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.
