Actually, it all goes back to 1980 and Reagan and Thatcher. Actually, it goes back to the "stagflation" of the 1970's that "discredited" Keynesianism (and "re-credited" 19th Century economics which political-economic philosophy has gone on to wreck things ever since as "neo-classicism" or "neoliberalism").
But, regardless, it sounds like an interesting book. It's called When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s and it's by John Ganz.
I'll put them in my 2024 Readings post when I'm finished. But I'm not done reading The Essential Erasmus or The Clockwork Universe yet. But reading them at the same time has made me think what a loathsome time it was when religion ruled our minds.
We had to create some sorts of explanations for the mystery of existence, and it's not like everything in religion would have been self-evidently stupid. A lot of morality and ethics is based on the realities of life and of participation in a society. All pleasures are passing and giving oneself over to them can be self-destructive. Selfishness and cruelty have to be suppressed or else life will really be "nasty, brutish and short." But at the end of the day, the religious explanation is a false one. Science will never explain the mystery. It's mysteries all the way down. But science is a more systematic way of trying to explain and understand things than is just making shit up. Which is what religion is.
I read Desiderius Erasmus's number-one smash-hit "The Praise of Folly" thirty years ago, and it had hovered before me having been mentioned in history books (along with Machiavelli's The Prince) since childhood. It was one of those books that apparently had a lasting impact on Western Civilization. Erasmus was described as a brilliant man and a humanist and a moderate. Someone who railed against the corruption and dogmatism of the Catholic Church while still wanting to prevent a schism within Christianity and all the violence it would inevitably create. He was the toast of Europe and both Hans Holbein and Albrecht Durer (and other artists) painted his portrait.
It turned out that I liked "Praise of Folly" but there were a couple of moments (one I remember in particular about strong, healthy looking beggars) that struck me as problematic. Just like nowadays, when assholes see a poor person receiving assistance before they've been reduced to starvation and rags, Erasmus believed that 16th Century poor people were all scammers, living it up on alms at the expense of decent folk.
There's even more of that shit in the first piece of this collection of his works. "The Handbook of the Militant Christian" was written as a guide to life at the request of the battered wife of some drunken, boorish knight. I found it to be obnoxious. Garbage from start to finish. Along with a few more jabs at poor people, Erasmus writes harshly about enslaved people as if it's self-evident that they're scum. He comes across as a hypocritical prig. In the brief biography at the beginning of the book it's mentioned that he was often financially straitened due to his love of fancy clothes and fine food. He spends the whole essay writing about the disgusting appetites of the poor and about the emptiness of the pleasures of this world but he was clearly unable (for his entire life) to live up to the standards he was constantly scolding others to aspire to.
The whole thing with the stink of religion is how it took the reality that pleasures are fleeting and that they often have consequences, and blew that up into a hatred of the world and a self-denying, self-hating rejection of life itself. In return for constantly denying oneself any taste of the good things in this one, brief life that we have, and for hating oneself for failing to do so, Erasmus (like so many other religious charlatans) offers the imaginary reward of eternal life with an imaginary God, which he describes with vague, meaningless superlatives. That so many people lived for so many centuries under this garbage delusion was just so depressing to me.
Edward Dolnicks The Clockwork Universe is about the impact of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton (with assists from Galileo and Kepler and a few others) in the transformation of European culture from the Medieval to the modern. And reading it at the same time as Erasmus's puritanical screed only compounded my horror at the stifling, distorting, wasteful impact of religion on human thinking.
Again, ... we felt that we HAD to come up with something. And since it was invented bullshit, we probably HAD to insist that it not be questioned. Because, inevitably, the obvious failings and contradictions would blow everything asunder. It was a stage we had to go through but it's depressing nonetheless. This idea of this psychotic, angry God (who is simultaneously loving and awesome and just the best and always helping us except when He isn't and then it's our fault for failing) who punishes us with plagues and fire on Earth and who threatens eternal torment for us in Hell should we fail to live up to His impossible standards, ... what sickening vomit.
[God probably thanked Himself that He had Satan conveniently ruling over the Hell that the damned got sent to. What would He have done without Satan providing that dumping ground?]
The thing about Erasmus is that I wouldn't expect him to have risen above the superstitions that permeated the world he was born into. He actually did criticize the rote-learning and the dogmatism of many Christian educators and thinkers. He could see clearly in many ways. But by his own standards he fell short. First there was the hypocrisy of his lifelong indulgences in food and clothing. But for someone who claimed to understand the New Testament, he seemed unable to recognize that Jesus hadn't been a member of any nobility. Many of the Apostles were fishermen, which would have been the maritime equivalent of the rural peasants Erasmus so clearly despised. "Christian Charity" is supposed to be given happily, not (as would seem to have been the case with Erasmus) stingily as if all in need are potential grifters.
