Fake News reveals some commonalities of "Left" and "Right"

As I noted in an earlier post, if you thought 2016 was weird, then 2017 is getting even weirder. Several things stand out about the past 12-14 months.

1. Bernie Sanders was cheated and thereby Progressives were crushed and abused
2. HER heinous was defeated in the worst political upset in American election history
3. Populism, both left AND right, have emerged strongly
4. The corruption of American politics is now perceived by the majority of formerly disinterested citizens
5. The curse of globalism is now coming under attack from two directions: right AND left
6. The vastness of income inequality is ever more evident
7. As a corollary, the enforced austerity of the 99% is also gaining recognition
8. Fake News and Lame Stream Fraudcasters are now seen clad in the emperor's new clothes
9. While the DemonRATic Party refuses to change, Trump is rebuilding the Repugnants
10. Deep State has now entered common parlance.

Many other things are excluded by reasons of space only.

The issue at point here is Fake News: what is said and what is not said.

What is not said include things like Bernie's candidacy, DAPL protests, and (gasp!) some positive things Trump has done. Do not be misled by what I am about to write; I have no love for the Hairball. But really we must give honest assessments to Facts, not "Alternative Facts", not anonymous sources, not on unfairly edited reportage. If we fail to acknowledge contrary views then we are no different than the hypocritical "Mainstream" (i.e., establishment) Democrats. Believe it or not, sometimes the righties have a few valid points to make. We should recognize this. To not do so would be to partake of the rampant hypocrisy.

Are the extremes of the traditional spectrum, left vs right, actually coming together in some fashion? I think yes.

While surfing the intertubes, I listen to various websites, including Right Wing. One of the RW sites is the very pro-Trumpian Next News Network. To strengthen my conclusion of some fold in the political universe bringing the two extremites closer together is strong anti-war rhetoric from this RW site. It's brief, about 3:00. It starts out about John McCain briefly.

Although the next item is relatively trivial, at least to most people, DJT doesn't see it that way. No, this isn't about the size of his hands, it is about the size of his inauguration audience. Seeing is believing. Judge for yourselves.

The next bit reeks of post-Benghazi misdirection. Remember that internet video which allegedly started the riot? A planned, coordinated terrorist attack, about which Clintonites and BHO lied about? Now some news agencies are blaming a Trump speech for massive Muslim refugee violence in Sweden, insinuating that it was perpetrated by a Trump speech. Yeah, right.

MSM still has not given up on smearing Trump. Smearing is done by innuendo. Criticism is based on fact. Modern news propaganda spewers of the MSM are parrots who say whatever their overlords tell them to say.

By smearing Trump, rather than criticizing actually harmful actions, MSM becomes the boy who cried wolf. They are becoming progressively less trusted every day.

The foregoing list of commonalities is small but is presented to show that some exist. A Republican Dove is still more Hawkish than a Progressive Dove. The overlap is similar but not identical.

Consensus needs to be developed whenever possible. Mitch McConnel and his fellow racist Republicans did not brook any consensus with Obama. DemonRATs do not seek consensus, they just roll over on their backs.

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detroitmechworks's picture

The only commonality I see among those they smear is an unwillingness to blame Russia for all the ills of the world.

Germany's moving troops to Lithuania, We're encircling Russia with bombers and missiles...

This war is coming no matter what the president says. Right now my money is on an "Unprovoked" attack on one of our ships. Probably either in the Crimea, or in the Baltic.

These assholes are way too predictable.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Alligator Ed's picture

@detroitmechworks Both the Clintonites and Drumpf's inner circle have been drooling over such a juicy target in a most non subtle way. Whatever excuse they will cock up, will be unrelated to the Truth. The Truth has two parts here (maybe more): oil and shedding the dollar as their exchange currency. Other observers have deduced that the invasion of Iraq was really about Saddam's effort to ditch the dollar. Gaddafi made the same mistake. Of course Syria is Russia's ally, so they must be finished off--but damn those pesky groups keep fighting with each other, blocking a unilateral victory.

False flag operation? You bet. Maybe wooden fishing boats attacking an aircraft carrier--yeah, that's it, perfect!

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detroitmechworks's picture

@Alligator Ed China too.

I'm pretty sure that the monoparty is well aware of that fact, hence the current fear mongering against both China and Russia. (If you recall a few months ago there was a big kerfuffle about China and the South China Sea, and how DARE Trump talk to Taiwan...)

