A revealing Facebook exchange, also, Joe Biden's climate liaison

When I criticized the Facebook "Clash against the Right" group on Facebook:

The group "Clash Against the Right" is not really against the Right -- they're totally fine with the Right, as long as its patrons have the magic (D) symbol next to their names.

I received this response:

Is that so, well lets see how brave you are and if you leave this here or remove it....I founded that group and it has over 1,800 Members in it, including many fine Socialists whom I know personally in real life...I'm a Marxist International Socialist myself of over 30 years experience...But CATR is not a Revolutionary Tendency Group and Comrades like you who fail to grasp that are rather embarrassing. CATR is group for CLASH fans of a broad left perspective and listen pal, my credentials for fighting the Right both on the streets for decades and politically are way beyond the scoop of your pathetic little pops...Grow up and start learning that you do not win people to your cause by attacking them...And posting messages like that on social media reeks of the sort of spiteful, juvenile behaviour we see from many Right Wingers, so by all means if you want a full length debate on here fire away and I shall explain why a facebook group dedicated to a rock'n'roll band and opposes Racism and Fascism is a place wherein people of a broad political spectrum are going to find common ground...Unless of course they are like you, who thinks that a place wherein it is possible to build connections and common ground with a wide range of people sees it as a place where you can attack anybody who does not share your exact positions. You are not winning anybody with that conduct in such a group, so stop conning yourself. You are attacking a left wing cultural bastion and your energies would be better served elsewhere..

I guess I'm glad to be important enough to have received a response of this length, despite the misrepresentation of what I said in his group. Well, first off, you can't criticize Joe Biden in his group -- I guess Joe Biden is regarded as one of these valiant fighters against the right or something like that. I mean, it only works if you ignore his record, but that's what Facebook group's admins are for, right?

Secondly, what's "multi-tendency"? Does that mean neoliberal social climbers are included in his group? Or right-wing Democrats who want to pretend to be "against the Right"? It seems to me that if you have a group "against the Right," then you're going to have members (in this case, Facebook group admins) who are actual members of the Right who are merely against that other part of the Right. What we know of social interaction, of course, is that, absent any actual diffusion of power, the neoliberal social climbers are going to win because they're the ones who made the connections that matter in terms of social power.

Lastly, I love the use of the word "credentials" in this guy's rant. I'm sure he has a far more impressive CV as a "leftist" than I do. I've been wasting my time thinking that the point of being a "leftist" was to achieve some sort of sea-change in the world, not to accumulate credentials. I've been following this ignorant quote of Chris Hedges: “I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists." As far as I can tell, the opposition to the Right in America has won damned little outside of a relaxation of the marijuana laws, and I guess I found that reality politically demotivating. Silly me! I wrote a diary earlier saying that I wasn't a progressive; I guess I'm not a leftist either. I'm definitely not part of "the Right."

Now, I guess I'm writing this diary not because I really care about "Clash against the Right," but rather because this little exchange points up a difficulty we've got in discussing politics. This fellow Joe Biden for instance. He's the President-Elect, so what we're talking about here is the awesome triumph of forty-eight years of neoliberal social climbing. His new climate liaison is a fossil-fuel company patron. Also a member of the New Democrat Coalition. But doubtless multiracial! Also multicultural. That's multi-tendency, right? If you're against it you're definitely a racist or something. You see the dilemma: acquiescence takes up less energy, and is thus better, than engaging this kind of stuff.

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Cassiodorus's picture

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay

aka Farcebook

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness "FascBook" would work, too, I suppose....

Slight Digression Here: I'm of the mind (and I'm not alone in this) that fascism isn't really a proper political ideology at all, but the runaway outcome of a bug in ordinary human psychology, much like grasshoppers turning into locusts. You could almost call it a medical problem: The essential mental illness of those who DO fit in with society. Psychologists/psychiatrists will be among the first to tell you that it's a terrible mistake to think that "healthy" people are really "better" than those of us who get sent to them because society wasn't made with us in mind.

The fundamental symbol of a bundle of sticks that are used to thrash members of the collective who get out of line is also wonderfully self-illustrative. It's really got nothing to do with "wingedness".

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

"Grow up and start learning that you do not win people to your cause by attacking them"

Credentials, credentials, credentials. If you aint got em you got nothin.

People like this make me appreciate the people here at C99 even more. I do believe that most people here will debate anything on its merits, calmly and without personal attacks.

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Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.