Obviously people were different back then. Life was much more violent and crude and therefore so were the humans who lived through it. But even for his own time, ... well, for a man of reading, to so clearly have missed the message of what he was yammering about, it's inexcusable for any age.
What do I know? I know that I wouldn't vote for either of Biden or Trump. Trump is a corrupt, racist, murderous asshole who has allied himself with even more dangerous, right-wing groups, like the evangelicals and the Heritage Foundation. He probably will implement some sort of fascist political order if elected. But where on earth did he get the power to impose a fascist regime in the USA, which is supposed to have a system of "checks and balances" to stymie legislative or executive overreach and defend minority rights? (I was pointing out since 2012 that the USA's political-legal system adequately prevents a government from doing things FOR US-Americans, such as provide public healthcare, while still allowing them to do things TO them, such as assassinate them overseas, spy on them, or otherwise abuse them.)
The other day I was somewhere that was playing horrible propaganda service "CNN" and they were reporting on Russian missiles hitting a hospital in Ukraine and making all the appropriate noises about how terrible it all was.
The deliberate suppression of Israel's deliberate, systematic destruction of Gaza's healthcare system on the part of hacks like CNN and the CBC ad nauseum made me, well, nauseous.
Caitlin Johnstone noticed it too: "Oh, Looks Like Bombing Hospitals Is Bad Again"
Kyiv and its western allies are saying the children’s hospital was hit by Russia, while Moscow says the hospital was hit by a Ukrainian air defense missile during Russia’s attack. All that’s clear as of this writing is that the hospital was bombed either as a direct or indirect result of the Russian missile strikes, and that western leaders are responding very, very differently to this news than they have been to deliberate Israeli attacks on hospitals throughout the Gaza Strip.
...
“This is abhorrent. Striking a children’s hospital — and the innocent children inside — cannot be justified,” tweeted Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, adding, “My heart goes out to the families who are grieving — and Canada’s commitment to Ukraine remains as strong as ever.”
...
Since October 7 there have been hundreds of documented IDF attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system, which according to the UN has been mostly destroyed by this onslaught.
Oxford University professor Nick Maynard has accused the IDF of “systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system” in Gaza after spending time working there during Israel’s bombardment of the enclave.
,,,
Where was all the outrage about all this? Where were all the statements from western officials about how “abhorrent” it is to attack those hospitals? Where were all the western news media headlines explicitly naming Israel as the perpetrator of those attacks, like they’ve been doing with Russia? Nowhere to be found.
This is because western empire managers do not actually believe that there is anything “abhorrent” or “horrific” about attacking a hospital — at least not one which provides services to Palestinians or other populations who are not favored by the western empire.
Some are saying it was an errant Ukrainian anti-missile projectile. Regardless, the USA provoked the war in Ukraine and it is subsidizing the genocide in Gaza and the Western mainstream media is playing its part to brainwash us instead of informing us.
This morning the CBC News website featured this story: "Trudeau heads for the hotseat at NATO summit as allies question Canada's defence commitments." It was accompanied by three other stories all of them about Canada's failures to meet the 2% of GDP spending on war and criticisms from foreigners of this failure.
Nothing from anybody calling for Canada to leave NATO. Nothing from anyone criticizing the dangers of NATO and the wasted resources on weapons of war.
This is how the CBC slants opinion. The same way that it maintains acquiescence to Israel's genocide of the Palestinians by simply failing to report on it for days at a time. And when it does report about that story it tends to be slanted to Israel's side.
The bosses at the CBC have a particular agenda they're trying to advance and it's not hard to see what it is.
Trump is a ridiculous liar. Hillary Clinton lost to him in the Electoral College because her own record, her beliefs, and her unprovoked abuse on the grassroots of her own party discouraged voters from bothering to come out. In the face of Trump's numerous, stupid, brazen lies, Joe Biden could only offer rebuttals (delivered with actual physical and mental exhaustion) and was overwhelmed by his own visible struggles with his developing senility.
And, the whole time, hardly any mainstream commentator reminds us of the million dead Iraqis, the millions of refugees from the Middle East, the agonies of Libya and Yemen and Syria. The genocide in Gaza. The starvation sanctions in Venezuela. All the inhuman filth that both these monsters oversee.
After fourteen years the UK Conservatives deservedly fall from power. Keir Starmer's UK Labour Party wins by default. But Keir Starmer and his partners are all braindead neo-liberal shitheads who are dedicated to serving the sociopathic desires of the oligarch class and so Starmer will now begin to shit his pants in public and being genuinely mystified when people start to complain about the smell.
