Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Billy_TParticipantThe part of the article I liked best is the explanation of how liberals let the right completely dictate the frames of debate, how they meet them on their turf, and accept their values.
I think that’s a crucial part of the article, and spot on — with a caveat or two. I wonder if it makes more sense to substitute “Dems” for “liberals” in that case, and I wonder also if it’s not time to take another look at our usage of the word, period, just as “neoliberalism” is considered for a tuneup as well.
Gut feeling: The meaning of “liberal” has been so stretched thin by our national political narrative, it strikes me as impossibly loaded and all but useless. The vast majority of mainstream discussions basically give Americans just two choices in political ID: Liberal and conservative. Obviously and logically, if that’s the case, then you’re going to have liberals who are diametrically opposed to conservatives and don’t cede them any ground, and you’re going to have liberals right next door to conservatives — kissing cousins, basically. If “liberal” runs the entire gamut, that’s gonna be the case.
We’re asking “liberal” to serve as a catchall indicator for the entire left, IOW, and most of us here choose other terms, well to the left of liberal. Those terms are rarely acknowledged in any discussion in recent times. Again, you get those two choices, and that’s it . . . . though, lately, I think right-libertarians have made a big push to gain their own place on the right’s spectrum, and in the process, they’ve managed to all but kill the use of left-libertarian, or libertarian socialist, or libertarian communist, which preceded them, ironically, by two centuries.
So, basically, liberal, conservative and libertarian. Since right-libertarians have all but won the PR battle, they don’t even need to add the qualifier. Does it make sense to talk about political philosophy, policy, reforms, etc. etc. using the word “liberal” when it’s asked to cover so much ground?
Not to me.
(More later . . .)
Billy_TParticipantMy own view is that the term is generally useless, but can be made better by adding “soft” and “hard” as adjectives. Ironically, the article mentions Washington Weekly, which some say is the main source for the “soft” version of neoliberalism arising in the early 1970s. WW changed a lot in its overall focus since then, but it was once the bastion for those “soft” version ideas.
But my main problem with the term is that a lot of people take it as referring to something new. IMO, it’s actually a return to previous forms of capitalism, with updates, prior to the short-lived Keynesian era. Unfortunately, I think a lot of Dems and liberals have, in the back of their minds, at least, the idea that the “natural” form of capitalism was in that era, and all we need to do to fix everything is return to those halcyon days and everything will be groovy again. While that era was the best that capitalism has yet produced overall, it was never anywhere close to good enough — when it comes to allocation of resources, wages, fair trade, fair pay, the environment, sustainability, etc. etc. It fell waaaay short in all those areas, and it required a fluky confluence of events in the first place. It was just better than what preceded it and what follows it.
Neoliberalism means the return of the Death Star to me. The return of an all out triumph of Capital over pretty much everything else, with enough crumbs thrown to the masses to prevent all out revolution, or at least mass strikes. It means stripping away Keynesian reforms, which again fell short . . . like modest regulation on Finance, the free flow of Capital, workplace safety and so on. It means we’re getting closer to capitalism in its raw form, but because of that rawness, mass propaganda has to be more and more sophisticated than ever before, has to fool we the people more than ever before, and distract us with enough new baubles to make us forget how badly we’re being used . . . and, yes, “exploited.”
Rereading a truly fantastic collection of essays by George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For, which I should finish later today. A treasure-trove for leftists, and he touches upon a lot of topics in Zooey’s article. He’s just brilliant, and modest about that too. I recommend it highly to all here, and will post about it this weekend.
April 19, 2018 at 10:14 am in reply to: have to take the dog in for the last time…this has been superseded #85235Billy_TParticipantSorry to hear about that, ZN.
Dogs can be — or at least seem to be — better friends to us than humans. As a kid, I felt that way sometimes about our doggies, and have known several people who didn’t even question this. They consistently say they loved their dog unlike any human friend, and it wasn’t close for them. My father was like that to a degree.
Condolences . . .
Billy_TParticipantThanks.
I’m guessing we all have done the same thing. No worries.
You didn’t see the joke. Look again.
Oh, man!! I DID miss it!!
Good one, Billy T!!
;>)
Billy_TParticipanta little more on the C.A. thing:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/mod-cambridge-analytica-parent-company-scl-group-list-x
MoD granted ‘List X’ status to Cambridge Analytica parent companyMPs call for investigation into concerns over SCL Group and its access to secret documents
Hey, WV, hope I haven’t been too argumentative on these topics. It’s never personal if and when it does happen. External stuff I should never let bug me, and I’m working on that. Getting back into Buddhism the last coupla days, starting with a reread of the Dhammapada.
