from Ted Rall, the Tom Tomorrow guy

“…Why didn’t militant leftists insist on greater prominence at the Women’s Marches than those Democratic hacks? Where is the grassroots organizing? Where are the left-wing thinktanks to create an intellectual and theoretical basis for our arguments? Why aren’t there protests daily, as opposed to annually? Trump and the Republicans and the Democrats shouldn’t be able to show their faces in public without facing a crowd of loud and angry protesters.
It’s not like the Democrats are a fiendishly clever adversary! Allowing the idiots who chose Hillary over Bernie to steal anti-Trumpism points to complete impotence and political incompetence on the part of what’s left of the Left.”
———————-

Well, my own answers to those questions are pretty dark nowadays. (though, i know i could be wrong)
My own answer is real leftists just dont exist in big numbers in America. They ‘do’ organize and they do march and stuff — there…just…arent…very…many.
Not NEARLY enough to elect real-leftists.

My own view is that ‘the system’ has colonized the VAST majority of voters minds, and the vast majority of American voters are indeed Dems and Reps (meaning corporate capitalists) and thats how they are gonna see things.

Meanwhile, the Green Party gets the usual 2 percent of the vote. Themz are the “leftists” more or less, generally speaking.

I think Bernie was an aberration. Hope I’m wrong. We’ll see.

PS — …and just think how wonderful all this is for the one percent. They have the Republicans. And the Dems have a bit of a split. There’s the majority who are Corporate-dems. Essentially Reps. And there is indeed some progressives (who knows how many but it aint a majority or even close to a majority)
So, if the progressives get all active and ornery they divide the Dems or maybe the progressives get disgusted and stay home or vote third party, etc — and that leaves the Reps as winners. Or the Corporate Dems if they are able to silence the Progs.

See any light there?

My greatest hope is that dont know what I’m talking about.

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Zooey wrote:

At this point, I don’t think it would make much difference if actual Leftists did take over. Climate change is going to disrupt food and water supplies enough that humans are going to start killing each other for resources, I reckon. That might be an over-the-top doomsday prediction, but I don’t think it would take much to, say, wipe out the heart of almond trees because of an extreme heat wave, drought, flood, or freeze. Just an entire year’s harvest of wheat, or something.

I dunno.

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We sound a lot like the russian-media you know. At least I do 🙂

“…Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse…
…america has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”….
….
….there is of course also an “opioid epidemic”. We use that phrase too casually, but it much more troubling than it appears on first glance. Here is what is really curious about it. In many countries in the world — most of Asia and Africa — one can buy all the opioids one wants from any local pharmacy, without a prescription. You might suppose then that opioid abuse as a mass epidemic would be a global phenomenon. Yet we don’t see opioid epidemics anywhere but America…
…
…This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America — utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers don’t capture it — but comparisons paint a bleak picture…there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse….
…
…And that is my last pathology: it is one of the soul, not one of the limbs, like the others above. American appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above. They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity,or having to numb the pain of it all away.

If these pathologies happened in any other rich country — even in most poor ones — people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly….
….
….
…that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.”
link:http://russia-insider.com/en/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse/ri22355

zn wrote:

The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too.

A Russian had the brazen hypocrisy to say THAT?

It’s almost like a Monty Python sketch.

Really, and this is completely honest. Unless you’re reading the actual Russian leftist dissident critiques of Russia, you’re just being sucked down a propaganda tube.

I would say the same thing to a non-American who took the American mainstream view of America at its word.

.

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Yeah, i knew you would feel that way, zn. I knew it when i posted that.

No problem. I get your view.

Thing is, he’s just saying things a lot of us have said on this board for years and years.

Sure he’s being all ‘black and white’ about it, and sure he’s just hi-lighting the bleak-dark stuff and ignoring the other stuff. And sure he has an obvious agenda (like everyone). And sure he’s ignoring russia (so what, its not a story about russia, or china or guam) But essentially his points are all things we’ve noted on this board for years.

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