Cassiodorus's picture

@The Wizard I criticized Joe Biden in his group under the assumption that since Joe Biden was on the Right and that since the name of this group was "Clash Against the Right," I would be permitted to do so. My assumption was wrong.

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay

Get ready to get in line. Glenn Greenwald is pointing out that a compliant corporate and social media platforms will be going after any independent voices as illegitimate now that democrats and their donors are in power. They are going big time after substack where independent journalists can making a living off subscriptions. It looks like the pressure is also going to be on just regular people.

Even Michael Moore is getting inline.

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@MrWebster @MrWebster @MrWebster .

I work in the television business. The most significant fact of all programming, especially news, is that nobody gets on TV unless they want to. The only exception to this rule is that some people are already on TV more than they want to be and try to avoid paparazzi and smart phone wielding fans. Other than that rare exception, you do not have to be on television unless you want to be.

Among the class of TV opinionators like Mike Moore, Noam Chomsky, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and the like, if you want to get called back to the Colbert or Bill Maher shows, you cannot be TOO FAR OUT THERE -- which means in this season you have to be part of the Trump Is Hitler Club.

You can within that broad framework take a wide variety of approaches, but you must adhere to the fear and loathing of Donnie Shrimpfingers if you want to stay in the mix of "progressive" guests on talk shows.

If you take yourself seriously enough, you can convince yourself that getting on TV (and everything that implies) is "necessary for you to do your work." And how hard is it to work up contempt for Trump?

It is a very short step from there to telling a network audience that Biden's religious faith makes him a worthy political leader.

Paddy Chayefsky nailed in in Network. Television destroys everything it touches.

.

The hammer came down this year and if you want to be on television, you have to be for Trump or for Biden. You cannot say they both are representatives of the same small group of big money donors and ever expect to be on TV again. The quintessential example of this is Noam Chomsky falling in line and urging people to vote against Trump.

Mike Moore is another guy selling soap. No sense hating on him and most of his movies are pretty damned good. Beyond that, meh.

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I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

Is he part of "the revolution"? Does he have a Pink Pussy Hat? Is that a credential? Did he get a PoliSci degree in leftism from Harvard? Masters? Phd? What were his grades? How many years has he been on KOS? SHOW US THE CREDENTIALS!!!

On a lighter note, if he has such serious lefty credentials WTF is he defending a center right career politician and the pack of Clinton retreads for?

Facebook...What good is it? At least with newsprint you can always wipe your butt with it.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@Snode They have an equivalent neoliberal social-climbing party there, too: the "Labour Party."

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay

@Snode
You could let the puppy wet your laptop, but it wouldn't be the same.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Deja's picture

@Snode
I like to use all the newspaper dead tree junk mail for soaking up oil in my cast iron skillet. Too bad all the political attack junk mail was card stock and all colors -- couldn't even throw it in the compost bin.

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a tad defensive cass, you must have hit a nerve. And yeah, gotta love the credential snobbery, just like a good Democrat.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

Pluto's Republic's picture

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
RantingRooster's picture

are a bunch of ignorant morons. (No offense to anyone here at C99)

Not one of these morons has a clue that the most hardcore NAZI's, ya know the actual "fascists", thought some US laws were a bit too harsh.

Let that sink in. Gee, US law was a bit harsh for the NAZI's?

The NAZI's loved US laws, fucking LOVED them! Hitler praised them! And if one tries to explain this, they just about wanna punch you in the face for even considering NAZI's loved US law.

Omer Aziz, writing for Dissent Magazine wrote a review of "Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law" by James Q. Whitman.

The Prussian Memorandum that passed between Nazi legal hands was an early blueprint for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship and criminalized sexual relations between Germans and those thought to have impure blood. It was the foundational text of Nazi legal thinking. Incredibly, the Prussian Memorandum expressly cited the gold standard of racist lawmaking at the time: the United States of America.

The following summer, on June 5, 1934, Nazi lawyers, jurists, and medical doctors gathered under the auspices of Justice Minister Franz Gürtner to discuss how to codify the Prussian Memorandum. The very first item discussed was U.S. law: “Almost all the American states have race legislation,” Gürtner averred, before detailing a myriad of examples, including the many states that criminalized mixed marriages. Roland Freisler, the murderous Nazi judge, stated at the meeting that U.S. jurisprudence would “suit us perfectly.”