The anti-genocide encampment at the University of Toronto was dismantled following a successful injunction against it. Noteworthy is the fact that the judge said that the U of T governing council and its zionist allies absolutely failed to prove their calumnies against the protesters being violent anti-semites. Dear U of T president and fellow scum: You're the ones supporting the mass murder of innocent civilians, through terrorism, torture, assassination, bombing and starvation. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
Finally, the CBC is a disgrace.
Canada's antiquated First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system allowed the federal Conservatives under the racist degenerate imbecile Pierre Poilevre to eke out a narrow win in the former Liberal stronghold of Toronto St. Paul's. (Around 65% of those who voted voted Liberal, NDP, or Green. I'm sure few of them are happy with there being another MP for the Corrupt Shit-Head Party of Canada in the House of Commons.)
It seems that a Ukrainian fired, USA-supplied ATACM, using coordinates provided by the USA (likely from a surveillance drone flying over the Black Sea) trying to hit a Russian airbase in Crimea, was shot down and it expelled its cluster munitions over a beach at Sevastopol killing four civilians and wounding 127.
This is insanity.
The US foreign policy establishment wants to dismember Russia and subdue China because those two countries are powerful enough to effectively resist the USA-dominated international order. The US foreign policy establishment doesn't give a fuck about Putin's authoritarian tendencies or China's treatment of the Uyghurs. If it were truly the case that they cared about such things they wouldn't be subsidizing and protecting and installing fascist death-squad governments in Latin America, their own murderously racist police and prison system and their for-profit healthcare system, and they wouldn't support the hideous House of Saud, and they wouldn't support the Zionist-apartheid criminal state of Israel.
Joe Biden was never an intellectual giant. Today he is a shell of the mediocrity he used to be. If he isn't in the beginning stages of dementia, he is inarguably very tired and slow. At his best it's likely he'd have no real conception of the risks he's taking with all of humanity in his war with Russia. The rest of them, Hillary Clinton, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, the Krazy Kagans, ... all of them, ... are shallow, stupid, vain, corrupt, useless individuals. Most of them have always been fat-assed armchair warriors who have never had a problem with throwing away other people's lives in pursuit of their sick delusions.
They call themselves "Realists" but that's such a stupid idea. If the USA doesn't really stand for anything other than the "interests" of its ruling classes, and this includes the profit-driven Military-Industrial Complex, why is it worth destroying all of civilization in a nuclear war to advance those interests? I mean, even I can see how these useless vermin can enjoy their careers of writing crappy analyses to justify the interests of the MIC and of US and international capitalism. They enjoy the lifestyle afforded by serving such wealthy masters and they get a little thrill thinking about the actual chessboard that their moronic plot play out on. But that could all come crashing down in an instant if heightened tensions and things like the cluster-bombing of Russian civilians on a beach in Sevastopol lead to full-scale nuclear war.
I called this post "Hopeless Liberals" because, sadly, there are a lot of liberals who have bought into this garbage. Hypocritical partisan hacks who supported Obama's continuation of bush II's imperialist foreign policy. (The foreign policy that they'd condemend when bush II was nominally in the driver's seat.) Hypocritical partisan hacks who gushed over the blood-soaked career of Hillary Clinton and who raged at Trump for "not listening to his generals" when he wanted to end the USA's illegal occupation of Syria. The absolute imbecilic cultists at "Daily Kos" who thrill to real and imaginary Russian losses in its war in Ukraine, imagining that Biden is supporting plucky freedom fighters against Russian imperialism when the reality is that Ukraine's military is dominated by bona fide NAZIS, that the war was stupidly provoked by the USA who repeatedly spurned a diplomatic solution to comepl Putin to accept for Russia what the USA would never accept for itself. And these "Daily Kos" shitheads jerk themselves off to their Ukrainian fantasies while excusing (or more often ignoring) the USA's support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Yesterday I read Henry Giroux latest article at CounterPunch. The first half of the article is about how the New York Times has been exposed for deliberately imposing a glaring double-standard on the actions and sufferings of Israels and Palestinians. The second bit is a diatribe about the dangers of Donald Trump and how the corporate media has normalized him and obscures the reality of Trump being a dangerous fascist.
Personally, I'm somewhere between Giroux and Caitlin Johnstone on this one. Trump really is a different sort of monstrosity from the Republican leadership that started to fizzle-out during the 1990's. But he's the product of a process of devolution. He's not the only whackjob ignoramus being supported by a movement of confused, reactionary ignoramuses in that party.
