with no guarantee, for sure. He still gives us something no Obama could ever give us—hope. The Alt-Right, manosphere, and the whole flourishing of high-quality dissenting intellectual efforts give us hope as well. Someone wrote that “the Alt-Right represents the first new philosophical competitor to liberalism, broadly defined, since the fall of Communism.” Someone else, here on ROK, noticed that more and more women were fed up with misandric grievance-mongering and longed to become mothers. These trends are more than interesting: they seem to point towards a better future that we still have to conquer.

On the other side, the liberal status quo and Hillary in particular mean pure hopelessness. If Hillary gets elected, we will have even less jobs, anti-white and anti-male organized groups will attack even more, the wealthy globalists will get fatter at our expense, and so on. Interestingly, liberals today use arguments of a conservative kind: when they shriek something as “the 5 last US presidents tell you not to vote for Trump” or “the Alt-Right and deplorables are un-American,” they look more like McCarthyists than hippies. They are the establishment clinging to the status quo and worsening. We are the embodiment of hope for a positive change.

3. Love

While hope should be spread among any decent people and is pretty straightforward once we agree on the intrinsic value of its object, love appears a bit trickier. In a relationship, whoever loves the other most is dominated whereas who loves less has more room to take action. If a man falls in love, he falls in the sense that he gets dumbed down, pedestalizes the girl, who in turn will get bored and look for a more challenging partner. Thus, seduction must be used to stir love in women: they must love us as well as their children. Both as a mistress and a mother, both as sexual and nurturing, a woman exerts love.

In men, love must be exerted in a more distilled and thoughtful form: when we protect our dear ones, toil for them, care about their interests, these efforts are an expression of love as well—although this form of love must be more distant as to allow ampler room for action. In any case, the feminine element must love the most and more directly.

It should be added that masculine and feminine can be conceived, not only as absolute, but also as relative terms. Esotericists consider that we are all “feminine” when considered under a higher point of view: the most fierce, courageous and risk-taking warrior remains “feminine” relatively to a genuine spiritual authority, and any human is “feminine” relatively to God as the ultimate Father. The Bible compares the good ones to a bride that shall get married to God (Revelation, 19). Hinduism recommends bhakti or devotion, i.e. religious love, to those belonging to the warrior caste, whereas the spiritual authority is more “masculine” as it enjoys a higher and more direct knowledge of God. These considerations might seem a bit far-fetched, but they were already highly relevant before the tiniest stint of modern degeneracy was born. Just remember that being in love is acceptable for a man as long as it never equates to pedestalizing a woman.

Conclusion

Passions and emotions matter. If we set them aside as irrelevant, someone else will push our emotional buttons—and the girls’—and spin us in no time. The philosopher René Descartes wrote that “all the good and the bad in this life depend from the passions” and that we had better be able to use them wisely. Ironically, the word “Cartesian” now denotes a logical, rationalistic, supernatural-denying mindset. This is accurate for the young Descartes, who was among the top scientists of his time, but tosses aside an important twist: the philosopher eventually lost his only daughter, Francine, and the sadness he felt while mourning her made him aware of the power of emotions. Yet, instead of being dominated by said emotions, Descartes strove to gain cogency about them, and he wrote a very interesting little treatise to expand a whole theory of the “passions of the soul.”

Our case is the same. Most if not all of us have been blue-pilled since infancy. Cultural Marxism was shoveled down our throat by school teachers, media figures, movies, social pressure. At each step of this process, our emotions were stirred and directed by spinsters so that, for example, we would feel a high empathy for so-called minorities while ignoring the homeless “white males” dying of cold at winter.

Ride the tiger of your own emotions and of (some) others’ as well if you don’t want sinister globalists to.

https://www.returnofkings.com/11010/how-to-control-your-emotional-state

We all have our ups and downs. Some days you feel on top of the world, you ooze a sexy masculine confidence that women love whereas other days you couldn’t be bothered to shave — you scowl at the thought of doing anything interesting and avoid all outside contact. Many guys accept this with a “que sera, sera” mentality. They feel it is just the natural ebb and flow of things, that taming your emotional state would be too chaotic of a task.

Those who do wish to change usually use hokey terminology talking about “energy” and the “universe.” They’ll seek guidance from another source so that they do not have to take responsibility for letting their emotions get out of check. People also seek a quick cure for a continual state of happiness, but what they do not realize is that happiness is transient.

I do believe there is a way to wrangle your emotions that relies on you, your habits and the power you have to respond to various stimuli. Essentially you must minimize the negativity and maximize the positivity in your life by altering certain habits.

Minimize Habits That Lead To Negativity

Take a moment to think about any time you’ve lost control of your emotions. When did you last get angry, depressed, hateful, etc.? What do you do when you’re out talking to girls that hurts your success? Do you have unreasonable limiting beliefs? Do you believe you always need to be happy to be successful? Do you get frustrated when you have anxiety because of any of the above?

If you think about the above long enough and are mindful when such emotional states occur you will begin to notice a trend in what triggers them.

For me the biggest habits that lead to a negative state of mind, in which I lacked motivation, was depressed, and stayed inside all day, were my nutritional habits. I started to recognize a pattern: I’d go out drinking or eat highly processed foods, I’d wake up the next day tired and dehydrated, then I’d stay inside all day watching movies because I didn’t want to go to the gym or talk to people. The cycle would just endlessly repeat until the natural ebb and flow of things took me to a high point.

Maximize Habits That Lead To Positivity

Repeat the exercise above. When was the last time you felt on top of the world, when did you last feel invincible, when did you last have no anxieties? When were you on fire when talking to girls, what were you doing that made you so successful? What were the thoughts running through your head?

Again if you pay attention you will begin to see patterns. You’ll start to realize what habits lead to a great mood.

For me I felt the best when ‘rewarded’ with something. Whether it was having great sex, sharing something with a friend, new PRs in the gym, busting my ass in the library and getting a good grade, or learning a new skill.

The Keystone Habit

Roosh brought up keystone habits in a recent article titled “One Approach A Day.” Essentially it is an innocuous habit that has a much larger effect than planned.

For me I started a few keystone habits: I started the day off with a nice cold glass of lemon water and my vitamins. In doing this I started drinking more and more water leading me to be less dehydrated, more energetic and making better food choices.

I also made a rule that as soon as I start talking myself out of something reasonable I would force myself to do whatever it was I was trying to rationalize my way out of. Maybe I’d start thinking “I’m kind of sore and I still haven’t seen the new episode of Game of Thrones, I think I’ll go to the gym later.” I know I wouldn’t go to the gym later so I would immediately get up and put on my workout gear. Just by doing this I started getting in the mood for lifting — I’ve also heard of guys packing a gym bag every night and leaving it in their car.

The peaks and troughs of our emotional state should not define us. As a man, whether it be through eliminating negative triggers or forming positive habits, you should be fully in control of your emotions. Use the power of a keystone habit to enact much larger scale change so you can be in a perpetual state of positivity, or at the very least, neutrality.

Read Also: How To Change Your Bad Habits

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newsninjablog · 3 years

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The Role of Counter Intelligence In a Military Coup

I'm really excited to share this information. First, I'm proud that I came to this conclusion before listening to the attached podcast by Mike Adams. It occurred to me after listening to Steve Pieczenik yesterday on Alex Jones.

https://www.infowars.com/posts/is-this-dr-steve-pieczeniks-last-appearance-on-infowars/

I realized I've been looking at this from all the wrong perspective, and it's no accident that I've been seeing it this way, because I believe that this is the way that Trump's team has wanted to portray themselves. I've been visualizing Trump as a lone warrior in the swamp, on the defensive, trying to stop an illegal coup on the left. He is repeatedly portrayed as a mindless bumbling idiot who is kind of like a loose cannon, bumping all over the place and having to be controlled and “handled” by his patient staff. WHAT IF they meant to portray this image to the fake news.

“There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” ― Lao Tzu

In order to help you understand fully what I’m talking about I have to explain “Q.” I've avoided this point of view because I have always been wary of "Q." Who or what is Q? The prevailing thought is that Q is a consortium of generals (white hat operators) who saw the rising role of the military industrial complex and it’s subsequent murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and committed to take this cabal down. These generals have been replaced over the years, as one passes away, always leaving a core of 200 generals operating down through time. They have been planning a coup to take this evil down for 50+ years. These white hat operators began making cryptic drops of information that can be traced back to Oct. 28, 2017, but perhaps there were earlier drops that the mainstream knows nothing about. Q should be distinguished from Q-Anons, in that the Anons, are people who have taken these cryptic drops and began to interpret the clues and disseminate them out to their followers. Many people have jumped on the Anon band wagon, but many people call their rhetoric “hope-porn.” I basically stayed away from these groups because I didn’t trust any information that was coming from a nameless, faceless source. Then General Flynn posted a video on Twitter of his family saying the Pledge of Allegiance and quoting the Q motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”

His account has been cancelled by Twitter, but here’s a CNN article about the tweet.