All the participants displayed either an eager interest in, or an avowed knowledge of, U.S. law. This went beyond specific legislation. The Nazis looked to an innovative legal culture that found ways to relegate Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and others to second- and third-class status; the many devious pathways around the constitutional guarantees of equal protection; the deliberate textual ambiguity on the definition of race itself; the draconian penalties for sexually consorting with a lesser race, or even meeting publicly. The United States in the 1930s was the apogee of a racist state.

(bold emphasis mine)

It's a great article, these morons should read some time.

There is this by Lynn Burnett at crossculturalsolidarity.com

For Hitler, the American conquest of such a vast and resource-rich land had been a turning point in world history, ushering in the first phase of White global domination, which Hitler now sought to complete. Indeed, the United States played a crucial role in the Nazi understanding of world history. According to Volkisch World History – a popular Nazi book about world history published in 1934 – “The most important event in the history of the states of the Second Millennium – up until the [First World] War – was the founding of the United States of America. The struggle of the Aryans for world domination received thereby its strongest prop.” In 1936, the popular Nazi text, The Supremacy of the White Race, called the founding of the United States “the first fateful turning point” in the rise of worldwide White supremacy. The genocide of Native Americans played a crucial role in that “turning point.”

Hitler not only praised the methods used to conquer the American West, he praised the racial order the United States had then created to prevent “racial mixing,” which had allowed White Americans, in his opinion, to maintain the “racial purity” of their supposed “Aryan” ancestry. Although Hitler certainly had no problems with the race-based totalitarianism of the Jim Crow South – according to his officials he praised the widespread practice of lynching there – the racial order he was most interested in involved policies that were found outside of the South.

In the second volume of his notorious autobiography Mein Kampf, published in 1927, Hitler praised the American Immigration Act of 1924, which forbade Asian immigration and greatly restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Immigrants from these European countries were seen as racially inferior both by Nazis, and by many White Americans. As Hitler put it in Mein Kampf: “The American union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.” Germany, he said, ought to do the same.

If that moron has been fighting the streets and politics for decades, well he's obviously failed miserably, no? Because, gee, look who is president, and then look at who is president-elect. Both are fucking NAZI's, at least in my eyes anyway!

Both of these, well, men, embody the sediments of Hitler. The only real difference is Joe Biden will have federal agents shoot black people in the leg, and Donald just want's them assassinated. Either way, POC continue to get shot for no other reason, because, ya know, our brave police men and women, are AFRAID for their lives around Black people.

The Clash, ya baby!
[video:https://youtu.be/bJ9r8LMU9bQ]

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C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

Cassiodorus's picture

@RantingRooster The Nazis' besetting sin was that they tried to do to eastern Europe and to Europe's Jewish population what the Euro-Americans did to the indigenous peoples of this land, a century too late, and with a much larger population. Everyone remembers "Judenfrage," the "Jewish Question," because the patrons of Israel will never let them forget -- but Hitler's other political plank was "Lebensraum," even more deadly. Imagine if he'd succeeded in wiping out 90% of the populations of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine. This concept is worth a diary in itself; it's more than just a comment.

On another note, I really do like the voice of Joe Strummer.

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay

@RantingRooster

what is white about this?

[video:https://youtu.be/qRItpnkbkrY]

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RantingRooster's picture

@QMS Well, that's just normal whiteness don't ya know...

(this was posted just yesterday...)
[video:https://youtu.be/k6dsY0QM254]

"I was raised in Oklahoma around black people."

I wonder if that was Tulsa Oklahoma? Or if she was even aware of the Tulsa Massacre? I seriously doubt it.

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C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Grow up and start learning that you do not win people to your cause by attacking them.

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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

RantingRooster's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Grow up, are you kidding? Not only no, but HELL NO!

[video:https://youtu.be/Dcr8dm9Prkk]

Crazy

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C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote

Deja's picture

... back in 2016, I still participated at Fakebook. Most of my family members are Republicans as well as some of my friends from school. I began hearing what I considered whining about censorship on the platform. It reminded me of the "liberal media" trope I had become used to hearing for a while.

Anyway, in hopes of proving them wrong about the censorship, I started paying closer attention. I realized that what I was seeing was definitely heavy-handed but against only my right-leaning Fakebook friends/family.

You might be thinking that surely they posted some call to violence or overthrowing the government (Obama was prez then), or even racial slurs, but no. Mostly it was badmouthing Dems and current events -- kneeling at football games was a huge issue then. The worst thing I saw was from one of my dad's relatives from one of the Dakotas say, "I'm sorry but if you don't want to show respect for the flag, you can go back to Africa." And she wasn't even put in "Fakebook jail". The ones who were repeatedly suspended never posted anything as bad as that as far as I could tell.

