by anthony freda
Well, almost all media, save for (tada!) the opposition’s. These Tweets aren’t all about the DNC leaks, but most are very related. Naturally, some of the comments are quite partisan, some are pretty fun nonetheless. The #ClintonFoundation account features boatloads of defenders, most notably something called Blue Nation, iirc.
Oddly, Wikileaks had at least one DNC Leak up showing that interim DNC chair Donna Brazile had worked for Stratfor from 2008 to at least 2003, but it’s evaporated for some reason. Thinking I might find it, I found this, but it has no drop-down menu to do searches for other dates or emails. Beats me; but it’s pretty great. Obviously, I don’t have a clue if Assange took it down, or someone else. ‘Please renew me.’ I didn’t think to check the dates; maybe it’s a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc? (after the Stratfor Tweet)
Cry me a river.
@wikileaks Aug 28 “US DNC Chair: We are going to build a wall to keep the true information in so the public doesn’t get annoyed again.” (same video)
can’t resist it…
Vanity, 2015
You may have seen this earlier, but it’s a good thing.
I’d seen a (cough) more reliable source on media donations; this will have to do.
Why, yay-uss, Adolp; TINA; ‘This Political Scientist Says You Should Vote for the ‘Lying Neoliberal Warmonger’ Adolph Reed Jr., TRNN
Just in; not satire, I’d imagine. ;-)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
I am reticent to sound like Johnny One Note, but this latest Adolph Reed, Jr. so fails to overcome his former self that one must suspect something untoward.
how very polite of you, davidly. i might call him…er…an elitist comprador, lol. (when i put it up, i’d remembered that you were shall we say…a detractor? ;-)
Right up until the most recent contribution to Common Dreams I was quite an admirer, actually. Anything I’d ever read of his resonated truth. His hallmark had seemed to be identifying the elite class of Black folk emerging from the voice of the oppressed, who had, sought of unsought, gained it all for nothing more than crumby access for, their elite class.
He’s a brilliant user of language and adept at making a case, which is why I find his lame reverse ironic non-endorsement unworthy of consideration beyond wondering how such a brilliant mind could take such a poop intellectually.
That he played the “nobody can call me a shill” card is just par for the course of the shills he’s just joined — whether he wants their access or not.
i stand corrected, then, if his early essays ha been geared to calling out elitist black compradors, then. i had scant memory of him (but looked at few of his past essays seeing your comment in email), save that in general i tend to be put to sleep by ivory tower mellifluous prose such as his.
i am constantly reminded that brilliance/intelligence doesn’t always lead to wisdom. that he fears trump above all else, plus ‘TINA’, shows how far in lock-step with the status quo duopoly he is. being so down with the bern (on his campaign team did i read?)…shows he doesn’t care any more than most about bern’s militarism, but that was true for most, as they were so hungry for a new fdr.
and right on cue, glen ford on trnn: ‘Corporate Media Casts Fog Over Wikileaks to Protect Clinton’
video, 9 minutes and change; the transcript
speaking of the promised wikileaks, recently someone climbed the wall of the ecquadorian embassy. julian called the police, and i believe that he’d said it took the police four hours to show up.
they want you dead. or in their lie.
hadn’t seen it, you won’t be surprised to hear. ooof. i let nolte’s interview w/ saint charlie play till the footage was finished. soulful-faced soldier:
‘maybe all men got one big soul everybody’s a part of, all faces are the same man. what’s your name?’ he asks a local child near him. bless his achin’ heart. i read a synopsis, oh my. clooney? well, never mind. ;-)
I hate Charlie Rose. he’s a terrible interviewer. his questions are banal & right when the guest starts saying something interesting, he makes sure to interrupt & redirect them back to something stupid.
that was for assange. one of the best war movies ever made, def. worth checking out. all the actors, incl. Clooney (pre-CFR/CIA days, I believe) were very eager to work w/director Terence Malick. love Cloon’s “family values” line: the dad is the head & mom runs it. if georgie annoys you that much, don’t let that deter you as this is his only scene in the movie.
rose sucks; i saw one interview (don’t remember who, but someone i kinda liked) in which he was just in full out attack mode, asking creepy questions, never waiting for a response.
yeppers, those were the exact lines i was pinging. for assange? oh no; for instance, i’m such a rube i loved the one where they all broke outta prison, and epic saga of hilarity. fun music, too, muses and all. we’ll see if inter-liBerry loan has it.
you mean “oh brother, where art thou?” yeah, that was fun. cohen bro’s. I was tempted to watch that nolte interview w/rose (nolte is stellar in thin red line, btw) w/superb guests but Rose…ugh. Harrison Ford was on once many moons ago & Rose asked him why he tho’t he was so popular. Ford says, “I think represent the Father in this country’s Oedipal complex.” what did he mean by that? we’ll never know cuz rose is a goddam moron.
that was it! iirc, someone gave us a copy as a gift. cohen bros, i should have remembered that. oddly, i can’t comment at the café on firefox today; gotta switch to other browsers or whatever ya call em. tryin’ chrome this time.
RT’s been under heavy attack since mid-august. i was surprised you got in this a.m. cuz i hadn’t been able to at about 6 mountain time.
RT hit with string of cunning DDoS attacks ‘, 12 Aug, 2016
https://www.rt.com/news/355610-rt-under-cunning-ddos-attack/
“US think tanks hacked – by Russia” was a (satirical?) note on RT this a.m. What? Russia doesn’t have enough cliches so they have to steal ours? the end of the Cold War decimated their truism factories? for some of these outfits, American Enterprise, Brookings, etc., the notion that Russia would waste its time to steal their “ideas” is just grotesque self-inflation & self-flattery, is it not?
ha; defense one’s obfuscating faux-reasoning was purdy funny, wasn’t it? but that’s the same outfit donna brazile mentioned.
“In an interview with Defense One, founder of CrowdStrike, Dmitri Alperovitch, blamed a group called COZY BEAR, or APT29, allegedly linked to the DNC hack, for breaking into the think tanks’ servers.”
and this must be the almost proof that cap’n nimmo in the final tweet was referencing.
““The report of the think tanks’ breach comes the same day as FBI announced the discovery of evidence that “foreign” hackers penetrated two state election databases in recent weeks.”
also, assange has a link to the stratfor files on georgia up; i’ll grab it if ya like. those things are almost impossible for me to understand. but mcCranky’s in there, and to the extent that i might have understood, seemed to actually believe his agitprop.
Sen. Maverick gets high on his own supply a lot.
After eight decades of Democrats being called Roosian stooges, they get to turn the tables on Republicans and it’s a major freakout.
Of course, it has to be the Roosians. Who else can fulfill the “Kenyan” in the reverse “socialist Kenyan mooslim”. How better to deal with the birther-pushing Trump than a reverse “Manchurian (Moscow-style) Candidate” play.
Besides the US government can’t possible let 42 expensive years of anti-Russian psy-ops go to waste just because the Soviet Union fell apart, can it?
