Yes. Helping each other, even in the face of the inevitable fade to black. “Grace” in the non-religious sense. Living by it, bestowing it on others. That’s how we break the cycle. That’s how we guarantee a “win” even if we ultimately lose.

And I think there is a great deal more meaning and heart to it if we do it without any sense of payoff or benefit, macro or micro, come what may. We just do it, because. We just do.

Which, again, brings me back to where we went so wrong, and had the chance to go so right . . . moving from feudalism to capitalism, from steady-state, localized, small-scale production for need and use and functionality; production for ourselves and each other, albeit under the thumb of aristocrats . . . to production for an even harder task master, the cold, heartless “market” and the Future, with a new type of aristocrat in charge.

If only we had cast off the masters, all of them, but retained small-scale, localized, steady-state, use-value production, for each other . . . linked that , one democratic cooperative to another, one cooperative community to another, ever wider, and wider, etc. etc. Still no masters, anywhere. Still producing for each other, not profits, not the invisible hand. If only we had managed to keep the economic sphere from dominating everything else, I think it would have been a thousand times easier to help one another as a matter of course — in all spheres.

Night, all.

Zooey wrote:

We needed Sanders decades ago. We’re past that now.

We’re now looking at a grim future no matter what. Which grim future is better?

I don’t know. But like flood waters coursing through a German town, there isn’t much hope of directing the current.

So now I’m finished with similes for the day.

I agree with all of that.

Again, one could easily say that because neither the Dems nor the Republicans have solved the problem of human mortality yet, they’re just the same. No diff. We can zoom out so far, there really are no differences, so nihilism seems the best course.

Then, again, we could fight for the most dignified, least painful, least miserable or cruel exit from the stage, and that can be our guide. To me, I actually do see major differences between the two parties (and the people who run them) along those line.

If we really are truly fooked, and it looks like we are, I’d rather not have to listen to serial-lying, far-right bullies, beloved by white supremacists, gas on about how the “deep state” is out to get them, and how “they” won’t replace whitey, and how “the far left” is supposedly destroying America, and it’s all “antifa’s” fault, and critical race theory’s, and blah blah blah.

If we’re on our way out, I want to go with non-fascist tunes playing in the wind.

I think there’s a danger in “they’re all the same” thinking, and it’s the proverbial two-edged sword to boot. We can make a case, for instance, when it comes to environmental destruction, that super-progressive action, short of replacing capitalism outright, is the same as centrist action, in the long run. Both routes will still render the planet uninhabitable for most life-forms in the not too distant future. It will put us on different time-tables, and the numbers of preventable early deaths will differ, but the end result is the same.

As in, if there’s no discernible difference between a Biden and a Trump, eco-wise, then there’s no discernible difference between a Sanders and a Biden.

Yeah, I know, blasphemy! But when you zoom out far enough, all the world’s a blur.

(More in the next post)

wv wrote:

====

If both men, are promoting policies that are World-killers.
Biosphere-enders. How can we say, one is really worse than
the other? I dont get that argument, anymore.

The words ‘centrist’ and ‘fascist’ and racist etc,
just dont mean a lot IF — IF — you think they are both
world-killers.

Maybe the difference is, you and zn, just dont see
Biden/trump as biosphere-killers.

w
v

WV,

Trump opened up millions of formerly protected acres (most of which had been saved by Obama) to fossil fuel extraction. He took us out of the Paris Accords. He seeded his administration with billionaires with direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, and with countless ideologues who thought, as he does, that Climate Change is a Chinese hoax. He put coal lobbyists in charge of the Interior and the EPA. He pushed for a massive increase in fossil fuel extraction offshore. He destroyed countless regulations designed to protect the environment, and took the side of corporate polluters against the planet without exception.

If that had been allowed to stand, literally millions of humans and countless other life-forms would have perished down the road.

Biden has reversed most of the above policies, and at least promised to tackle 99% of the rest. Does he go far enough? Of course not. Not even close. Hell, the GND doesn’t go far enough, and we know Biden won’t go for that. But I think it’s a mistake to view Trump’s ultra-aggressive destruction of the environment as equivalent to Biden’s (far too) modest attempt to right the ship. The difference between the two positions means the difference between losing tens of millions of lives, or hundreds of thousands.

It obviously should be zero. No lives lost. No one left behind. No more Sixth Extinction. We obviously need to make radical changes if we’re to prevent the Sixth Extinction from including us too. But to the individuals who will live or die based on the differences between the two agendas, it means the world. They definitely wouldn’t say “they’re just the same.”

