A Comment Pissed Me Off

So, in this little post, I wrote about ... Ah hell, it's so short it's taking me just as long to summarize it. Here it is:

"Change the Culture" - Progressives got to get out and put it out there. People have to take a side: Democracy or Inverted Totalitarianism? Food and shelter for all or super-mansions for the super-rich and starvation for the majority? Dignity or consumerism?
Artists, musicians, business owners, ... we have to make a culture and an economy that is ours and put it before the majority and reject the corporate system and sustain ourselves.
Ah, who am I kidding?

Well, that brought this gem of a comment from one "greg":

What is your solution. You seem to crap on anyone who wants to do something or is doing something. At least lay out a plan. Is there anyone or any group out there you like?

 I replied thusly:

"greg"

I wonder why you saw fit to write that. Your tone and words convey the notion that you're a regular reader of my blog, but the plain facts of the matter show that you don't have a clue.

Here's a post (with links to companion pieces) about how I thought we could "stop harper."

http://thwapschoolyard.blogspot.ca/2013/08/my-plan-part-fourth.html

Here's one of many things that I've written about as a way to fight the larger battle against capitalism itself:

http://mail.enmasse.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8180&sid=c2ca5a0fced95120161bb4afc6f6ef7e

Finally, I find it a bit rich to say that I "crap on anyone who wants to do something or is doing something."

As I repeat again and again and again, progressives tend to do NOTHING when they're not repeatedly doing the same ineffective things that they've always done.

I've stated in great detail why I think afternoon protests, petitions and small acts of vandalism are a waste of time. Instead of sniffling out some vague complaints about how I'm hopelessly negative, you could actually engage with what I've actually said.

As with everyone, there's an open invitation to prove me wrong. But whining that I'm a big meanie isn't going to accomplish that.  

More than two days passed and I guessed that "greg" had nothing more to contribute to the discussion, prompting me to conclude:

I guess the plan was to drop a little brain turd in my comments section and move on, self-satisfied. 

 And the thing is; it started as a mild irritation, but that built up so that I feel compelled to make a post about it. This is the sort of whining, deluded, close-minded bullshit that so pisses me off about the left. I'll admit that I've lost a great deal of my optimism and my passion since 2011. I know that fewer people read this blog and that's not just due to the infrequency of posts. I sound like a broken record condemning the left for its laziness, its lack of ideas and analysis, its delusions and inability to form lasting coalitions.

But if I sound like a broken record ("record" refers to these flat vinyl discs that audio recordings used to be adhered to. When they were  broken, it meant a scratch or a crack that made the needle of the phonograph player - which transferred its movement along the tiny grooves in the vinyl into electric messages to the speaker system - continue to bump backwards, thus repeating the same short bit of sound over and over again), it's because the left never changes.

Progressives continue to split themselves between the corporate scum-bags in the Liberal Party and the wannabe corporate scum-bags in the NDP. Environmentalists divide themselves among those two parties and the Green Party. Leftists divide themselves among the NDP and splinter parties or the "brilliant" tactic (represented by EnMasse's "Slumberjack") of imagining that Canada's 30 million people should refuse to participate in parliamentary politics at all, but should instead sit at home and write cockamaymee, impenetrable post-structuralist prose between masturbation sessions and pointless rallies and demonstrations.

Speaking of masturbation: pointless demonstrations and rallies, often featuring tiresome old white guys reciting the things that everyone already knows and believes in, perhaps hoping that if they say the magic words this time everything will start to happen. ("Duh! Maybe I'm the 'Chosen One,' and my version of the same old bullshit will bring about the Revolution!") 

As I said in my first reply to "greg," I've gone into great detail about my disillusionment with leftist nonsensical day-dreaming. I invited "greg" to prove me wrong. But "greg" is apparently uninterested in proving me wrong. He simply disagrees (although he can't articulate why). And, therefore, the whole leftist circle-jerk can continue in its own pathetic non-progression. (A leftist circle-jerk would probably end in recriminations and back-stabbing [there's a metaphor with multiple meanings!] with a bunch of bitter misanthropes, angrily pulling their puds, having pointedly turned their backs to their erstwhile comrades.)

"Our power is in the streets!" they yelled as the police crushed yet another pointless demonstration.

"Hey-hey! Ho-ho!  So-and-so has got to go!" they yelled repeatedly about the guy who retired five years later and got cushy jobs from his private-sector benefactors whose servant he was.

"The People, United, Can Never Be Defeated!" they yelled before they ever managed to unite "the people" and right before the elites crushed them.

"We're standing up for working families!" said the "social democrats" right before they caved to pressures from the elites on Bay Street and the oil patch.

It's all so depressing. What we need is a new party! And to circulate a petition!

 

Overestimating Them: stephen harper edition

Yesterday I talked about how Dick Cheney was reduced to stammering confusion when confronted with the mildest recitation of the truth about his dismal stupidity and asserted how all these cowardly cretins would fold if faced with genuine challenges.

stephen harper is a sterling example of this cowardice and fraud. harper isn't a very bright guy. he leads a political bowel movement that is mainly based upon ignorance (the mass of their voting base) and greed (the capitalist vermin who finance them). To dominate the pack of idiots that is the Conservative Party of Canada doesn't require Isaac Newton. harper has, as did Dick Cheney, relied on the abuse of power to escape every and any crisis brought upon by his own blundering and corruption.

But, whenever harper found himself in a genuine tight spot, his chosen tactic was to flee in pants-shitting panic. Each and every single time, when harper could cower somewhere during a crisis, he did. Because he's a bully. And bullies are cowards. Bullies are compensating for some external problems (abusive parents/siblings, some sort of personal trauma) or internal problems (sheer stupidity, sexual conflicts, general feelings of self-loathing and incapacity). It would be nice if harper could wrestle with, and defeat, whatever demons are tormenting him. he should attend to that on his own time and not subject the rest of us to his psychoses.