JFK went in strong with the Eisenhower-Nixon “Missile Gap” in 1960. Clinton likely is going to unleash a “Hacking Gap” and make the NSA happy to be scrambling for cash if she is elected. And if Trump is elected, someone might tell him what he can do with the NSA’s current capabilities. Isn’t it obvious that Clinton already knows what to do with the NSA? No it’s not abolition.
plus: nato enemies, (alleged) cyber-hacks as casus belli for moar war, playing to Queen of neo-con land, and was the alleged ‘think tank hack’ looking for stuff that’s in aid of Herself’s FP marching orders, and in plain sight to boot?
love the ‘hacking gap’, and i’d meant to say that your cliff’s notes on zbig’s new epiphanies had a far funnier ending. yeah, she knows what to do with it…and w/ syria, if i read right.
mcCranky’s stash must be baaaaaaad shit.
if anybody’s reading this, is http://www.rt.com up & running?
I ask cuz I’m my local library cuz my PC is acting up. and neither IE or Moz Firefox are allowing me to access RT. if the library is blocking access, I’m going to raise some holy hell.
never mind. after 10 tries, it came up.
RE Assange (attempted assassination???)–I read it took the cops two hours to respond, but they are located only two blocks away. I guess that’s how the intruder was “caught” by Embassy security but managed to flee successfully. If at first you don’t succeed . . .
Check your dates on Brazille/Stratfor, m’dear wd.
How low they have fallen–I saw a Clinton supporter on MSNBC yesterday justifying as appropriate the latest email reveal about the Chinese state dinner seatings for big corporate Foundation donors, by saying that Bush/Cheney had secret meetings with Halliburton, so it’s all good and virtuous. (Who says there are no good role models anymore?) :-(
I see dead people (if only lol). (Just trying to support the funeral directors’ union, “Please, Jesus, send me more stiffs”–anybody remember where that line comes from?; If so, you might be a terrorist or a conspiracy theorist lol. What ev.)
yes, it’s the 2008 one. as i’d said he’d put a tweet noting 2008-2013, that’s all i could find. no drop-down menu for others.
well, sure; what’s good for the cheney goose is good for the clintononian ganders. get it now? msnbc? aaaaarrrrrggggggghhhhh! glad i don’t watch teevee save for mysteries on pbs.
“Where I lived at Pencey, I lived in the Ossenburger Memorial Wing of the new dorms. […] It was named after this guy Ossenburger that went to Pencey. He made a pot of dough in the undertaking business after he got out of Pencey. […] He made a speech that lasted about ten hours. He started off with about fifty corny jokes, just to show us what a regular guy he was. Very big deal. Then he started telling us how he was never ashamed, when he was in some kind of trouble or something, to get right down his knees and pray to God. He told us we should always pray to God—talk to Him and all—wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs.”
~ holden caulfield
I had no clue, despite my big orange hunting cap with the floppy ear muffs that i wear constantly.
nooooooo; not elmer fudd! i’d thought your hat was just like this un!
(and did the site end you an invite to contribute? and if so, did ya click ‘accept’? i’m tryin’ to figure out if then y’all won’t need to give your info every time ya comment.)
AND, we have a winner lol.
Extra points if ya didn’t Giggle it. ;-)
of course i did, ya great idjit! now jason…had he seen the quote, he’d have pulled it outta his literary magician’s hat in a milwaukee minute. so…no points, just pay the cashier my usual fee of $1.99 on your way out the door….
and actually, i did have to use teh google, as my firefox is acting in a very unusually rubbish manner.
well, lookie there; firefox allowed me to comment here, lol.
CLINT FUNK $TUNT$. Next, Bombo ERUPTIONS !
grin. the first one’s for you, bruce; the others are interesting and useful, including the guccifer 2 memos from the dccc, this: CA
the twittersphere says that the soros docs page has been terminated. more grins.
I’m having a wonderful time watching heads explode all over the Establishment political world. If you believe as I believe, that first the Establishment game must be broken down before it can ever be replaced by something better, you must admit that Trump is displaying true genius toward that short-term goal.
We have been living in a complex web of lies for decades; now, it has become impossible for any thinking person to believe in or defend those lies or their propagators any longer.
It’s a chess game, and Trump is winning it, against all odds and all conventional ‘wisdom.’
Priceless..
i do believe it, although i’m not convinced that T-frump hasn’t unwittingly exposed the ‘democratic’ sham, but is simply playing his part as in his former Reality Teevee star schtick.
of course the dnc and dccc emails helped to out the charade, but few ‘likely voters’ will be treated to them, eh? and gosh: the bern helped in that effort, didn’t he, ha ha. but ooof: how wonderful it would be for someone to hack bubba’s emails and see if he’s had further conversations with the T-hairdo dude.
T winning? explain please? but not only web of lies, but corruption, games by spooks, and the non-profit industrial complex NGOs. but yes, it’s more of a circus than ever, although…i don’t watch news on teevee, so just read some o’ the headlines.
Trump winning
Re that,, I’m monitoring and evaluating way too many things to type them all out and elaborate my thinking about them here (major league crippled today, stupidly acted like a young rc last Monday), but if you desire one single concrete datum, HiLiary’s disapproval number was 40 in January, now it is in the 60’s, while Trump’s has remained stable. IOW, he’s staying in place, while she is plummeting.
I don’t love the guy, but I do agree with some of his points. OTH, I hate the Estab and everything associated with and supporting it.
I think ultimately this all nets out as better for regular American folks, and that is my bottom line preference.
P.S.Have you seen the latest in PC at Rutgers? Now, they have expanded the “microaggression” concept to include three specific sub-categories, to witless, “miicroassaults,” “microinsults,” and my personal fave, “microinvalidations.” Aristotle would be so proud LMAO.
(I still don’t know how to make a damn link, but easy to Giggle)
Fuck safe spaces. ;-).
just to get this outta the way: to make a hyperlink, left click on the url (web address), to highlight it, right click, get a drop down menu and choose ‘copy’ (it’ll loaded it into some memory or other) when you want to add it to a doc, comment, or a different browser address window, place your cursor, then right click again, and choose ‘paste’. voila! save for in a word doc, you need to press enter for the link to become Live). for a single world, sentence, paragraph, highlight the text with your cursor, right to left, left to right, doesn’t matter), right click, choose ‘copy’, move your cursor to a new location, right click, choose ‘paste’ where ya want it. please pay the cashier $1.99 on your way out the door.
i didn’t know the unfavorable numbers, but polling of any sort is kinda creepy, plus it doesn’t speak to how folks will vote, or i they’ll skip the vote, etc. not that voting matters, as we know. diebolds, last minute willie horton ads, yada, yada.
well the rutgers stuff may be off the charts, but i don’t agree w/ ‘fuck safe places’, especially for some of the completely marginalized and loathed for no reason except their being: trans, lgbq, muslim, indun, rabble black, and so on.
glad ya don’t love him; i think he’s an odious pig, has a few good policy stands (or used to), we dunno what he’d do as prez, or if the ptb would allow him access to power, but…we know what the queen has in store for us and the rest of the globe, more importantly.
on edit: i’d meant to say that i’m sorry yer hurtin’ fer certain, but i’ll not ask what youthful endeavor caused it, lol.