And that Captain from Red October just keeps running through my head...

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-JA1ffd5Ms]

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Alligator Ed's picture

@detroitmechworks but only Russia, as far as we know, has nukes. I fear however that the neocons are quite capable of thinking the unthinkable. Maybe this is their vision for the end-times because continuation of this disastrous military build-up and fear-mongering will undoubtedly lead to a different type of climate change: nuclear winter.

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detroitmechworks's picture

@Alligator Ed The only SANE response is to point and laugh.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIoBrob3bjI]

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

@Alligator Ed There is absolutely no doubt that China has thermonuclear weapons.

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Great column

Disagree with #3. It is NOT populism. It is running from a theater on fire. The masses know that they have been screwed. This is covered in other items on your list. The elites are now out in the open trashing the earth and all of us and there is a growing sense from the 99%.

Check out this first paragraph. I separated the two sentences and added bold to the second sentence

I begin with the simple idea that climate change and its denial have been organizing all of contemporary politics at least for the last three decades.

Climate change plays the same role that social questions and the class struggle played over the two preceding centuries.

The main point is to link climate change to your entire list of crazy things happening. And if the second sentence is true, then this calls for a massive change for everyone and everything on the earth.

The election was about 2 lies. Lie of globalization. Lie of return to the land. And the lie is right out in the open.

This is the first time that a political movement has been explicitly organized by and for climate deniers. And it is easy to understand why: the total lack of realism of the combination—billionaires dragging millions of so-called middle class people towards a “return to the past”!—would be starkly obvious. For the moment, the whole thing only hangs together on the condition of it being totally indifferent to the geo-political situation.

It is reasonable to try and escape behind borders, but it is insane. No country is an island. Another impossibility.

Aligator Ed's article is about the danger facing us

If 2017 is the year that will be full of dangers, it is because Trump is looking like propelling the U.S. into a geopolitical dream that even the mavericks in the administration of Bush Jnr were not able to imagine. How can you be realistic in geopolitics if you deny the very contradiction between the material conditions of the “geo” situation and the political aims for which you are striving?

Bush Jnr still had the idea of constructing a world order—……

.

I will now ask for two huge favors.

The quotations above are from Bruno Latour. I think he is the most important thinker in the world today and my small steps to bring his work to others have been uneven at best. Even Aligator Ed who was a philosophy major has struggled with his work. The post below is an attempt to put Latour's work into circulation.

Here is the really big favor. I don't have much time this morning but after a long discussion last evening with a Clinton supporter I had some thoughts. Blame Jill Stein???? Missing the point. In a way this comment below was a response to him. And here is the really big favor. Out of habit I looked at DK/TOP and the comment just came out. I am not asking you to comment or REC it over there, but if you want more details and links to what I wrote above you can find it there.

I spend so many years on DK, and it is so easy to comment, that it just flowed out. Sorry.

Can we learn from a French Intellectual?

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Alligator Ed's picture

@DonMidwest This helped me understand Bruno Latour a bit better. Many excellent points are presented in the two citations. I will copy just a few with my analysis.

Secondly: the rush forwards managed for thirty years by the deregulators is no longer compatible with the ideals of development and the calls for globalization. That kind of globalization is finished; there is not enough globe left, to put it in plain language. The modern world is just not possible.

By deregulators, I infer the corporatists who seek unfettered ability to pillage and squeeze blood from the proverbial turnip. By globalization, I infer that means oligarchists having free run of the planet, not just a country to exploit. Thus retreat from globalism as defined by Latour is simply retreating to established sovereign states for these oligarchists to continuing raping. If one disagrees with this interpretation, fine.

In my mind, the only difference is in the scope of the rape: globalism exploits globally, but "return to the old world" implies to me a more limited scope of exploitation.

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Steven D's picture

@DonMidwest fpr whatever reason I cannot recommend your comment Don. Strange.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

I am putting them here so we don't all have to click on that place to get to them.

Europe Only Europe
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/P-178-EUROPE-GB...

How Not to Be Mistaken About Trump
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/LEMONDE-12-11-1...

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

@dkmich @dkmich

Thanks! I did not want to go there.