Anyway, as a way to kinda sorta wrap up this thread from my end:
If Cambridge’s parent company is tied to various secret services, and has engaged in the kind of sleazy stuff that’s coming out, isn’t that all the more reason to investigate further? If it’s anything from a remote connection, all the way to an actual front company, I’d say that just adds more urgency, etc.
Bring ’em down. Bring ’em all down.
Billy_TParticipantBilly_TParticipant“What you will not find in this data is support for the common narrative that we have a free speech crisis on college campuses in America, driven by political correctness on the left. That narrative is essentially a myth. Like many popular beliefs, it does not survive confrontation with actual facts.”
Link: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/free-speech-perception-vs-reality/
Here’s another recent article debunking those myths:
The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth. Here are the facts.
Billy_TParticipantWill we ever see the film ‘the Lobby’:https://popularresistance.org/will-we-ever-see-al-jazeeras-investigation-into-the-israel-lobby/
Excerpt:
“…
…..Almost every journalist I’ve met in the Middle East has encountered similar problems. When I worked for the The Times, I alerted the then editor, Charles Douglas-Home, to evidence that Israeli officers had secretly buried at least seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners – done to death in an interrogation centre – at night in a Sidon graveyard in 1983. He wanted me to spend as many weeks as necessary to find out if the story was true. Then, months later, when witnesses emerged with evidence of the burial, including the gravedigger – the bodies still had their hands tied behind their back with nylon rope when they were brought to him – I called my editor. My witnesses were being “visited” by armed members of the Israeli Shin Beth intelligence agency, I told him, and I was being trailed around Sidon by Israeli-registered vehicles. It was time to run the story.To my shock, Douglas-Home – an editor who otherwise loyally stood by me in every Middle East dispute over my work – replied that he wasn’t sure “how we’re justified in running a story like this so long after the event”. In other words, we had to be sure of our facts on such an important story – but by taking the time to do just that, the story was now out of date.
After much argument – during which I suggested to the Israelis that they might like to institute a military inquiry into the deaths if they wanted to avoid a scandal (they said, mysteriously, that it was already under way, although I doubted this) – the story ran. A deputy editor, I was told, had tried to cut the report by two-thirds. He was overruled. Then the story ran. In full.
So, old story, new story. I’ve appeared many times on Al Jazeera. And never been told to mince my words. Nor would I. But a lot of us are waiting to see Swisher’s new documentary. If we don’t, we’ll know what to think of Al Jazeera.”
It’s almost a common place of history: The oppressed become oppressors when the power dynamic is reversed.
Reading again about early Christianity and the Roman empire, it’s pretty stunning to consider just how quickly Christians turned into vicious, violent and all too often sadistic oppressors of pagans, more than reversing the previous dynamic — actually, many times over.
Also just finished rereading a very good biography of one of my favorite writers of the 20th century, Bruno Schulz, a magical Polish/Jewish author who was killed by the Gestapo in 1942. Thinking about the Nazi terror, the Holocaust, the profoundly tragic loss of life, of art, music, literature, of culture in general. So many of Schulz’s friends and relatives died in pogroms or the Final Solution as well.
Fast forward to the Israeli occupation, its wars, etc. etc. . . . and they’ve become oppressors in their own right.
On an individual level, yes, humans can and do remember what we’ve gone through and make sure not to even come close to doing that to others. It becomes part of who we are. But in the aggregate, when that power dynamic changes . . . . it’s just amazing how quickly we can forget.
Billy_TParticipantMost of Palast’s article is really good, and that usually the case for him. He’s an intrepid reporting in the old school sense. But his opening, to me, is surprisingly clunky, and he engages in classic “whataboutism” and a straw man or two:
The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.
That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],
First off, no one is saying Cambridge is a uniquely bad apple. They’re reporting on its sleazy business practices, and the more that comes out about them, the worse it sounds. None of this prevents other reporters from going after what Palast would consider bigger fish. None of this stops any other reporter from going after the Kochs or whomever. But Palast seems to be saying, at least until near the end of the article, that we should ignore this because other stories are much more important.
To me, that’s like saying we shouldn’t worry about a chemical spill that killed a few hundred people, cuz much worse spills are on the way.
Also, no one is saying that Cambridge invented psychometric manipulation. It’s not even a part of the discussion. They’re just saying CA used this to harvest 50 million FB users without their permission.