And another — again, separating them because of the filter.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/217577/outlays-for-defense-and-forecast-in-the-us/

Interesting dialogue between youze guys, regarding Biden vs. Trump.

IMO, Trump is significantly worse than any president since Andrew Jackson, and the most vile human being ever to sit in the White House. Biden is “meh.” He’s the centrist we basically expected, so he obviously falls way short of leftist dreams and hopes. But Trump was a fascist’s dream come true, and the worst president on the environment, perhaps ever. He seems to take pleasure in all of his destruction, and isn’t finished with his coup attempt(s) yet.

Let them drink bleach! he basically said. So he has the deaths of hundreds of thousands on his hands — above and beyond his escalation of wars/bombings in Yemen and elsewhere. To me, there’s never been such stark differences between past and present administrations, as far as damage to the earth, to society, to the future.

WV, could you elaborate on your comments regarding Biden’s “rebuilding” of the CIA and the police? I wasn’t aware that it was happening, and I didn’t see any indications that Trump reduced their powers one iota, or their budgets. In fact, compared with Obama’s budgeting, Trump increased them a great deal more. If I read the graph below correctly, the intel budget increased more than 12 billion under Trump, and fell a coupla billion under Obama.

https://fas.org/irp/budget/

Overall military spending also fell under Obama, and rose significantly under Trump.

(I’d add another link for that, but it likely won’t make it past the spam check.)

zn wrote:

Tutu Atwell worked out with Teddy Bridgewater and got in throwing sessions with him in Miami this offseason.

Was happy the Rams took a flier on such a freakish athlete. But, damn, he’s skinny. He and Tutu need to take a crash course on eating massive quantities of cheesecake and pizza, or something.

Well, actually, it should be really healthy food, but mega-calories in total, along with continued weight-training, etc. etc.

I’m guessing most of us here know how hard it is to lose weight. Gaining it should be easy, and kinda fun.

Kids these days!!

;>)

Currently reading a really good book by William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (2016).

Loose thematic frame is Marx’s use of Dante’s Inferno as loose thematic framework for his Magnum Opus.

Getting a ton out of it. Like:

There is a fundamental conflict between the commitment of the laborers to pursue the means of enjoyment and the commitment of capitalists to pursue the endless accumulation of wealth.

It’s useful to remember that people once understood this, saw the change, remembered earlier, highly localized and dispersed economic systems that focused on entirely different things. As in, people tended to work enough to fulfill their needs. That’s it. Then, capitalist hegemony, mechanics, laws of motion changed all of that. People work harder, for longer hours today, because they work for something well beyond what they, personally, ever needed. They work to make it possible for the few to increase their wealth via surplus value that doesn’t really mean a damn thing to individual workers, and doesn’t help them, either.

I’d bet very few Americans ever stop to think what they’re doing when they work at all — why they work, and for whom.

I think this calls for some real innovation. Use six O-linemen, and include a second-string D-lineman in the backfield — Copeland or Hoecht, perhaps — as blocker or carrier. Put Tutu back there now and then. Though, as Tom Hanks said in A League of the Rhone, “There is no Tutu in football!” So he’s gonna have to find another name.

Again, I think Henderson has a lot of talent, so it’s just a matter of staying on the field and away from the training room for him. Beyond that, I’d go with Funk before Jones. The name speaks for itself.

I’d actually love to see Gurley back in horns. Or Peterson. Don’t break the bank to do it. But they could help with 5-10 carries a game, if they’re willing.

Important qualifications for the above.

1. There is a huge difference (of course) between Op Ed pieces and “regular news,” in both print and electronic media. But even there, CNN and MSNBC have long made room for partisan Republicans, including ex-Trump officials, and the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) typically bring in more Republicans than Dems for their political talk shows. And the Dems they do bring in tend to be centrists to center-right.

The NYT and the WaPO give Op Ed slots to a host of conservatives. There is no corresponding openness on Fox and its right-wing brethren. Right off the bat, the right has advantages when it comes to media partisanship, and they’re huge.

2. MSNBC is owned by a very conservative corporation, and it hired a conservative program chief. He hired all kinds of deeply conservative hosts, like Joe Scarborough (three hours in the morning) and Nicolle Wallace (two hours in the afternoon), and they tend to have on all kinds of deeply conservative guests. It’s not “carrying Dems’ water” when Republicans there tell the truth about Trump and decry the changes in their party. They still try to push pro-GOP narratives when they can, but those usually center on some golden past that never was, when Reagan balanced the budget, defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly, refused to lie about the Cherry Tree, etc. etc. . . . If MSNBC really were just an arm of the Democratic Party, why would it give so much time to Republicans, including its former chair, Michael Steele — among dozens and dozens of others?