When I saw this, I began to sit up and take notice. Because of his endorsement, I believe that Q is a real force and they are the good guys. Does that mean that everything Anon’s have put out has been true, NO. But that’s because while Q has been doing drops to keep Trump’s faithful followers from being utterly demoralized by the mainstream media’s disinformation campaign, (hear me on this because THIS the important premise of this article) Q HAS BEEN ENGAGING IN COUNTER INTELLIGENCE AS WELL, and they have been using their faithful followers to push that information out. Why would they purposely misinform their supporters? BECAUSE, this is the coup... an underground military operation that has been in the works since way, way before Donald Trump. In fact, THEY recruited him. This is a coup, to take back the Republic from enemy hands, which have been slowly taking over more and more of the government. In order to be successful, they HAD to manipulate the enemy to underestimate their Commander and Chief... not to mention subverting attention away from where the real action was happening, by sending followers on wild goose chases at times. Anons became a powerful counter intelligence tool for Q to use to manipulate the enemy and in this way, they have played a crucial role in the success of this operation without knowing it.

If there are two entities that the left loves to HATE ON it’s Q-Anon’s and Alex Jones. They watch these two phenomena like a hawk. Whatever Anons are saying and whatever Alex Jones is saying, they believe this is coming straight from intelligence inside Trump’s inner circle. That’s why there is a barrage of media hit pieces designed to discredit these two sources. Alex Jones was de-platformed and cancelled by big tech years before they turned this on the rest of us. It’s a miracle his media organization has survived, but survive it has.

Anyway, back to my explanation of Q. The Q version of what's happening here is that our country has been slowly taken over by a underground network of bad operators empowered by the intelligence agencies, funded by illegal activities and protected by the pseudo government or Deep State as it is referred to. The cancer has reached the pinnacle of its success by openly and brazenly stealing the presidency right in front of our eyes. Past presidents tried to take this on. JFK was murdered for trying, Ike Eisenhower alluded to it in his "undue influence" speech, and Reagan may have been close to going after it before the assassination attempt. So I'm coming around to realizing that Q's general platform is likely true. In that case, this isn't that Trump is defending himself from an illegal coup. This is Trump, the finisher, following an intricately planned play book to retake the republic. This is the counter coup, and it’s been in the works for a long time. Understand, they knew that the election was going to be stolen and they had to stand down and let it happen, because before they could reveal the evil that the enemy was doing, they had to let it reach a pinnacle of that evil to help open the eyes of the American people. This seems like a cruel punishment for those of us who just wanted to celebrate the victory of our president and go to the inauguration and enjoy another 4 years of his leadership...but we are all a part of the operation now and we have to “hold the line.” Do not be demoralized by the left into thinking that you’re crazy or that Biden is the president elect. This whole operation on the left is depending on an international gas-lighting operation that is trying to deceive the whole world into thinking that this election was legitimate and that Joe Biden is now the “legitimate” leader. It’s all a lie.

Last week’s march on the Capitol was not a fiasco caused by Trump. It was an intricately planned military operation designed to draw the rats out of the sewer. The entire thing was surveilled and recorded. The left purposely planned to bring in insurgents dressed as Trump supporters to attack the Capitol, in order to 1. get sympathy for Joe Biden and the Democrats as the innocent victims of violent insurgents and 2. to paint Trump as inciting violence and therefore unfit to lead. Notice, they tried to remove him the next day using the 25th amendment. MEANWHILE, the geniuses on Trump’s team hijacked their hijacking and went in with special ops to retrieve key laptops from the Speaker and other treasonous Congressmen and women. Please take a look at these two clips showing our white hat special forces guys (recently reorganized by Trump as another branch of the military directly reporting to him..BRILLIANT)

Here the are entering the Capitol

and inside deploying to their designated offices to complete the “laptop mission.” Does that sound like a President who’s laying it down? Does that sound like someone who’s given up?

What’s really cool, is Trump supporters, by showing up in those huge numbers, were a part of the plan, without even knowing it. After the insurgence took place, Trump had to announce that everyone needed to disperse peacefully. This is one of the requirements that must be fulfilled before the In-surrec- tion Act can be invoked.

“To be used, the In-surrec-tion Act says, “he (POTUS) shall, by proclamation, immediately order the insurgents to disperse and retire peaceably to their abodes within a limited time.”

Are you getting the picture here? On the surface, this looked like a bumbling attempt by Trump to get his followers to overthrow the government (Trump knows his followers AREN’T those kind of people.) but the media and the Trump haters don’t know this. Brilliant counter intelligence going on here. Follow me...Now the LEFT is so scared of those horrible, violent, racist Trump-sters (as they derisively call us) that they INSIST on military backing in DC. Trump responds to their request by declaring State of Emergency, which allows for the deployment of troops (18,000 and counting) to the nation’s capital, all under the guise that they are protecting Biden and HIS inauguration. Meanwhile, the Insurrection Act has been signed, and under this and the Emergency Declaration, the military and FEMA are in charge. The men at the helm are both Trump appointees who you can bet were strategically placed there for such a time as this. (Please listen to the Mike Adam’s Podcast linked here for a detailed explanation of this).

Meanwhile, over on Info Wars, Alex Jones has been acting very strange. People who don’t know him very well, or haven’t been listening for very long, might not pick up on it, but I’ve been listening on and off for so long, I feel like I could predict his words before they come out of his mouth...suddenly he’s changing his tune A LOT. Everyday seems to be a bashing of Q and Q-Anons...Alex seems to have inside knowledge that the president may be giving up...he’s ranting and panicking and belying the military presence in DC as Biden’s attempt to try and turn us into a military state. He goes on and on and on but something is wrong... Then yesterday, his argument the Steve Pieczenik..it was all so staged in my mind. It occurred to me that Alex is being recruited to push out the narrative to keep the left (who THINK anything Alex Jones says is coming from the inside) will be dissuaded from any worries they might have had about the military presence in DC. Info Wars and Mike Adams were being used for counter intelligence. Now you might ask, how can we trust anything Mike Adams says. Well first of all, he’s one of the good guys who has been fighting corruption in the CDC, Big Pharma and the health industry for YEARS. I strongly recommend you listen to his podcast linked above because you will instantly be able to see the difference between this podcast, which is the real Mike Adams, and the fake one he put out a couple days ago, regarding Pentagon push back. The real Mike Adams would never put something out there as absolute fact unless he was privy to the information personally. His normal approach is to describe the different arguments, critically analyze them and them give people the possible scenarios and which one he thinks is most likely. That’s what he is doing in today’s podcast...completely different from the one he put out two days ago. So why would the good guys want to make the left believe that the Pentagon is not with Trump? Simple? Because they will not worry about the Insurrection Act anymore and they won’t be concerned about the growing military presence. Counter intelligence at it’s best.

Bottomline, on Saturday when certain key individual began pushing out the intel that Trump had signed the Insurrection Act, I responded by wrongly thinking, THIS IS IT! An emergency broadcast is soon to follow. However, although the act has been signed, it won’t be made public until the absolute right moment. Think about it, if they had made it public on Monday, they wouldn’t have had the troops in DC ready to meet with the push back that will surely come when the general public realizes that Joe Biden is not going to be president. They are ready now, but there are probably a LOT of things most of us are still not privy to. We may continue to be used to push our narratives that we think are true, that are really just moving pieces on the chess board, to prepare for the next thing. The only role we can have now is to prepare for the obvious fact that there is going to be rough spell coming with possible shut downs, black outs and maybe even a false flag attack. The left has already revealed their next card, in that they are trying to gin up a militia insurrection at the state capitols this weekend. I hope no one is foolish enough to participate in this one...our president has told us to calm down and stay home...don’t let them use Trump supporters for this. The last thing we want to do is spur on a civil unrest, before the geniuses on the inside have sprung their incredible trap on the Deep State.

That being said...

No plan is perfect or invincible. We have no idea who will win this battle, but we KNOW WHO WINS the war! Our hope is not in Donald John Trump, but in the Lord and of HIS government, there shall be no end. Keep thinking critically about everything you see and hear. Don’t believe a single word the mainstream press is putting out and question everything that is coming at you from all the other sources. Here are some of the things for which I am absolutely certain of (that means 99% at this point)

1. Donald Trump will not commit treason by surrendering the country to a known CCP asset

2. Donald Trump is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar empire and didn’t get there by being dumb and bumbling

3. The Insurrection Act has been signed and is in play

4. We will be looking at a pretty incredible piece of history over the next 7 days...

Stay alert and hopeful!

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politicaltheatre · 4 years

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Consent

September 2nd.

In any other year we'd be remembering the official - well, "official" - end of World War II, 75 years ago today. Or we'd be learning about it, because 75 is a nice, round number and we like nice, round numbers because they give us the opportunity to remember and learn things.

Obviously, this year is different. Milestones of history have flown by this year, unremembered and unlearnt, and certainly undervalued.

Not that we're so good at learning history, let alone remembering it. No, we're far better at forgetting, at pushing lessons away. We prefer challenging and, especially, uncomfortable things at a distance. That's why we have to work so hard learn and remember, especially in times like these.