It's sometimes the case that whatever mental problems are afflicting an individual are, they themselves aren't to blame for that person being generally shitty and unpleasant to be around. I'm pretty sure I'd find harper to be dreadful company even under optimal conditions.

Don't Overestimate Dick Cheney

Perhaps I'm wrong, but, obviously I don't think so. I've long recoiled at the notion that we on the left shouldn't underestimate our political opponents, given that most of these guys are fucking morons. Maybe people who disagree with me see something that I don't. I don't see anything intimidating about stephen harper, or ezra levant or bush II, or any of them.

Case in point: Gary Leupp over at CounterPunch.org describes plodding failure Dick Cheney reduced to incoherence when Megyn Kelly of FAUX News mentions the unavoidable in the middle of Cheney's babbling about Iraq's present crisis:

Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal advocating renewed U.S. military involvement in Ira to prevent a seizure of power by the al-Qaeda spin-off ISIS (or ISIL) and opining, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,”

Citing this comment, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly unexpectedly snapped, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong as well sir.” She referred specifically the false accusation about weapons of mass destruction used to sell the Iraq War. A flustered Cheney fumbled his interrogator’s name (“Reagan, um, Megyn”) before declaring, “You’ve got to go back and look at the track record.” (As though Megyn were doing something other than precisely that.) “We inherited a situation where there was no doubt in anybody’s mind about the extent of Saddam’s involvement in weapons of mass destruction … Saddam Hussein had a track record that nearly everybody agreed to.”

Cheney's career has been built on the acquisition of raw power so as to compensate for his total lack of talent and ability. Whenever anything turned to shit (as it did again and again for him) he was able to rely on blatant bullying and corruption to see him through. If Cheney came upon genuine, sustained criticism, the rotten old shit would fall out of his chair and suffer a cardiac arrest.

Observations on the Iraq Fiasco

Not that I believe that anything that I say will influence anyone of any political standing. But I'm a narcissistic blogger and I gotta blog!

1. Notice how nobody is all that concerned about getting george dubya bush's views on the Iraq crisis? Doubtless all of his supporters and his media enablers realize that he's an absolute imbecile and there's nothing to be gained from the exertions that would be required to present him as an "elder statesman" at this point in his dotage.

2. Can we really be all that sure that the takeover of vast swaths of the country by Sunni militants is entirely unwelcome by some in the USA establishment? After all, Al Qaeda was a useful tool in Libya and is a useful tool in Syria. It's pretty clear that US ally Saudi Arabia is providing the funding for this mess. If the US were truly serious about bringing an end to this nightmare, they could lean on the House of Saud to cut off the cash flow to these fundamentalist rebels.

3. But if the USA isn't really traumatized by the progress of these Sunni rebels, why all the public wailing and gnashing of teeth? Simple answer: The US political elite is as disconnected from reality a group as you're ever going to meet. IOW: They're completely insane. At one point at the end of the Cold War, the Bush Sr. administration claimed it was withholding economic aid to the reformist Gorbachev government due to its aid to the Sandanista government in Nicaragua. Gorbachev was justifiably frustrated by this because this aid to the Sandanistas was entirely a US propaganda fiction. But, the Americans are so cocooned in their self-righteousness and their bubble of misinformation, that they'd come to believe their own lies and were basing high policy upon them.

4. Further evidence of this thorough delusion can be seen in John McCain's belief that Barack Obama is responsible for the total withdrawl of US troops from Iraq, when in fact this had been negotiated by bush II. (Obama had tried to renegotiate the withdrawl, wanting to keep them there with total legal immunity for any war-crimes, but the Maliki government could not allow this when reports of covered-up atrocities by the US military were revealed by Wikileaks.

To conclude, this is a disaster. A fiasco. The people of Iraq continue to suffer and die because of the blinkered, incoherent (but for their consistent callousness and selfishness) of the US foreign policy elite and their oil industry paymasters. A pack of deluded, violent psychopaths.

Dick Cheney; gall of ...

So, "Crooks and Liars" have a nice little piece called "The Gall of Dick Cheney" about his shameless co-authoring with his imbecilic daughter, an op-ed about how the sectarian violence in Iraq is Obama's fault.

To ask how he thinks he can get away with such nonsense is to explain it. What IS anyone opposed to him going to do about it?

...

Well?

That total non-answer is the reason for Cheney's gall. That's a measure of our impotence.

Hopeless

Imagine a friend or a loved one with a debilitating disease. It's going to kill them one day, but nobody can say when exactly. It could be a month, it could be years from now. In the meantime, they're wracked with excrutiating pain and the slow degeneration of their body's functioning. They're either whacked on sedatives that reduce their pain to a constant, throbbing ache, or they're gritting their teeth in a hopeless frenzy.

No dignified suffering. No lessons on living to impart to those around them. Just a hopeless waste of a life.

That's kind of the level of futility I feel watching progressives and leftists stumble around in their delusions and schisms and impotence. It's hopeless to ask for anything more or to expect that something meaningful will come out of this stupidity.

Change the Culture

Progressives got to get out and put it out there. People have to take a side: Democracy or Inverted Totalitarianism? Food and shelter for all or super-mansions for the super-rich and starvation for the majority? Dignity or consumerism?

Artists, musicians, business owners, ... we have to make a culture and an economy that is ours and put it before the majority and reject the corporate system and sustain ourselves.

Ah, who am I kidding?