Maher on the Republican party

I saw that one.

Looks like Maher is supporting Bernie now, btw.

w
v

The conspiracy stuff drives me crazy. The political right has promoted some truly sick examples for generations, but some parts of “the left” are echoing these today and that needs to stop.

The “spygate” bullshit is one example, and it’s ensnared people like Glenn Greenwald. Here’s a fellow Intercept author’s take on it and it strikes me as far more credible than GG’s take:

https://theintercept.com/2018/05/31/spygate-trump-russia-fbi-informants/

No one should be aiding and abetting Trump right now, especially in his usage of new political physics, which posits some kind of magical “embedding inside” a campaign by a person who never gets remotely close to it.

As in, if asking three people whom Trump has said were unimportant, peripheral people in his campaign — Clovis, Page and Papadopoulos — just asking them questions, places that person magically inside a campaign, then why not say all salespersons, reporters, IT guys, caterers, telemarketers, etc. etc. . . are suddenly “inside” a campaign too?

(No one gave him a job. No one invited him into any campaign meetings. He was never, ever “inside” it.)

Boiled down, Trump and Clinton seem to have caused mass insanity in America, left, center and right. It’s time to give a big old FU to both of them and move on.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

The conspiracy stuff drives me crazy. The political right has promoted some truly sick examples for generations, but some parts of “the left” are echoing these today and that needs to stopa…

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Ok, but ask yourself how and why the conspiracy stuff has just taken off recently.
(or has it? seems like it has to me, but i dunno the history)

Seems to me, so many people are susceptible to conspiracy-stuff BECAUSE they have figured out they are being LIED to so much and so often by the official powers-that-BE.

To me, the conspiracy stuff is a SYMPTOM of something large and ugly that is wrong with the Corporotocracy.

A related issue is the anti-science stuff that is common now. People dont trust science-news.

Add it all up and eventually, it could mean the end of the biosphere as we know it.

Which would be a shame. It’d be a shame to lose the Orcas and Tapirs. If only we could just get rid of the humans.

w
v

WV,

You and I agree about the lying. But I think we may differ a bit regarding its recent acceleration. I don’t see that, really. I see the same forces spinning their BS, just like always. Both major parties, corporate America, the intel community, the Pentagon, etc. I’m just not really seeing how this is all that different from, or worse than . . . 50 years ago, with one caveat:

I think corporate lying has gotten far more sophisticated (and coordinated), and since the early 1970s, they’ve been supported to the nth degree by both parties. I’d say their lying has become a part of the woodwork so that Americans don’t even see it anymore, and with the collapse of “the left,” or a left that thinks in terms of class analysis, especially, there is almost no exposure of this any longer. We don’t have a modern day Frankfurt School, basically, going after this part of the nexus.

Which means our focus is almost entirely on political parties, government, intel, the FBI, etc. etc. And mostly just Dem versus Republican. Dumb versus Dumber.

The above is a thousand times necessary, of course, but I think we need to expand our view to include class, the economic system, how it actually owns the two parties, and needs to be held to account along with them.

(I’m not saying you. You’ve seen the Big Picture stuff for decades, likely well before I started to)

But, yeah. We need to keep the tapirs and the orcas.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Both major parties, corporate America, the intel community, the Pentagon, etc. I’m just not really seeing how this is all that different from, or worse than . . . 50 years ago, with one caveat:

I think corporate lying has gotten far more sophisticated (and coordinated), and since the early 1970s,..

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Well the corporate component of the system is huge, I’d say. And I think its gotten worse as the Media has come under the control of fewer and fewer Corpse.

I also think the new technologies have helped the lie-factory. Except for the internet. And thats why, of course, the internet is coming under control of the Lie-Factory. At least they are trying. I wouldnt bet against them.

w
v

That makes sense. Fewer and fewer media companies, but far bigger and more powerful than ever before. They’ve become “too big to fail,” basically.

And now Sinclair has bought up almost every local news channel, and they’ve been caught recently spreading government propaganda about drinking water, the environment, covering for Scott Pruitt, etc. etc.

That’s dangerous because a lot of people, for some reason, tend to trust their local news folks but not the Networks.

I don’t trust any of them without corroboration, etc. etc. Which is where the Internet can really help.

Trust, lies. The thing that still baffles me is why so many people trust Trump and the GOP. I understand perfectly saying FU to the Dems. But it’s just not logical to choose Trump and the GOP as a champion of truth and anti-corruption. If the issue is a lack of trust for any political party, shouldn’t it be both of the majors? Or, if it’s “government” in general, both parties too?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by Billy_T.

nittany ram wrote:

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

thing that still baffles me is why so many people trust Trump and the GOP. I understand perfectly saying FU to the Dems. But it’s just not logical to choose Trump and the GOP as a champion of truth and anti-corruption. If the issue is a lack of trust for any political party, shouldn’t it be both of the majors? Or, if it’s “government” in general, both parties too?

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Well, i guess at some point people just decide to believe in something. I mean, how in the world do people believe Alex Jones? How do people believe in Lizard-People? How do people believe Trump? Hitler? On and on.

I think Lie-Factories and Dirty-Rotten-Systems just…damage people. And damaged-people are prone to latch on to anything, Fascism, Trumpism, anything. Humans iz dangerous.

w
v

Trump is restoring “white” to its proper place at the top of the social/economic hierarchy.

All other considerations are secondary to that.

Not that it wasn’t already there. It’s always been there. His supporters just think it wasn’t. They view equality as oppression.

That’s true. I think sometimes we try too hard to figure this all out — I’m definitely guilty of that. Too many surveys about Trump voters make this very clear. It’s about the fear of lost white privilege, and that didn’t just start with Trump either. The GOP has been courting that vote aggressively since at least the 1960s. It’s just that Trump has dropped all the public pretenses about this and has gone full-fascist playbook.

(Find a “volk.” Endlessly smear and scapegoat minorities, immigrants, women, the poor, “the left,” unions, etc. etc.; whip that volk into a frenzy of hatred and fear for all of those various “Others” and pose as the champion of that volk. It’s classic far-right bamboozlement.)

Bannon should have been honest in 2014 when he came up with the slogan, MAGA. It should have read MAWA all along.