Orange State's who won the week poll
I found this choice very disturbing
Ecuador, for shutting off Julian Assange's internet access, forcing him to spend his days playing minesweeper and engaging in witty banter with Clippy
So they have jumped the shark so completely on liberal values that they PRAISE the attempt to censor information about our corrupt system!
Nobody that supports that site should EVER be allowed to use the word liberal to describe themselves
This on top of the daily LITERAL red Scare tactics that they endorse
Our allies believe Assange to be a hero, but not the Hill-bots of Orange State.
It is almost like they want the world to hate us like they did under Gee DUHHH B Bush
WTF?!
Germany honors them as heroes while the US govt. treats them as the worst criminals ever.https://t.co/apIPoMK6Zt@DrJillStein @LeeCamp
— Zorixas (@Zorixas) October 21, 2016
Comments
Actually, it's time to retire the terms liberal and liberalism.
Liberal does not describe people of good will toward others and shepherds of the earth. It has been despoiled and tainted. As in neoliberalism and global liberalism, a form of sociopathy that has harmed so many and destroyed so much.
I've been using "The Left" which has roots in history. But words change and evolve and there may be better terms.
I nominate
"humans".
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
As in "The Human Party"
I am all for that!
Agreed
At least in American discourse, the word 'liberal' has come to mean something like 'cosmopolitan centrist.' It's practically synonymous with political uselessness and the status quo. A "liberal" is a corporate executive who pays low wages and supports offshoring jobs and privatization--but listens to NPR and recycles! Or an academic who doesn't care a whit about wars or economic justice, but is obsessed with "safe spaces" and "microagressions." It's as if modern liberalism is a construct designed to avoid dealing with more pressing problems, similar to Fox News Republicans, even if the bubble isn't quite as obvious. Though this may explain both sides' visceral contempt for each other.
And the way the Clinton crowd has been going around claiming the word 'progressive' for themselves, that word is about to meet the same fate. These people are so phony that everything they touch turns stale almost immediately. For the new movement or party, I'd simply nominate 'socialist'--it's tried and true, and historically, it's the only thing these ass clowns are afraid of.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." --Noam Chomsky
I like that idea.
especially because it is unlikely to be quickly co-opted.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
Bought this t-shirt from my local Socialist Alternative folks,
same people who helped elect Kshama Sawant in Seattle.
I wear it all the time, usually paired with the Tax The Rich button I also bought from them.
Yes, I definitely, proudly proclaim myself publicly to be a Socialist. When explained so few are ready to oppose you.
Anybody know how how to properly position this picture? Just spent too much time trying to upload it, and when it did it came out sideways, which is not the way I shot it or was downloaded to my computer. I'm not great with this stuff to begin with. Thanks for any help.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
Hell, you saw that much coming in Obama's first term
Several of us made it a point regularly to point that out at every opportunity, starting back then, and boy did that piss off those Stepford Acolytes at Kos. I often called it "predictable" and "purposeful" and they could call themselves progressive all they wanted but that it would be bullshit every time they did, and people were on to them. This was back before they allowed the free-for-alls on hide-rating, and is no doubt why such gang attacks on the written word were so encouraged after awhile. That's the only way they can suppress the
sentimentsfacts laid bare against them.Don't discount how rapatiously
right wing media trashed the name "liberal". So-called liberals stopped calling themselves liberal and moved to using "progressive".
Personally, I like the term "Social Democrat". It's less scary to the average Joe, is reminiscent of Bernie who was liked on all sides, and steals what little cache remains to the Democratic Party without joining it.
I like the term "Social Democrat" too, Gusto Girl.
It's redolent with kindness.
I have been trying to come up with something like...
CBCP - Citizens before Corporations Party.
Not sure its got a good ring but we need something that shows we will be placing the needs of the regular person above corporate needs like the 2 current main parties support.