Sarah Kendzior, “Trump’s Wall guards nothing but the sanctity of bigotry”
had enough time to embed the link, thd, before the real life gong rang; i’ll read later. but for now: under which administration did dhs or whomever find an actual wall too expensive, too cumbersome (plus tunnels?) to build, and tried to build a virtual wall, and so sorry…the cameras’ software was totally fubar? lo-bleeping-l.
Yes, RL and kitchen remodel diverted me. The wall of nowhere caught my attention. Kendzior covered #blacklivesmatter in Ferguson with a great sensitivity to the local community. Since has gotten part-time gigs with Globe and Mail, Guardian, on a piece at a time freelance basis.
i only vaguely remember her, to say the truth. comments below were what one might expect.
cool on the kitchen remodel. ‘home is where the kitchen hearth is’. keep the kettle on, and some soup available for hungry wanderers.
noteworthy that the bumper stickers say “lock Her up”, isn’t it? well, nationalistic demagoguery is selling very well in europe, isn’t it? not sarkozky’s new platform, for instance. more le pen than le pen?
kinda hate knowing more about this rubbish, really, but…so it goes. i couldn’t make out what T-dude said about nieto’s stnce on ‘the wall’, but as i remember it (help me out if you can), obama provided plenty of dinero to him to jail as many visitors from the south coming thru mexico as he could.
there are so many potential fixes for immigration from the south, including ending the drug war, exporting guns to mexico, better-paying jobs, and more. but isn’t it true that ‘illegal immingration’ is way down, the thought being there’s so little work here in any event.
but ah, the red queen is full tilt for ‘comprehensie immigration reform, prolly not as liberal as dubya’s, but more on the order of obama’s ‘dream whatever’.
and yep; there are hashtags, of course.
https://twitter.com/Bikers4Trump
the claim on there seems to be that it’s all crowd-sourced; who knows?
exquisitely related: ‘Afghan Opium Production 40 Times Higher Since US-NATO Invasion’, telesur
When last seen, Sarkozy was busy getting NATO (or a coalition of the willing) to oust Gadhafi to solve his refugee problem before the election that he lost to Hollande who out Islamaphobed him. Wonder if he has “Lock Her Up” bumper stickers for Mlle LePen?
And if Hollande runs for re-election he will be more Le Pen than both of them.
Well, Mexico has been a close partner in the War on Drugs, haven’t they. Just ask folks in some of the southern Mexican states like Oaxaca and Chiapas. And Obama has deported for eight years at an amazing rate for someone not credited with doing anything.
The politicians don’t want fixes to the problem that don’t allow for bidding down wages. One interesting on would be a minimum wage bill that sets the minimum wage at $15 an hour and eliminates the agricultural and tip employment separate wages. Another is cracking down on employers who recruit illegal immigrant labor. But that doesn’t allow permanent border anxiety.
I find it very interesting that US long wars seem to feature drug-producing areas. Vietnam had the Golden Triangle opium trade. The Iran-Contra War was involved in cocaine transport into the US. And the Taliban had suppressed the opium growing in Afghanistan, but oh so helpfully, Hamid Karzai’s brother was a major opium trading figure. I would love to see a public audit of the outside income sources of US clandestine operations either from the military side or the intelligence community side. Someone is bringing in some extra income IMHO. And the very interesting part about the phenomenon is how it gets directed only into certain neighborhoods. Appalachian rural neighborhoods have to depend on BigPharma for their supply of opiates. And of course after 15 years of war, production in Helmand province especially is in full swing.
Heard nothing about any rumble between Bikers 4 Trump and protesters at the GOP convention. Guess they were just chest-beating.
ha; yes, ‘obama was leading the french from behind’ or some such. plus, he was up for re-election at the time, an had hoped that a nice plum war might… ha. loved “Wonder if he has “Lock Her Up” bumper stickers for Mlle LePen?”
yes to all the long wars and drugs, though i hadn’t know about helmand province. and that’s why the fake ‘war on drugs’ is such a con. on both sides the US makes $$. busting employers who recruit illegals: that happened some places for a time, mebbe not ‘recruited’, just hired for shit wages and 14-hour days. but very unevenly applied, say: personal grudges? i did like the movement trying to get employees w/o green cards to join trade unions to help raise wages, but of course most were far too afraid to join, fearing: ICE would find out.
guess i never paid much attention to either convention, so i never heard. but ooof: look at all the blue muscle in that parade!
sleep well; i’m for some Tremé time (third time thru the series). ;-)
shorter version: ‘Conspiracy, not journalism’: WikiLeaks blasts NYT story on ‘Russian intel’ behind DNC hack’, via RT
on edit cuz i forgot this: ‘Don’t Let the Russians Ruin the U.S. Elections System! (Don’t Make Me Laugh)’, glen ford’
“Hillary Clinton isn’t simply trying to beat the hapless and disintegrating Donald Trump: she wants a mandate to rule the world as she (and her bankers) see fit. To achieve this, she must run against the dreaded Russian “threat,” which requires entangling the Russians with Trump and spreading the nonsense that Moscow is attempting to rig the elections. As if U.S. elections haven’t always been hopelessly racist and corrupt.”
bill van auken did some diggin’.
“Two of the three bylines on the Times hit piece against Julian Assange bear closer examination. One is that of Eric Schmitt, the newspaper’s national security correspondent, who serves as a regular conduit for the CIA and the Pentagon. Among his services rendered was a 2002 feature article, published at the height of the CIA’s waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Sarcastically headlined “There are ways to make you talk,” the article was based entirely on the lying assurances of US officials that the interrogation methods being employed by the American military and CIA were all in strict compliance with the Geneva Conventions and that “torture is not an option.”
Schmitt was also heavily involved in the Times’ handling of the major document leaks by WikiLeaks, which exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as US conspiracies around the globe, in the “Cablegate” release of State Department documents.
He was one of the Times reporters who was sent to the White House in 2010 to brief Obama administration officials on the contents of the material obtained by WikiLeaks and to consult on how the newspaper should handle it.” [snip]
“The other noteworthy byline is that of Steven Erlanger, the newspaper’s London bureau chief and a 30-year veteran of the Times. In addition to his reporting duties, Erlanger serves as a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, which organizes Bilderberg-style, closed-door conferences of top state officials and big business figures to discuss strategic issues of concern to US and British imperialism. Other governors include the former head of MI6, the British secret intelligence service, various bank chiefs and the senior director of Goldman Sachs. Honorary governors include former Tory prime ministers David Cameron and John Major. The chairman of the group is Lord (George Islay MacNeill) Robertson, a senior advisor to BP and former secretary general of NATO.”
LOL The youthful activity that crippled me was just bending, lifting, and carrying way too much, so your discretion, wd, though appreciated, was unnecessary. (More’s the pity lol.)
I must say, I don’t understand your antipathy to having a controlled border, like every other industrialized country, including Mexico, seeks to have–do you not agree that Islamist terrorists can come in that way? (Note: Reports are that several have already been apprehended, and ISIS has proclaimed its intention to infiltrate its people that way.)