But my question for Giroux and anyone else who wants to shriek about the [genuine] danger of Donald Trump is this: If Trump is such an existential threat, why does the Democratic Party offer us Joe Biden as the USA's alleged democracy's alleged champion? And, if they're giving us Joe Biden and his support for the wholesale slaughter of all the Palestinians in Gaza is alienating Democratic voters and weakening his chances against Trump, ... why is it incumbent upon those voters to swallow their principles and side with Biden rather than Biden having to renounce his support for genocide?
I ask you: Is Israel's right to commit genocide more important than saving America's "democracy" from Trump's fascism? If so, why?
I could ask: "Where does this end?" but the question is superfluous. Biden is committing genocide. He can't go any lower. He can't be any more vile of a monster than he already is. GENOCIDE. Do not attempt to speak to me of the genocidist being the "lesser evil." Do not speak to me about how the demented idiot and his moronic advisors risking nuclear war with Russia and China are going to save us from the danger of Donald Trump's fascism.
If this is how it plays out, that Biden lost to Trump because US-Americans felt the way that I do, and they couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, then so be it. That was the role that people like me will have played in that tragedy. In the same way, the hopeless liberals who aceded to the Democratic Party's neoliberal policies and abandoned their principles and their brains to defend imperialism and mass-murder when it was a Democratic administration doing it, who made their party's brand so toxic that less and less people could bother to vote for it, played their own part. And they can eat shit and die if they want to guilt-trip me while portraying themselves as innocent.
Biden's work to expand the USA's Prison-Industrial Complex, and his work on "anti-terror" legislation that the creators of the Constitution-shredding "Patriot Act" praised as their blueprint, his compliance with Obama's insane "kill-lists", everything these fucking Democratic Party "liberals" contributed to the erosion of human rights in the United States is responsible for whatever capabilities Donald Trump has to crush those rights upon an election victory.
And the beyond ridiculous, pathetically sad liberal devotion to the whole "Russiagate" myth only served to give ammunition to Trump's fans that there is a criminal "Deep State" aligned with the Democratic Party that will fabricate charges and threaten people and spy on them, in a witchhunt against anyone they don't like. They will push "FAKE NEWS" against Trump to hobble him and etc., etc., ... Gawd, that "Russiagate" stupidity caused so much damage. And hopeless liberals refuse to this day to recognize it.
The Democratic Party's support for the same pro-oligarch policies as the Republicans is what is making the population more frightened, reactionary and extremist. And the fact that, even after everything, the Democrats are less terrible than the Republicans, doesn't cut it:
Biden rewarded Zients’s poor performance by making him White House chief of staff. Zients’s predecessor, Ronald Klain, was pragmatic enough to maintain close ties with the Democrats’ progressive wing. As a result, Klain steered Congress toward passing historic investments in clean energy and infrastructure and reductions in health costs, paid for by tax hikes on wealthy corporations. Plus, he empowered progressive personnel at the regulatory agencies to crack down on exploitative fees and corporate power.
The very last speech Klain presided over was one of the most populist State of the Union addresses in U.S. history. Letting Zients fail upward into the number two role in the White House sent a message to corporate America that the days of tough talk like that were over.
...
NOW, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS HAD SOME GENUINE, even populist, successes in the Zients era. But these have mostly come from independent agencies and their directors, like Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, or Jennifer Abruzzo at the National Labor Relations Board. Biden nominated all of them, so he can take some credit for their achievements. But they do lead independent agencies—Chopra, Khan, and Abruzzo do not take orders from the White House. If Zients had disapproved of their antagonizing Wall Street and Big Tech ahead of an election, he could not have stopped them.
Moreover, Biden has done little to tout these accomplishments from his team. His communications officials routinely balk at even talking about actions against big business. If this was meant to show corporate America that Biden isn’t as scary as The Wall Street Journal editorial board makes him out to be, clearly it hasn’t worked. It never could. It is abundantly clear to the world that Joe Biden is a capitalist — it’s in all of his speeches, it’s why moderates united behind him in the 2020 primary, it’s something anyone with a passing knowledge of his 50 years in national politics could tell you. The C-suites are fully aware that Joe Biden is not a socialist bent on their destruction. They don’t care.
If Zients actually did unite the formidable power of industry behind Biden instead of Trump, or at least keep big money evenly distributed in the race, I’d have to grudgingly admit that it was effective. As Lyndon Johnson once said, “there’s nothing more useless than a dead liberal.” But that has not happened. Just as they have for 50 years, the captains of industry are mostly lining up behind the Republican. Whatever his ideology, clearly Biden does think the business world should have at least some set of checks on its power sometimes. That is enough for the billionaire class to prefer the fascist.