It’s still a puzzle to me why some public lefties appear to be expending so much energy trying to dismiss stories involving Trump. Why? Especially when, in a case like this, folks like Palast can pursue their view of bigger fish regardless. Though I’m also puzzled why a president isn’t considered a pretty big fish. Anyway, no report on CA blocks him or anyone else from that, and it’s only recently become a story here.
It’s as if they’re telling us it can only be one or the other, not both/and. It can always be both/and.
Billy_TParticipantis that SCL, CA’s parent company used to work for MI6 (or be run by them) and this technology was used by them in god knows what elections around the world for the good of the empire
You know? I spent years criticizing USA actions messing up the democratic process elsewhere. But I (and the many like me) didn’t screw up elections elsewhere…various “security state” style american governments did. So I (and the many like me) were both critical of AND not even a tiny bit complicit with those kinds of anti-democratic actions.
And just because a government I criticized did it does not mean I am going to happily accept anybody, from the Mayor Daley machine to republicans to Russians to British sleaze firms messing up the elections I participate in.
It is getting so I completely tune that argument out.
One of the many problems with Trump is that he is complicit with a Russian autocratic imperialist. And advanced sleazeball British manipulation firms.
I didn’t stand up for elections elsewhere to be so cavalier about elections I myself participate in.
….
Hey, ZN. You mixed up the quotes. That originally came from WV’s post, not mine.
Anyway, I think you make a good point. Aside from the old adage, Two wrongs don’t make a right, 99.99% of the country wasn’t involved in the actions of our clandestine services around the world — from the top down to the bottom. It doesn’t make any real sense that we should feel guilty enough to make us accept having our own elections tampered with by other nations and their clandestine services. It’s not an eye for an eye, when it comes to the vast, vast majority of the country. It’s not even logical on the barbaric grounds of the Old Testament, or the more enlightened grounds of metaphor.
Oh, and if Cambridge Analytica really did have a history with various clandestine services, isn’t that all the more reason to want to see all of this come out in the wash, including the Trump connection(s)? Britain’s Channel Four seems rather unafraid of blow back from MI6 at this point, it would appear . . .
Billy_TParticipantPS — this is really the only part of that post that I was interested in: “…is that SCL, CA’s parent company used to work for MI6 (or be run by them) and this technology was used by them in god knows what elections around the world for the good of the empire…”
——————————–This is just another drop in the vast ocean-of-lies that make up “the West” now.
This is my mantra, BT. (until i become obsessed with a different mantra 🙂 )
Did you know that CA’s parent company worked for the brit-lie-factory? I didnt. Most people dont. What does it mean? I dunno. We dont get to know.
In a land of lies, we dont get to know. What can we trust anymore? What information can we trust in the West? Or the East.
Thats the situation one finds oneself in, in a factory-of-Lies.
And the people are so dummed-down now (not their fault) by the factory-of-lies, that they have…no…clue. They are not ‘citizens’ in any meaningful sense.
There are no citizens in a factory-of-lies.
Just how i see it now. Not tryin to persuade anyone.
w
vWell, WV, just as we all should be skeptical of reports from the MSM, the same skepticism, at least, is warranted when anonymous posters say that X company is tied to X spy agency. How do we know the poster is telling the truth?
It may well be the case. But I need more to go on that just the poster’s word, and he/she got a lot of other things wrong in the section you posted so . . . I’m withholding judgment.
Either way, even if they did have connections, I’m not sure how that alters the exposure of their business practices, what they were caught on tape doing, what they bragged about doing — as in, helping Trump win the election. It doesn’t alter that FB has finally admitted that CA harvested personal information from 50 million users, and sowed disinformation using that platform. It doesn’t alter Steve Bannon’s connection with the harvesting, and the Mercer family founding the company, or the link to Wikileaks, etc.
Anyway . . . I agree with you about this land of lies. Unfortunately, posts from various Internet sites aren’t necessarily the antidote. I know you know this, but we should be wary of all of it.
Hope all is well —
Billy_TParticipantFor me, this isn’t about how much impact it had on the election, if any.
It’s the immorality of it,
the sleaziness,
the likely illegality…===============
Well, I agree on the immorality. And i agree on the Sleaziness.
As for the Illegality — In a Corporotacracy? BT, as you well know poisoning the entire biosphere is perfectly ‘legal’ here. Fracking is legal. Busting Unions is legal. Neoliberalism is legal. NAFTA is legal. Buying elections is legal. Incarcerating gazillions of people on drug charges is legal. Increasing global warming is legal. Imprisoning whistle-blowers is legal. Interfering in other nations elections is legal. Torturing people is legal. Blowing people to bits with drones is legal. Denying poor people adequate health care is legal. Empire is legal. The CIA is legal.
