Zooey wrote:

My thought has been that the troops are irrelevant.

The troops weren’t there defending the Kurds. And Turkey has wanted to wipe them out for as long as I can remember, going back to Reagan, if not Carter. Not just in Syria, but in Turkey itself.

And our troops have been in Syria only 3 or 4 years.

It wasn’t the withdrawal of troops that opened the gates to Turkey’s attack of Kurds.

It was the withdrawal of the US’s diplomatic protection of the Kurds. Trump green-lighted the attack. Nothing to do with troops.

That’s my thinking, anyhow.

It was both. Our troops being there meant Turkey wasn’t going to attack that particular area, because American troops were working side by side with the Kurds. It would have meant war with the US, in effect.

Also: Trump tried to gaslight Americans with “bring the troops home” rhetoric. They didn’t come home. He just repositioned them elsewhere to apparently guard oil reserves, and ordered a few thousand more to go to Saudi Arabia to do the same.

What a world.

I don’t know anything about the author, but I think he’s working overtime on the subject of motives, which really boils down to pure speculation, not known knowns. This, IMO, is something my fellow leftists are prone to. It can all too often color an entire critique in the haze of paranoia, and traps the mind behind that fog. It rarely produces clarity or insight.

Not only is it next to impossible to know another person’s motives, it’s also, generally speaking, irrelevant. What matters in the world is cause and effect. Save the speculation on motives for the couch, IMO.

Cause and effect. Trump had a call with Erdogan and gave him the Green Light to invade Syria, so Turkey could massacre the Kurds and flood Syria with 2 million refugees formerly inside of Turkey. Turkey wanted to both get rid of the burden of those refugees, and do “ethnic cleansing” of a long-time thorn in its side. The Kurds have (rightfully) fought for their own homeland for more than a century, and if they got it, it would mean nations like Turkey, Iraq and Iran would lose key regions.

It wasn’t the US (for a change), being directly imperialist in this case. It was Turkey. And not just imperialist, but genocidal. Chomsky’s right, IMO. The author is wrong. And, to make it all the more clear about this, the Rojava Project is one of the most astounding attempts at anarchist-socialism in the world at present, and Turkey’s invasion will destroy it.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/rojava-syria-kurds-ypg-pkk-ocalan-turkey/

I’m mixing scenarios here in an impossible way, but hopefully it expresses what I mean:

Trump: It’s a beautiful day today, the bluest skies ever, the best sunshine ever. It’s amazingly gorgeous!!

Trump crowd: Gorgeous Day!! Gorgeous Day!! Gorgeous Day!!

Reporters: But, Mr. President, the sky is dark gray and a major storm is predicted within the hour.

Trump: Like I said, it’s a grayest day ever, and this is going to be the greatest storm we’ve ever seen.

Trump crowd: Greatest storm!! Greatest storm!! Greatest storm!!

. . .

It’s all about the delivery, the way a politician delivers the message.

wv wrote:

Corporate-Capitalism + Capitalist-Christianity = ?

The capitalist-religion-thing kinda helps to super-charge the toxicity of capitalism. Ya know. Jesus as the guy who values ‘hard work’ and ‘keeping yer nose to the grindstone.’ The value of everyone, including immigrants, is judged on “how hard they work.”

Halloween — I have yet to see an American child come to my door dressed up as: Marx, Jesus, Any Intellectual, Any Writer, Any Artist.

This year it was all ‘Super-Heroes’ or Zombies.

I dont know what any of that means.

w
v

I think it’s interesting, and incredibly tragic, that Christianity developed as it did, and it does have that toxic effect (all too often) on a large portion of the electorate.

All organized religions tend to veer (wildly) away from the original messenger — real or imagined — though I’d argue there has never been a wider gap than the one between Jesus and his church. Perhaps it’s because it’s lasted so long, was taken over by the Roman Empire, and then exploited by dozens of other empires along the way. But there’s virtually nothing “Christian” about it — at least in its right-wing form.

Jesus, from what little we can gather about him, was a proto-communist and all-around DFH. He and his merry band of proto-communists went from town to town, owning nothing, sharing everything, refusing all remuneration for services rendered, while teaching a gospel of collectivism, community-action, sharing, cooperation and love. He flat out said no rich person could get into heaven or even follow him. They had to give away all their wealth to the poor before they could do that. He obviously would have been spit at by today’s right, kicked out of town, or worse.

“Get a job, you dirty effing hippy!!” would have been the mildest thing he’d hear from much of today’s right-wing.

It’s just incredible how a proto-communist prophet of peace, love and understanding gave birth to a religion of hatred, exclusion and profound selfishness, at least as interpreted by a certain sector of the populace.

Zooey, you really should read Martin Hagglund’s This Life. He deals with those issues so well. It’s a deeply philosophical look at our existing system, and why it must be replaced with democratic socialism/secular humanism, as he sees it. Brilliant book.

We’re all born in the capitalist soup, so it’s pretty difficult for most people to envision something else. But I’ve always wondered why we accept others owning the work we do, in absolute, legal terms. I’ve always wondered why anyone would think that the purpose of the economy should be to make a few people rich . . . rather than to provide for everyone‘s needs, first and foremost. Hagglund adds a few other essential rationales:

To work for the Common good
The solve problems
To radically expand free time

On the latter, he’s not just talking about the time we have when we get home from work, sit down on our couches, and watch TV in relative peace. He’s talking about slashing the time we spend working, and turning that into time we can pursue our most passionate interests, our life’s work . . . or, as Joseph Campbell would say, “finding our bliss.”