This is one area where I feel that Trump is making sense, when we have so may sworn enemies, we should know who is coming into our territory. And I would note that Nieto also said there were benefits to Mexico if drug cash and guns had more difficulty coming south from our territory into Mexico.
This is only one area where Trump points favor our own legal workers. Another is his condemnation of our horrible, worker-injuring trade agreements I thought it would be a no-brainer that you would show more sympathy for the interests of our own workers, and would not be, in effect, taking the corporatist-favoring position, which is alsoo the Clinton position.
Am I missing something here?
you my be missing a lot, as far as i’m concerned. first, if the mexico-us border wall is so fine, why aren’t the agents stopping US arms getting into mexico? and:
“The Mexico–United States border is an international boundary running from Tijuana, Baja California, and Imperial Beach, California, in the west to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, Texas, in the east. This border, separating Mexico and the United States from each other, traverses a variety of terrains, ranging from major urban areas to uninhabitable deserts. It is the most frequently crossed controlled international boundary in the world, with approximately 350 million legal crossings being made annually.” wikipedia
i checked, and far more mexicans and other nationalities in the global south are leaving than coming. but here’s the wiki on the us/mexico border ‘barrier’, including the cameras, the problems of divided lands, and more. silly idea, imo.
as to reports of ISIS entries, again i’d ask: who created isis but the US and its western puppets? and still fund/s the newly branded ones to keep the money rolling in? who sells weapon systems and arms to the saudis to make war on the houthis in yemen, creating more and more pissed off extremists? fearing isis for me is a fool’s game. so some come (not the lone wolves predicted to be here already. perhaps the US will consider stopping the endless war on terror and think of diplomatic peace efforts. well, no; that aint gonna happen, is it? more fear equals more militarization, both globally and domestically.
as far as the TPP (ttip, for that matter) believe me when i tell you they have almost nothing to do with worker wages. and if you think t-rump cares about workers, or that ‘hillary is the cause of black immiseration’…i dunno what to tell you.
this must be one of the silliest conversations i’ve ever had on the boards.
Also, thanks for your instruction on making a link; I use that technique to copy/paste generally, but thought something else was required to make a link. So, here is the link I wanted to add, hope it works: http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=8081
I provide this link because this is the third area where I agree with Trump, i.e., that political correctness has been allowed to take us deep into the land of the absurd. Ultimately, we will all be admonished to just stay inside the womb lol. How can we compete in a world with such tough people as the Russians and the Chinese if we continue to breed and create such delicate snowflakes? IMO, all pc word re-engineerings take us away from direct speech and truths in favor of cushioning sensibilities, but we will never have a world where nobody’s feelings ever get hurt. More reasonable to grow a thicker skin, IMO, than to embrace “microinvalidations.” What does the First Amendment mean, then? Indeed, what does “freedom” mean?–it cannot just mean freedom to do only what hurts nobody else’s feelings.
There is bluntness, and there is bluntness in service to acts of intimidating discrimination. Over 50 years watching the counter-attack against the civil rights movement that ended de jure segregation in Southern states, I have become very interested in the large number of transplants to the South who “go native” in their attitudes, who take great delight in calling a spade a spade but are uttlerly offended when they get called out directly for gratuitous insults. And heaven help anyone who accuses them of white Northern privilege that still tolerates massive de facto segregation. Or tells them that the practice in the 1920s in North Georgia of “sundown towns” (Ball Ground self-confesses to being one of them) was contrary to the the 14th amendment of the US Constitution.
It is only the amendments that protect what I want to do that I promote, not the ones that restrain my (cough) “freedom”.
I know lots of Noo Yawkers and Massatoosits folks who don’t like being reminded that those regions profited from the slave trade. That’s what they call “pc”. And they seek safe spaces where they can get away from historians.
That said, the trend that I see with college anxieties about micro-aggressions (which are not so micro in the aggregate) is the outright failure to prosecute rapes committed by one student on another.
The in loco parentis tut-tutting about microagressions harks back to what back in the day were called dorm parietals. The issues are active campaigns of harassment, intimidation, and discrimination of students who are labeled as “other”. Bullying and rape are tools of intimidation; that’s where the issue is. And for dominant groups, false charges of rape are a weapon of intimidation.
So Trump appeals to folks who no longer are guaranteed that in every situation they will be assumed to dominate by their being a “real American”, whatever that might be. As best I can tell, Trump’s “real Americans’ are the folks that can’t tell a Muslim from a Sikh and are ready to terrorize either in the name of protecting the borders.
It’s just another form of Sundown Townism…”If you are around this town after the sun sets, you will not be alive.” Just kinder and gentler. “We will transport you to the edge of town with no transportation, no food, and no prospects. Good luck, cuz the next town is just like this one.”
I fully expect that there are some folks from Boston’s Southie who have gone native in north Georgia and western North Carolina. It seems that talking about race in the South is always too “politically correct” to allow for justice. When the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1680 passed the law that defined “Indian”, “Negro”, and “white”, they did it to protect the 1% from the 99%. I am very clear that Trump is representing the 1% because he is telling it like it is: “I, Donald Trump, am the capitalist boss for hell.” Believe him. Good luck trying to figure out how to vote in this miserable election.
Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male is still relevant almost 20 years later because by and large men and the masculine ideal in America have not changed. The advertising promises and social contract in the immediate Post-World War II period is what most men think they are defending. In fact, that set of cultural norms betrayed them. Trump’s shilling on the old promises.
good answer, thd. i might add that ‘trump’s honesty’ about mexicans being rapists, drug dealers, and criminals’ (yes, i ha to look it up) also allows for increased brutalization of anyone w/ brown skin.
the wiki on faludi’s book is worth reading on its own if one hasn’t read the book; thank you. crisp visuals by her historical narrative and terminology.
ack: added: i was on a long phone call when i saw rc’s comments come in via email. one of my first thoughts was how many are offended by first americans taking offense at sport teams names, and for instance: chief wahoo. ‘oh, don’t be so fucking politically incorrect!’ or the braves’: the chop.
Well, you should both know me well enough by now to know that I abhor ALL of the ugly and extreme behaviors referenced above.
Must we always go to the extreme on each and every f–ing point? How pointless that seems to me. I’m not pushing back against efforts to undermine those old outrages, I am pushing back against microinvalidations, microassaults, microinsults, and any other such nonsense. Did y’all even read the link I provided? I can’t believe that either of you two very sensible people can contemplate that idiocy and not want to vomit. Read the article I linked, please. Every good idea can be, and often is, taken too far, until it becomes divisive and counter-productive. When that happens, it is rational to swing the pendulum back the other way until you have re-entered the reasonable zone.
Also, why no response to my points about the border and the effect on our own legal workers?
I did read your link. Did you see my discourse about in loco parentis attitudes of university administrations? The cure might be laughable but the problem of hardnosed bullying and discrimination at elite or wannabe elite universities is real. It can be debilitating to someone who isn’t an aggressive extrovert.