September 2nd was the date in 1945 when the Japanese signed the "Instrument of Surrender" on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri. They did so because we had dropped two nuclear bombs on them, the first infamously on Hiroshima and the second, too often overlooked, on Nagasaki.

Two more milestones of history barely given a glance this year. They were the first and so far only nuclear weapons yet used by humanity on humans, and in two horrifying flashes they killed up to 200,000 civilian men, women, and children.

Consent.

A strong case could be made for not having dropped either bomb, certainly not on an inhabited area. The United States already had film of a successful test to share. Think of it, sharing that film with an enemy and inviting its representatives to watch another, live test before demanding that they submit and accept defeat. How genteel. How civilized.

No, this was war. We abandon exactly that best part of ourselves in war. That's why the right wing always tries to push us into war. War pushes us towards short term thinking, short term gains, and short term defenses, all held together by a string of victories as long as you can just hold on.

It doesn't last. It can't. Short term solutions can't solve long term problems. They make them worse. That's why the right wing always loses, and always will. In the long term.

Still, it takes its toll even on the best of us. We become exhausted, physically and emotionally. We just want it to end. Fight long enough and suffer enough, we also want to punish. We want those who have caused us pain to feel it themselves.

So, we dropped "the bomb". We did, the Americans, the "good guys". Two of them. And with the consent of all Americans, 200,000 lives were taken. Like that.

It ended the war. There's no arguing that. And it's not like we were alone in what we did. It was one more atrocity in a war filled with them, each one committed by armies with the consent of civilians.

For the Japanese, there was "The Rape of Nanking", that left a scar so deep you can still see the bones of its victims in Nanjing today. For the citizens of the Soviet Union, there was the Katyn Massacre, which compounded their earlier collusion with the Nazis to divide and consume Poland. Have you heard of the fire-bombing of Dresden, an abomination shared between the British and the United States? All together, these killed 200,000 more. At least.

And then there were the Nazis and their "Final Solution". When Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, it was this, men and women not merely consenting to genocide and committing it but justifying it by organizing it with corporate precision.

The marriage of fascism and corporate organization was no mere accident of history. They were, in point of fact, born of the same lineage. They are children of colonialism.

The economics of colonialism gave us corporatism. Multinational entities with close ties to governments required organization and legal justification to build and maintain industries rooted in the imbalance of power.

Think of the labor policies of corporate America, of how and why they fight not only to undermine unions but to undermine labor laws. This isn't capitalism, it predates it. Humans have been profiting off of cheap or free labor as long as there have been humans.

All capitalism did was provide an economic means to move commodities from one place to another and to build industries based on far flung resources. Which brings us back to colonies, and slaves.

When we think about slavery - the word, the culture, the cost in human lives - we tend to think of American slavery. It's only natural. In very real ways, we're still fighting the Civil War to this day. To Africans, though, and Asians and South Americans and Australians and Pacific islanders, there is little to distinguish slavery from colonialism.

Labor was forced. The laws, such as they were, favored those in power at the expense of those under their rule. The colonial industries and there friends in government saw to that. In very real ways, those people are still fighting for their freedom to this day, too.

It didn't start with brutality. No. it never does. Colonialism started the way most relationships do. When the colonizers came, they had something to offer, something of value. They had technology. They had the ability to travel great distances. They were something new. They had whatever it was that seemed good in the short term.

It was only as short term grew to long term that the cost of the imbalance of power and what the colonizers would do to maintain it became clear.

Which brings us to what became known as fascism. The colonial era - the late 19th century into the early 20th, in particular - was a period of great technological advancement. That "technology" included methods of controlling "unruly" natives. The colonizers talked to each other, shared ideas, experimented, and found what they hoped would be better, more efficient ways of forcing those natives to accept things as they were.

Of course, they failed. The more effort it takes to force anyone to accept your control over them, the more they want you gone. Eventually, like a star exhausting its fuel, your expansion collapses and things explode.

This is what happened to the colonizers. At least, this is what happened to their colonial occupation. The first World War was fought over colonial possessions. Don't let the stories of trench warfare fool you, it was resources they were fighting over, and the right to control the natives in the countries where those resources could be found.

The countries that held colonies after that war made a killing. The ones that didn't, well, you see where this is going.

Italy had a chance to rule what is now Turkey; the Turks kicked them out. The Germans lost all of their colonial possessions to a group of countries that demanded they pay for the privilege. The Japanese had ambition, but the Europeans and Americans held all the colonies in their own backyard and liked to draw racist caricatures of them.

The appeal of fascism was that it was market tested. Decades of methodology and technology had been tested on local populations and reported on to governments and titans of industry alike.

Soldiers, humiliated by failure in war and having no colonies in which to serve, were easy recruits. Give them certainty and the weapons to force it on others and they'll happily serve.

Throw in a bad economy and national humiliation in the eyes of the world, and you have a sizable portion of your own population ready and willing to see those same methodologies and technologies imported back home for domestic use.

That's what the Italians did. It seemed to work. The trains ran on time. That the leader seemed like a big buffoon didn't matter.

So, the Germans gave it a try. The Nazis weren't going after Germans, anyway. It was all of those "others" they hated: the non-Germans, the intellectuals, the radicals, the deviants, the Jews. If you weren't any of those things, they left you alone. You might even profit from their loss.

And so, the Japanese took it on. It would restore national pride. It would give them purpose. Before long, fascist Japan had expanded their colonial reach from Korea to inland China, and were eager for more.

By the time Spain's generals, lamenting the loss of their own colonial empire and prestige, launched a Nazi-supported civil war, fascism had gone from being a bunch of fringe extremists with guns and pseudo-military costumes to mainstream political movements. The ideas hadn't changed, just the consent of the people they sought to rule.

We all know what happened next, or should. We fought a war, one colonizer against another, just like the last one. The big, big difference was that this time one side was fighting to justify using the brutal methods of colonization on everyone and the other side, our side, was fighting to stop them.

Fascism. That was our justification for "the bomb". We had to fight it. We had to build a bomb so they couldn't, because we knew that if they did they would use it. And because we knew that, we told ourselves that we had to use it. We knew that because we knew them, because we knew what they believed, because we had seen it and bore witness to it, atrocity after atrocity after atrocity committed in its name.

Fascists believed, and still do, that might makes right, that force trumps consent, that apologies are for the weak, and that all must be accountable to them while they must never be held accountable to others.

And here we are, September 2nd, 2020, two months from what may be the most important election in our nation's history, and we are fighting that same fight again.

This time, the methodology and technology have been imported from war zones back to our home for domestic use. In the space of a few decades our police have become militarized and our military are, for purely political purposes, being used as police.

The cheating culture that infested Wall Street and professional sorts has wormed its way so completely into American culture that the corruption we see on a daily basis in Washington is considered normal. Attempt to point it out all you want, if you still have the energy, but Trump's supporters already know.

It isn't that they don't care. Quite the opposite. They love seeing someone getting away with it. That's their fantasy. That's the power they crave: all must be accountable to them while they must never be held accountable to others.

Laws, to them, are for the governed. For the weak. They are not weak. They will not be governed. Does that sound childish to you? It should. It is. That doesn't change the fact that it is the reality we face.

That reality exists because of our consent. We have allowed the bullies in our midst to hold an imbalance of power over us and to abuse others around us in order to do so.

Their victims were always someone else, someone "other", living far away literally and figuratively, far enough away that we could accept whatever it was. It did not affect us.

Only, now it does. It always did, of course, we just had that fantasy to hold onto, the one that it was all so very far away. We had the luxury of putting that distance between it and us, of forgetting. We're good at that. Historically so.

The pushback of the past five years - Black Lives Matter, #metoo, Occupy Wall Street, etc. - only came about because the bullies in our culture had become so emboldened by our collective inaction that they pushed the imbalance of power too far and, like the colonizers before them, triggered their own decline.

What have we seen the past four years in reaction to that? A racist, misogynist, man-child elected president. A Republican Congress passing massive tax cuts for themselves and their friends before giving their president a pass on naked corruption. Deregulation so complete that it will take at least two Democratic administrations with Democratic congresses to undo most of the damage, and that's only if the Republican-appointed judges let them do it.

And, oh, yes, the callous disregard for human life that has led us both to the politicization of using brutal, military occupation tactics on non-violent, domestic protesters and the avoidable deaths of almost 200,000 Americans from Covid-19. For all the world to see.

If I was a Trump supporter, I'd get a rush just thinking about it. I'd feel like I had permission to do as I please, to harm others if I pleased, to kill as I pleased, because they are "others", other thinking, other looking, other feeling.

That's the thing about fascism. It isn't concentration camps and genocide. It isn't the atrocities of war. It's the profit-driven enabling of man's inhumanity to man. It's the encouraging of it. It's the foundation of it.

That only happens with consent.

- Daniel Ward

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queenie-in-the-beanie · 4 years

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Please elaborate on the english teacher enemies. (And the cryptid appearance stuff)

Ooooh story time!