Liberals in the USA who support the rotten Democrats, Canadian liberals who fanatically worship the Liberal Party, British liberals who stupidly support the Labour Party of Keir Starmer, ... all of them are hopeless idiots.
All of these parties are leading us to global heating catastrophe, risking nuclear war by provoking Russia (and wreaking Ukraine in any case), and supporting genocide in Gaza. I refuse to go so low as to give them my support.
The other day I wrote that one thing to keep in mind as Antony Blinken makes statements clearly contradicted by reality is that the man is stupid. This is a guy who thought that singing a song about how fucked-up 1980's America was at the time (Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World") at a nightclub in Kiev would inspire the people of that country to fight on and continue to die for the USA's proxy war against Russia. No matter how you look at that action it looks stupid. Because it WAS stupid.
LINKJuan Cole does a decent job of explaining that it is Netanyahu's fascist coalition that has rejected Biden's deal.
On Sunday, according to the Israeli newspaper Arab 48, Netanyahu told the families of soldiers killed in the Gaza campaign, “There was no deal because we will not give up on completing the war objectives. The main disagreement with Hamas revolves around the commitment to end the fighting without completing the objectives.”
Netanyahu’s war goals are the complete destruction of Hamas (and apparently of Gaza in general). Netanyahu says he will not end the fighting until all his goals are fulfilled. He openly said that “there was no deal” because it would require stopping short of wiping out the people with whom he is negotiating.
Biden’s three-stage plan begins with a pause in the fighting and partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, then a prisoner exchange and complete Israeli withdrawal, and then the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip. But this plan implies that the fighting would end permanently so that rebuilding could start. Netanyahu is rejecting this third stage and pledging to start the war back up as soon as the hostage exchange is complete. You have to ask what is in the latter a proposal for Hamas, or for anyone in Gaza. Although Biden represented the plan as Israeli, Netanyahu has disputed that.
Elsewhere Cole lapses into his "responsible, mainstream centrist" persona that has tragically prevented him from seeing more clearly:
Yahya Sinwar and the other leaders of the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas paramilitary, who are doing the dickering are themselves wretched war criminals and you only wish they could be whisked off to the Hague for trial. If the Israeli military were merely trying to accomplish that goal, one could just wish it luck.
If you simply look at the nazi-level barbarism and the degenerate racist culture of the Israelis, then you would see what Hamas sees when they think about how to deal with it. Which is not to say that I want to have a beer with anyone in Hamas and talk about going fishing with them. I'm sure some of them are nasty, flawed, deranged individuals. But the blame for this bloodshed rests mainly with the USA and the Israelis. Hamas is a product of Israel's garbage culture of sadism and thievery.
The main thing that I want to say though is to read Cole's commentary with the understanding that Antony Blinken is the complete shit-for-brains that I've described him as here:
Blinken appears to believe that if he can get Netanyahu to pause the fighting and move to hostage negotiations, he can create momentum toward a truce and a cessation of hostilities, regardless of what the extremist Israeli government says in public.
But Blinken is naive if he thinks that Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will yield to such mere diplomatic momentum.
Blinken is frustrated with Hamas because it wants more than a vague expectation of momentum toward a truce. It wants a genuine cease-fire and end of hostilities. This position implies that it does accept a ceasefire, it just doesn’t believe that the Israeli government does. And given how truculent and slippery the Israeli government has been on this issue, you can’t really fault this suspicion.
Thus we have an explanation for Blinken's nonsensical babbling. Blinken is an arrogant, racist imbecile. He's a shameless liar who is too stupid to know how to keep his story straight. Inside of his skull is a relatively small, smooth brain that smells suspiciously like shit. That's why everything he says is so disconnected from reality and insults the intelligence of normal people.
Yesterday I was reading an article about a various forms of colonialism and it mentioned Canada's failure to provide First Nations with clean drinking water on their reserves. This was something that I'd made efforts to find out about in the past. Trudeau had made the promise in his first election as leader of the Liberal Party. I knew they'd started to work on the problem but then I had difficulty finding out what happened.
Robert Koehler at Counterpunch deals directly with "The Lesser Evil Gambit."
The election paradox looms. Do I calm myself down, steady my hand, pull the lever for Joe, even though it feels like voting for Netanyahu? Even though it feels like I’m loosing another bomb on Gaza?
I’ve had a number of intense conversations with friends about this recently, the essence of the pro-Biden argument being: We have no choice!
...
So here are today’s primary questions, which eventually we must all answer: Do I support Joe Biden? Will I vote for him? And beyond that: Will we ever have another election that’s about the greater good – nationally and internationally – rather than the lesser evil? Are we stuck from now on with a two-party nation that renounces further evolution, despite the problems the planet faces? Or has the time come to truly challenge the nation’s military-industrial status quo in this year’s election, no matter the consequences of doing so?