"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me
Using traditional political categories
to describe the complexity of contemporary belief systems tends to limit, rather than facilitate creative discourse. Most of the various "ism" terms that we've been using to explain, delimit, and identify ourselves no longer accurately define who and what we actually are. Very often these kinds of words serve to inhibit, or block communication - sometimes intentionally so. They are old-fashioned, outmoded words for the most part. I think we might be better off to quit using them altogether.
native
Too many people say Hillary is the left
I want a better term!
I do NOT want to be associated with her in ANY way!
When I was a kid, Republicans used to red scare people, now it's the Democrats. I am getting too damn old for this crap!
They have no idea of the historic
connotation of the term. They are ignorant, brainwashed, bewildered by our opposition to their sociopathy, and too lazy to learn. Our society has been really dumbed down by the media over the past few decades and the inability of so many teachers to teach the truth to students.
It's my opinion that No Clhid Left Behind & Race To The Top
are all about getting working class kids into permanent vocational training for the menial jobs the controllers of the political economy envisage to maximize profits for themselves. If the above programs were so important, why weren't they extended to the private schools?
The expensive tests are all about keeping kids in the digital workforce of the low-paying future; same for the charter schools except with the charters, there's healthy profits for the capitalists.
For the kids that don't pass or don't want to be peons, there's an efficient jail or military option.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
School them.
Hillary is NOT the left. Define the left, and show how she is not.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
Berlin is still haunted.
I was there the year the wall fell. I never want to live in a country that has been bombed. So I may be able to now. Well, fuck.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
I never got the
sense, when I was there, that they (Germans) felt haunted. I did get the sense that their Army couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag (likely becuz of their reliance on ours, feeling they were just there for our support).
A few of them (Germans) didn't like us much. Maybe more than a few and maybe more than much. But, I never got the sense that many felt haunted. For the most part we (military) were treated well, a full generation after WWII. Maybe after nearly 30 years of seeing post-war GIs wandering their streets they didn't think another thing of it. I miss the beer.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
German Green Party unveils statues of Manning/Snowden/Assange
To see that is so uplifting and encouraging. So noble.
Of course, that's in Europe. Where they tend to venerate such people, along with their artists, scientists, poets, musicians, authors, philosophers, inventors. They name their stadiums, streets and plazas after such visionaries. Here we name our stadiums after corporations and banks, who pay for such rights while they deface the Main St's of our cities and small towns with their gaudy, obnoxious monopolies. Everything in America is about profit.
The statue really does say it all; in terms of the kinds human beings who find what they've done as the epitome of courage, sacrifice and moral righteousness. As opposed to the blinded little coward HS cheerleaders at TOP.
The supporters of HRC deserve to have their convention in a place called Wells Fargo Center, a bank that has ripped off millions and millions of their own customers and complicit in sinking the world's economy. They deserve to be Disneyfied Stepford robots marching in lock stop with their corrupt Wall St puppet, barking xenophobic chants "USA!USA!USA!" to drown out ant-war dissenters. They deserve American Idol and Kate Perry as their music.
They deserve a world of continued crass consumerism, empty platitudes, and rapacious, merciless and grinding unbridled capitalism, executed by the global financial elites who will drive the dagger deeper, while those dopey minions will eventually explode like frogs in boiling water while being happy just to be invited to their lavish parties where they'll be rewarded for their Loyalty.
They deserve the Inverted Totalitarianism of an HRC presidency. On the surface not as scary as the comic fascist demagoguery of buffoon boy Drumpf, but way more consequential, because while it seems to may to be innocuous nothing could be further from the truth.
Meanwhile another world exists in which human beings realize we're all in this together, true are one, and that no one should be left without a roof over their head, or go hungry, or be without healthcare, a decent paying job, or wrongfully imprisoned, or be attacked by bombs. People who see the scam, charade and fraud of the banking elites dividing and conquering the wide swath of working people, while they rape and pillage unabated.
I may be one person but I will continue to live as a dignified dissenter. I refuse to participate in their soul-sucking sham.