Teacher number one, who we'll call Karen, was my public speaking teacher in freshman year. She was also an English teacher.

Now, she was very very openly conservative. Straight up had a big white flag with the Republican elephant brandished over that hung on her back classroom wall. Plus there was the little cups of miniature American flags and the cardboard cutout of Edward Cullen in the corner. No joke

Ghastly interior decorating aside, there were a lot of little things she did that raised red flags, like how on day we had a classroom discussion about accusations and truth, during the Kavanaugh hearing. She made it clear that she thought the accusations we faked to get 15 minutes of fame to ruin a man's career. Now, there's always more harm in doubting and turning away potential victims than there is in believing the possible weight in the claims. Plus all her talk on how his career would be ruined forever because of a potential lie ended up getting proven wrong when that man got the seat anyway.

Then there was that time when I forgot to send her the PowerPoint for a presentation and she gave me an immediate zero without hesitation. She only reconsidered once the other students spoke out because I was clearly having an anxiety attack about it. The next day when I gave my presentation and she gave it high praise, not an apology was heard at all.

Now, here's real the real meat on the bone is. One day she gave everyone an assignment to write a persuasive speech with a free choice of topic. The speech also had to address a counterargument and have the topic approved by her. My friend in that class decided to do a speech on trans rights in the wake of the then recent Trump trans military ban. When she went up to Karen, Karen decided to provide to provide counterargument ideas, but her own opinions quickly seeped through that veil. She said amount other things "so a guy dressing up as a girl can take advantage of a free surgery?" and "why should they be given *extra* rights?"

My trans ally ass hears this so I peep in and try to educate her that cross dressing and being Transgender are not the same thing at all. She said "okay, but why should the military pay for their surgery then?". My friend and I argued about the importance of having access to gender-transition medical care is, but it didn't really get through her thick, close-minded skull.

Later that day, I did some research and emailed her a full ass government research paper about the cost of gender transition medical care being added to the military budget and how it was less that a 1% increase of spending. It was the perfect cocktail of statistics and facts to shut down the arguments that banning Transgender people from the military was a way to "cut costs" when it wouldn't really anything other than perpetuate transphobia.

The following is an exact quote from what she emailed back to me:

"" I am really not a “ban those trans genders from serving”-type person. However I am a “ban anyone who wants to USE the military to get what they want” person. I think anyone who TRULY wants to serve their country should be able to in most cases. However, my father was denied service because of his eyesight. My friend because of his asthma. People have “conditions” all the time that eliminate their ability to serve. I don’t know if I fully believe that all trans genders shouldn’t serve, but I’m probably more of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” type of supporter. That might sound bigoted, but I don’t mean it to. I don’t think we have to verbally diarrhea all facets of our lives to be “happy,” tho the current generations seem to believe so. ""

We don't have time to unpack all of that but basically:

Fuck Karen :)

Second teacher isn't a bigot (thank god) but was one of the most unorganized and weirdest English teachers I've ever had. I'm going to call him Wombat Man and just put a list of all the bad teaching he's done:

Had such a messy desk that he lost multiple students tests which they all had to redo

Took anywhere from weeks to months to grade assignments, which would negatively affect our grades

Would spend a lot of classroom time playing "brain break" activities instead of letting us work on assignments. For context, we were a classroom of all 15/16 year olds throwing around a ball in a classroom instead of learning

Wombat Man also had a rule where no technology was allowed and if he saw it he'd put a bag on your desk which you were expected to put whatever you had in and then leave on his desk.

Additionally if he ever saw you breaking one of his rules and he wasn't able for whatever reason to tell you to stop, he told us he would stare at us until we stopped. Hello 911?

He once said that people shouldn't care as much about marijuana legalization as much as they should mass incarceration even when THOSE TWO ISSUES ARE DIRECTLY LINKED YA DUMB BUTT

When the district writing essay topic was about whether to ban cell phones in schools said "you teens are so addicted to your phones you'll through logic out the window" after a discussion with some valid arguments he chose to undermine and ignore.

Once said "Shakespeare was really nasty" which was creepy as fuck and kinda out of no where

There was once an assignment where we had to talk about our choice read book to him and he'd give us points for it. It's simple enough that one would have hope he wouldn't fuck it up...

So anyway he forgot to record the score for my friend which ending up dropping their grade. After several emails which he never responded to, my friend marched over demanding an explanation. He said that the two email addresses my friend sent multiple emails too were for work submissions only.

That's right, he had two separate emails, both only for submitting work, and didn't bother to tell my friend that after several emails sent.

Eventually my friend put his foot down and said he wasn't leaving until his grade was submitted. Wombat Man caved but still took a whole ass month to finally put in the grade

There was also once this story from his last year student that after not respecting Wombat Man in class, Wombat man followed the student out to their car once class ended at the end of the day and demanded an apology.

I could go on but you basically get the point. Wombat Man was unprofessional, unorganized and straight up weird as fuck to the point of fucking up grades and making his classroom a living hell.

Ironically enough, Karen and Wombat Man had classrooms right next to each other. Two hellish teachers, one hallway. Lucky me.

As for my cryptid appearance, I look like the very basic starter pack of a confused lesbian. I've got glasses, long brown hair that I don't know how to manage, a solid 5"5 stature, nearly always wear a beanie so my strong gay vides are even more visible, and I apparently walk very weird which now that I think about it, yeah.

I have that kinda face which is a solid 6/10 which can look either good or bad based in how your standards are.

#queenie talks #asks #teacher stories #bad teachers #transphobia

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themadmage · 5 years

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What Can I Do?

I imagine that I’m not the only person feeling like I’m feeling with the state of things in the US right now - helpless. I’m too broke to donate to legal funds to help the people being held in concentration camps. I can’t travel. I spread the word as much as I can, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

A good friend told me today, “No one changes the world alone, but nobody doesn't change the world at all.” Each of us alone are just one person, but if we all do what we can and encourage others to do the same we can make a difference.

So what can I do, without money or traveling?

Write to Government Officials

We hear it a lot, but it’s true. It is our elected officials’ job to listen to their constituents. Even if they don’t do a good job of that, they will see the bulk of the letters they receive. They will get the content of the letters from the aides that read them in detail. They will be irritated as all heck, even if they aren’t moved to action. It’s a small thing. It might not work. But I’ve always lived by the phrase that ‘many littles make a lot’. If enough people start writing, something has to come out of it.

Bring up the upcoming elections in your letters. Threaten their jobs. Many of the elected officials who (criminally, horribly) do not care about the people who are being held in inhuman conditions will care if they don’t get re-elected.

Look into what your officials have said on the topic in the past, and mention it in your letters. If they have spoken out against these camps and worked to end them, like Senator Cortez Masto, thank them and encourage them to continue the fight. If they’ve been silent, remind them that silence isn’t okay in human rights issues. If they’re on the side of ICE, Trump, and these horrible camps, then rip them a new butthole over it. Tell your elected officials what you’ve seen from them and how you feel about it.

Flood them with letters. Writing once will do very little. It’s easy to ignore. Writing ten times, or getting ten friends to write as well? That will do more.

Physical letters tend to be more impactful, harder to ignore, but if you can’t afford postage or access a place to send your letters out, you can email your officials from home for free.

A google search for ‘contact elected officials [your state]’ will pull up a list of the elected officials who serve your area and their contact information. Notable officials to include are your state governor, your U.S. senators, and your House Representatives.

Spread Information

Many people aren’t as aware of the horrors happening here in the US as they should be. They think it doesn’t affect them, so they ignore it. They think they can be uninvolved in politics, so they ignore it. Throw the truth in their faces. Make them listen.

Spreading information alone will never be enough, but it isn’t nothing. It isn’t nothing.

Double check your information before you spread it - make sure that it is from a valid source. This is too important for the message to be muddled by misinformation.

Elevate the voices of people who are being victimized. They have a right to be heard. Their voices matter, and spreading their words is important.

Be Active in the 2020 Elections

We all know by now how important it is to vote when the election comes around, but you don’t have to wait until next November.

Research the candidates currently vying for nominations. Choose one who will correct this injustice and support them.

Money isn’t the only way to support a candidate - talk about them, spread their platform, volunteer to make phone calls or knock on doors if you can.

Vote in the primary or caucus in your state, when it’s time! It’s intimidating, but it isn’t hard. I can tell you that, because I did it in 2016.

Once a candidate has been nominated, support them! We cannot afford to be divided over the imperfections of a candidate when there are such grave injustices happening all around us. “Perfection is the enemy of good enough.”

If you are able to donate to legal funds, purchase supplies, or travel to protests, then that is excellent and you should do that. But here are some things you can do if that’s just not possible for you right now.

Many littles make a lot.

No one changes the world alone, but nobody doesn’t change the world at all.

We do what we can, and encourage others to do the same.

It’s not nothing.

#activism #politics #ICE #concentration camps #reblog this

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Trump’s Paradigm of the Personal https://nyti.ms/2NwK2xW

Excellent piece by @CharlesMBlow of the Times. Highly recommend, also the comments are interesting as well.