...
Biden, in minimally stunning contrast to the Republican viewpoint, “delayed” a shipment of bombs to Israel on May 8, including some 2,000-pounders. As Stephen Zunes pointed out:
“Though pausing the shipment of 3,500 bombs may not be that significant in light of the estimated 90,000 bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza since October, it should be seen as a reflection of the growing popular opposition to U.S. military support for Israel and, in that sense, a partial political victory for supporters of international humanitarian law.
“This is also the first time Biden has conditioned any aid to Israel. . . .”
So here’s where we are as election season approaches. The Israel assault isn’t the only matter on the table, of course. Biden, as Sanders noted, walked in a picket line with UAW workers. He’s pro-choice. He has forgiven some student loan debt and invested money into sustainable energy.
Somehow all this matters to me about as much as a scoop of mashed potatoes – at least compared to the hell he’s complicit in inflicting on Gaza. I may go lesser-evil when I vote in November, but right now I remain uncertain. I’m still waiting to see Biden’s courage emerge, as he stands up to further militarism.
It would have been nice if Koehler also articulated a strategy to sweep aside the entire rotten system that leads otherwise decent, intelligent people to vote for the candidate committing a genocide. [And let's be honest here; Joe Biden's over-enthusiastic arming of Israel and his subsidizing the Israeli economy above and beyond the costs of supplying weapons, makes him a participant in this genocide. His alleged "concerns" about the carnage, and the "pauses" in weapons deliveries that announces, are just as likely to be about public relations management as genuine.] Koehler does not, and therefore, his bleatings are to be dismissed. People's lives sucked under Trump. They have declined under Biden. Not because Trump is better. But because inflation has soared under Biden. Homelessness has increased under Biden. Things have gotten worse under every president since Lyndon Johnson. Things have gotten worse despite all of the "victories" and "resistance" and "fighting back" of progressives against neo-liberalism.
I've said the same thing about Counterpunch's main guy Jeffrey St Clair. The man has been at the helm of Counterpunch for 25 years and has had all that time to think about a revolutionary vision, a strategy and tactics. And after all that, he has a website and a couple of books outlining particular abominations of the contemporary capitalist system.
I don't know why so many progressives need to have it explained to them that besides endlessly writing critiques of the system (punctuating that with peaceful afternoon protests making "demands" of our overlords that they blithely ignore) we should be spending much more time thinking, talking and acting seriously on how to get out of this mess.
Recently I wrote a couple of posts about Antony Blinken's performance of "Rockin' in the Free World" in Kiev. I argued that no matter which way you looked at it, said performance was indicative of crippling stupidity on Blinken's part. I wrote those posts, not because I wanted to make fun of Blinken and feel superior to him. I wrote them because Blinken is the US Secretary of State and is therefore a very powerful man. And if we want to understand why the world is the way that it is and if we want to anticipate where the world will go as people like Blinken respond to subsequent events, it is imperative that we acknowledge the incredibly low level at which these freaks are operating.
Just thought that I'd say here what I've said (to little effect) to various activist groups. Protest and "resistance" that doesn't do much more than make you feel good that you "did something" is what progressives seem to be happy to resign them to. But peaceful afternoon gatherings (even of tens of thousands in our larger cities) obviously isn't going to end Canada's support for Israel's genocidal behaviour against the Palestinians.
Canada's ruling class (including their representatives in the LibroCon Party) have evidently weighed the pros and cons of disemboweling their future ability to yammer about "human rights" and other such topics versus angering the United States, betraying their devotion to the imaginary Israel as a beacon of morality and strategic asset ["The Future of an Illusion - CounterPunch.org"], and alienating Zionist voters, and decided that continuing to enable Israel's genocide is worth it.
There'll be two links below to speak more intelligently than I will about this subject. But the fact is that the number of human beings on the planet Earth needs to start declining. Through natural causes. Through a lower birthrate arrived at by free individual choices.
BUT OLD PEOPLE ARE A MILLSTONE AROUND THE NECK OF THE LIVING!!!
To a degree the very aged ARE a burden. But they CARRIED the burden when they were younger. Still and all, as a pessimist I don't think that I'll have a problem allowing myself to die when there doesn't seem to be any point to it. My continuing to eat and think and suffer from aches and pains isn't so fucking important that some poor immigrant woman should have to change my diapers and wipe my ass.
There's lots of stories about the cultural impact of an aging population coming out of Japan. They're interesting.