Drenching people in propaganda is legal.I dont even know what ‘legal’ means in a Corporotacracy, BT.
Carry on, Billy. I’m nuthin but dark-matter, i know 🙂
You be the light.
w
vWe both agree on the obscenity of that list of yours. We both want it to stop and that it’s a horror show. But in a world where the vast majority of things are never exposed, when so few even try to expose them, shouldn’t leftists support the rare cases of sunlight when they do occur?
All those things you list — yes, it goes without saying that the rich and corporate America and international capitalism get away with endless crimes against humanity and the planet, and all of that is profoundly wrong and should not stand. None of it. Not one iota of it.
But a tiny sliver of this is being brought to light in the Trump era, in a weird way, in an incredibly ironic way, because he made himself rich and powerful through playing the media, through marketing, through using images and slogans and marketing campaigns to fake it until he made it, and it may well bring him down. The proverbial sword that cuts two ways. The NDAs that cut two ways.
I think he’s guilty of major financial crimes, endless bullying, threats of violence against women, sexual assault against women, stirring up hatred against minorities, plus emboldening white supremacists, neo-nazis, neo-fascists . . . and his policies destroy the poor and the planet. He’s the head of a political party which is much more aggressive about doing those things than the other major party, which is also guilty of crimes against humanity and the planet. He deserves to be in jail for what he’s done, and America has the right to know the entire story.Leftist principles sync up perfectly well with the desire to see all of this brought to light. As mentioned before, if Trump does go down, it’s not a vindication of Clinton, or the Dems, or anyone else. It’s just about Trump and his crime family. Just them. Clinton was a terrible candidate and none of that changes, either way. IMO, leftists make a mistake if they fear supporting these investigations due to side issues like that. It’s just not relevant.
Billy_TParticipantThere’s a lot of fuss about CA now, seemingly because someone thinks they can convince everyone that Brexit and/or Trump only happened due to computer voodoo, and we should therefore reverse them. While they’re obviously dodgy, I think this story has been overblown by hopeful remainers: eg CA worked for ted cruz first for ages before trump – didn’t do cruz much good – most of the data they had was related to cruz – they switched to trump late in the day, so the effect of any direct trump-related psychometry had would have been minimal i’d guess. Similarly with brexit – they were going to work for leave.eu if they got the main funding, but they didn’t so they didn’t apparently. Companies like CA are in the business of overstating the power of their algorithms seems to me.
The poster’s premise seems inflated to me from the get go, and I think he or she seeks to dismiss recent scrutiny via major exaggeration. I don’t bump into anyone reporting on this trying to claim CA is the reason why Brexit passed or Trump won, and no one is suggesting the results should be reversed because of CA. They’re just doing their due diligence about corporate corruption, which is beyond dispute in this case. Even FB now admits it happened, after two years of trying to hide it. It makes them look bad too, and their stock took a hit, so it’s not as if they gain by finally coming clean about this.
Also, the post is wrong about the timing of the Cruz connection. It can’t have been “ages” as the company wasn’t even formed until 2013, and they switched to Trump in 2015 (marketing his core slogans in 2014). Yes, the Mercers originally backed Cruz, as did people like Kellyanne Conway, but then they switched to Trump and still back him. Bannon, as mentioned, was on the CA board.
For me, this isn’t about how much impact it had on the election, if any. It’s the immorality of it, the sleaziness, the likely illegality. I think the people involved should be held accountable, all the way up to Trump and the Mercers. To me, it sends a horrible message if they can get away with it. It tells billionaires they can use any means necessary to win elections, pass preferred legislation, force their own agenda into law, etc. etc. I think all attempts to corrupt the process should be exposed and the people responsible made to pay the price, regardless of party.
Billy_TParticipantWell there’s several different issues there. Did CA ‘steal’ something from ‘facebook’? If they did why hasnt the FBI arrested someone? Is it ‘illegal’ to steal from facebook or is it a gray area?
Secondly are you saying CA is a russian organization? Or that simply a russian is part of it?
