Both Clinton and Trump Are Unacceptable

Keeping in mind my earlier assertions that the Left's inability to fight back makes any idea of resistance null and void, I am changing my advice for US-Americans from "don't vote for either of the two rotten front-runners" to "oppose the system that gave you two such rotten candidates."

That is the proper position for non-US-American progressives as well.

Yes. Donald Trump is a nasty man. A rapist. A racist. Corrupt. Insane. And many of his supporters are deplorable neo-Nazi, misogynist idiots. But stop debasing yourselves into saying how Hillary Clinton is the "lesser evil."

In the first place; just because Hillary doesn't burp and fart and scratch her crotch on stage, and (being a woman) tends not to sexually assault people, it doesn't mean she isn't thoroughly vile. US-American liberals (like Canadian liberals) are often seemingly intelligent, decent people. But these people are blinded by partisanship into excusing Obama's professed legal power to assassinate US-American citizens. They call Edward Snowden a traitor to his country for revealing Obama's illegal mass-surveillance of everyone on the face of the planet. Obama's slavish devotion to the 1% is obvious for all to see. He illegally crushed the Occupy movement. He's done nothing to rein-in murderously racist police forces. (Could he at least halt the military's program of giving surplus war toys to urban police?) He's done next to nothing on global warming. He's prolonged and expanded the slaughter in the Middle East. On and on I could go. But it is suffice to say that he's a monster.

And now, US and Canadian liberals are uniting in trying to convince themselves and everyone else that Hillary Clinton isn't a monster too. In fact, for all his killing, Obama showed himself to be less bellicose than Clinton when she was his secretary of state. Obama negotiated a very harsh treaty with Iran whereas Clinton wants to destroy Iran. It was Hillary who pushed for the destruction of Libya. Hillary Clinton has an insane level of animus towards Russia's Vladimir Putin. She's talking like a mad woman about imposing a no-fly zone in Syria, whether Russia likes it or not. People talk with some justification about an unstable idiot like Trump with his hands on the nuclear button. But given that Trump has said (among other things) that he thinks it's stupid for the USA to be antagonizing nuclear-armed Russia and China, how can we pretend that he is the greater threat than Hillary? If anything, it will be Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first female US president, who is likelier to get you and all your loved ones vaporized.

How insane our political culture is that we sincerely see a lunatic like Hillary Clinton as the "lesser evil" to Donald Trump!

Who are Donald Trump's supporters? Mostly stupid, and/or ignorant people. Most of them are "deplorable." Progressive, anti-Hillary writers would do well not to downplay this reality and ascribe criticisms of Trump's base to elitism and snobbery. They really are noxious. Take, for example, the babbling idiot neo-nazi Davis Aurini. A complete moron. An utter incompetent at the role he's chosen for himself; that of film-maker. A stupid, nasty, racist, sexist piece of sludge. This is the sort of intellectual excrement that Trump attracts. Giving them a victory would be horrible.

What would a Trump presidency be like? Trump, not being beholden to anyone, says whatever he thinks. When he first started this process, apparently he got some people to find out what the Republican base was all fired-up about. (Besides his own "birther" activism about Obama being a Kenyan usurper.) He found out that ordinary Republicans are angry about losing manufacturing jobs to other countries. They're angry about stagnant wages. They're angry about Wall Street corruption. They're angry about the excesses of for-profit health care.

Of course, being ignorant and/or stupid, they blame much of their predicament on poor people, immigrants, Jews, Blacks (who they deem to have jumped ahead of them in the line-up for the "American Dream") and a whole host of other things, including attacks on their brainless, "social conservative" hypocrisies.

But regardless, Trump decided to pander to that. I don't think he had any real hopes of winning at first. Unfortunately for the world, the USA's culture has been debased for decades by right-wing garbage culture like FOX News and the vapid, celebrity-worshipping mentality of the mainstream corporate media in general. Trump is a rich, white man who had his own television show and he's speaking in ways that line-up with their thinking, so despite that he's actually a full-time con-man, they gravitated to him like moths to a flame.

When he won the Republican candidacy, Trump realized he'd need more resources to actually win. Now, being a huge egotist, Trump can't bring himself to lose to a WOMAN. So, he gets funding from other scum-bags like Sheldon Addison, and there goes whatever reasonable stuff he'd said about Israel. Thankfully for his nazi supporters, Trump still says enough nasty things about Blacks and Latinos that they (being imbeciles) can overlook his new pandering to Israel and delude themselves that he'll still go after "the Jews" once he's president.