It is not the fact of political correctness that has taken us into the absurd by the cowardice of management and administrations to deal with the issues that minorities are pointing to that draw the response of conservatives as “political correctness”. wd is correct with the statement about sports team mascots. I’m looking forward to the day that a rez team gets a mascot of a snake and a name something like the Wanblee Wasicus. Or a historically black team calls itself the Demon Honkies. That will either provoke an attack of bothsiderism or a mass fainting couch session among the media. Yes, the idea of reverse discrimination here is kind of hard to imagine; those two names are quite a stretch.
So the three areas of agreement with Trump is homeland security at the borders, the scam of so-called free trade agreements, and political correctness.
That you feel the need to find any agreement with Trump, given his total unseriousness about the office that he is seeking was what triggered my thought that some of that North Georgia barbecue had turned your head and Nathan Deal country was casting its spell on you.
The first step to homeland security is to stop gratuitously making enemies in the first place. The second is to be thorough but watch your paranoia and the scams of security contractors. The 9/11 highjackers flew into the country with legal passports and came in through normal custom points of entry. Unless there is information that precedes them, it is very difficult to obey the Constitution and screen out terrorists at points of entry. There’s that “freedom” thing. Freedom of movement, absent probable cause is considered a human right. Being Mexican or being muslim does not constitute probable cause as there are terrorists who are neither Mexican nor muslim who might be of concern.
Trump’s concern for free trade agreements is a matter of pandering to communities that have lost jobs to offshoring by corporations. As a corporation CEO, Trump engages in similar practices himself. It is a purely political pose.
What makes university administration actions absurd is that the measures do not really take a hardnosed stand against the discrimination they intend to discourage. The “political correctness” charge has been a bit of a sham since conservative professors first uncorked it in the 1980s. Students were wanting to learn about how the very interests that funded the university were engaging in perpetuation of all types of discrimination. And those students wanted courses in the history and sociology of the origins of racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in Western Civilization. And courses in all the cultures and civilizations of the world. That ran afoul of conservative insistence on the “classical” form of the history of Western Civilization that sought to initiate students into a “liberal” education that provided the basis of freedom. In other words, history of Western Civilization was a set ideology much as Marx’s recapitulation of the history of ancient society, feudalism, and capitalism is a set ideology. Students no longer wanted to be initiated into the ideology that conservative professors were peddling. (Note that a lot of these conservative professors were otherwise quite good and meticulous scholars in their fields, but on this they went too far.)
By far the most contentious area of study was history of the South, for obvious reasons. And nothing upset the anti-political correctness people so much as the deconstructivist intellectual movement of post-modernism that argued that narratives are socially and politically constructed instead of being eternally or objectively true. And the absurd part of that movement was the precious jargon and language used to communicate ideas about political narratives. So we get a real issue being labeled “microaggressions” without a lot of practical grounding to it, a movement on campus to deal with it using the same terminology, and administrative memos doing the same. That puts a patina of absurdity on a half-measure to deal with a real activity of discrimination.
What is at issue is not just hurtful speech by a pattern, unconscious or deliberate, of persistent and repetitive hurtful speech intended to exclude a category of people from equal participation within an institution. Often these patterns are unconscious language frames that have excused discrimination traditionally. Other times, they are unconscious actions based on a supposition of a traditional privilege.
The privileges that remain untouched at universities with rules against micro-aggressions are those of rich alumni, tenured professors who are predatory, athletic teams, and fraternities, sororities, and secret societies whose whole function is exclusion to keep the 1% gene pool pure. The absurdity masks this lack of backbone by the administrations.
Enlightenment values that shaped US understanding of rights consisted of freedom and equality. The French Revolution added brotherhood (fraternite). Those three values operate in tension with one another. I suppose one can insist on freedom to be a jerk; that, after all is Trump’s platform and the source of his popularity among a lot of white working class men. “Make America great again” after all is an assertion of militant exceptionalism that appeals to the flagwavers who also voted for W.
Clinton’s exceptionalism is much more polite and insiduous, dangerous but not inconsistent.
Choose your poison but be clear about what you are getting.
This is a lousy election for any sort of sound policy at all.
fine short essay, amigo. i’d add that it depends on which jobs sector is being affected how. of course the US economy *depends* on undocumented immigrant labor, especially agriculture. you may be right that changing from big ag to sustainable farming would help a hella lot, but the bureau of labor statistics guesstimates that over half the undocumented work in ag, including dairy farms, without which…there would be no workers.
jesse jackson was wont to say that immigrants from the global south were the only folks good enough to bend over and pick the food we eat…off the ground. but again: unionizing workers not under the Bigs, but true alternatives, would be helpful in the ongoing struggles.
mr. wd like this shirt that elon james (twib nation) sported for a time; i bought him one. gets a lotta chuckles from brown and red folks in cortez… as does his ‘the original homeland security’ one. note the $ headband feather. ;-)
I understand the BLS data as the farmers of Georgia who so much wanted to rid Georgia of Messicans wound up with crops rotting in the fields when the state legislature actually passed such a bill.
One of the issues today is that most farm labor is used for harvest, a task that used to be accomplished by neighbors scheduling cooperative labor. With large families. Wages, dignity, and schedule are issues never discussed with regard to farmwork because most consumers like the fact that our food is cheap, compared to even a century ago.
Increasingly one political decision that people make unconsciously is what resources to stripmine. Peonage or slave labor, fertile land, coal mountaintops, and petroleum are the current top of the list that contribute to our “high” standard of living. Trees are moving up quickly. And semiconductor minerals.
this conversation, iirc, began when you lauded trump’s failure to comply w/ political correctness, then you’d said ‘fuck safe spaces’. i disagreed, and thought that the micro-stuff seemed a bit over the top, but hadn’t cared enough to go find it. i reckon it’s kinda a misguided riff on the show about reading micro-expressions as more accurate a read than what a person says. i agree.
but i stand accused, that’s okay, if silly-seeming to me. i did begin to wonder if you’d read your link; clearly thd had.
it was ONE residence hall at rutgers that put up the posters. the links: did you read any? many seemed wrapped up in gender, countries of origin, and lgbtq issues and bullying. the [RELATED: Rutgers students smear themselves with fake blood to protest ‘Most Dangerous Faggot’] link was interesting as hell, including that milo Yiannopoulos is a breitbart news editor; his supporters chanted ‘trump, trump’ as protestors chanted ‘black lives matter.’ charming fellow.
now the author of the ‘exposé’ is a graduate (or did she say ‘intern’) of the charles koch assoc. program, “A year of professional education and a full-time job for those passionate about promoting free societies to advance well-being.” the partner organizations tab on the left is kinda fun, too.
the reason i’d mentioned only tpp is that that’s the only one i’d seen a headline about him objecting to. they’re pretty much the same, save for potential signatories; not about trade, but corporate power grabs enshrining into virtual law the lowest common denominator of any regulations, , although tisa is about services and privatizations of same in the main.
yep, clinton was for it before she pretended to be agi’n it (Her running mate’s for it again already), trump is agi’n it till he’s for it if he gains the Big House, and tra la la.
Well, wd, I see I missed your response to some of my points, having thought there was only THD’s and your following comment following my comments.
Now that I see your earlier comment, I must say I find it very disappointing, and not at all persuasive. You can use gratuitously scornful language all you want, but that does not make your points any less silly than you proclaim mine to be.