Signed, Billy_T, heretic leftist.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

I think it’s important to pin down the lies they think they recognize. What exactly do they think they’ve been told that isn’t true? Are they the same lies we see? .

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

Its a duopoly, right? Two corporate-capitalist parties.

The Rightwingers see the Lies from the Duplicats (CNN, MSNBC, NPR etc)

Do you think only half of the duopoly is doing the lying?

w
v

WV, I guess I worded all of that poorly.

I’m saying that the right doesn’t see what we see as a lie. They see the truth as lies, and lies as truth. So I don’t think it’s productive in the slightest to assume they agree with us on the subject of establishment mendacity, because from my vantage point, they don’t. Not in the slightest. They never have, and they never will.

Again, what lies, specifically, do they recognize? That’s essential, at least for me.

NPR, CNN, MSNBC the NYT, the WaPo, etc. etc. . . aren’t lying to them at all about their guy, their team, climate change, Covid, etc. They’re lying, usually via omission, about things that the right believes in passionately anyway, and doesn’t recognize as a lie, or an ocean of lies . . . Capitalism, empire, corporate America, America’s eternal innocence and greatness, the carceral state, the necessity of war after war after war, black ops, etc. The right sees all negative reporting about Trump, the GOP, plus coverage of Covid and Climate Change as a lie, but it’s not. The MSM supports their reporting with video, audio, direct quotes, transcripts, science, and so on. It’s easily corroborated, and withstands serious scrutiny, with rare exceptions, IMO.

Right-wingers, with less than rare exceptions, don’t recognize establishment jingoism or Go America Go as based on lies. In fact, they think there’s a leftist conspiracy to tear this country down via even the slightest reassessment or doubt cast upon our perfection and perfect innocence. As mentioned earlier, they don’t have an issue with the security state, at all — except to the extent they think it’s after Trump. They couldn’t care less about its impact on Muslims, leftists, people of color — historically or today.

In sum, I don’t see a single instance of the right recognizing a lie as a lie, or a truth as a truth. Not one. Their critique of this society is a critique of a phantom, not reality, and who do they blame the most for all of its (and their) ills?

Migrants, immigrants, the “undeserving poor,” people of color, feminists, with we leftists supposedly pulling all the strings.

I’m just not seeing any evidence that they’ve recognized a single actual lie, WV. I’ve tried, but can’t.

zn wrote:

I;m not providing much in the way of analysis. Just blunt “IMO” reactions. But it really is my feeling that the desire to find some kind of underground affinity between the left and magas is not very compelling. Something similar happened before Trump’s election. I detected a bit of “how bad could he be” sentiment, and frankly I found it disturbing. My line at the time was that he is even worse than you can imagine. My point of reference is that in Maine, the governor was a pre-Trump Trump-like type (LePage). He was freaking gawdawful and was very damaging. That’s what we get with these people.

That’s how I see it anyway. That’s just my own little vote.

…

I had a similar take, pre-election, though without the Maine-angle. Even back then, I was stunned that some thought Trump would be less of a warmonger than the Clinton Dems, given Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, his Nazi-like call to “shut down” all Muslims, his call for even greater military spending, and a much tougher “law and order” regime, etc. His extremist anti-immigration platform necessarily meant more wars, covert, and overt, a stepped up security-state involvement, a far more aggressive ICE, and so on. And he actually wondered out loud why the US couldn’t use nukes, even on Europe.

I just couldn’t find a single issue — and I tried — where Trump would be even slightly less destructive than Clinton and the Dems, or where the GOP itself was.

His presidency didn’t just confirm my fears. He went well beyond them.

What is even more frightening, however, is that with his departure, the right has gotten even worse, more aggressive, more determined than ever before to make America a truly One Party State . . . and not in the old lefty formulation of the “Money Party” with two wings. Literally one party at the helm for as far as the eyes can see. And it seems obvious to me that the number one rationale for Trump’s attempted coup, and continued pushing of election lies is this:

He thinks the only way he stays out of jail is if he has control of the DoJ and the courts. He desperately needs to get back in the White House, by any means necessary, to make that happen. And if he makes the impossible happen again, he won’t leave until he dies.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Billy_T.