Btw, here is a post i read today on the lifeboat board. Its about CA as well. It was noted that CA has links to the British-CIA, not the Russian-CIA 🙂
Fwiw.__________________________
There’s a lot of fuss about CA now, seemingly because someone thinks they can convince everyone that Brexit and/or Trump only happened due to computer voodoo, and we should therefore reverse them. While they’re obviously dodgy, I think this story has been overblown by hopeful remainers: eg CA worked for ted cruz first for ages before trump – didn’t do cruz much good – most of the data they had was related to cruz – they switched to trump late in the day, so the effect of any direct trump-related psychometry had would have been minimal i’d guess. Similarly with brexit – they were going to work for leave.eu if they got the main funding, but they didn’t so they didn’t apparently. Companies like CA are in the business of overstating the power of their algorithms seems to me.The real issue for me is that SCL, CA’s parent company used to work for MI6 (or be run by them) and this technology was used by them in god knows what elections around the world for the good of the empire – and no doubt still is being used by many agencies, private and otherwise – and probably to a much higher sophistication level than CA has. Not to mention the same technology as used by the major social media giants in-house as a matter of course in their own business models.
(I read somewhere that the tories have apparently been in talks with CA for three months about working for them – can’t remeber where now)
=====================This is a pretty recent development, but I think arrests will be made in the near future. Mueller is apparently looking into this now. It’s pretty obvious by now that he works very slowly, methodically, etc.
As for illegality of harvesting info without permission: You know the law a hell of a lot better than I do, but I would guess it’s illegal in most spheres. I’m also guessing, however, that in the Internet, social media, digital realm, it is “gray” to some degree, but should not be. It’s gray because Silicon Valley has been adept at working both parties — in recent years, especially the Dems — to stave off serious regulations. But in this particular case, it does appear that CA misrepresented what they were doing to FB. So there may be an issue between the two corporations.
I don’t think any private company, of any kind, in any sphere, should be able to harvest any of our personal information, ever, without our consent, and that that should be the law. It appears to be, however, that they can, and they do, without telling us, and then they sell it to other companies, which don’t tell us either. I’d make that all against the law.
No, I don’t think CA is a Russian organization. But it looks like they hired a Russian to build the app in question.
A follow up on your quote from lifeboat in the next post.
Billy_TParticipantUnfortunately, and primarily because of Trump and his media fluffers, the viewpoint taking hold isn’t the logical one, the one perhaps first formulated by C. Wright Mills as the Power Elite back in the 1950s. It’s the Alex Jones view. That’s why the polling numbers have ticked up so much recently.
And I find that change interesting but highly dangerous, too. Many of the most fervent believers on the right in the “deep state” idea not so long ago were true believers in its necessity. They were Bush fanboys, who took every criticism of the “Law and Order” state, including the Surveillance State, as “anti-American” and/or treasonous. It’s only now, because their guy Trump has painted himself as a victim that they did a 180. But even that 180 is incredibly selective.
None of these people are against the “deep state” in the way it’s seen by the left. They’re only against the part they see as in a conspiracy to bring down Trump. And they view that as all Dem, all left-wing, even “socialist.” They don’t see the GOP as involved, or conservatives, or right-wingers. Their “deep state” is “far left” with one major aim:
destroy Trump.
I’ve never seen one iota of a discussion from them about the need to clean any of this up across the board — regardless of party — or to put in democratic checks to restrain the powerful. Not one iota of it is directed at the powerful crushing the powerless. It’s all about Trump and his supposed victimhood. They would be just fine if Trump controlled the “deep state” and used it to consolidate his own power, etc. They’d be perfectly fine if he expanded its grip, just as long as he controlled all the levers of the machine.
This won’t end well.
Billy_TParticipantI dont get it BT. I dont see the illegality in any of that. (granted i havent studied on it)
That analytics stuff just looks like the same ole political focus group crap that Obama, Clinton, and all the rest of them have used for a long time. Whats illegal about it?
w
vCambridge Analytica stole personal information from 50 million Facebook users, and FB has known about this for more than two years, apparently. They’re just now admitting it and have supposedly severed ties with CA. CA suspended their CEO in the wake of these revelations.
Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Cambridge Analytica was founded by the Mercers, the far-right billionaire family, and Steven Bannon was on its board. Kushner brought them into the Trump campaign and they were key in his social media/digital operations. CA also had direct communication with Wikileaks.
And — surprise surprise!! The guy who created the app which culled those 50 million profiles is a Russian.
;>)
If you read the articles, you’ll also see a pattern with Cambridge of very sleazy business practices, including entrapment.
Yes, political operations for both major parties have engaged in seriously sleazy nonsense for a long, long time. But I’ve never seen anything like the Trump campaign. He makes Nixon look like a choirboy.
As mentioned before, I think the main driver for all of this is massive debt. Trump and Kushner owe billions, likely, and no one would lend Trump money except for the Russians. Kushner, while in the White House, managed to get half a billion from CEOs he met with in the Oval Office.