Who cares who created ISIS? They are now a real threat. I guess that you don’t care if some of our folks, who did NOT create ISIS, get killed in the blowback?. Very, very silly of you, IMO
Likewise your dismissal of my argument re the effect on our workers of the trade deals, by your referencing only the TPP. That deal carries some new and unprecedented problems, but I am talking about all the other ones as well. It is beyond ridiculous to pretend that our workers have not been devastated by all those other deals.
Whose side are you really on, m’dear? Serious question. You are making me wonder if you can think in any way about the real world we are dealing with, and can only argue from the perspective of an already-achieved perfect world that you wish we had instead.
I hereby accuse you of microinsulting and microinvalidating me. Maybe also of microassaulting me; on this last, I’ll have to consult the sociological geniuses at Rutgers lol.
Actually, if you follow what’s going on with Syria, Libya, and Iraq, Daesh/ISIS/ISIL are under serious pressure from Russia/Syria, the Syrian YPG Kurds, Iranian units in Iraq, the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, and a couple thousand embedded US special forces trying to avoid shooting each other because of the complexity of alliances and clandestine operations by the US and NATO.
What is likely is that Assad will reestablish control and if Iraq and the Kurdish Regional government can tolerate a coordinated policy, they will evict Daesh/ISIS/ISIL from Mosul. Russia and Turkey are talking about closing the Turkish border to Russian national Daesh fighter trying to return to Chechnya or Dagestan. And the US/NATO is engaged again in Libya rooting out the Daesh presence in Sirte. There is enough of a consensus among the Gulf States that Daesh crossed some line that they likely will not be given aid and sanctuary there. They are likely less dangerous to the US than other affiliates of al Quaeda. And more likely to lash out at France for some likely personal reasons of the fighters than political strategy.
It very well might be that after 15 years, that particular form of terrorism and the theatrical brutality that went with it has backfired and lost credibility.
US security is much more endangered by the actions of the US overseas than by terrorism at home. What terrorism might occur here is more likely from a frustrated right wing that sees the failure of modern conservatism and sees its chance of driving a permanent Republican majority further to the right slipping away as the GOP splits under the impact of the Trump candidacy. Too much loose talk of Second Amendment solutions and sly references to killing politicians, mostly Democrats at this point. Only takes one Jared Loughner to act on what has been circulating in the local political culture after all.
may i ask you to please not call me ‘m’dear’ while you’re delivering a smack? thank you in advance. as far as isis being a real threat (to USians?) i kinda doubt it, but many of us already had opined that the only way to stop the war on terra’ which has created more enemies as the military occupies muslim holy lands, overthrown duly elected governmental leaders (usually the sectarian ones, of course) is when ‘they come for us one day’. yep, blowback’s a bitch. but i will NOT ‘je suis charlie’, or ‘je suis georgian aujourd’hui’, or any of the other crazy solidarity statements that are so directly related to our nations’ endless foreign debacles.
but i reckon thd is correct about which sort of terrorism is more likely ‘in the homeland’. that is, if ya don’t count DHS itself, as all dissidents have been deemed ‘terrorists’ by them already. ‘-)
THD, I do agree with you that making a voting choice in this election is harder than ever before. I did not vote last time, and I do not intend to vote this time. Withholding the illusion of my consent seems to be the best I can do, especially since I am stuck here in Georgia, where they never vote for anyone I like. :-(
On workers and the border.
When US law arrests and imprisons employers who pay sub-minimum wages and tolerates contractors who hold undocumented immigrants in peonage on as consistent a basis as the US currently deports people, the flood of immigrants at the border will cease.
When the employers of the models that Donald Trump loves to marry stop recruiting Eastern European women for “exciting careers in modeling”, that flood of immigrants at the border will cease.
When transnational corporations cease reassigning foreign nationals to US offices and plants and those foreign workers stop bringing their relatives in for a side business in which the employee of the transnational corporation and their relatives are partners, that flow across the border will cease.
When H1-B visas are no long and corporations must pay top dollar for local engineers, scientists, and other educated personnel, that flow across the border will cease.
When local small-scale agriculture massively replaces giant agribusiness firms in California, Florida, and other places that now employ current and former undocumented workers, that flow across the border will cease.
Until then, it really is just bidness as usual not matter what the demagogues whip up in outrage.
And you know of course, Americans can outbid them by working for less. [ducks]
May/June 1994, Columbia Journalism Review
Trudy Lieberman, “Churning Whitewater”
https://web.archive.org/web/20040427023804/http://archives.cjr.org/year/94/3/whitewater.asp
The organization is Citizens United. Yes, that Citizens United was sued for raising lots of money for a hit film about Clinton; the Supreme Court said it was OK because corporations are people and money is speech. But long before that, Trudy Lieberman starts the story like this:
In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp, handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. “I have a whole file on bond transactions,” Bossie tells Ingersoll. “I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out.” A few minutes later Bossie says, “I don’t know what I have to give you,” but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. “You’re on deadline, I understand that.” He then points Ingersoll in another direction. “Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm,” he adds.
Who was paying David Bossie in 1994 for this research?
And ends:
As of this writing in early April, it appeared that Citizens United was still conducting outreach. A briefing led by Floyd Brown for the Washington press corps was held at the National Press Club on March 15 “to discuss information and documentation regarding Whitewater.” According to Shane, the experience was like “trying to explain it to the learning disabled.” Apparently, though, Citizens United was getting through. The next day the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that Brown handed out a “treasure trove of information” to reporters, “who grabbed them up like goodies.”
A Watergate-style feeding frenzy for those too slow to scoop Watergate and seeking fame. And so it has been for 22 years of scrutiny of the Clintons.
What was the Clintons’ threat to the Republican Party that they devoted so many resources to their destruction as political actors?
My sense is that co-opting all Republicans but the most extreme conservatives was their threat.
Isn’t it interesting that in August the GOP saw their own candidate driving away all but the most extreme and making real the threat that the GOP had spent so much money and effort trying to avoid.
And David Bossie just joined the Trump campaign staff, hitting his middle-age stride. Gonna get interesting before November.
i hadn’t even known they were an actual organization, ay yi yi, but i reckon your guess is correct. maybe, too, they’d noted that bubba was a teflon prez, and that by extension, so would be miz it takes a pillage. absolutely nothing sticks.
Well, Bossie carries a stink with him that can’t be ignored, I certainly agree with that. It seems to me that Trump is doing whatever he thinks is necessary to win, and maybe that is justified when one considers how the entire Establishment and its media are so rabid and one-sided in their attempts to destroy him. But remember, those folks were never deemed to be on OUR side, either. I don’t sense in my heart, and of course I could be proven wrong, that Trump is or would be an extremist in how he uses power when he gets it.
But, THD, your long list of border/worker abuses does nothing to refute the possibility that some ISIS agents with, say, a suitcase nuke, or even something lesser, could come thru our porous border and kill many here. All the things you cite should be fixed, but of course we can’t seem to do anything about any of them. We CAN do something about making the border more secure.