IOW:

Could it be that some lefty pundits are projecting their own “discoveries” onto others? Wishful thinking on steroids?

In my view, that’s at least in part what is happening. There isn’t an actual awakening on the right about anything, and they’ve never wanted the same kind of society we want. They don’t want equality, alternatives to capitalism, or even modest restrictions on capitalism to save the planet.

I’m reading an excellent study of William Faulkner right now, focusing on the Civil War and race as it relates to his life and works. The Saddest Words, by Michael Gorra. Getting so much out of it, but this one section just seems to typify the right-wing mindset to a T. I doubt it was Gorra’s intention to spark my reaction, but it did.

Summing up a section in Absalom, Absalom!

One day young Sutpen was sent to the Big House with a message and went up to the front door, curious about what the place looked like inside. But a black butler blocked his path before he could say his piece, and told the boy never again to approach that way; people like him needed to go around back to the servant’s entrance, the slave’s entrance. The incident enraged him. “Sprung from a people whose houses didn’t have back doors,” he had never before encountered a social barrier between one white man and another, and for a moment he thought about shooting the planter who maintained it or beating the butler’s “balloon face.” Then he realized that what he really wanted was to be on the other side of that division, a man with a hammock of his own. For that he would need money and slaves, land and a house, children and “incidentally of course, a wife”; and so he went to the West Indies, where he had heard that poor boys might grow rich.

They see that the establishment is working to thwart their ambitions, and destabilize their livelihoods. But they don’t accurately understand what forces are at work in that reality, what their objectives are, and how and why they do what they are doing.

I know you know this, Zooey, but even their idea of “the Establishment” is all wrong. All too many Trump supporters don’t even include their own party/media as being a part of that establishment, unless it’s openly opposed Trump, then it/they go on the list. They’ll never accept the fact that liberals hold little power in America, or that leftists hold less than nothing. And they’ll never accept the fact that the Powers that Be, regardless of party, have pretty much always been center-right in America.

I’m struck also by the desire by some lefty civil libertarians to forge closer ties. Just because a Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan raises holy hell about alleged snooping on Carter Page or Tucker Carlson doesn’t mean they have the slightest concern about anyone else. When was the last time right-wingers ever condemned security-state abuses directed at Muslims, or against leftist dissidents, for instance?

Trump actually called on the military to shoot protestors. Did any Trump supporter condemn that?

And, to raise the hypocrisy meter ten-fold, Paul, Cruz and company pitched a fit about Carter Page and FISA the same day they voted to reauthorize its post-9/11 powers.

In my view, right-wingers are hard-wired to think about themselves first, last, always, which obviously makes societal critique a bit difficult. That’s pretty much a pre-condition for choosing the political right in the first place, though there’s that chicken and egg dilemma. They see inequality as perfectly natural, and capitalism as synonymous with their god, apple pie, Mom and the flag. “Real Americans”? Well, they don’t include people of color or we leftists.

The Dems piss me off endlessly for playing Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the football so often. I don’t think there’s much difference when leftist pundits, real or faux, try to force some (futile, insane) compact with the far-right.

Zooey wrote:

In D&D terms, Trump is Chaotic Evil. Biden is Lawful Evil. From a business point of view, Lawful Evil is better. So I think that’s just true.

Thanks for the original article, and your response, Zooey. Glad you posted them.

I like the formulation above. Trump was seen, before 2016, as chaotic, almost cartoonishly corrupt and vulgar, and a second-rate grifter. The establishment is more stable in its corruption and bad intentions, and prefers that kind of “leader,” typically. It also tries its best to hide what it does, and wants those in charge to do the same. And while Trump did a hell of a lot of horrible things behind the scenes (too) that we’re just now finding out, he broke all the norms by being an asshole in public, continuously. The establishment greatly prefers those who limit their assholery to closed door sessions.

That said, I think where some pundits go wrong is to assume that the establishment went after Trump with falsehoods and trumped-up charges. To me, that’s a bad assumption to make, and it’s not logical. They didn’t need to lie. Trump gave them all the ammo in the world, going back decades, and throughout his presidency. There was never any reason for the establishment to make shit up to try to take him down. And, of course, given the fact that he escaped time and time again, and had nearly universal backing from the GOP establishment and right-wing media — as in, establishment insiders . . . Well, it was never really a case of David versus Goliath. Contrary to what the right wants to paint this as, he was never persecuted, and was surrounded by billionaires and Republican insiders defending his evil from 2016 on, at least.

(More in a bit)