They’re breaking all records for corruption, and America has had more than its share.
Billy_TParticipantA Guardian article on the subject as well. It includes the hidden camera video of Cambridge execs:
Also, with the Facebook data breach involving 50 million members, the suggestion from some that the reach was minimal should be a dead talking point. And I think this is just the beginning. A recent article alleges Republicans in North Carolina utilized this service back in 2014 as well.
While both major parties may end up implicated, right now, at least, this appears to be a GOP-only scandal in the making, extending beyond Trump.
Billy_TParticipantWell…..for me…The CIA itself is a terrorist organization. With a long long long history of terror, torture, assassination, lying, stealing, framing people, interfering in elections, and drug-dealing.
So does it matter who runs a Terrorist Organization?
I suppose so. But in a better world the MSM would be discussing the Organization itself instead of the musical chairs part of it.
w
vWell, we both know the media aren’t gonna do that, and we also know their tendency to leave key things out of the discussion. So, in relative terms, this is kinda refreshing, at least to me. Mainstream sources openly talking about torture programs and who ran them, and that a person who was in charge of one will now run the entire agency. They seemed to have jumped on that right away.
I suspect that prior to Trump, when the media were much more likely to be sleepy lapdogs to power, they wouldn’t have done this so quickly, if ever. Now, because of an awakening of sorts — which, of course, is still way too limited — they seem to be channeling their inner Watergate.
Who knows how this will play out? But I’m glad to see them expose what she was up to before her confirmation. It also adds more proof that Trump never had any intention of bucking the “deep state.” He just wants to make sure it works for him.
-
This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by
Billy_T.
Billy_TParticipantThe Washington Post adds some further details:
A key section:
Jameel Jaffer, formerly deputy legal director of the ACLU, said Tuesday on his Twitter feed that Haspel is “quite literally a war criminal.”
Billy_TParticipantQuick addendum:
It already has in part. When I first looked her up this morning, Wikipedia described her as a “war criminal,” as a part of its intro. That’s now gone.
Billy_TParticipantLike everyone here, I think the MSM is pretty lame. But I read it, watch it, listen to it, along with a lot of stuff outside the MSM.
Perhaps the main reason for that is that I want to know what they’re actually saying, and not what people are sayin’ they’re sayin’. I want to know for myself, first hand.
Over time, by doing this, I’ve discovered that a lot of the criticism about the media, left, right and center, falls into the same traps, ironically, that beset the MSM: lack of context, absurd glibness, an unsaid assumption of being smarter than everyone else, and not needing to really make a solid case for this or that. But perhaps the worst thing they do, like the MSM, is to use the part for the whole. That bugs me — a lot. A person or two, a show or two, isn’t a zeitgeist, etc. A person or two, a show or two, doesn’t give the critic license to imply or state straight up that “they all do X, Y or Z.”
Another observation: The next president, Dem or Republican, is gonna catch hell. I have a strong feeling that Trump has helped the media take itself seriously again, perhaps too seriously. They played lapdog through several administrations, and largely because Trump went after them viciously, they finally woke up out of their lapdogmatic slumber.
The next occupant of the White House is gonna get the full Trump treatment, especially if he or she is a Dem. The MSM are gonna do everything they can to avoid being accused of “bias” and double standards.
Billy_TParticipantI’m basically an atheist, with caveats. As in, I don’t think there is a supreme being of any kind, but I’m not going to stick with that belief if actual “proof” arrives. Not just as a personal revelation. I don’t trust those. But if it’s the kind of proof millions and millions of people can see at the same time . . . and agree that they’re seeing the same thing at the same time.
I first decided against Christianity as a kid, after reading a ton of mythology and then studying the myths themselves. A light just came on for me that if we’ve had thousands of different iterations of the divine, with thousands of different stories, then there can be no “one true god.” The sheer overwhelming mass of diversity renders that impossible in my view. For me. I fully accept that others feel differently.
As I got older, I tried to refine that, and soon enough came to the conclusion that the Christian god is no more likely than Zeus, Thor, Isis, Krishna, the Dagda or any god from any mythology. So while I might have a caveat that prevents me from being a rock-solid, permanent, never-changing atheist, I am rock-solid, permanent and never-changing in my belief that no human being knows, and no religious/mythological tradition can possibly represent “reality.” From that rock I can’t move. Which is why these church histories are so fascinating, and so tragic at the same time. People actually died for their beliefs and faith that they had been told the truth when no human can know. Church leaders actually killed one another over minute theological differences, riots broke out, wars were launched, basically because one mythology clashed with another.