Trump’s Paradigm of the Personal

He confuses the way he thinks he is treated with the well-being of the country.

By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist

Published Aug. 25, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 26, 2019 |

For Donald Trump, all is personal.

And in his view, he is not the executive of the company. He is the embodiment of the country. He runs the country the way he ran his business, as the curating and promotion of his personal brand.

The people who support him are customers — people to be sold a vision and a dream. The people who criticize or oppose him threaten the brand and must be dealt with.

For Trump, everything is image-based and rooted in the appearance of personal relationships. When the Danish prime minister rebuffed his overture about buying Greenland, calling the idea “absurd,” Trump threw a tantrum and canceled his visit to Denmark.

Trump discussed the episode at one of his press gaggles, calling the prime minister’s response “nasty’ and saying, “We can’t treat the United States of America the way they treated us under President Obama.” He went on to say: “She’s not talking to me. She’s talking to the United States of America. You don’t talk to the United States that way, at least under me.”

No, actually, she was talking to him.

America was not being dismissed or disrespected. This proposal, which sounded like a joke, was being laughed at. And this president hates being laughed at.

Everything in Trump’s view is about whether someone is nice or nasty to him. It’s not about the country at all. It’s not about historical precedent or value of continuity.

His dislike of his predecessors — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even Jimmy Carter — is personal, not rooted in policy. He has a particular obsession with Obama, and has set about to undo everything Obama had done.

It’s petty and small and beneath the presidency, much like Trump himself.

I believe that Trump has had a longstanding belief about how China should be dealt with, but I believe that the current trade war is as much a personal beef with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. Trump thought that he could play rough and that Xi would fold.

That was silly and shortsighted. The U.S. presidency is term-limited. China’s is not. The Chinese may experience pain from the trade war, but they can afford to wait Trump out.

The fact that Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, won’t attempt to manipulate the economy in ways Trump thinks would be favorable, but is instead operating as an independent thinker, Trump takes as a personal slight. Trump appointed him. Trump demands loyalty and blind obeisance.

When China announced another round of retaliatory tariffs this week, Trump had a Twitter meltdown, tweeting “... My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” and sending the markets into a tailspin.

Trump hated North Korea’s Kim Jong-un before he loved him. Kim has played Trump like a fiddle. Kim has baited Trump into two summits, where Trump got nothing and Kim got a priceless public relations moment. Kim can just send Trump love letters and do what he wants and surrender nothing. In Trump’s paradigm of the personal, Kim likes him and is his friend.

Vladimir Putin is also exploiting Trump’s personal need to be liked — his weak man’s desire to be admired by strong men. Trump has a deep and mysterious affection for Putin. Yes, Putin helped to get him elected, but I’m not sure even that explains the way Trump genuflects for him.

Everyone around Trump knows his weakness: He is a bottomless pit of emotional need, someone who desperately wants friends but doesn’t have the emotional quotient to know how to make and keep them. So, they flatter him and inflate him.

They have all become major-league yes men and women.

None of this is good for the country. The presidency is not owned; it is occupied. It is bigger than any man or woman. Men have grown into it, but they have never subsumed it.

The presidency must have one eye on the past and one on the future. It must place national interest over personal interest. It has absolutely nothing to do with any one person’s feelings.

In George Washington’s farewell address of 1796, he said:

“The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

Trump is trying to embody the country and to lead it astray in the way that Washington warned against. Trump is a slave to his emotions, and this impulse is doing great harm to the nation, both internally and on the world stage.

I’m not sure that damage is irreparable. Our democracy, though fragile in many ways, has proved remarkably durable in others. But there is no doubt that the damage Trump is doing is deep and will take time and effort to undo.

Trump’s personal problems will leave a national scar.

COMMENTS FROM READERS, ADD YOUR THOUGHTS AS WELL:

""Trump’s personal problems will leave a national scar." More like an open wound that won't heal. 60 million citizens have succumbed to his bombast, and to date there seems to be no weakening of their support. That will take years if not decades to heal. It may never. Iraq and the Bush years were tragic, but with President Obama we started a recovery. Even with one of the deepest recession, we all pulled together, and we started the to build jobs again and pulled out of the recession quicker than the rest of the world. We lead the way. But literally within days of Trump taking office the country started it's tragic descent into the abyss. And there is no end in sight."

CHERRYLOG754, ATLANTA

"Because this president views himself a king, like Louis XIV, his actions and words smack of "l'etat c'est moi". Which is a fancy way of saying, what Charles just said, he thinks he embodies the nation, not leads it. Which is funny, because if you are the nation, wouldn't you have a better appreciation of its history, culture, mores, and values? One would think so. I watched the world leaders at G-7 and except for Trump, each shows a keen understanding of what their country represents and where it's headed. Even newbie Boris Johnson is well educated, even if his bombast often resembles that of Trump. More important, they know they are leading their entire countries, not just a small base of ardent supporters. Trump's problem is he can't grow his base, because he doesn't want to: the best part of his job is the one he shouldn't be doing on the taxpayers' dime: holding political rallies to boost his ego." CHRISTINE MCM, MASSACHUSETTS

" In other words Charles, Trump lacks the temperament to be President. Anyone who is honest with him/herself knows that. Even the Republicans in Congress know this. The problem is that neither they nor Trump's base care."

JAY ORCHARD , MIAMI FL

"It makes a sort of sense that Trump expected his "tough guy" act with President Xi would result in Xi giving in. Just as he thought his thrown down the papers and stamp out of the room would make Speaker Pelosi grovel for whatever he wanted. Trump, in the private sector, could choose his victims, and he made sure they would at least perceive he was far richer and more powerful, (whether he was or not) so he could, bluster and rage, doing as he pleased and demanding whatever he wanted. That doesn't work when you become a public employee, which the President is, and Trump has no other rabbits to pull out of that same tired stage hat. And he clearly can't figure out why it's not working any more."

1DCAce, LOS ANGELES CA

"There's nothing mysterious about the President's admiration for Mr. Putin. Putin has made Russia into exactly what Mr. Trump would like to make the United States: an authoritarian plutocracy where the super-rich can do absolutely anything they want — except dispute the legitimacy of the government — while everyone else is kept in line by voter suppression, state-controlled media and churches, and an intimidating security apparatus."

JL WILLIAMS, WAHOO NE

"From my understanding of Trump, his greatest fear, going back to his early days in NYC, is that he is not taken seriously. It's an old vs new money sort of thing, as far as I can tell. He tried to buy his way into big money society by assuming a false name and giving the media false numbers about his personal wealth he was so desperate to prove his real worth. He put gold plate on everything he touched, hoping that would show how wealthy he was. Still, no one took him seriously. And now he's finding that world leaders fail to take him seriously as well. You can almost hearing him thinking -- I'm in the White House, surely they'll take me seriously now. But alas, he's the poor little sort-of-rich boy that no one wants to play with. He doesn't care about the country. He only cares about himself. And he still finds that no one takes him seriously. Sad, as he used to like to say."

AVRDS, MONTANA

"Excellent observations as usual from Charles Blow. I would only add that Trump's form of mental illness is dangerous. It is not innocuous, rather it is pervasive and boundless. That renders him an immediate dangerous to our nation. Immediate. That means he must be removed office immediately. Failure to do so opens the door to sheer disaster and that is exactly what we are looking at everyday he remains office. Disaster." INDEPENDANT, ALABAMA

"After World War 2, our allies respected the United States. Mr Trump has destroyed this respect. Now, our once-firm allies are looking to go around the United States and put their countries first. This will result in a race to the bottom. Trump has diminished the US - and succeeded in making China and Russia great. However, it’s important to remember the this isn’t just Mr. Trump. The vast majority of Republicans like what Mr Trump does, not seeing the damage and reveling in his tough-guy rhetoric. When the damage becomes too obvious to ignore, they’ll say that Trump was’t really a Republican (as they did with George W Bush) They will also, of course, blame Democrats for the consequences of Republican policies. Pity that Republicans, including Mr Trump, seem incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions."JOHN M, OAKLAND

"For Trump, the sun rises and sets in himself. He cannot conceive of anything without inserting himself somehow. He cannot make any move without calculating how it will benefit him personally. The farthest from what a leader should be."NM, NY

"In my more than 60 years I have never experienced a President who truly believed the nation, the American people, excluded all who did not support him. Nor millions of my neighbors who were fine with that idea if they considered themselves as part of that group of supporters. This, to me, is among the most dangerous things which this man has unleashed. My disappointment in my neighbors goes very deep. We will get past Trump, but not the millions of our fellows who like him."DAGWOOD, SAN DIEGO

"Countries can tragically and suddenly head in the wrong direction. In the 1930s, Germans were the most educated in Europe with Berlin the leading city in Europe. Ten years later, the country and most of Europe was destroyed. 75 million dead. It can happen here." SOMEWHERE, AZ