Edit: Right, what I got out of this was: the de-regulators were 'rushing the world forward' into 'modernization' - corporatization of the planet was necessary to 'overcome the limitations' of local democratic government, allowing the people of the country an interest and a voice in their own lives, governance and country in the double-plus-ungood-unModern way - and if America does not control all other countries for their corporations and billionaires, then this may be an 'opportunity' for Europe's corporations and billionaires to control all other countries in this looting phase.

Corporations are grossly ineffective because they often try to run local business via distant CEO orders with no idea of needs or circumstance beyond squeezing out maximized profit even at the cost of ruining the actual businesses, in order to maximize the profits specifically of each highly-bonused CEO. This is even more disastrous when civilizations and ecologies are being sacrificed by distant controllers regarding and labelling them as 'trade blocs' and their people and natural resources as either assets or liabilities, all to be disposed of as Those Who Actually Matter see fit.

I do not like this Bruno Latour, and he sounds to me like a Parasite Class-serving 'ooooo, it's devastatingly new and anything not-new, by its nature is garbage; it must be (gasp) modern!!! and therefore fashionably destructive' idiot to me.

I detest propagandists passing themselves off as philosophers...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Alligator Ed's picture

@Ellen North @Ellen North quite appropriate:

if America does not control all other countries for their corporations and billionaires, then this may be an 'opportunity' for Europe's corporations and billionaires to control all other countries in this looting phase.

I grant your premise. When the biggest dog leaves the room, the next biggest dog is free to rape and pillage just like the former bully. Your opinion about Bruno Latour may be correct. I am still unsure. Unlike the clarity of Camus and Sartre, I still find his writing somewhat opaque--see my comment above to DonMidwest.

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@Alligator Ed

Opacity and obfuscation are, I've found, common to corporatism/'globalists'. And I've also found that they tend to ascribe different meanings to words, at least in part, I suspect, so as to be able to speak in code without making the prey nervous. That being a separate issue from the created confusion of co-opted conceptual terms such as 'reform', 'liberal' or 'progressive'.

There's been a lot of impetus for some time among techies and, really, all over the net, to dispose of 'the old' and 'bring in the new', promoting change simply for the sake of change, 'new being better', which I ascribe, also at least in great part, to social engineering in order to accustom the people to loss and disruption in the name of 'inevitable updating' and 'modernizing'. 'Modernizing' generally being less human-appealing and often far less user-friendly for at least some of us old farts, much like 'the new economy', and the corporate restructuring of democracies. I suppose it all works out for certain groups, just not for others, but the general ideal of the internet - and of democratic society - was previously that it worked for virtually everyone. But those who translate such as hostile corporate take-overs of countries and the world as 'modernization' raise my hackles.

Probably haven't expressed this well at all; still waiting for coffee to circulate to my brain. Maybe later today, lol.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

were doing a hatchet job on Trump when they piled on with massive opposition before he had actually had a chance to do anything except talk. For comparison, just before Bush was "elected" in 2004, we didn't pour out into the streets, screaming at the top of our lungs--and we knew, at least on the left, that he had started a fucking illegal war with people who had never attacked us. But that wasn't worth pouring out into the streets. Somehow Trump saying toxic racist and sexist shit on TV for 6 months is worse than killing tens of thousands of Iraqis. Somehow his racist and sexist campaign is also worse than the racist campaigns of George W Bush, who literally climbed up into the Oval Office on the backs of thousands of disenfranchised Black voters. Because saying things is worse than doing them, in this rabbit-hole we've gone down. Or, more to the point, because the Establishment wanted Bush in there, and they don't want Trump. So they're making use of us, giving us what we want so they can get what they want. We get to have a nasty mean right-wing strong man to shake our fists at, and we get to have an inspirational outpouring of people shaking their fists at him in the street, which we can then characterize in our own minds as the rebirth of the Left we've been waiting for all this time. They (the establishment) get to keep piloting this corrupt shambles of a system without interference from us.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

That was last year. It was smashed. The leader of it is now going around the country advocating for the oligarchy. These days, the only thing the left wing can think of to do is to play roles in a stage play put on by that same oligarchy.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Alligator Ed's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal However Left wing populism, like seeds for a new harvest, lays just beneath the surface. This pop up in time. So, too, will the weeds on Status Quo Oligarchy. Anger is seething in this country. The question is which will flourish, the crops or the weeds?

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kharma's picture

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There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties.. This...is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.--John Adams