And, for everybody’s continued edification, I offer this: http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/28888/
Really, this trend is unmistakable, and accelerating, it would seem. How can it be reconciled with free speech, freedom, or, especially, the marketplace of ideas concept? Some things are much bigger than specific focused election issues, IMO.
did you note my links to ‘the US/ Mexican borders’. did trump mention the canadian border? far easier for your suitcase bomber to enter, no? although those are quite permeable.
well, the edification seems to be that you are indeed in search of right-wing conservative sites and cherry picking quotes and sources to ballast your belief. i guess we have different ideas about which speech is constitutionally legal (as per SCOTUS) legal, which speech is wrong toward building a more just and inclusive civil society, esp. in closed private college environments). the dude’s huff-po link had exactly one comment (iirc) but objecting. note your source; and may i ask where you’re finding all this stuff? libertarian row, red state, bill mahr?
your link on the header: ‘Your daily dose of right minded news and commentary from across the nation’ (with the italics.
About the Author” William Nardi
“William Nardi is a student at Roger Williams University. He has formerly interned for Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, and worked as a coordinator for several campaigns across the country, including Carly Fiorina’s. He has been published on HYPELINE, Rabble-Rouser, Lone Conservative, College Conservative, Odyssey, and hosts the conservative talk show The Thinker. His articles have been featured on Fox News, Gun Owners of America and the Drudge Report.”
on the right sidebar: ’Professors tell students: Drop class if you dispute man-made climate change’ yeah, colorado springs: such a bastion of liberal thought.
i’m out; i got better things to do w/ my time.
Let’s get real about this. Trump is as much the establishment as Clinton or any of the other Republican or Democratic candidates. Hell, even Bernie Sanders was the establishment, if sort of a gadfly sort. By hiring Bossie, Trump is hiring a skilled character assassin to win without having to discuss policy or issues.
The fixation of terrorists coming through Mexico is very interesting and likely hides some RW brown man fetish. Ya can’t tell a Messican from a Mooslim, ya know. The idea of the great fear being a suitcase nuke is also interesting because politicians have peddled that one for a while without investigating what it would technically require and how heavy it would be. The real practical concern we should have is a locally-born second- or third-generation somewhat secularized muslim who thinks he (likely a he first) is getting in touch with his heritage post-assimilation in the melting pot and buys a jihadi romance of dying for his faith. (The same motivation as the good ole boys who go off the deep end about dying for their country.) And that guy having access to and the ability to open carry a handgun with sufficient ammunition. Paris was a half dozen or slightly more of these guys. San Bernardino was one of them. They operate through a strategy of stochastic terrorism in which the motive is presented and the generic target but the actor and target are random as to whoever is crazy enough to step up to the invitation to a terrorist act or invitation to an assassination.
In some respects they are no different from the mass killers who go postal but they get the big fear because they are muslim and not just postal. It amounts to the media terrorizing up by the frame of the story they tell. Two guys kill a dozen or so people with gunfire; one says nothing; the other says Allah Akbar. The media soon paper over the first and hype the second. That hyping propagates the terror. The media are politically acting in support of terrorizing the public.
And what Paris proved was the real danger is not Mexico but Belgium. And that Hollande’s, Sarkozy’s and Le Pen’s agitating and the aftershocks of the Algerian War 60 years ago make the Parisian banlieues just a little bit angry even without resorting to terrorism. There has not been such ethnic animosity in France since the Dreyfus affair.
Now to your pet hobby horse of the moment: university “Respect” campaigns. Here is one that is not so vague and frivolous and gets to the point of what’s driving this with their translation of their acronym.
http://respect.uark.edu/media-campaigns/
University of Arkansas
Rape Education Services by Peers Using Conscious Thought (RESPECT)
You have to understand the term “rape culture” to understand where this is coming from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_culture
Wikipedia – Rape Culture
Quite a long overview. This seems to be the latest active edge of the feminist movement. And it is about a serious subject.
Of course the rightwing culture that forged Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, and Donald Trump would be demeaning efforts to change the culture that legitimizes and excuses their harassment and assaults.
I predict that like the birther movement put race on the front burner in the Obama presidency such that we ended up with #blacklivesmatter emerging as a movement at the end of his presidency. Like that. if Hillary Clinton is elected the central debate that will erupt toward the end of her presidency is about rape and sexuality and abortion and all of that part of the culture war.
If Trump is elected, that postpones that controversy will be overshadowed by Trump himself, just as W (and his puppeteer Cheney) dominated those eight years. But it will come out when there is a woman elected President of the United States.
Rape still is the third rail of sexual politics. There is so many convolutions of class, race, and commerce imposed on top of that issue.
But no matter. The Breitbarters insist on the freedom of speech to call any woman at all a cunt. The pricks.
thank you, thd; that’s without a doubt one of the best comments i’ve ever read, even w/o time to read the links.
time for me to say g’nite, but for you, and all of us…when i went to find some treme music to send to a musician friend in deecee, i found this; might be on the cutting room floor, dunno. but with all the best art, it’s timeless and universal. can’t even guess how many times i’ve played it today and my heart swelled, and i brimmed tears. ‘annie tee’ (Lucia Micarelli) w/ the subdudes
she’s been playing violin since she was three. nope, that one won’t embed, here’s the link.
so ‘the subdudes w/ out lucia micarelli’
‘Carved in stone is a name I will remember
Skin and bone and a heart that was so tender
Carry on and have yourself a lovely ride
Think of me when you finally reach the other side
Carved in stone is a date he had to go on
And another from the moment of his first dawn
Now alone is someone who cant surrender
To the darkness and sadness this life has sent her
Carry on and have yourself a lovely ride
Think of me when you finally reach the other side
Hold on tight to the things you always taught us
Speak out loud about faith, hope, love and trust
Carry on and have yourself a lovely ride
Think of me when you finally reach the other side
Carry on and have yourself a lovely ride
Think of me when you finally reach the other side
Carved in stone is a name I will remember…’
I really can’t deal with all the reliance on ad hominem/bad messenger shit I’m getting here; you ought to be addressing the factual data, wherever it comes from. I read from many sources, deliberately seeking left AND right, BECAUSE I KNOW THAT BOTH SIDES ARE FULL OF LIARS!!!!!!,
You guys are only using stuff from very left-wing sources, and using straw men. Canada, rape culture, Belgium,blah blah–I ain’t talking about ANY of that, I’m just talking about what I’m specifically talking about, and the basic issues those things raise, but you guys won’t or can’t engage on those, you’d rather pretend that other toothpicks need to be dissected before you consider the big picture forest that I’m trying to focus on.
Last night, I spent 2 hours talking to a 32 year old white farmer who barely scrapes by, here in Atlanta–he was proudly bone ignorant about all the things that we have spent endless hours chewing over for the last 15 years, but you know what he did know about, and was therefore totally fixated on like the carpenter with just one tool, a hammer, who thus thinks every thing is a nail?
WHITE PRIVILEGE.
So, I asked him, OK, if that’s the most important thing, what should we do about it? Blank stare, “I don’t know.”
If you guys don’t think we should be alarmed by this, then I just give up.
Welcome to the world I’ve inhabited for 70 years.