"I have a hard time seeing where it is all personal with Trump. He is faithfully carrying out two agendas, one of the white nationalists and one of the extreme libertarians. It is hard to tell how much of his rolling back of Obama's accomplishments are personal and how much is agenda driven. There seems little question that Trump will have done permanent damage. Western countries will no long be able to trust the US again as they did in the past as another Trump could be elected in any future election. It cannot be quantified how much he has set back efforts to fight climate change but it would seem to be considerable. Can white nationalism be put back in the bottle? That seems unlikely. Trump has uncorked some of the worst stuff in the US population. It is anybody's guess whether the country can return to its previous level of civility." BOB, HUDSON VALLEY

"In the same address Washington also spoke about the three big threats that could destroy America: too much debt, influence of foreign interests and political partisanship. hmmmm" AERYS

"People keep trying to find rational explanations for Trump's behavior. I don't think he generally acts from anything more complicated than going with what makes him feel good. He, and those around him, often say that when he feels attacked, he punches back. That is consistent with a lot of the strange things he has done. Punching back makes him feel strong and he likes that feeling. The problem is that governing is complicated. If Trump's feelings are hurt, he seems to feel justified in throwing a temper tantrum. That tendency to bluster in an effort to intimidate may work for male gorillas, but leaders of governments ought to know better." BETTY S, UPSTATE NY

“The U.S. presidency is term-limited.” The US presidency was term-limited. Does anyone really think he’s joking when he talks about being in office another 10 or 14 years? He’s not going to leave willingly. The bottom line here might end up being whether the military will support his coup."

CLAIRE ELLIOTT, EUGENE OR

"Rather than making America great again, 45 has made America a second rate country. Our allies no longer trust us to keep our word. Our enemies see that our leadership is faltering. It will take years perhaps decades to regain the trust we once enjoyed throughout the world. People see that 45 has not thought out anything he says past the current news cycle. There is no vision for America, no grand plan, nothing."

PSCHWIMER

"Now that this "president" has decided that he has the authority to order America's private businesses to cease all operations in China (which would entail crippling a great many of them financially), it seems to me that the 25th Amendment truly needs to be invoked. Which is to say that the walking apparition named Mike Pence should visit the Oval Office along with the leaders of both houses of Congress and as many of Trump's cabinet members as can be rustled up and tell our delusional chief executive that he has no such authority over private industry and that he should immediately and publicly acknowledge this. He should also explain that the order he had delivered was intended only as a suggestion or a recommendation. Should he refuse to go along with this, it would be clear that he's fully entered the realm of madness (as his private obsession with China would already seem to indicate) and that his removal from office would thereby become necessary. If we weren't already at such a critical juncture we could spend a good deal of time discussing Trump's own business connections with Beijing and arguing that his preference for having his (and Ivanka's) branded merchandise produced there should dictate that he not impugn other American business executives for doing the same thing (let alone "order" them to cease doing so). It's too late for idle speculation, however. Mad King Donald really has to go." STU FREEMAN, BROOKLYN

"I have to think that Washington's words would be met by Trump with blank incomprehension, not merely because the language is hard (by comparison with Trump's own "cartoon-bubble" mode of communication) but because understanding it would require Trump to betray his own most firmly-held convictions." PORTLAND, OR

"Thank you, Mr. Blow, for another strong column. This president's bizarre behaviors have led to complete demoralization and discouragement for U.S. citizens. How can a powerful country be so feckless when it comes to getting him out? Someone commented that the 25th amendment wouldn't work because it's for cases of complete incapacity. I assume they mean physical incapacity. In the case of mental/emotional incapacity, does a President have to be drooling and catatonic, or fly into a rage on television? Is it not enough that he lies constantly, proposes buying another country, frequently insults allies, calls himself the chosen one, decrees that private businesses shall exit China, and flip-flops in divergent directions on important national policies during the same 24-hour period? If it were another president in another time, members of Congress would have taken Trump in hand and led him away to restore order and standing to our country. But no, Congress is on vacation and Trump golfs while the Amazon burns."GWOO, HONOLULU

"The Greenland episode is classic Trump: throw out a crazy initial offer and see what happens. But international politics is not pure business. Greenland was never up for sale by Denmark. Trump's behavior makes him look wholly irrational and by extension makes the American voting public look like a population of fools. Trump displays isolationism with "America First." Other countries should take this seriously. In fact, they should quarantine the United States. They should do so until America can figure out how to elect a sane president and a stable cast of supporting legislators in Congress. Indeed Trump has a penchant for calling those he dislikes "nasty," but that term is reserved for women in power, such as HRC and the prime minister of Denmark. Trump befriends ruthless dictators in countries like North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- leaders who actively torture and kill their people -- without referring to them in this way. Trump is also already backtracking on China. He will not let the economy crumble before the election: after all, it's his only real "selling point." Trump maintains a particular disdain for Obama because he is black and Trump is an overt racist, as demonstrated by violations of the Fair Housing Act in the 1970s to the Central Park Five to birtherism to Charlottesville to the Squad. The election next year is bound to be a close one. Do what you can to see that Trump does not win a second term."

BLUE MOON, OLD PUEBLO

#politics #trump news #trumpism #trump scandals #trump administration #president donald trump #greeland #impeachment inquiry now #impeach trump #impeachthemf #impeachtrump #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #g7 #g7biarritz #trump trade war

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evilelitest2 · 5 years

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I've seen the right of conquest argument before. It's insane to me how some fucks are morally REPULSED at people coming to a nation without permission (except asylum seekers, who aren't illegals but they hate them anyway) but 100% morally okay with taking things by force.

sWell that the thing, on paper @gservator position here is complete hypocrisy, adherence to the rule of law is hard to reconcile with belief in right of conquest, just as his insistence that he is rational contradicts his rejection of facts and his use of slurs instead of arguments. If you look at the arguments he is making, its totally inconsistent, but it is consistent if you look not at the words he is saying but instead at the words he isn’t saying, the sentiment behind the words. And to do that we kinda need to do a psych profile on @gservator, which shouldn’t be difficult, he isn’t a very complicated guy.

What ties those two position together is not rule of law, its adoration of power and White Nationalism. See mr G identifies with the powerful, specifically when its white Americans so when its ‘his group” massacring natives and taking their shit, its ok because he is ‘winning”. When its immigrants entering the US, he doesn’t care about criminals, except as a dog whistle for nationalism, if you look through his tumblr he only brings it up when he is talking about minorities, and the reason why he cares so much about CHain migration is beacuse he is deeply afraid about the US becoming a White minority nation, since he is one of those peoples whose sense of identity is so weak he has to bind it to something as arbitrary as race. “His group” is gained power in the 17th century, and losses power in the 21st century because his prority is the protection of existing systems of power rather than rule of law, enforcement of justice, or really any moral standard other than tribalism. @gservator views everything in “us or them” standards, because he isn’t that into complex thinking, its like those WoW players who imagine everything as Hoard vs. Alliance.

Innunedo studios does a pretty good job of summing this attitude up here

The important thing is taht @gservator doesn’t really want this reality to be true, he defines himself as Egalitarian while supporting white Nationalism, Skeptical while ignoring facts, and Liberal while denying basic freedoms and human rights for children. HIs image of himself is wildly at odds with the reality of himself, so while he is basically a garden variety bigot who doesn’t care about anybody other than himself, his self image of himself is that of a rational skeptical intellectual who is a perfectly reasonable open minded guy unless SJWs force him to call people faggots rather than make an argument. Just like how Donald Trump imagines himself as a saavy business man tough guy with a thick skin while in reality he is a whiney baby man draft dodger who over reacts to everything. People will build a self image to make themselves feel powerful, and they lack the internal critical thinking skills to realize how much their imagination of themselves clashes with the reality.

In @gservator case he identifies himself as a liberal, in intellectual and a free thinker but he seems to get most of his news from social media and never does any of the indicators of an actual free thinker, he never admits he is wrong, he never fact checks, he never actually examines his larger political opinions or questions base assumptions nor does he really nuance his arguments, its just the typical right wing echo chamber where he gets all his information from a small bubble.

@gservator does this weird thing where he kinda demands that you “do your research” on him before talking to him, so I scrolled through his tumblr while waiting for the bus, and it was really a trip. The whole blog just reeks of insecurity on every level, he fetishists strength and power on every level (hence why he loves Free Speech but supports Border patrol silencing critics) , and most of the blog is this kinda teenage thing where he is trying to be as proactive as possible but can’t think of anything more imaginative than just saying faggot over and over. He really thinks of himself as a “real” liberal, but he is doing the Sargon of Arkad thing where he clearly hasn’t read any political theory or research on the material, just some quotes online from Locke (certainly not any of the books). And its very myopic, you can kinda feel how angry and unhappy this guy is, he talks a lot about being lonely and at a few points literally says that he feels lonely when people aren’t attacking him, so its a very toxic view of human relationships. So no wonder he fetishises power, he desperately wants it himself and since he is so unhappy he desperately gravitates towads confrontations because it makes him feel important.