Trump will probably abandon any pretences about controlling the avariciousness of corporate America if faced with their genuine opposition. He'll only be allowed to retain those policies that benefit capitalists or those to which they are indifferent too. This means his mass deportations, police harassment of Blacks, slashing taxes, and generally making the world safe for billionaires.

Make no mistake about it; a Trump presidency will be horrible. His racist, drooling moronic followers will revel in their moment and all sorts of abuses will result. Given the fact that they're all staggeringly ignorant of how the world works, they'll also push for he most idiotic, counter-productive policies to be imposed upon ordinary people. When these cause the economic misery that they inevitably will, the Trump-fans will blame it all on feminists and minorities and atheists (who bring down he wrath of god upon the earth).

But a Clinton presidency will be horrible too. Because her husband's was horrible. ("Three Strikes You're Out" prison policy, "Ending Welfare As We Know It," de-regulating the financial sector "Financial Modernization Act," and one corporate rights "free trade" deal after another.) Obama's presidency has been a failure. And Hillary's will be even worse. Because unlike Obama, Hillary is psychotically obsessed with using the military against other countries.

Hillary will mean more war, more corporate free trade deals, more profit-friendly health care, more coddling of the rich and corrupt. And more of the stuff that makes Trump's angry, ignorant, bigoted followers angry. Here's the thing about stupid people: Don't make them angry. For reasons known only to themselves, when corporate America takes their jobs away from them, they lash-out at immigrants and GLBT people.

We on the left have to articulate an actual program that makes everyone's lives better, sensible and stupid alike. And cravenly cozying-up to corrupt, psychotic monsters such as are offered by the Democratic Party USA (or the Liberal Party of Canada) is the exact opposite of that. A vote for Hillary or an endorsement of Hillary is an endorsement of mass-murder. It means support for the policies that have created millions of miserable refugees. It means support for the bloody coup in Honduras.

Canadian and US liberals; please, at long last, pull your fucking heads out of your asses and realize that people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Justin Trudeau, Paul Martin, Dalton McGuinty, Kathleen Wynne, are the scum of the earth and that association with them is defiling.

Damn!

Damn this is a beautiful movie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_467324&feature=iv&index=10&list=PLHLYMMYCXqijkZCTVfmyhOlpABxXNuTlu&src_vid=TgLB08lTxM4&v=CctH0iAyqYs

(It's a link to Iggy Pop's scene in the movie "Dead Man.")

Two Books I'm Reading

I feel like blogging about two books that I'm currently reading. The first one is Volume One of Ray Monk's biography of Bertrand Russell: Spirit of Solitude. I'm glad I check it out of the library.

I knew that Bertrand Russell had been an atheist, an opponent of the Vietnam War and even a vocal opponent of World War One. I'd read several of his essays and bits and pieces of his History of Western Philosophy. His "A Free Man's Worship" was a big influence on me. I also know he'd written a huge book on mathematics Principia Mathematica that is famous for being so widely known but so little read. I was a big fan of his political philosophy, especially "Proposed Roads To Freedom" and "Power: A New Social Analysis." Oh yeah. I had a house-mate from China who told me that Russell was a big deal over there due to a famous visit in the 1920s. And, finally, I was impressed and delighted that my home town's university, McMaster, possessed the Russell Archives.

But I didn't know much about him as a person. What did he do in China? Why did he protest against war? Why was he an atheist? Monk's beautifully written book tells the story of the development of Russell as a man, a philosopher and an activist. I've a couple of chapters left to go but I can't wait to read more.

Russell, disappointingly, was highly unstable. His mathematical philosophy and his philosophy of logic appear to have been half-baked semantic arguments. He had a terribly repressed childhood, treated women abominably (even while fighting for their right to vote) and was, in my estimation, highly immature and selfish.

But here and there, often in fact, the brilliant mind does something amazing.

The other book is Martine Rothblatt's Virtually Human: The Promise - And The Peril - Of Digital Immortality. It's a big disappointment. I'm one of those people who believes that human beings are going to start altering our bodies in major ways. I think we're going to combine DNA alteration, nanotechnology and robotics and become mutant cyborgs. I also believe that the brain, being a combination of chemicals and electricity can be replicated by powerful enough computers. We could transfer this activity to a computer and "live" enormous lifespans.

