WV!

I think he’s about as good as it gets in comedy/politix these days.

w
v

PS, i watched this. At the 18:20 mark there’s some criticism of the women’s march leaders. Thot it was interesting. No big thing, just thot it was interesting.

It isn’t about privacy. It is about who runs the internet privacy. FTC vs FCC. We don’t want the FCC running privacy, cause the FTC already does it. The FCC thing is about censorship by the FCC. I am not motivated enough to post the relevant data. Sorry.

Conspiracies: For me, a good way of cutting through the bullshit is to ask these questions:

1. Could the people involved achieve X through drastically lower level and far more simplified tactics, strategies, etc. etc.?

2. Could they achieve their aims moving the dial to 3 or 4, rather than the 11 of the conspiracy narrative? As in, if banal, every day, low level corruption would suffice, why go to Defcon One? Why go to “hair’s on fire” when subtle winks and nods suffice?

3. Is the risk worth the result? Is the result beneficial enough for the participants to warrant the risk?

4. Could they achieve the same or better results without taking any risks at all?

5. Where does the money lead us? What is the logical progression for that money trail?

6. Does the conspiracy narrative sound as if someone thought up the worst possible thing a person or group could ever do, and then created scaffolding for this?

For example, the 9/11 Truthers posit that Bush and company were willing to risk certain jail or worse, all in order to start a war, when America has traditionally accepted wars at the drop of a hat, without any elaborate schemes. And it never made any sense that the Power Elite would attack itself to provoke that war. As in, destroying centers of financial, political and military power. Um, sorry, but if they were going to scheme to provoke a war, they’d attack targets that wouldn’t harm themselves in the slightest, and they would be far from home.

Pizzagate: Running a child-sex-slave ring out of a pizza shop in DC? That’s #6. And by placing it in DC, you go up against the “don’t shit where you eat” rule.

My guess is most of the truly ugly, miserable, despicable and rotten stuff that happens around the world comes about without any elaborate scheming, and that it’s mostly banal in its mechanisms. Routine. Normalized. Often quite subtle in approach. Horrible in effect. But it’s just not likely to be the stuff of a Robert Ludlum novel — or a Marvel comic.

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Why criticize the march? Well, in the video the woman critiquing the march is Medea Benjamin a co-founder of Code Pink. She was asked by the interviewer “why has it been so hard to build an anti-war movement…at the womens march in Washington our wars abroad werent even mentioned…?”

And Medea sez “…no, they didnt even mention it in the platform, and we called them, we tried, and we couldnt even get that in the platform of the women’s march. Its just extraordinary….they said it was controversial.”

The vid is about FIXING fissures in the left-movements.

w
v

Well be prepared for a very different view. What you quote there? I don’t are about it. A united front does not mean universal doctrinarire conformity. It means lots of things happen in conjunction, representing different views and interests. To me the only viable stance is to support all of them. Even when it appears, in the short term, that they clash. In the course of the process being a process, different parts of it evolve, change, interact, intersect. But only if there’s a process.

We had this conversation before. I know uncountable bunches of people who went to Washington and none of them, to a person, meets the cliched description of this limit-think in-group.

This is my view. If people can’t persuade beyond their own base, let them keep trying. Sooner or later intersections happen…unless certain types withdraw into the stance of being purists. Then THEY become the problem, IMO. And I personally end up just ignoring them.

On the other hand it’s true that criticism is part of the process too. But only if we begin with the assumption that not one single faction or group is beyond criticism, and that includes Ms. Medea, and also if we accept that criticism should be optimistic and constructive, not this conformity test.

BTW my sense of things is that there is more anti-USA foreign police action sentiment today than there was in the 80s during Nicaragua and El Salvador. In fact right now, predictably, Trump is upping the ante with troops on the ground, including troops deployed in Yemen and Iraq and Syria. That is leaving aside the ineffectual cruise missle attack from the other day.

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well i dont disagree with any of that.

I have a world of respect for Medea after listening to her, btw.

w
v

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

well i dont disagree with any of that.

There are things that are annoying about this round of left resistance.

You feel it, I feel it, just about different things.

When we were trying to reason our way through the iraq war, there was more spontaneous unity. I mean everywhere.

So I guess I is just this old nostalgic S.O.B.

…

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Well, i think the corporotacracy has just gotten worse and worse.

I never used to see the term “deep state” back in the Iraq War days. Now there’s a sense among a lot of leftists that the CIA/NSA/Defense-Corpse/Congress/President/Mega-Corpse are…i cant even think of a metaphor or image…..like a dinosaur-sized flaming planet-eating giraffe.

The hopelessness and hideous trajectory of things iz making a lot of leftists
even more difficult than usual. I’m burned out myself. Even though i post almost nothing but political shit, i mainly enjoy the Sciency, quirky stuff i see on the board. The Pol stuff is too hideous for words.

w
v

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by wv.

zn wrote:

The hopelessness and hideous trajectory of things iz making a lot of leftists
even more difficult than usual

We may differ on that.

I don’t things are any worse than usual.

I just think some have talked themselves into that view.

This is from an honest place in me, and I am not trying to one-up or be holier or any of that. It’s just something I sense. I maybe don’t know how to put it well.

…

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Well I’d say you are dead wrong. 🙂

The science sez, the air is getting worse, the water is getting worse, the fracking is getting worse, the climate is getting worse, etc.

I ‘do’ hope you are right, though.

w
v

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by wv.