That Italian sculptor and the people in that square in Berlin from the Green Party let me know I'm not alone. I thank each and every one of them for that. They are my people.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
I'm with you Mark
This is one of the best statements I have ever read on the screwed up mentality of way to many people in this country and the sad situation way to many are in unnecessarily. The statues are very inspiring as are your comment's.
The only reason why they are doing this
is because Assange is telling people what Hillary and her cohorts have said behind closed doors.
I find the topics of what she and the bank CEOs like Blankenfein talked about very interesting.
In two of the speeches she was paid to give the topic was about what she will do foreign policy wise.
I would wonder why bank CEOs were talking about foreign policy instead of financial matters if I didn't know how the banks always profit from wars.
Just ignore the hundreds of thousands of people who might be killed during them, let's just talk about how much money could be made from them.
Sociopaths, everyone who doesn't care about the innocent people who are put in harm's way because other people want to make more money.
And that includes the people who are going to vote for her even though they should know better.
Mark, I couldn't agree with you more. They do deserve what is going to happen to them, but those that don't and the innocent civilians don't.
I'm not going to get any satisfaction from saying that we tried to warn them.
"...is because Assange is
"...is because Assange is telling people what Hillary and her cohorts have said behind closed doors."
And, drunk on kool-aid, they find that reprehensible. But here's a reality-based perspective:
"You know, my opinion is a minority opinion, because most Americans disagree with me. I did not deplore the WikiLeaks revelations. They just made public what was actually the truth. Most often, the revelation of the truth, even if it’s unpleasant, is beneficial." -- Fmr. Pres. Jimmy Carter
http://theelders.org/article/only-us-president-who-didnt-wage-war#Truth
Great 2013 quote from Jimmy Carter supporting Wikileaks.
Thanks for linking this OzoneTom.
You know, it really can not be overstated: The difference between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are so goddamn stark in how they chose to spend their post-presidential careers.
Carter spends his time building houses for Habitat For Humanity and overseeing elections around the world. Billy Boy joined the jet set Hamptons crowd where he could party, which is likely where he got the idea from the wolves who assembled around him to set up a charity to be used as a money laundering and influence peddling operation.
The slimy, arrogant and greedy Clintons will no doubt get a grace period from the complicit lapdog press who have been coddling them to ensure they don't get the anti-Christ Drumpf. Then we'll see these little cowards begin, perhaps from public pressure or god forbid their consciences gnawing at them, appear to be stiffening their spines. But no, the truth is it'll only be part and parcel of the game they play. To knock down, then build up again, according to what works best to retain the most viewers so their advertising dollars keep flowing in.
This whole DC circus makes me so sick. And I'm sure the American public is catching on too. If there is any hope in the Fourth Estate being resuscitated it is not with a Clinton presidency. If the craven morally bankrupt press can be galvanized as one into action against Drumpf, isn't it a much better scenario to hope for that they just might discover honoring their journalistic credo if the Buffoon gets in?
Watched the Big Short last night. The crux of it was that a few insiders and outsiders slowly came to the realization that the whole goddamn premise of Wall St was built on sand, that it was fraud filled with liars and cheaters who fundamentally did not care about anything in the world but their own profits. Maybe a few within government and the media will have similar epiphanies and blow the whistle, after these criminal clowns return to DC and we can no longer ignore the truth.
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
According to Michael Bowker's
According to Michael Bowker's Fatal Deception, Jimmy Carter was the only US president not tied in with the asbestos industry.
Possibly he wasn't drawn to people who knowingly, if typically slowly, killed people for profit and rigged studies designed to be used in court and in determining risk/attribution levels of the health effects and premature deaths of workers with the causes initially said to be worsened by and later almost exclusively transferred to the worker's life-styles, as their insurers panicked over the notion that the public would discover what appalling hazard they'd been placed at and that the resulting lawsuits would bankrupt them instantly, after all those years of taking money from such industries while expecting to never have to pay out more than a very tiny fraction of the legitimate claims.