Rothblatt's book was supposed to discuss the social and ethical implications of one aspect of this process, as well as the technological feasibility of it. Sadly, the book is a repetitive set of assertions about how this will all be technologically possible in coming decades, combined with very brief discussions of very deep topics about the Mind, personal identity and human rights.

Essentially, we will upload photos, writing, social media presences, and other information into a computer program and it will create a "clone" of our personalities that will interact with us as a "Max Headroom" kind of avatar. After we die, our families can talk to our clone instead of looking at pictures of us.

That's it. That's the entire description of the mind-clone. How does all this work? What happens to the mind-clone after you've died and your children and grand-children have died? Do we really expect four generations from now, people are going to want to spend a lot of time with this mind-clone? What will it be doing for all eternity? Rothblatt has established that being sentient, and human, it will have rights. It can't just be turned-off because that would be murder. So, what?

I'm on page 153 of a 310 page book and I have no clue as to what exactly is supposed to happen. She's just finished saying that our mind clones will learn new languages and that, as a result, "we" will be multilingual. (And won't that be nice?) But why would "I" be multilingual because a computerized facsimile of my personality is? Rothblatt manages to point out that the question of personal identity is a vague, incoherent concept and that, at root, we are all stardust. Fine and dandy. But to leap from there to assert that our mind clones are therefore "us" is not justified. If we don't know who "we" really are and we're all related as the stuff of the universe, what's the point of pursuing "immortality" via a "mind clone"?

I'm so bored I'm thinking of giving up and returning it to the library half unread.

But I do want to share something funny. In a section about whether these computerized humans will go rogue and (somehow or other) attack us, Rothblatt says:

There are sure to be rogue "evil genius" mindclones and bemans, just as there is no shortage of rogue human bad guys. These mindclones are as smart as us, or much smarter. While good social policy would be to identify and fix their problems early with cybertherapeutics, this will not always work and some will fall through the cracks. But these anti-human mindclones are a job for law enforcement, not a reason to ban all virtual humans. Society will have plenty of tools at its disposal for tracking down fleshophobic vitology, including legions of citizen mindclones as adept in the vitological niche as were the cavalry's Native American guides on America's Wild West frontier. (Italics added.)

Given the fact that it's been four decades since we've admitted that the Wild West and "settling the frontier" involved the brutal displacement of the First Nations people, in some cases reaching levels of extermination and genocide, I found it a bit odd to seeing that metaphor of the Native American guides assisting the US cavalry in such a fashion. Then, on the very next page, in a discussion about how the mindclones' humanity and morality will help to check potential anti-social behaviour, Rothblatt admits that humans are not always humane and moral:

It is of course true that spouses kill each other. Hatfields kill McCoys and people who are "folk" one day, like German Christians and German Jews, or Rawandan Hutus and Rawandan Tutsis, can rapidly be deemed nonfamily vermin. Yet these situations are exceptions rather than the rule. They startle us because they are exceptions. These killings occur because of an abandonment of reason, or faulty reason, rather than an exercise of sound reasons. Proof of that is the outcome: The Nazis committed millions of indescribable atrocities and attempted to put its boot on the throat of civilization, yet they lasted barely a decade, and the Rawandan genocidaires shorter than that. Killing is a noproductive strategy. It does not advance our prospects for life, but only appears to, in an illusory fashion, when assessed over a very short period of time.

Amazing ain't it? Rothblatt uses a metaphor involving a process of genocide, to assert that we'll be protected against rogue mindclones, and then on the very next page refers self-righteously to the failure of other cultures' genocidal acts to show how rare such occurrences are! I'd say the USA has profited immensely from exterminating so many Native Americans and stealing their land and resources. Such ignorant and superficial arguments from one of the leading proponents for the creation of digital sentient minds is troubling.

I'm still not sure HOW a mind clone could attack us anyway. What does it DO? Surfs the net for its own amusement and talk to us about what it has found out? Does it set the thermostat in our homes for us? Will it yell at us? (Couldn't we just turn down its volume control?) It's so vague it's absurd.

Rothblatt is right to say these computer programs are inevitable. Indeed, she's helping to make it so. But here we see a case of scientists forging ever ahead with no real understanding of the implications or the purpose.