He also loves macho things and is super homophobic but he is into Gravity Falls and Adventure Time so....ok then.

I’m not just doing this to fuck with one insecure man on the internet (though it is hilarious) I’m mostly doing this to make a point, the people we are fighting against don’t usually have coherent philosophies or consistant values, they aren’t even particularly thoughtful, its just a mass of rage and insecurities that is more dedicated to “owning the libs” than it is towards any values. This is why they don’t care when children are dying in Ice Camps (well beyond the racism) its that they don’t really care about any policy that isn’t in some way destructive. They want to hurt their enemies not build anything, and as long as they are this miserable they aren’t going to care about victims, since @gservator feels deep down like he is a victim, he doesn’t have sympathy for any other possible group of victims.

Its a shame too because he wants to be a DM and is interesting in world building and homebrew champaign settings, but he can never really thrive in that direction because he doesn’t have any ability to think complexly, which is what is necessary for good world design. I’m kinda just left with the picture of a really lonely kid who really identified as smart and so assumes he must be, and gravitates towards radicalism and ‘rationalism” because it makes him feel powerful, but doesn’t really socialize outside the internet.

Ok, so that little post took about 10 mins while on the bus, so I’ll wrap it up before I get to work, so i have to wrap this up, let me just say that reading this blog reminded me a Lot of the stuff Contra points is always talking about and also innuendo studios video here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4

#ask evilelitest #@gservator #The Card Says Moop #Innuendo Studios #Contra points #Understanding the Alt Right #Bigotry #Gamergate

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progressivemillennial · 5 years

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Robert Mueller and the Fake Resistance

In the wake of the end of the Mueller investigation, the major print journals have run articles in the past day with titles like “We’ve All Just Made Fools of Ourselves--Again” and “Collusion Was a Seductive Delusion” and “The Mueller War is Over--and Trump Won.” And, I suppose in the tiniest way, the people writing these articles deserve some kind of credit for acknowledging the apparent failure of the Russiagate Collusion Conspiracy Narrative. And I only say that because some media personalities have shown no critical self-reflection and have chosen to double down on Russiagate, which is utterly dumbfounding.

For those of you who think that the “liberal media” has been exposed by the lack of further indictments or affirmation of conspiracy, I agree with half of what you’re saying. A variety of media personalities and writers have certainly been exposed for sensationalizing stories, claiming factual evidence where none existed, and calling themselves “The Resistance” with pride. I want to make one thing clear right now:

These people are not the resistance.

They’re not even all liberals. Two of the articles I cited earlier came from David Brooks and Joe Scarborough, well-known conservative media personalities. What has happened here transcends the liberal-conservative paradigm.

“The Resistance,” instead, is about:

Raising advertisement revenue and selling papers: sensationalized stories with apocalyptic tone claiming the end is near for Trump get viewers and readers. There is an inherent profit motive involved here.

Lining the pockets of media personalities: if you get viewers and you attract a large fan base, you’ll be given a larger platform to spread your message, regardless of any dedication to factual reporting or depthful analysis. As a result, you will make more money.

Groupthink: in mainstream media, people who step outside of the acceptable discourse either will be attacked until they change their tune, or they will lose their jobs. This is a very powerful motivator that perpetuates narratives regardless of whether they’re accurate or not.

Virtue signaling: it’s important to remember that media personalities and opinion writers have followers who project their value systems onto the media professional. As a public personality, you gain fame, notoriety, and adoration for siding strongly on issues that matter to your followers. And if you start bucking the groupthink status quo? You may not be seen as a champion anymore, and you might lose a significant portion of your audience.

Careerism: speaking of losing your audience, if you don’t have readers or followers or viewers, you don’t have a job. And if you fall out of line with the status quo, you won’t have a career, either.

If “The Resistance” in the media actually cared about resisting Trump, they could have taken any number of different approaches that would have been less short-sighted and would have demonstrated much more integrity and self-awareness. Instead, they took a route rooted in self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. I suspect most of these people will retain their employment because, after all, how can you fire someone for doing what virtually everyone else was doing? Why would you fire someone for selling all of those papers or getting all of those ratings?

The Fake Resistance has done irreparable harm to those attempting to expose Trump and remove him from office.

Because, as The New York Times puts it, “Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy,” Donald Trump can use this moment to reinforce his claims that the media lies and that the media is the enemy of the people. From an electoral standpoint, this will make it more challenging to win over Trump supporters in important states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. From an activist standpoint, for those of us engaging with his supporters, it will be more challenging to convince Trump supporters that he is dishonest, fascistic, racist, and unfriendly to the working class because many of them believe that we are all part of the liberal media monolith and use false equivalencies to engage in political discourse.

Again, this colossal failure by some “Resistance” figures in the media reinforces central pro-Trump narratives about his victimization and about the “fake news” media. These stories resonate powerfully with voters and sow further distrust in the news media and in our political system. The work of genuine resistance has now been made significantly more challenging.

To close, I don’t want to give the impression that the entire media has done poor work or failed the public. There are writers and media personalities who have challenged the Russiagate narrative over the past two years, and have done so courageously. There are also plenty of reporters and contributors at prominent institutions like The Washington Post and New York Times and at other outlets who do excellent work, write thought-provoking stories, and do investigative journalism with integrity. This piece is not about them.

Instead, this piece is about a set of opinion peddlers in print and visual media who need the type of reckoning they promised Robert Mueller would bring to Trump.

Peace and solidarity, Tom

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scripttorture · 5 years

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(pt 1 of 2) So I've got a character (A) that gets snagged by this group of mercenaries/assassins in the hope of drawing out this other character (B) they've been trying to kill. B is telepathic, so the group is hoping that by torturing A he'll have to come and save her. It doesn't work, and A goes through about three days of torture (beatings, mostly) before she's rescued by another character, C.

(pt 2 of 2) C and A are from different races that are mortal enemies, but C saves A because torture is something he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. Granted, he does the bare minimum to save her, but could that sort of thing be enough to shake A's firmly held beliefs about C's whole race? Secondly, how do I patch things up between A and B? I've got a lot of people being unreasonable, especially in the short term, but I'm not sure how reconciliation should go, since A is mad and B is ashamed.

Whenit comes to strongly held beliefs I don’t think there are many firmanswers.

Evidencealone generally doesn’tshake our beliefs and we have a marked tendency to pick and choosethe evidence we cite, emphasising and giving more weight to thingsthat support what we believe. We do this even when we’re aware ofthis effect. It seems to be a universally human trait.

Butevidence coupled with emotional appeals canchange people’s minds. People can also gradually change over time.

Thekey word here is ‘can’. It is possible.That doesn’t mean it happens every time.

Thingslike de-radicalisation programs domake a measurable difference in the broad sense. But they don’treach everyone they interact with.

Andthe things which trigger a change of heart are not always fastacting. They can be things that gnaw at a person over a course ofyears, gradually prompting them to shift their stance.

Essentiallyyou could choose to take this either way. You could have A’s viewof C’s people changing, either abruptly or gradually. But you couldalso have A write the incident off as an exception to the rule orotherwise dismiss it. Either response can happen in real life.

Let’sstep back from the success rates of organisations like After Hate fora moment and address this as writers.

Ifyou wantA to have a massive change of heart then however quick the change itcan’t feel like it comes out of nowhere. The readers have tounderstand the process A goes through emotionally.

Whichmeans the reason behind this has to be more than C’s actions: itneeds to be the feelings and thoughts those actions prompt in A.Otherwise the change is going to come across emotionally flat.

ShowA struggling with these thoughts and feelings, swinging betweendoubting what they were taught and what they experienced. Don’t betempted to make this change easy and don’t be afraid to show Afalling back on old, toxic patterns occasionally.

Movingon from these sorts of hateful idea isn’t easy. It means aconcerted choice every day to address your own toxicity and dedicateyourself to being a better person.

Thatsort of introspection, judgement and emotional work is always inprogress. People often slide back a little even if they’re makingprogress over all. That isn’t unusual.

AndI honestly think that this change will read better if it involvessome internal struggle. The best way to present that will vary withhow you write. If it’s from A’s point of view you can show it asis. You might be able to work it in to conversation with C.

Youmight find having B pick up on it works as well, because that thengives you a way to tie these separate sub-plots together. It mightwell be easier for A and B to argue about how A feels about C/C’speople then it is for them to address their problems with each other.

Whichleads us to A and B’s relationship.

HonestlyI think this is something you should be tailoring to the charactersbecause the ‘right’ answer is going to vary with the individualsinvolved. It might be helpful to unpack some ‘logical knowledge’vs ‘emotional assumptions’ on the part of both characters though.

Let’sstart with A.

NowA probably knowsthat rescuing her wasn’t just a question of skill or bravery. Arescue mission is a difficult and risky prospect, highly likely tofail and extremely rare in reality.

She’dknow that B would find it difficult to rescue A. If B doesn’t havean organisation backing them up then a rescue would have been almostimpossible to pull off successfully.

She’dknow that a rescue attempt could result in B being captured andtortured too. She’d know that an unsuccessful rescue attempt couldeasily lead to A herself being killed.