This while they'd refused to insure the actual asbestos workers for a period... but I suppose that the optics weren't good for the asbestos industry they still insure today.
http://www.preventcancernow.ca/justice-denied-mistreatment-of-former-can...
When court discovery uncovered the Sumner Simpson Papers (also known as the Asbestos Pentagon Papers) and proof of a vast swath of people and industries having been fully aware of, and not only downplaying but concealing, even in medical and other publications, the deadliest aspects since at least the 1930s - and with heavier asbestos exposure having been known to rapidly kill throughout the recorded history of human exposures, going clear back to Roman slaves - it turned out that the EPA wasn't able to ban asbestos use and President Bush insisted that the asbestos industry (comprising a far wider range than those of mining, direct manufacturing, various appliances, vermiculite (formed under the same geologic conditions as tremolite asbestos and almost invariably contaminated by it,) generally now used for such things as gardening, for potted plants and insulation, not to mention automotive asbestos uses and many others, all creating exposures and environmental releases of ultimately nano-sized fibres which might easily break into ever-smaller, ever more easily inhaled fibres but which are noneless indestructible both in the body/cells and in the environment, tending to circulate in breathing zones where they are easily deeply inhaled and which begin perpetually causing scarring/potentially cancer-causing damage at the microscopic level the instant they contact living tissue) must continue poisoning not only workers but the unmentioned general public for the humanitarian reason that the very few victims/survivors receiving compensation from various asbestos companies/users would no longer be able to obtain this if the asbestos industry wasn't profitably continuing to increase the hazard ad number of victims the asbestos industry was being protected from.
So Bush told the (still relatively few) asbestos victims actually aware of their condition and able to meet the bizarrely limited asbestos-industry-designed criteria to potentially receive compensation if they fought hard enough and didn't die first to go sue the tobacco industry, since in most areas of America and at the time, virtually all workers had smoked.
The history of the asbestos industry and the complicity of multiple governments is sickening in all senses of the term - especially those of the latter seeking to avoid compensating war veterans and war workers (particularly those multitudes having worked in Navy shipyards) their 2nd-hand asbestos-work-exposed families and others (often expediently/gratuitously exposed to asbestos as well as the better known radon and atomic bomb-test radioactivity) for deadly illnesses having a long enough latency for those responsible to be able to escape much of the attribution through victim blame transference to the polluting industry life-style 'industry scientist' blame transference strategy, most predominately including Dr. Richard Doll, who remained, in example, on retainer to Monsanto for the rest of his life, after saving them much moola over that harmless Agent Orange thing.
If you can get hold of a copy of Fatal Deception, it's an interesting, if enraging, read, a well-documented one which makes clear how little our health and lives matters to those in government when polluting industry profiteering is at stake.
http://www.preventcancernow.ca/global-asbestos-trade-increased-by-more-t...
Never vote for evil.
There's already a lot of it about.
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.
Why do some of you persist in going to the Orange Satan
and giving Slavemaster Kos hits for his sponsors? Fucking stop it! I doubt most of us here give a flying rat's ass what those morons are saying or thinking over there, if you can call their brainwashed, un-evidenced rants, thinking.
I believe it symptomatic of
the implosion of GOS. Kos himself is more unraveled than ever.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage
I've seen the term 'neoliberalcon' used here and elsewhere
recently. I think we should expand the definition of this to include those idiot sociopaths at Orange State suffering from acute cases of Clinton Cognitive Dissonance Syndrome. Agree with Mark's comment above.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK | "The more I see of the moneyed peoples, the more I understand the guillotine." - G. B. Shaw Bernie/Tulsi 2020
I've seen "NeoLiberalCon" in UK newspapers.
It accurately defines the underlying ideologies in that sub-specimin of humans. Frankly, I see neo-nazism in the implementation of these ideologies in the real world. Or, we could call it "fascism" because it has always been with us. It is alive and well in every jail in America and in the delivery of justice in every municipal and state court in the US. Get arrested and see for yourself.