The Best Comment

I have something I want to say about the US-American atrocity that some call the 2016 presidential election, but today I just want to post what I think is the best comment on Montreal Simon's over-the-top condemnation of the protesters at the CLC Youth Conference:

"As a working class progressive I'd love it if any of the parties actually represented me. Instead the "best" I can apparently hope for is another out of touch rich boy who markets himself well enough to get otherwise thoughtful people to shill for him whenever anyone else dares point out what an empty suit he is, especially if they do a crappy job of it.

All JT is going to do is turn the more ignorant segments of the population against any sort of progressive or left leaning sentiment as he wraps himself up in it like a security blanket while screwing everybody with the same neoliberal crap that led us here. It'd be nice if the NDP would do their job and be a viable alternative but I guess that's too much to hope for these days.

And yet you fools are here QQing about some people being "rude" to this guy. After Bill Morneau's comments I think you clowns are going to get a real education in what being "rude" looks like in the years to come as people's situations worsen and become more desperate. Voting is of questionable value since we know someone(s) have attempted to interfere with an election at least once, peaceful protests en mass are often met with violent repression by the state while the news media does it's best to look the other way, what exactly are you expecting to happen? You think everyone is going to link arms and sing sunshine and lolipops?

You'll probably still be here, concern trolling people who dare complain about the boot stomping on their faces forever and ever."

Indeed. First Nations' leaders have given Trudeau a failing grade. Perhaps they're just stooges for the party of stephen harper? The Liberals have adopted harper's targets for carbon reduction and are continuing to push bitumen pipelines (whether the FN want them going through their lands or not) and oil tankers to China on the West Coast. The Liberals have decided to continue to give weapons to the monstrous dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, arguing that if we don't, others will. IOW: The same logic that people who sell crack cocaine to teenagers use. His silver-spoon finance minister (who joined his daddy's firm and "rose through the ranks"!) tells young people to acquiesce to the "reality" of precarious employment:

As for Morneau's "job churn," MacEwen notes that the average length of time young Canadians spend working at the same job has remained "remarkably stable since 1976":

...

If people are jumping from short-term contract to short-term contract with the same employer, that might suggest "the new reality" isn't quite as inevitable as Trudeau and Morneau would have us believe.

His international trade minister plans on ramming a harper regime-negotiated corporate rights bill down our throats, which gives corporations the right to sue for lost revenues should, say, something like laws restricting carbon emissions impact their profits. 

And the Liberals have shamefully betrayed 3 Canadian citizens, tortured by Syria and Egypt on our behalf.

But criticizing any of this is "thuggish."

A Question For My Liberal Friends

D'you suppose Liberal MPs slobber all over Henry Kissinger because they're ignoramuses and don't know he's a war criminal? Or do you suppose they do know and they like it?

"Deus Vult"

Back in July, intrigued by whatever mental stew had inspired the detestable Davis Aurini to refer to left-wingers as "rabbits," I took the time to go through the essay in question line by line. The results of my study was that Aurini is a complete idiot who strings together groundless, often incoherent assertions into meandering, nonsensical "arguments" and upon completing one of his ravings, masturbates himself to his delusions of his brilliance.

By the end of reading his garbage I was too tired to really think about the Latin statement he concluded with, which was "Deus Vult."  About a week later I decided to look it up:

“Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin) was a battle cry called out by Crusaders at the declaration of the First Crusade in 1095. Online, the historical phrase has gained popularity among fans of the strategy video game series Crusader Kings, as well as thealt-right camp on Reddit’s /r/The_Donald and 4chan’s /pol/ (politically incorrect) board, typically in the context of discussions relating to Islamic extremism and the moe anthropomorphized character Christ-chan. The phrase can be seen as the Christian equivalent of “Allahu Akhbar”, an Islamic Arabic expression that is most well-known as the battle cry of Jihadhists in Western cultures.

Isn't that special! The Christian lunk-heads have their own version of the battle cry of their Islamic enemies!

It was almost worth posting about!

But I refrained from another post about Aurini until the wonderful David Futrelle informed his readers about Aurini's absurdly bad attempt to film himself and other "alt-right" (read: "racist") losers as if they were Tarantino-esque bad-asses. Specifically, Aurini tries to imitate the credit sequence of "Reservoir Dogs" wherein the actors playing the criminals walk towards the camera and their names appear in front of them during close-ups as the song "Little Green Bag" plays.

Futrelle and his readers are all quick to point out that Quentin Tarantino is the political opposite of these losers. He supports Black Lives Matter's campaign against racist police brutality and he fucking hates Nazis.

