@Centaurea @Centaurea

"Do you think that democracy is part of the problem? That in a democracy people are always going to vote for more things, they are never going to vote to take them away. Now the payroll tax is down; good luck ever having it go back to the way it was. Good luck with a lot of these things. Is democracy going to be what sends us over the cliff?"

Getting this quotation took me to DK. First time I've clicked on there in a while. It was, in fact, my own essay. Perhaps I should look into getting my stuff off of there. I simply haven't wanted to *be* there at all, so I haven't done it.

As to Erin's question, I have one of my own:

"Who's `us?'"

#2

Beet Press is a satire site. This is the first I've heard of it, but looking at their current material, they do it well.

What makes the Neera Tanden "quote" such good satire is that it perfectly expresses what she actually thinks.

If you take Tanden's actual tweets and read underneath the layers of snarkiness and personality-disordered nastiness, that's what she's really saying.

@Centaurea

It's not "anti-American" in the sense that whoever wrote it is trying to destroy us. If anything, it's "anti-American" in the sense that it's criticizing America as fundamentally morally bankrupt and authoritarian.

I don't exactly agree with strife delivery on this, because I don't think nationalism, or national/tribal culture, is the most helpful lens through which to view our current conditions. I see an international financial arrangement between bankers, big businessmen, and what I loosely call goons: the CIA, MI6, Mossad, yes, but also Blackwater/Xe/Whatever Erik Prince's band of thugs is calling themselves these days, Stratfor, Palantir, etc. That international financial and political arrangement could be called capitalism or fascism, which to me, at this point, look like descriptors for different aspects of the same thing: capitalism now seems to describe the economic and financial workings of this international arrangement, while fascism describes its political and military functions. Or one could use capitalism and fascism in a traditional way, with their traditional meanings, in which case we could debate about which we're living under. But regardless of how we use the terms or which one we think applies, nationalism plays a subordinate role. You might almost see nationalism as one of the fictions the arrangement produces through its media machines to manipulate people.

That's why, though I don't think they know what they're really rebelling against, so many of the right, particularly those of a Brexit or Trumpian sensibility, are styling themselves as defenders of a national culture. They sense that their national culture has been, or is being, digested by a malign influence. Unfortunately for them, they see the source of that malign influence as people from different areas of the globe with different skin colors and different mother tongues than theirs, rather than seeing the source as the City of London (or here, as Wall St.) And for all their talk of black helicopters, they don't see the CIA or MI6 as the source of this nastiness either. At the end of the day, it's all the fault of the nearest handy scapegoat, preferably someone against whom you can activate your racism or xenophobia.

In fact, what actually happening is that the same thing that's destroying the biosphere is also destroying national cultures--blitzing them and then digesting the rubble to fuel itself.

I hate living in system L-374.

#3
1) In what manner is the Jimmy Dore clip "right wing"? Be specific.

2) For reference, here's the signature quote in question:

America is a pathetic nation; a fascist state fueled by the greed, malice, and stupidity of her own people.
- strife delivery

What part of that do you believe is "anti-American", and why?

@snoopydawg
and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself".
Mark Twain
Great final episode last night on PBS.

#4

There's humor in the pain to acknowledge Jimmie's truth because it is so reveling of corruption, a quality which includes lying, is that he is right. We need lots of things in politics--but the most important is integrity above self.

He destroyed the dem's idea that people have nowhere to go if they don't vote for them. Schumer is an idiot to think that any centrist republican would vote for the leftist, socialist, communist democrats. They will vote with the true republican not the democrat that is trying to sit on the fence.

Hope people will take the time to watch it. I would love to post this elsewhere, but...