Now I see non-conforming liberals/lefties are getting ridiculed for not falling in line as well. When will they be getting suspended like all those Right wingers? How long will they be able to voice their opinion about the policies or creepy videos regarding Biden? Those cspan videos will get you suspended on Fakebook and Twitter and they are actual videos of him being blatantly inappropriate right in front of the cameras; and Reddit only allows them to be posted in the conspiracy sub, but I think they disappear from there as well. (Side note: cspan videos are not conspiracy theory.)

It all reminds me of the Martin Niemoller poem. They did it to crazy Alex Jones, but we're not crazy so we didn't object (some here did, but were met with a lot of pushback). Then they did it to the right wingers, but we said nothing because we're not right wingers.

I know that a Fakebook group isn't the entire platform, but how long before no one will be allowed to criticize Biden or his cabinet or Antifa or anything corporate sponsored, including the Dems? What about AOC and a list of her fellow Capitol Hill electeds who didn't support what she thought should be supported?

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snoopydawg's picture

@Deja

it’s going to seem like it was over night, but it started around the time Russia Gate did. Lots of journalists saw through the Russian scam that Hillary started and they had to be silenced. Google changed the way it does algorithms and lots of websites saw their traffic reduced by up to 90%.

Next came Alex Jones and the TV station telamundo and I know I botched the name. But they kept getting banned from Twitter mostly. Not too long ago a bunch of sites were kicked off social media. Sites that called out the police and others in that vein. I think it’s over 100 sites that got banned and not for doing anything wrong, but for telling the truth.

Next up was the Hunter Biden laptop saga and now we’re seeing Twitter trying to censor Trump. Will they do it after he leaves office? They could. But I think they will want him tweeting so he can distract us from Biden’s policies.

Next it’s just going to happen. Boom. Censorship is here. But it’s actually been here for some time. People weren’t paying attention. Or they cheered it.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Pricknick's picture

@snoopydawg
If more of us did, there wouild be fewer talking heads that anybody would listen to.
I don't need any help blocking the bullshit.
When the pen loses to the sword of censorship, it will be the word that's important again.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

Deja's picture

@snoopydawg
They were cheering it when you were saying that you don't like the guy (Alex Jones) at all, but if they push him out who would be next. Good riddance and basically fuck him was the response, pretty much.

Telemundo is a major Mexican news org. It would be like Twitter banning ABC or NBC, etc.

It's coming for anyone they claim has Wrongthink. It's sickening.

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snoopydawg's picture

@Deja

the Jones banning. But then they also agreed with Kamala’s banning of Trump on Twitter. Yesterday someone said that Fox News must be shut down so they can’t spew their lies to his supporters.

I got the name right? Cool. But yes they got kicked off both Twitter and Facebook more than once. Wendy might have written about it.

For some it seems like the things they used to be against are now things they are for and vice versa depending on who’s in office. Anti war during Bush? ‘Twas okay during Obama’s tenure.

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8 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@Deja

fascism of the WWII era looks like. Back then, it was state cooptation and support of corporations; today it's more or less the reverse--corporations can and will coopt the state and bend it to their will. The end result is functionally similar: oligarchs maintain their control through propaganda, fear, and censorship. It is very scary! But it's very challenging to get someone to listen and open his mind to what's going on, who doesn't want to.

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impressed by their successes in backing candidates who won.

Next thing I start getting emails from the local (Louisville) DSA asking to join and get active. The email started "Comrade"-.... Sorry, but I'm not crazy about this "comrade" thing. Kind of sorry I sent the money now.

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

Cassiodorus's picture

@Fishtroller 02 Maybe you could send them a notice telling them "please don't call me 'comrade'"?

The thing that seems most objectionable to me about the DSA is one of why they haven't supported the Movement for a People's Party. My guess is that the DSA is largely supported by people in places which have majority Democrat populations (New York City for instance), in which the winner of the Dem primary (or, in California, the "top two" race) wins the November election. Thus "the Squad" can be Democrats. They don't see why some of us would feel obliged to run not only against Democrats but also against Republicans, and have no idea of the great harm "lesser-evil" voting does to the world.

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"I'm starting to believe that they want Donald Trump to get elected." -- Compton Jay