But we don't need an economy based on the frantic production of junk and garbage that nobody needs where we're all atomized as self-seeking individuals. This world where old people suffer in loneliness is the end result of a society based on shit-head Margaret Thatcher's shit-head utterance of "There's no such thing as 'society.' There's just individuals and families."
A more collective, ecologically sane society that attends to genuine human needs rather than manufactured desires can do it.
Making More Babies to Drive Economic Growth - CounterPunch.org
Declining Population Thru Lower Birth Rates Is GOOD, Mmmmkay? – Ian Welsh
That'll do pig.
The "lesser evil" candidate is committing a genocide and he refuses to stop committing genocide when his genocidal actions are harming his re-election prospects.
It us up to the people sickened by Biden's genocide who must change their views if they want to stop the "existential threat" to US-American "democracy." Biden (the genocidal "lesser evil") views exterminating the Palestinians as more important than stopping Trump.
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| Pol Pot, the genocidal dictator of Cambodia who the USA later protected because the Chinese didn't like him. (It all makes sense somehow.) [???] |
Genocide is the worst thing that a society can do. It's the collective version of a serial killer. It is monstrous. Everyone knows this. Except for people who have been living in an insane and debased culture for so long that they've managed to normalize mass murder and genocide. People like Robert Ivie at CommonDreams who write editorials such as this: Opinion | If Democracy Dies, So What? | Common Dreams
Former pretty-boy (according to some women I've worked with he's "hit the wall" ... which is the phrase misogynists use to describe a woman older than 25) and once and forever airhead Justin Trudeau says that he finds it "troubling"null [????] that the International Criminal Court has found both Hamas AND the Israeli government guilty of war crimes.
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| Ce n'est pas un falafel |
When you really think about it, Antony Blinken's performance of "Rockin' in the Free World" in Kiev is astonishingly stupid.
Let's step back for a bit.
I've been slowly making my way through Deutsch's The Beginning of InfinityThe Beginning of Infinity (along with two other books) and I've been accepting the occasional bad metaphor, unfair generalization, vague wording, because, on the whole either I agree with him or I get where's he coming from. All the while though, I'm thinking that I wish he had a co-writer or a more courageous editor.
So, after hearing about it a few times over the last couple of days, I decided to look it up:
I can't bring myself to watch the video. I just can't. [Same as I was never able to muster the courage or the enthusiasm to watch a video of stephen harper singing.] And that means that I really don't know whether or not the performance included someone singing Neil Young's dystopian lyrics.
It was supposed to be a work of satire. But it is easy for people to take things the wrong way. Even putting "satire" in the title as I did wouldn't prevent an zionist or zionsymp from using my tongue-in-cheek "rethinking" of Adolph Hitler by the same criteria we judge other genocidal maniacs like Bibi and Biden (comparing Hitler's racist obsession with the Jews with Bibi's racist hatred of Arabs; looking at Hitler's opposition to communism according to the way that right-wing shit-fucks like stephen harper etc., similarly see communism as a monstrosity; looking at Hitler's economic accomplishments the way that Biden's supposed good policies today mean that we should OVERLOOK his active support for the murder of two million people. [Obviously if there were six million Palestinians, Bibi and his crew of racist religious nutbars would gleefully starve them all to death without batting an eye.])
But I decided it was too much work for a stupid blog entry so I brought that post to a finish as quick as I could.
I just thought that today I'd write about how, with the Gaza genocide, the Left has once again revealed its pathologies. We seem to be happy just to say that we protested, and then leave it at that. The fact that in a democracy, where there are nominal rights to protest, write to your representatives, and exercise our right to free speech (including the sharing of information via media), the Canadian government can continue to provide diplomatic and material support for an ongoing genocide for eight months, ought to be seen as an indictment of our tactics and the cause for a soul-searching debate about alternatives.
We have all been raised to believe that the state of Israel is a virtuous outpost of the glorious Western Civilization in the barbaric and backwards Middle East. It is a democracy where [Jewish] people are free to be straight, gay, trans, ace ... whatever. Women have political and social and legal equality. And they have cutting-edge electronics. Oh yeah, and a public healthcare system that US-American taxpayers stoically deny themselves.
We also know that trying to eliminate an entire people (whether by erasing their culture and their sense of themselves as a people or by simply murdering them down to the last child) is called genocide. And we are told that genocide is a bad thing because the Nazis did it, the Stalinists supposedly did it, the Chinese Communists are doing it, ... and (maybe) us Canadians are doing it and if so, we should stop it. Hindu-Nationalist BJP leader Narendra Modi has the anti-Muslim progoms in Gujarat brought up whenever the USA wants to criticize him for not supporting NATO. So, genocide, and the racism it springs from, are supposedly bad. As a society we appear to be quite clear about that.
