The Time is Right for Fighting in the Streets
File this in the WTF department. An already overcrowded pigeon hole earns another entry. Before posting this, what the heck are we doing with labeling frenzy? Identity politics to the max. Alt-Right, Anti-Fa, centrist, neoLiberal, NeoConservative, Progressive, Regressive, Depressive. Where does it end? Are we c99ers Alt-Left, marginalized Free-thinkers, burned-out Berners? Can't tell the players without the labels. I was so much easier before the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.
So, while surfing the intertubes, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tulsi, I came across this bit of head-scratch inducing material:
anti-war protest--not peaceful.
No, this isn't what you think it might be from the title whereupon the Police gang-up on innocent peaceful protesters and crack a few skulls. The protesters were not peaceful but the police were restrained.
Am I the only one thinking that two anti-war groups ought to be working together? Wouldn't that strengthen the pro-peace cause? Uh oh. This country is becoming more messed up with every passing day.
And so, two immature mobs allegedly supporting peace go to war against each other. I suppose maybe they have different definitions of peace--or maybe they just hate each other. My vote is for the latter.
We don't need George Soros with his nicely titled and financially secured NGOs. We are getting the societal undermining he has been paying for at no charge to him.
Minor outbursts such as the pseudoanti-Trump / Resist fracases were just a prodrome at what is going to be escalating violence the longer this Syrian War disaster continues. It will only get worse. [I avoid referring to the true victims of this, the Syrians, because their plight is too obvious already.] But right here, in the good ole' USA events do not portend well.
Subjected to austerity for decades, people are hungry. Many are hungry for food. Many are hungry for a living wage. Many are hungry for a better world for their offspring. Hungry people are irritable people. The hungrier, the more irritable.
Scapegoats abound: Muslims, Jews, gays, Mexicans; you name it. It doesn't take much effort to search YouTube for Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, etc. and find a trove of the particular type of hate being researched. This isn't going to improve peacefully.
Why? It's human nature. Greed begets greed. The rich insist on being ultra-rich. The ultra-rich insist on, well, everything: mine, mine, mine, mine! So the bottom 50% are already doomed to disappear (starved people do not take up as much ground as well-fed ones). The next higher 49% will get the POW (prisoner of Wealth) treatment. Their survival (our survival) will be encouraged only until efficient robots can be manufactured.
Our elimination from the planet will cure so many of current day environmental ills. No more debates over planned parenthood, because we won't be alive to be parents. No more worries about global warming--there won't be many cars on the road or homes to heat. No more worry about species extinction--except our own.
How many people will have the patience to wait until 2018 brings its false hope of meaningful governmental change? The numbers of patiently suffering, demeaned, marginalized is growing. Apparently with an irresistible impetus. Misery loves company--maybe. But misery doesn't love misery.
Prophecy of gloom and doom: No worries about climate change. Fighting in the streets will heat up more rapidly. Stock up on your pitchforks and axes now while still available.
Comments
My buddy who recently retired after 38 years in
the Army sort of laughed off the Middle East wars and the effort to control the oil, said "it won't be oil that causes world war. It will be lack of water."
My label for myself this morning is "duped".
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Read awhile back
where the Bush twins bought 140 sq. Miles of land somewhete in Paraguay that sits on one of the largest aquifers in the world.
Yeah, I think it's about water.
Thanks for the thoughts Alligator Ed.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
@on the cusp
Hey, the water's mostly polluted because of a number of fossil fuel-related issues, as is climate change, and geoengineering involves reflective and generally highly toxic metals and toxic (fossil-fuel-derived) pollutants being sprayed into the stratosphere (and which will sift down to more heavily pollute the entire globe, especially water supplies affected by run-off) which will destroy the ozone layer protecting us from deadly rays, 'making it difficult to stop once started' as well as creating drought and less sunshine, crippling plant growth and pollution absorption, (just as pollution intensively increases both from this and increased polluting industry/military/corporate control) along with oxygen as well as food production, both for humans and animals/wildlife, in the already rapidly accelerating die-off of the final vital components (think pollinators) forming our natural life-support system, already pretty much circling the drain for global corporate/billionaire profiteering and 'pollution rights'.