Life is far too short for that shit, IMO. Live and let live. If people want to believe in the divinity of Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, I couldn’t care less. As long as they don’t corner the market on them and share.
Billy_TParticipantI was just talking at work last night with a guy who told me about a co-worker who is a Seventh Day Adventist who celebrates the Sabbath on a Saturday because that’s how it is supposed to be–that the Romans had just decided to make it Sunday instead because of the pagans who worshiped the sun God as they were were forced to become Christians. I told him that I thought most of the traditions were handpicked by men and that you could not separate man’s influence on this.
But it’s interesting how one sect will accept some things while some accept others and they all believe they’re practicing the TRUE religion.
Everyone thinks they don’t want a theocracy–unless it’s in their own tradition–but even within that they’d get outraged over things that did not line up to their personal beliefs.
One of the biggest internal battles in early Christianity was between Jewish Christians and those who followed Paul, directly or indirectly, and wanted to sever all ties or most ties from Judaism. There were many factions and degrees of this. Jesus, of course, was born and raised a Jew, and said often enough that he never had any intention of changing the Jewish Law. Scholars, including Ehrman, have noted the contradictions and changes in the gospels and NT in general that reflect this battle, and the movement away from Jewish conceptions over time. Certain parts are downright anti-Semitic, and dangerously so. It’s not a leap to say that antisemitism started with the NT and that shift, the prime rationale being that the Jews supposedly had killed the Christian god, not the Romans.
Complexities galore, of course. Cuz even the “gentile” movements of Christians wanted to appropriate the antiquity of the Jewish faith, knowing it was a hard sell to start something brand new. How much better to show a tradition that goes back, at least via myths and legends, before Homer? But they also knew that circumcision and the strict dietary laws were a deal-breaker for millions of pagans who might convert, so the proto-orthodox did their best to split the difference.
Almost finished rereading Lost Christianities, and into the part that he talks about forgeries and copies of copies of copies, which I have always found interesting. We have NO original texts for the NT, and the only fully complete NT copies are from the 4th century. And because they were copied by hand, they’re filled with alterations, errors, divergences, etc. etc. Basically, no two copies are the same . . . and scholars have basically agreed that there are from 200,000 to 300,000 differences in the main 5400 copies.
We’re not reading anything close to the “original” manuscripts.
Billy_TParticipantAnother pattern that seems to come out from reading about this era again . . . and then projecting it onto others:
With exceptions, the “winners” were the folks who were best organized, and went for the jugular. It was rarely the case that they were ever “Oh, we’re cool with whatever you do. Live and let live. The more the merrier.”
In almost all cases, the “losers” were the folks who wanted a “live and let live” dynamic, or more broadly, society. Which is my preference. I think “the left” often ends up on the losing end because we do in general champion openness and diversity, a vibrant exchange of ideas, pluralism, etc. etc. We do think “live and let live” is better than “crush all your opponents without mercy.”
But the latter attitude tends to win the day, and that causes even more problems down the road, because to maintain power, that attitude often must become the rule and the Way. The more adamant a group is in their “our way or the highway,” the more forceful they have to be to keep that going. It tends to snowball.
So in the case of the various factions in early Christianity, it seemed that the ones who were okay with serious diversity and lots of different visions and versions . . . ended up losing to the proto-orthodox who weren’t okay with that. Same thing happened with the battle between polytheists and monotheists.
Billy_TParticipantThe Gnostics were fascinating. It was a great thing that at least some of their writings were recovered in 1945 in Egypt.
Diverse though they were, there does seem to be some basic commonality among them. That the secret teachings of Jesus were what mattered, not his death and resurrection. They had elaborate and often beautiful myths to describe fallen worlds, fallen beings, and the difference between our true home and this (living in a) material world. Escaping from it to go back to that original realm was key. Gnosticism seems to have some things, at least tangentially, in common with Hinduism and Buddhism in that sense.
Books: I’m running out of space for mine too. But I love them. I love looking at them, picking them up, flipping through the pages. E-books will never come close to giving me that kind of pleasure.
Billy_TParticipantIOW, so many people assume there was this agreement about what Jesus said, did, meant, and how he should be worshiped. In reality, scholars have discovered, especially from the Enlightenment to the present, there was incredible diversity of thought and vision for centuries, including debates about his divinity . . . Was he human, and not divine? Was he divine, and not human? Was he both? Was the son lesser than the father? Were they the same in essence or just similar? Even into the 4th century, after Constantine had become the first Roman Emperor to (at least nominally) accept the Christian faith, riots were started over “same essence,” “similar essence” visions. The so-called Arian Heresy . . . where one single letter in Greek might be the difference between excommunication or worse.
