Pilger on Hillary

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  • #47311
    Avatar photoZooey
    Moderator
    #47312
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    Thanks, Zooey.

    Pilger is excellent, and damn brave.

    Agree with pretty much everything he said in the article, with this one quibble:

    I think some people are using two different prisms for the two candidates. To be overly simplistic about it, “best case scenario” and “worst case scenario.” I think the latter is a good way to view any potential leader given great power. Big time skepticism, no suspension of disbelief, no automatic trust, not even “trust but verify.” They have to earn our vote, and it’s up to them to erase our doubts, etc. No givens, etc. But this should apply to both of them. To Clinton and Trump.

    I think some are rebelling against the idea of Trump as media monster by going too far the other way. Almost to the “He won’t be nearly as bad as folks are saying” point. They don’t say that about Clinton. And they shouldn’t, IMO. But they also shouldn’t say it about Trump. Just because he hasn’t done all the horrible things Pilger lists, doesn’t mean he won’t once in power. And I see no indication from his words or his temperament that he would buck U.S tradition when it comes to the violent, brutal expansion/protection of empire.

    Though he did say the invasion of Iraq was wrong, I think that’s just pandering to his right-libertarian base, the Ron Pauliacs among them, especially, etc. When you pair this with his all too frequent calls for getting tough on the rest of the world, including using nukes, I don’t think it really matches up.

    In short, I think Trump is every bit as likely to take us to war as Clinton and do crazy, violent shit, and both will. The only difference is, where. We really are screwed.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    #47387
    Avatar photoInvaderRam
    Moderator

    i think we’re at a point of no return. this world has 2 options.

    either we somehow get off this planet which i think is a real possibility. and somehow humanity is able to keep stumbling forward.

    or we destroy this planet. or the planet is destroyed by some cataclysmic non-human event.

    right now i’m hoping for the latter.

    #47388
    bnw
    Blocked

    i think we’re at a point of no return. this world has 2 options.

    either we somehow get off this planet which i think is a real possibility. and somehow humanity is able to keep stumbling forward.

    or we destroy this planet. or the planet is destroyed by some cataclysmic non-human event.

    right now i’m hoping for the latter.

    With that attitude how can you even get out of bed?

    The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.

    Sprinkles are for winners.

    #47390
    Avatar photoInvaderRam
    Moderator

    i don’t know. just cuz i think it’s hopeless doesn’t necessarily mean i want to stop trying while i’m still alive.

    #47408
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    i don’t know. just cuz i think it’s hopeless doesn’t necessarily mean i want to stop trying while i’m still alive.

    =====================
    Yes. Exactly. Just cuz its probably “hopeless doesn’t mean i want to stop trying”.

    That-there notion is what gives human-life its poignancy,
    and richness. Or somethin. I think. I dunno.

    w
    v

    “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” Les Noyers de l’Altenburg: Andre Malraux

    “Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.” ― Joseph Conrad

    “The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. And he is
    not insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a
    sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile that is not a grin.” Joseph Conrad

    #47410
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    i think we’re at a point of no return. this world has 2 options.

    either we somehow get off this planet which i think is a real possibility. and somehow humanity is able to keep stumbling forward.

    or we destroy this planet. or the planet is destroyed by some cataclysmic non-human event.

    right now i’m hoping for the latter.

    ===================
    Well, i am not rooting for a cataclysm, because it would destroy the innocent luna-moths, tapirs, and banana-slugs. Plus it would wipe out all recordings of ‘the tackle’.

    As far as getting off the planet, Nittany and his science-people are working on that. From what i’ve heard the latest testing involves a giant frisbee (that will hold over ten thousand people) and a great-big catapult.

    w
    v

    #47411
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    Great quotes. All of them. But especially the first. I read Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope a long time ago. Favorites of mine. Took a class on French Existentialism and the Age of Alienation when I went back to school in the 1980s, too. He was a big part of that class. The man also walked the walk and fought fascists, bravely. Risked his life, constantly, like Orwell and Camus.

    #47412
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    Depressing read.

    https://newmatilda.com/2016/03/23/john-pilger-why-hillary-clinton-is-more-dangerous-than-donald-trump/

    ==============

    “…The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

    A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear]weapon more thinkable.