So it's basically all because of fossil fuels, no matter how we look at it - unless we're looking at it through a corporate propaganda slant. In which case, it's probably THE RUSSIANS!!! Or Bernie-Bros.
Edit: I suppose this means that the dinosaurs are having their unwitting revenge while being used in polishing off those pesky mammals, in having the deadly combination of the burning and polluting use of the profoundly chemically-altered (by pressure applied in an oxygen-free environment) once-organic remains of their period long after we could have been shifting over to something greener (edit: but) ordained for continued use by the lizard-brains of The Pathologically Greedy Parasite Class.
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.
Pollution and life = incompatible
"All through the day: I Me Mine, I Me Mine, I Me Mine..."
The gist of your essay was just begging for it, and with the obvious counterpoint to the Stones:
That's really it in a nutshell, I think. I'm inclined to believe human beings will not progress much, from the basics of self-preservation, which every animal is born with, and egotistical self-interest, to something more evolved and compassionate upon which the foundations of a universal society can flourish and no one is treated like a commodity.
We're stuck in pre-K in the school of life, because so many are trying to get rich quick.
"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
it seems that all humanity is this way.
but what about the countries that are going left?
scandanavia, canada. etc.
Going left
Bolivia, possibly France.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
@irishking
Canada is being run by the Koch brothers, et al... Canadians are left, and left holding nothing but an ongoing disaster by corrupt Cons and Liberals purchased by Those Who Know How To Cheat Electorally.
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.
Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king,
... and a king ain't satisfied till he rules everything.
Thus spake his Bossness.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
At some point
can't stop until I have (little finger pointed at corner of mouth) all the money in the world!
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Great song
Yes. Taking it to the Street.
It has worked out so well.
It's complicated.
Monster or Savior?
You decide.
Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!
Firesign Theater
Stop the War!
I don't think Americans are about to take to the streets
Obviously, I could be wrong; but I don't see it.
A small number are already in the streets.
The pussy-hat brigade poses no threat to order. But the testosterone engorged gangs pictured in my essay are the wave of the future.
Without claiming any authority to speak for others,
it seems to me that most of the people here have a leftist perspective, but have become thoroughly disenchanted with the Democratic Party in particular, and with the dualistic stranglehold that the American oligarchy maintains over both political Parties. And so, over the nation as a whole. I think that a majority of us are Systemic critics of US politics, which is to say, we are objecting to the entire power structure of the nation, rather than simply opposing one half of it or the other.
The critiques offered here tend to go beyond traditional partisanship, and instead to examine the more fundamental causes for America's political and social dysfunction. At least, that's what the general orientation of this site seems to be, to me.
native
Labels are a deflection from ideas
@Alligator Ed
That must be Dorothy Parker quoting Gertrude Stein.
One of my favourite Dorothy Parker quotes:
'Hello!' he lied.
To thine own self be true.
Yes Gertrude Stein
Mine is her response
to the young ingenue who opened the hotel door for Parker, saying "Age before beauty..". Dorothy swept past her replying "Pearls before swine!"
Ideas are ways of organizing thought.
Labels are ways of categorizing ideas so they can be put to effective use. But when our categories and labels fail to accurately describe the ideas they are meant to organize, nothing but confusion can result. This is what we are experiencing now.
native
According to the dictionary, you are correct.
It's hard to discuss more than
one thing at a time. What's missing is a comprehensive synthesis of how one discussion is related to another.
native
I think this shows the US near-perfectly
Not sure if this is the original, but I got this image here.
That's a brilliant little video haiku.
Can you provide an attribution?
native
One problem with eliminating the poor...
Slowly for sure but that is how it's always been..little by little they can be immiserated. Try it to burn them down in with speed and you will find they are heavily armed.