Reading between the lines of his book — he lays it out clearly enough so that’s usually pretty easy — capitalism has other ideas when it comes to the free time generated by innovation:

It folds that back into profits for business ownership, and workers still work the same number of hours or more.

Hagglund’s talking about taking the results of new innovations and handing those hours back to citizens instead. All of them.

Self-evident, to me.

Thanks, WV.

That makes a lot of sense. Both your own rationale and Dore’s, if he shares that with you.

Orwell was similar. He was a life-long leftist, but he decided to focus most of his critique on “the left.” It was a given for him that the right was horrific. So he spent most of his time trying to get his own side of the spectrum to live up to its principles and stop its betrayal of those principles whenever that happened. Camus did the same.

Orwell and Camus, of course, literally put their lives on the line fighting fascists . . . in Spain and France, respectively.

It was also, I think, much tougher for them to critique their own “team,” because Europe in their day had a much broader political range and there actually was a vibrant “left.”

Anyway . . . thanks for the videos and the answers. Great points on McCain and family.

WV, got some questions for ya. I don’t follow Dore, beyond watching the videos you post, so I really don’t know. Does he go after Trump and the Republicans too? Not just as an aside, not just in the background of his comments, but, say, for an entire episode, as the major focus of his critique?

It goes without saying that both parties suck. They both stand in the way of social, economic and environmental justice and a sustainable planet. To one degree or another, they’re either a lump obstacle or at war outright against what’s best for us and the earth. I despise both of them, the two-party system itself, and especially the economic system that is killing the planet and has to be overturned.

But if I only watched Dore and no other media, I couldn’t help but conclude that it’s the Dems in DC and in the Media entirely at fault. I’d have to conclude they were responsible for all the corruption, venality, callousness and indifference to the suffering of countless people, and no other party. Like Assange going after just HRC and the Dems, exposing them and not the GOP . . . If I got all of my news from folks like Dore or Wikileaks, I wouldn’t even know what the GOP does in DC and elsewhere. I’d have to conclude they’re relatively innocent and benign, because they’re barely mentioned.

In short, Dore’s critique is pretty lopsided, in my view. And that’s not an argument from “whataboutismville.” It’s just an observation of the near absence of critique about the other party, which just so happens to hold the White House, the Senate and the Supreme Court, and has long dominated the military, police, and the various intel agencies.

Your thoughts on the above?

My own take:

This is a good thing, but it won’t have much impact overall. And I think Mr. Ham is exaggerating the effects, bigly.

People can still talk politics all they want in their accounts and in other threads. Twitter isn’t banning political speech, just ads. And there’s Facebook and a gazillion other ways to “get the message out.”

Again, this just a ban on political ads, which none of the platforms seem willing to fact-check to begin with. TV and Radio, OTOH, are required by law to do that.

What did people do before Twitter? It wasn’t even in existence until July of 2006.

Just my two cents . . .

Of course, the other problem with that tact is this:

There is no proof that immigrant children are tougher to handle in the classroom than the so-called “native born.” There is also no proof that poor kids are tougher to handle than rich kids, or middle class kids. There is no proof that immigrant kids, or poor kids in general, are more “disruptive.”

So if American parents are upset that their kids have to go to schools with disruptive, unruly children, however one might define that, they’re not going to be able to solve that by kicking out the children of immigrants or the poor in general. Putting up walls, building moats, filling them with snakes and alligators — as Trump said he wants to do — isn’t going to solve anything . . . and that policy will kill tens of thousands of our fellow humans in the near term, and potentially millions, given the trajectory of climate change.

This is one of the essays in Naomi Klein’s new book, and it’s spot on in my view. She updates it a bit in her notes.

https://www.thenation.com/article/capitalism-vs-climate/

Excerpt:

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable. These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to terrify Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent global warming are akin to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society”), the reality is that Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia. And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done, China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways and extraction-based energy projects, particularly coal.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.

Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

I watched it this morning on Youtube.

Praeger showed up, and was, IMO, buffoonish.

I remember hearing him in the early 1990s, but not really since then. Back then, he was really big on moral and ethical behavior. At least publicly. I can’t even count the numbers of conservatives who once put a premium on personal conduct who now back Trump . . . easily one of the sleaziest, most mendacious, more immoral and unethical humans we’ve ever had the misfortune to see in public.

In the same way that Republicans seem to only care about deficits and debt when Dems are in the White House, they’ve shown that “personal morality” only matters when the other side is in charge.

This is the Overtime section of the show. I’ve linked to it because, as far as I know, it’s actually supported by HBO. People watch the show itself (Realtime) at their own risk.

Praeger gets his chance to spout nonsense around the 2.50 minute mark. It’s in reference to supposed “left-wing lies.”

If I can riff off your question, WV . . . How about the most productive QB, with the least amount of actual physical talent, himself? As in, the guy who made things happened, but really had no business even playing football?

I started out as a Rams fan from the beginning, but grew up in the DC area, so I watched a lot of Skins football. They had two pretty successful quarterbacks (back in the day) who struck me, and still strike me, as verging on non-athletes. But they were fun to watch and oh so colorful:

Sonny Jurgenson and Billy Kilmer. The latter was known to drink a wee bit before and after games . . . and rumors were that he did so during them. Neither guy looked athletic, but they still made plays — Jurgenson being the better of the two (1960s all-decade team; several Pro Bowls, etc). Jurgenson went on to become a really good radio guy for the Skins.

On the other side of the ledger, I’d say Jeff George was the QB with the most arm talent and the least amount of actual overall production. He should have been a HOF guy. But, fair or not, the word was he was a “head case.”