    What makes it all even more surreal and nutso,
    is the rightwingers argue Obama is soft on defense, blah blah blah

    sigh

    w
    v

    #47413
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    Great quotes. All of them. But especially the first. I read Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope a long time ago. Favorites of mine. Took a class on French Existentialism and the Age of Alienation when I went back to school in the 1980s, too. He was a big part of that class. The man also walked the walk and fought fascists, bravely. Risked his life, constantly, like Orwell and Camus.

    —————

    Some folks around here know i save quotes. I’ve saved over a thousand of em, i suppose.

    Bout a year ago, i decided to try to classify them ‘hierarchically’. Ie, list about a hundred of them in order of how much i liked’em. My favorites, in other words.

    Them three made the top 20 🙂

    w
    v
    “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that
    in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
    — Ralph Waldo Emerson

    “It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human
    problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than‘try to be a little kinder.’ “ Aldous Huxley

    “We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.” ― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

    #47418
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    More goodins.

    I used to write all kinds of things down in little notebooks. Was obsessed with doing this in the 1980s, especially. I think it lasted up into the very early 1990s, but then I stopped. Larger notebooks after that, but I tended just to jot down general feelings about my readings, and not go into major details.

    I miss have that kind of intellectual fire and passion for the new. At my age, far too much of that is gone. I fear more than a decade of chemo has something to do with this, and just life itself. It can beat that excitement out of you — if you let it. I just need to fight harder against that.

    Thanks, WV.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    • This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Avatar photoBilly_T.
    #47472
    Avatar photoInvaderRam
    Moderator

    “The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” Les Noyers de l’Altenburg: Andre Malraux

    that pretty much encapsulates what i think of life.

    you’re right too. i wouldn’t WANT to see this planet destroyed. can’t punish other living things for our mistakes.

    i do think what will ultimately happen is the rise of the machines type scenario where robots become sentient and become the dominant life form on this planet. but it won’t be a violent uprising like the terminator. and then they will live in the peaceful communist regime billy_t has been yearning for. hahahaha!

    #47479
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    I miss have that kind of intellectual fire and passion for the new. At my age, far too much of that is gone. I fear more than a decade of chemo has something to do with this, and just life itself. It can beat that excitement out of you — if you let it. I just need to fight harder against that.

    Thanks, WV.

    ==============

    No doubt. Old age can beat you up, too. I wake up nowadays,
    and sometimes i walk to the bathroom like a 90 year-old, crooked west virginian. 🙂

    I once dated a rich jewish lady from New York. When She came to visit me in Morgantown the first time, we walked downtown, and I asked her what she thot. She hesitated, and then looked around town, and kinda painfully said, “are all West Virgnians bent-over and crippled?”

    Ah well.

    w
    v

    #47482
    Avatar photowv
    Participant

    that pretty much encapsulates what i think of life.

    you’re right too. i wouldn’t WANT to see this planet destroyed. can’t punish other living things for our mistakes.

    i do think what will ultimately happen is the rise of the machines type scenario where robots become sentient and become the dominant life form on this planet. but it won’t be a violent uprising like the terminator. and then they will live in the peaceful communist regime billy_t has been yearning for. hahahaha!

    =================

    Communist sentient-machines?

    Well damn. What about football? What about the Rams?

    w
    v
    “In fact, I suspect that our only hope is disaster. Cruel tho’ it is to say it, there has got to be a vast die-off in the human population — likely including us and our families — before the survivors find themselves in a world where a new and humble and ‘religious’ adaptation with nature is possible. Disaster is not necessary; the better world could be achieved through reason and common sense and a sense of fellowship — but most of the present human world is dead set against us…” Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

    #47483
    Avatar photoBilly_T
    Participant

    WV,

    I think you did it again.

    ;>)

    Looks like you quoted Invader Rams’ #47472 in your #47482 post, but attributed it to me.

    No big deal.

    We both are getting old. Walking like we’re 90 and such. I’ll be hiking in the Blue Ridge tomorrow, and hope I don’t keel over. My younger friend won’t like it if I keel over. She will have traveled a good bit to see me, and that’s not a good look, falling off the mountain.

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