AdditionallyA would also be aware that torture was warping her perception of theworld. A would probably not always be awareof where She was being held or many of the details of herimprisonment.

Ifall B has to go on for a rescue mission is A’s thoughts then A mustknow that B would have had trouble finding her.

Awould also know that the more B connected with A’s mind the moreimpaired B would be. Because B would also be experiencing thedisorientation, confusion and delirium the pain of torture causes.This sort of confused thinking would leak through and create animpairment even if B couldn’t experience A’s pain.

Bwould also know, logically, all the reasons they couldn’tpractically have rescued A.

Bwould be in the unfortunate position of having a second-handexperience of A’s trauma throughout. The threat of torture is veryreal here. It’s immediate. B’s fear of that is legitimate andshouldn’t be dismissed.

Butthat logic doesn’t trump the emotional side of all this.

Andthe emotional side is that B probably feels like they let A down. Aprobably feel betrayed and hurt and abandoned. They bothprobably feel isolated from each other and like it’s harder totalk.

Neitherof these sets of feelings are logical or rational. But there’s anextent to which that doesn’t matter.

Ithink the best way to address it is directly. Which doesn’t providean easy resolution.

Thething is- most torture victims don’texpect to be rescued. They are not in a position to…. think there’sany possibility of rescue. A’s position here is unusual and thatcomes in part from her being privileged enough to know powerfulpeople. Contact with other survivors might help A realise this andprocess a little of how she feels emotionally. It might help heremotionally accept that the expectations she had of B wereunreasonable.

Havingthem talk about it, the reasons why A expected something and thereasons B couldn’t provide it is an important first step. But thisisn’t something that’s going to resolve overnight. Oneconversation, even if they do listen and understand each other, isn’tgoing to resolve everything.

OnA’s side it’s a case of rebuilding trust. I think that’s ofteneasier to write because we see so many examples of it in literature:trust lost and rebuilt. It’s something that’s best built upslowly over time with a lot of actions on B’s part rather than withsome kind of ‘Big Damn Heroes’ moment.

Agood starting point would probably be helping A with her recovery.Consistent help with the little things she’s struggling with (whichinitially may include eating, getting dressed and moving about) wouldgo a long way.

Shemight not forgive B quickly or at all. She may stop relying on B toprotect her. But care is important too. It’s possible to trustsomeone with some things, some aspects of life and not others.

Partof this depends on how deep you want their reconciliation to go. It’sperfectly possible for them to completely rebuild their relationshipso it’s just as strong as before, but it would take more work thenrebuilding something shallower.

Ithink in some ways B’s side of this emotional problem is harder. Acan meet other torture or trauma survivors and learn that theexpectation of rescue is a fantasy out of most people’s reach. Shecan gradually come to trust B again if they both communicate honestlyand B takes the time to try and care for her, to try and build thatfriendship back.

ButI get the impression B has lost their trust in themselves and that’sa lot harder to regain.

Angerruns out of steam eventually. And sick angry people still need to eator help getting out of bed.

Shamecan eat at someone for the rest of their life.

Myhonest instinct is that if these were real people they’d both needtherapy. A lot of therapy. And while that’s not something that wecan work in to every setting emotional support definitely is.

Bis going to have to forgive themselves for what happened. A big partof that means accepting their own powerlessness in this situation,which is a terrifying thing. It create a sort of emotional push-pulleffect, forgiving themselves means accepting something incrediblyfrightening so it’s easier to avoid those feelings and hold on toarrogance.

Itcan sometimes be easier to tell ourselves we’re cowards or badpeople then it is to accept our own limits.

EarningA’s trust again may not necessarily combat these feelings, B mightcontinue to feel unworthy of that trust.

Thereare a lot of ways to write a set up like this convincingly and well.I think you’ll get the best results by trying to tie thecharacters’ progress to both the overall story and the charactersas individuals.

They’reprobably going to go mess up a few times. They’re probably going toheal at different rates and be ready for different things atdifferent times. Try to be aware of how other things that arehappening in the narrative might effect the characters emotionally.Because the other things going on in their lives could be useful toprompt this kind of emotional growth.

WhenI’m trying to reconcile characters I often try to think about whatthe root of the problem is. It’s often not what the characters areexpressing or consciously aware of as the ‘problem’.

Inthis case I’d guess that it’s ideas of safety and security on A’spart and ideas of duty and bravery on B’s. Those ideas are thingsall of us can understand but the ways they’re expressed areparticular to your characters.

Ihope that helps. :)

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Disclaimer

#tw torture #writing victims #writing carers #writing witnesses #effects of torture #torture and belief #torture and relationships #Anonymous

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opedguy · 3 years

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Burns Tapped to Get to Bottom of Havana Syndrome

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), July 22, 2021.--Tapping 65-year-old CIA Director and career diplomat William Burns to investigate the so-called Havana Syndrome where U.S. diplomatic have fallen ill with mysterious symptoms, including headaches, nausea and dizziness. Burns, while working for the State Department, helped track down Osama bin Laden, is now asked to deal what promises to be a thorny subject wth the Russian Federation, possibly China, for using some kind of microwave weaponsto injure U.S. diplomatic personnel. While the U.S. has no definitive culprits yet on the radar, there’s no question that the Russian Federation has been monkeying around with new types of weapons. When State Department officials reported in 2017 Havana diplomatic personnel falling ill, the Trump administration ordered its diplomatic personnel out of the embassy. Now the same complaints have shown up in Vienna, Austria.

Knowing Russia’s longstanding relationship in Cuba, it’s doubtful the former Castro government could come up with a microwave pulse technology, most likely developed by Russian engineers. Now that the same problems showed up in Vienna, it’s possible that Russian agents may be sending a similar message that U.S. diplomatic personnel are not safe anywhere on the planet. President Joe Biden, 78, has been locked in new Cold War with the Russian Federation, meeting June 16 with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Biden talked with Putin about recent cyber or ransomware attacks on key U.S. infrastructure from allegedly Russian cyber gangs. Putin told Biden he would look into it but made no promises, nor did he acknowledge that he knew anything about cyber gangs operating on Russian soil. Burns has his work cut out for him tracing what today remains a mystery illness of unknown origin.

Reported in the news in Dec. 2020, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine reported that the Havana Syndrome could be caused by “directed energy” most likely microwave weapons. Vienna authorities are working with the CIA to determine the source of recent attacks on diplomatic personnel. With the microwave attacks unchecked, it’s not safe for U.S. diplomatic personnel especially in proximity to Russian operatives. Vienna is home to many nonprofits and U.N. agencies, including Russian-based agencies, trying to keep their foot in Western Europe. But Burns has a real problem, not only tracking down the source of the attacks, but, once discovered, sanctioning the culprit responsible. Since Biden took office, more that two dozen U.S. diplomats or intel officials have been stricken in Vienna, not making the important U.S. outpost unsafe.

When you consider the attacks are designed to maim U.S. diplomatic and intel personnel, it’s a matter of top priority for Burns to figure out the source. If he finds the Russians behind the attack or some other proxy group, Biden will face some tough choices, short of going to war against Moscow. Putin’s been itching for some time for a fight with the U.S. or its transatlantic partners. Recent skirmishes in the Black Sea with Russian frigates prove that Putin takes the Crimean area seriously, having no plans to give up the strategic peninsula seized from Ukraine March 1, 2014. Putin’s new aggression toward the West has a lot to do with the U.S. and EU sanctioning the Kremlin for it’s treatment of 44-year-old dissident Alexi Navalny. Putin know that support of Navalny in the West attempts to foment revolution in Russia, looking for any way necessary to remove him from power.

When you consider the effect of microwave radiation, the victim cannot point to a diagnosis like a bullet to the head. Falling ill with Havana Syndrome symptoms doesn’t leave any marks other than creating possible brain damage from harmful, concentrated microwave radiation. “High powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate or kill and enemy over time without leaving evidence,” said an anonymous National Security Agency [NSA] official in 2014.who suffered from symptoms of headaches, dizziness and nausea. Burns knows it’s a matter of urgency to find out who’s aiming the microwave weapons at U.S. diplomatic and intel personnel. No career service person can feel safe working in a U.S. embassy, consulate or mission knowing what they face. State Department officials know the seriousness of potential Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [CTE].

Burns needs to enlist all Western and Eastern intel agencies to find an answer to the current problems faced by U.S. diplomatic personnel. No one can expect to go into harm’s way just because they signed up for diplomatic service. That same 2014 NSA memo said that intel indicated that such a weapon was “designed to bathe a target’s living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damage nervous system.” If the U.S. were on better terms with Russia and China, they could be of assistance in trying to pinpoint the source of such attacks. If the attacks are coming from the Russian or Chinese governments, Burns will face the same kind of denials seen today by Russia regarding ransomware attacks on key U.S. infrastructure. Burns must get to the bottom of the Havana Syndrome before more U.S. diplomatic personnel are subjected to debilitating brain injuries.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in global and national news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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