All true. As well as the fact that four dumpy guys in non-descript clothing, plodding down the street pretending to be tough guys is mega-embarrassing when they're all around the age of thirty and not sixteen.

"Film-maker" Davis Aurini manages to appear in one of the scenes when the camera is mounted on a tripod. For the rest of it, this complete fucking moron is absent, being behind the camera. Quentin Tarantino is widely hailed as a film genius for coming up with the astonishingly original idea of having someone else filming while he's acting in front of the camera. And he came up with the master stroke in the 1990's, so there's no reason for Aurini to display himself as such an incompetent shit-head.

Aurini, the "film-maker" also hasn't mastered the arcane secrets of putting titles over-top of moving film. To display the names of the dumpy alt-right racist loser dweebs in this travesty, he resorts to inserting stills of them with their names displayed.

My god! This was a embarrassingly childish concept to dream up in the first place. And it's a "homage" to a director who would loathe everything its participants stand for. But to top it all off, it's execution is shockingly, laughably horrendous.

To think that this waste of sperm considers himself an "intellectual."

"Intelligence" is an invented concept. We can't really measure it since we don't really know what it is. And some people can be really "intelligent" in some areas and not so in others. But sometimes, there's enough evidence and general patterns of behaviour for us to know when someone is STUPID. Aurini is one such case. Too stupid to know he's stupid. So stupid that he think's he's smart. But he's really just stupid.

Positive Proposals

Just saying that since I've stopped blogging on a regular basis, and have relegated myself to merely reading and observing, I've not noticed much in the way of positive, world-changing proposals coming out of the Left-wing. Instead I'm seeing lots and lots of descriptions:

• Donald Trump is a monster and we have to vote for Hillary Clinton
• Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both monsters and we shouldn't vote for either of them
• The war in Syria is a catastrophe
• The USA has fucked-up the Middle East
• We've passed the point of no return for global warming
• Black Lives Matter vs the police and revolting media shills like Sean Hannity
• Anti-fracking protesters under corporate and government assault
• New trade deals are horrible corporation-empowering travesties
• Israel is acting abominably (as usual)
• Justin Trudeau's Liberals slobbering over war criminal Henry Kissinger
• stephen harper got a new job as Assistant-Shit-Licker-In-Chief at some corporate law firm

And etc., etc., There are some hints of positive thinking and acting among the Left: There was the Bernie Sanders insurgency (which more and more I'm thinking was a Pied Piper scam from the start) and stated aims to vote Green Party USA and thereby reject the corporate duopoly.  This is also seen in the support for Jeremy Corbyn and the left-wing resurgence in the British Labour Party, mirrored in a small way by the "Momentum" grouplet in Canada which (together with other undercurrents) has produced such charming moments as when Tom Mulcair confidently claimed the title of "socialist" for the NDP only a few short years after he strove mightily to fulfil Jack Layton's desire to have that "divisive" word removed from the party's constitution.

"Black Lives Matter" and "Idle No More" are pushing for positive things too. Besides demanding the end of their systemic abuse, they're demanding policies that will make their lives better. Just HOW they'll achieve their aims is a complete mystery. Blacks in the USA and First Nations here in Canada are political minorities; electorally insignificant in the case of the First Nations and, for the USA, those places where Blacks are not insignificant, the Repugnicans have implemented voting laws and other policies to steal their votes from them. Their demands are generally ignored by the mainstream media. And they are physically abused (even murdered) with near-impunity by the forces of the state.

Let's say that Jeremy Corbyn wins power as the head of a majority Labour government. What then? He's already under constant assault from Blair-ites in his own party. He'll have the right-wing fascist tabloids whipping up their moronic readerships into frenzies over refugees, taxation, single-mothers and terrorism. The whole slurry of incoherent hateful delusions will be constantly referred to. The capitalists will work mightily to sabotage him and blame their own deliberate economic damage to his 1960's social-democratic platform.

By which I mean that the same forces that destroyed the great postwar compromise of 1945-1970 will destroy any attempt to return to that compromise in 2016. The power imbalances that existed then are even more lop-sidedly in favour of the forces of destruction now.

Nobody is articulating any serious means by which to attack this power imbalance. Nobody is articulating any coherent revolutionary plan. (You know; like "Workers As Citizens.") Instead we're all content to run on that hamster wheel talking about Israel and police brutality and neo-liberal corruption to ours, and our specie's, dying days.