Full video, not cherry-picked, of Obama and Jane the Virgin star.

I’ve seen this for decades now, and it’s beyond tiresome. The right throws so much absolute shit out there, distortions, outright lies, hair’s on fire hysterics, twisting nothing into something, it’s really impossible to keep up with.

It’s a smart strategy, though. Despicable in every way. But smart. Why? Because the overwhelming amount of pure D bullshit spewed by the right takes time to debunk. All of it is easily debunked, but it takes time. And that time would be far better spent developing structures and policy and communications to get out the left’s message.

The center-left, to generalize like crazy, often falls for this, and the right knows it. That means it’s basically up to leftists to mobilize, concentrate on better policies, vision and methods to express all of that. The Dems, who run the gamut, typically, from center-left to center-right, with the party power being center-right, seem lost in this battle against the far more aggressive and scruples-free right.

Here, on this site, I fear I’ve fallen back into some bad old habits, and I need to take my own advice:

Be a leftist who doesn’t waste any time with endless wingnut bullshit. Gotta stop posting about that aspect of politics, and the end of this crazed election will make that a hell of a lot easier for me.

;>)

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Billy_T.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Here, on this site, I fear I’ve fallen back into some bad old habits, and I need to take my own advice:

Be a leftist who doesn’t waste any time with endless wingnut bullshit. Gotta stop posting about that aspect of politics, and the end of this crazed election will make that a hell of a lot easier for me.

—————-
I actually have intense negative Italian hot-headed emotions about all the rightwing tactics and stuff, like the Fox crap and Rush Limbaugh/O’Reilly/Hannity/etc crappolla-fest.

My own approach, which has changed over the years, is to use such interactions and experiences as…oh…’tests’ of my ability to stay..’centered’ for lack of a better word.
I mean I HAVE all the same emotions you do, but i ‘try’ to find a way to stay tranquil in the midst of rightwing-fuck-the-poor crap.

Call it ‘political meditation’ :>) I dunno. It just doesn’t seem healthy for ‘me’ to get all crazed by things i cant change. Ya know. It is VERY difficult for me. You have no idea. But i get better every year.

w
v

;>)

WV,

It may sounds weird, but that makes me feel better. Knowing you also have struggles with this stuff.

Most of the time when I read your posts, I’m amazed at their “grounded” aspect. Off the top of my head, it’s like you’re a comedic Yoda and you’ve internalized that old saying our wiser high-school buddies would always write in our yearbooks.

;>)

Anyway, it’s going to be a tremendous relief when this lunacy is over with. Gotta get back to my writing and step up reading as well. Currently reading Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Stranger. It’s kinda like a biography of a novel. On a bit of a Camus kick at the moment.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

<

WV,

It may sounds weird, but that makes me feel better. Knowing you also have struggles with this stuff.

Most of the time when I read your posts, I’m amazed at their “grounded” aspect. Off the top of my head, it’s like you’re a comedic Yoda and you’ve internalized that old saying our wiser high-school buddies would always write in our yearbooks.

;>)

Anyway, it’s going to be a tremendous relief when this lunacy is over with. Gotta get back to my writing and step up reading as well. Currently reading Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Stranger. It’s kinda like a biography of a novel. On a bit of a Camus kick at the moment.

——————-
OMG, Billy you have no idea how hard it is for me to even read the titles of rightwing articles or even hear the NAME Bill O’Reilly, etc, etc.

I mean this is serious stuff right. Its not football. Its real life policy stuff that affects who lives and who dies and who gets to live longer and who gets gets dehumanized, etc. Serious stuff. So, yeah, it all grabs me in the Gut and twists me.

So, i can either go nutz and become Mr Hateful Angry Leftist, or i can… find another path.

I try and figure out very quickly when its pointless to go any further and when its not.

And i try to find my happy-place and stay there for as long as i can :>)

I’m reading the “Black Jacobins” btw. Fine book. About the only slave revolution that was successful. The slaves rose up and took over Haiti and fought off the Brits, French and Spanish.

w
v

Again, that’s good to know.

I’m guessing there are several books with that title. Are you talking about the classic by C. L. R James? That’s definitely on my list. Recently bought Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (with an intro by Sartre), which is often listed along with James’ work as seminal, leftist, must-read books.

Gotta get back to my reading. A New Year’s resolution, perhaps. It brings me a great deal of satisfaction, and this current political stuff does the opposite. It’s not healthy for me to take time away from great art, etc. etc.

Hope all is well —

Of course, to take the historical further back, the Dems once owned the South, pre-Civil-Rights era, and at least that part of the party was “hard right.” They actually tacked a bit to the left when they lost the South. For decades prior to that, the Dems were quite mixed, ideologically, and included severely right-wing Southerners, moderates and liberals in the North, Midwest and West, especially . . . .

This was also true of the GOP, which once had its share of center-left pols, in pretty much the same geographical areas as the Dems.

Talking heads, like the truly vile Jeffrey Lord, whose presence on CNN puts the lie to its supposed “liberal bias,” mix this stuff up constantly. He’s another of those nutcases who says the Nazis were “leftists” and that the KKK was a “leftist” organization — the latter because Dems supposedly started it. What he and pretty much every wingnut forgets is that the Dems used to be solidly hard right in the South, as mentioned, so it’s absurd to just assume Dems are “on the left.” His idiocy about the Nazis has been debunked here and elsewhere endlessly. The Nazis considered themselves “right-wing,” as did every fascist party in Europe at the time. Everyone during that time period — the 1920s thru the 1940s, primarily — considered fascists to be right-wing. Contemporary news reports, letters, essays, political party minutes, etc. etc. all show this. Memoirs from the French Resistance show this. Memoirs from every partisan group fighting the Nazis and the Fascists show this.

And, of course, present-day KKK members consider themselves right-wing, as do all neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist movements and parties around the globe.

Anyway . . . /rant.

;>)

Eternal Ramnation wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Eternal Ramnation wrote:

I don’t know guy’s , it really bothers me when you describe Obama or Clinton as Left or even center Left . The Right wing owns all of the media and both Democratic and Republican parties as well as the Libertarians . It’s all just corporate branding

Unless I missed it, no one here has done that, Eternal.

The collective you not you or anyone personally BT. I am basically agreeing with you here:

Billy_T wrote:

Here, on this site, I fear I’ve fallen back into some bad old habits, and I need to take my own advice:

Be a leftist who doesn’t waste any time with endless wingnut bullshit. Gotta stop posting about that aspect of politics, and the end of this crazed election will make that a hell of a lot easier for me.

Thanks for the clarification, ER.

Yeah, I think the right just gets the political spectrum and the media waaay wrong. One aspect of that, IMO, is its (general) conflation of a few “culture war” issues with all of politics. So if the media, or the Dems, come down on the side of things like a woman’s right to choose, or marriage equality, then that supposedly “proves” they’re “far left” on everything. Plus, tragically, even Climate Change has become a culture war thing, when it’s obviously not. It’s science, logic and common sense observations of what humans have done to this planet.

Most of we leftists would agree that the Dems and the Media tilt right on things like economics, capitalism, war, empire, coups, regime change, covert wars, “law and order,” the mass surveillance state, mass incarceration and so on. The establishment tilts right on pretty much everything outside a few socio-cultural things.

In short, from my pov, our two major parties and the MSM range from the center-right to the hard-right now. The actual left, as opposed to the one invented from thin air by the right, has no real representation in our current system.