I've just started two books. They've not yet been mentioned on the page where I'm sharing my 2024 readings with an inordinately curious world. They won't be added there until I've read at least two-thirds of 'em. I just have some observations from reading the first little bits of them that I want to deal with.
First up is The Panic of 1819 by: The First Great Depression by Andrew Browning (published in 2019).
This is from John Helmer's blog "Dancing With Bears.
A senior Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) officer, who is the Assistant Chief of Staff at the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), faces court martial, “dismissal with disgrace”, and loss of his military pension for having disagreed with Canadian, American, and British military planners of Ukrainian battlefield operations against Russia. His disagreement was in private, when the officers were asking for his professional assessment, and didn’t like what he told them.
Colonel Robert Kearney was charged by the Canadian military police on April 23. The charge sheet says he faces “five (5) x counts of Conduct Prejudice to the Good Order and Discipline pursuant to section 129 of the National Defence Act.”
Public disclosure was delayed by the Department of National Defence in Ottawa until Monday, April 29, when a press release claimed Kearney had been under investigation since another officer filed a complaint against Kearney last November. According to the ministry statement, the military police had “received a complaint of a senior CAF officer allegedly making derogatory and disloyal comments about Senior CAF and NATO members.”
mind the gap ...
CanaCanadian
military sources believe Kearney is being court-martialed now because the Canadian government’s policy to finance, arm, train, plan, and direct Ukrainian operations against Russia is being defeated, and that the military collapse east of Kiev now risks loss of more territory and the lives of Canadians currently working in the Ukraine and at cross-border bases in Poland and Romania. At least one thousand Canadians have been counted by the Russian Defense Ministry on the battlefield since the start of the Special Military Operation; by March of this year, 422 had been confirmed killed in action.
“The timing of the alleged offences,” says a Canadian veteran who served with US and NATO units in Afghanistan, “was when the Germans took over command of NATO’s rapid reaction force which has been building up men and materiel, including heavy tanks and F-16s, in Romania for a plan to attack Russian forces around Odessa. Kearney’s court martial is a warning to his fellow officers not to object or predict destruction of the NATO forces engaged.”
...
If all this is true (and it's obviously true that the guy is up on charges) we can then reflect upon the bogusity of previous and past statements of belief in their "missions" by members of the CAF.
We can also ponder the level of narcissistic entitlement of the nazi psychopath Chrystia Freeland.
And we can just think about how terrifying it is that our "leadership" will punish simple disagreement and continue to lead us into further stupid quagmires on top of Afghanistan and Ukraine.
Just a short little post on something I thought important. I'm working on a longer piece that is taking its time because I'm busy with life.
One thing that the zionist nazi Netanyahu and his like-minded racist scum say to justify their genocide of the Palestinians is that the men, women and children of Gaza should have "risen up" to overthrow the illegal, terrorist regime of Hamas. But, instead (says the nazi Netanyahu) they obviously support Hamas.
Leaving aside for the moment that Israeli citizens supporting their country's apartheid regime, with many of them voting for nazi-like political parties, makes them liable to the same criticism, and, therefore, the same treatment, we need to consider the following facts that make the argument of Israeli Hitlerites so fucking stupid.
The only reason women backstab each other is because the patriarchy distorting their minds.
The only reason a working class person would think something racist is because the capitalists divide people to conquer them.
We would all be happily living in harmony with nature if not for capitalist advertisers creating artificial desires.
Mutual aid is a fact of nature and the lamb would lay down with the lion but for ... I don't know, ... bourgeois science?
If only we could be as innocent as children who NEVER demand anything and who NEVER grab things from each other.
There is no God or gods. There is no good or evil. There is just energy. Blind, purposeless energy.
The self is an artificial construct. But there is no enlightenment to be found in the abandonment of the self. If you want to become "one" with blind, purposeless energy, ... good luck.
There are things that hurt and things that create temporary pleasure. Pain and pleasure are neither good nor evil in themselves. They are sensations felt by sentient carbon-based bags of mostly water.
Perhaps "happiness" always tends towards equilibrium. Like, John Cage said at the idea that there's too much pain in the world. Maybe there's just the right amount.
Rich, beautiful people have their little constant desires. People who have known great suffering are happy for relief.
It's my understanding that Joe Biden doesn't like the English because of his Irish ancestry. Which is ridiculous because why the fuck should anyone care? He doesn't side with the Palestinians against the Israelis. He doesn't side with African Americans against Whites. He imposes the same sort of hegemony worldwide on befalf of the US Empire (Bill O'Reilly's "White, male, Christian power-structure") that the English used to inflict on their Empire in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