Another key: This didn’t happen as some “natural” evolution of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This wasn’t some kind of hashing out of disagreements, and then everyone decided they can get on board with X, Y and Z. This was mostly a matter of violent suppression of opposing views . . . both by the competing church factions and brutal state suppression.
It’s also amazing to think about the lost context regarding various “saints.” Many of them were among the most vicious when it came to these doctrinal disagreements . . . and none of this even touches upon how Christians, once in power, went after pagans.
And that seems to always be the thing: Power. History teaches us most of the people who hold it, abuse it, with tragic consequences. Exceptions exist, of course. But they’re rare.
Billy_TParticipantEllsberg is an American hero. Not many people would risk what he did, knowing he was going to catch hell and maybe die because of the Pentagon Papers.
Didn’t know about Gun.
Will take a closer look at both videos later. With the chemo, my ability to concentrate comes and goes. Running on a coffee high for now, but that’s gonna crash soon enough. I can’t predict any of this.
Hope all is well in WV land.
Billy_TParticipantNot sure this link will work but:
books vid:https://www.facebook.com/ahmetk62/videos/o.308011272639434/1603402759710447/?type=2&theaterThanks, WV.
I’m not a FB person. But will figure it out.
March 6, 2018 at 11:02 am in reply to: Hiding in plain sight: WHY the GOP/Trump collude with Russia. #83528Billy_TParticipantJust to clarify a coupla points.
I think Trump and the GOP were on two different tracks with Russia until recently. It’s overlapping now, but it didn’t start out that way.
I also think Trump hooked up with Russia, not because he thought they could help him win the election. I’m betting he thought he never had a chance — even to win the Republican nom. He hooked up with Russia because of his massive debts, and he brought in all kinds of shady characters — Flynn, Manafort, Page, Gates, etc. etc. with contacts in Russia to help him. We’ve never seen any campaign with even a fraction of a fraction as much.
Russia likely didn’t think he’d win, either, but it wanted to hurt Clinton, so it put its thumb down on the scale for Trump and the GOP. Wikileaks did the same.
Once he won, he started to pay them back.
The GOP, however, accepted Russia help to win elections in general. It gladly accepted that help and worked, and is still working to prevent effective, coordinated countermeasures. As the likelihood of a blue wave becomes more and more real, the GOP knows Russian help — along with its usual voter suppression tricks — may be the only thing standing in the way of a wipe out.
All of that said, America would be obviously better off without either of the major parties. Their record of governance is a scandal in and of itself, and an epic failure going back more than a century — with only brief moments of sunlight. Both parties have proven, time and time again, they don’t represent us and they don’t deserve the power we’ve mistakenly ceded to them. Any of it.
March 6, 2018 at 10:47 am in reply to: Hiding in plain sight: WHY the GOP/Trump collude with Russia. #83527Billy_TParticipantWell, i disagree with most of that, but its a minor thing to me. I’m not gonna repeat myself on the topic.
We agree on all the big stuff.
I think I’m gonna concentrate more on what we agree on from now on. I dunno why. I just feel like it.
w
v
———–
PS, this looks like a good book to me:https://legalform.blog/2018/01/19/review-of-sidney-l-harrings-policing-a-class-society-the-experience-of-american-cities-1865-1915-second-edition-chicago-haymarket-2017-part-one-stuart-schrader/
Review of Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915, second edition (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017) (Part One) — Stuart Schrader“…Harring argues that police in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War played a key role in capital accumulation by controlling labor strife and managing the growth of the restive industrial working class. His analysis centers on the Great Lakes region, focusing on Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Toledo, plus some other smaller cities. He looks at both concentrated police activity toward working-class organization, like strike-breaking, and diffuse control of labor pools, like the enforcement of vice regulations and control of “tramps”, the itinerant unemployed or underemployed male proletariat.
One insight of Harring’s research is that it was not inevitable that police officers would side with capitalists against workers…”
Thanks, WV.
The last sentence is really important. Throughout history, one of the keys to the success, even temporarily, of popular uprisings is when the police and the military side with workers and “the people.” With exceptions, that’s about the only way it happens.
If you’re still reading October, Mieville does a great job of demonstrating that.
Another book of interest:
Fraser is really good at compare and contrast, especially between the reaction to the first of our Gilded Ages and the second.
-
This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by
-
AuthorPosts