I am alarmed by that because I know that what it requires is accepting the fact that blacks, Latinos, and Asians will be treated equally, and people who are privileged are blind to how they are privileges especially if they are at the bottom of the class heap. And that’s just the way the system was put together in 1680 and maintained ever after. The reality is that he won’t get stopped on the highway for driving while white. He won’t be discriminated against in most corporations unless he runs on a vindictive minorty manager. But he still will be excluded from exclusive neighborhoods on the basis of income and class. Unless he has business in the neighborhood, delivering produce or a side remodeling business.
I was alarmed by it when I first became conscious of it in 1964 and 1965. I’ve tried to answer that same question you asked for 50 years. I can’t talk seriously about this issue in real ways with my own relatives because their suppositions about other communities are not in fact the realities of those communities.
Too much cynicism can eat you alive and you wind up not engaging in doing anything. Too much credibility can mislead. It’s damn hard to walk that thin line between them. Especially in a region that has deceived itself about its own human rights crimes for 400 years.
i just saw at the Guardian that trump is going full-tilt-boogie on ‘stop and frisk everywhere! cuz it works so well in NYC.’
i remembered that i’d never said that i didn’t begin to understand why we should have been alarmed by your farmer’s focus on white privilege (i must have skittered off to do something else). thd seems to have grasped it, but not i.
but as far as ad hominems, i would have said look to your own self (whose side are you on?’) , and on particulars v. wider picture, i still don’t get that anything we brought in was avoiding any of your issues, save for ‘our jobs and the wall’, and i reckon i’m not quite as nationalistic as that, nor do i think any sort of wall would save any, even if i did. too penetrable, both borders, so the answer lies in anti-capitalism, not waging the drug war, etc., but those are much longer discussions, of course. as in: our current immiseration is a by-product of capitalism a it was initially constructed.
anyhoo, i just figured i’d say this, not expecting you to be back, rc.
What white privilege looks like:
When we have bad white presidents, no one says “won’t see another white pres for generations!”
Laurie Penny, The Baffler, “Harry Potter and the Conscience of a Liberal”
http://thebaffler.com/blog/harry-potter-laurie-penny
It is interesting how one’s youthful commitments shape one’s view of what’s important no matter how much maturity makes you see the intertwining of good and evil and the complexity of getting anything at all done. And the way even simple social principles create their own epiphenomena.
White privilege has a number of forms. Laurie Penny here dissects the meritocratic liberal form, the kinder gentler assumption of earned privilege of social mobility. What is resurrecting itself after 70 years of defeat and delegitimization is the direct assertion of genetic and racial superiority and dominance, even if the attempt is to play the victim in doing it. Qui bono? Who benefits from either of these? A continuing unjust system that requires an underclass (local and global) to create the wealth of capital (that in economic mythology gets recycled into general prosperity) and the individual wealth of the 1%, which they pass on to their children as a legacy just as Hobbes’s absolute monarchy passed on to heirs as a legacy. Among others, the British still pay taxes to support the royal family, one of the most generous welfare systems in the world. And the royal family in capitalist society is above all a network of interlocking corporations.
White privilege is exposed in the anger when the meritocratic system leans down and picks an African-American or an immigrant for the magical training that potentially can make them rich, a Supreme Court justice, or a President.
A similar anger exposes itself when women enter fields “where they don’t belong”. Or women’s sports asserts that it deserves the same meritocratic magic as men’s sports. Danica Patrick knows this full well, among others. Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Lies: Sex, Lies, and Revolution digs into the sexual and gender issues she only hints at in this Baffler piece.
In the simplest form, “rape culture” refers to the attitude that it is the female who is responsible for her own rape and the institutional attitudes the support that attitude in law enforcement, criminal justice, the courts, universities, corporations, and general society. It is the exclusion from the ability to walk streets safe at night without other people making assumptions about one’s sexual behavior. Is the the engraining of this attitude into the “common sense” among men and women of a society. It is the social construction of power and a culture that creates a narrative that is socialized into a common sense of how the social world operates.
So when one asserts the common sense of freedom, the question is freedom for whom and whom else? How far does that freedom go? For privileged white males it goes far enough to rape a female and get no more than a six months jail sentence because it might ruin his privileged affluent life otherwise. For too many white and black males and females in blue uniforms and stars, it means a freedom to kill without consequences. For affluent white males of a certain class, it means the magic of getting a million dollars and being told to start a business with it after years of careful mentorship of a cutthroat business operator dad. For people who come in contact with them, it is the freedom to be raped, be excluded solely because of one’s race from housing, employment, and fair consideration, of having one’s public schools taken away or starved into failures.
For less affluent whites who have the privilege of not being excluded because of race, it means forking over taxes and school tuition to go to a private school or the indignity of going to a black majority school, where the anger against other people’s exclusion gets taken out on you. But those folks have the freedom to see how their situation has been manipulated to bring them in conflict with blacks or to side with the creators of this system as fellow whites.
For less affluent white women, white privilege means not being excluded from better trailer parks because of race (to use a stereotype as shorthand; reality is more complex), but it also means always having to be more attentive to surroundings and less sure of safe spaces than the more affluent sisters who are seeking safe spaces in universities.
Each of the conflicts among those social demographics and classes works to maintain a system that institutionalizes continuing peonage (slavery), dollar-sign justice, and cultural conflict and violence that is the form of business as usual. And business-as-usual means that everyone must know their place and not depart from that place in a society that judges people by how well they compete. The right wants to continue business-as-usual to expand their own freedom. The left wants to radically overhaul the system to actually deliver on freedom, equality, and brotherhood (siblinghood? laugh if you want) because business-as-usual eventually leads to a nasty social crackup.
quite an essay, my friend, laurie’s looks to be so, as well. 2L2R for now, though. i’ve read yours twice already, likely need a third or fourth to absorb it, and i must say that looking up epiphenomena, reading the wiki, made me none the wiser for it.
i’ll be back later, hopeully, but as to the wiki on ‘rape culture’, before i read it, i’d been going to mention to you ‘in prison and whoa, the military’ as well. unless i missed it, the rampant (largely unacknowledged save for ‘we will not tolerate it’ offishull baloney), military rape culture wasn’t mentioned.
Nor is officially sanctioned anal rape to queerify (or is that feminize) the dominated. Police and nightsticks and broomsticks are a too often problem. Fraternity hazings can sometimes get out of hand. Putting people in their “place” and extending a vampire-like hold of abuse through a culture.
yes. as many of us had, i’d learned that mot rape was about power/domination over individuals and targeted groups rather than libido.
your final sentence is a gem; your essay above would qualify for the baffler, methinks. you still w/o a sound chip? stuff’s breaking bad at standing rock. i’d thought to do a storify rather than just videos since i assume you’re still w/o. dayum, there’s a lot to bring, and me…so slow.
Yes, it is breaking bad at Standing Rock. Sheriff of the next county north of the rez is in the pockets of the pipeline people, emphasizing the protest not being peaceful after they ruined significant sacred sites, like bulldozing a community cemetery really.
It really is emotional for me because I know the family names from that area and knew some of these folks parents, grandparents, and probably great-grandparents (it was 40 years ago that I was there).