zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

A smarter president would have just shut his mouth, and made sure he and his team got all of the usual forms right from Day One.

All true.

But Manofort is interesting in his own right way beyond this year’s headlines.

That’s a long article but it’s an invaluable read.

I’ll take a look.

Does it mention that Republican insiders were shocked that he wound up with Trump, at least at first? Former GOP campaign gurus like Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt have said that Manafort was well known as seriously damaged goods long before he ended up with Trump. They’ve stated no one else would have hired him.

wv wrote:

truthdig:https://www.truthdig.com/articles/unlearning-war/

…U.S. troops are now in 70 percent of the world’s countries and engaged in active conflict—what we used to call war—in, by even a modest count, some seven countries. In 2017-18, we’ve killed and been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Niger and Pakistan. At least for starters….

This is the kind of “context” that needs to be repeated in the Media. Endlessly. Every time there is some complaint about a country having the gall to want to influence events in its OWN region — like, say, Iran — it needs to be restated that we’re everywhere. There has never been an empire with as many military bases, worldwide.

Currently rereading a coupla good books about the Roman empire and early Christianity, and it’s amazing to think about Roman power versus our own. We dwarf theirs.

(Will post about the two books later. They’re very interesting, even moreso on second reading.)

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by Billy_T.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Armed teachers. That’s totally insane..

Well I think the pro-armers are thinking it would be a deterrent.

I dont think it would be, but even if it were a deterrent, wouldnt the shooter just go elsewhere to shoot people? A church or a library or wherever?

I suppose the next step would be to arm church-goers and libraries….once you start down that policy of arming teachers, you have to arm pretty-much everyone. Which is what the NRA and gun-sellers want, i guess.

What if a hospital gets shot up? Arm the patients? The nurses?

What if Seaworld gets shot up? Arm the Orcas?

w
v

I might be in favor of arming the orcas. At least until they can unionize.

;>)

. . .

As for deterrents. The pattern for these mass shooters, especially in the schools, is they seem to want to die — or at least get caught. They seem to plan for it before they go in. So I don’t think the threat of armed teachers will be a deterrent at all. They’re just going to take out as many kids and staff as they possibly can before they’re killed or caught, and they likely think, with guns like an AR-15, they’re going to be able to take out a ton. Which is the entire point of those kinds of weapons.

What is never talked about, and should be, is this: As horrific as these shootings are, they would be a hell of a lot worse if the people doing it were — I know this sounds ghoulish — “experienced.” Cruz reportedly fired 150 rounds, at least, and he killed 17 and wounded nearly as many. Imagine if the shooter had been “highly skilled.” You’re talking about hundreds of deaths, not 17. Of course, it’s not really about greater numbers. One death is a tragedy. Just one. To that person and their family, it’s everything. The entire world. But, if we’re cold-eyed about this for a second, we’ve avoided, so far, much, much higher death totals almost entirely due to the shooter’s own relative youth and limited experience.

Cruz was 19, small, a likely victim of bullying himself — most school shooters are — but there’s no indication that he was particularly adept at guerilla warfare. It won’t be long before America experiences shooters who are — perhaps multiple shooters at the same scene. Perhaps that’s what it will take for the nation to finally wake up: body counts in the hundreds for a single mass shooting.

Armed teachers. That’s totally insane. If it happens, and a shooter with an AR-15 appears, people scramble, run for their lives, or hide. Expecting a teacher to remain behind, standing, facing the shooter, is suicidal. Expecting them to beat the shooter to the draw is straight out of Hollywood fantasies. Jason Bourne, etc. If he or she were able to get off a shot or two before the shooter kills them, which is highly unlikely, the chaos of the situation likely means they shoot students accidentally. Teachers may well end up killing students the shooter misses.

Again, it’s insane.

The NRA has gone full blown fascist. Anyone who caught its president’s rant at CPAC can see that. Full on fascist. He talks as if it’s the early 1950s and there’s a McCarthyite red scare going on. Any company that does business with them is siding with fascists. Any member of the NRA who has heard La Pierre or Loesch speak and still keeps their membership? They knowingly belong to a fascist organization with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans on their hands.

Zooey wrote:

Yeah, it’s my post from an argument elsewhere. I didn’t say so because I wanted to hear responses to the ideas themselves without consideration of me.

For several years, I allowed students to write on those papers, and the result was exactly as zn described…the kids just accused me of being partisan, and giving their papers grades because I don’t agree, rather than on the paper’s merits. I think it’s better to teach them critical thinking/argument/rhetorical skills first with issues they don’t have their identities tied up in. Sometimes kids will start in pursuit of an argument, and then while doing the research for the paper, come back and ask if they can change their position and argue a contrary position to what they set out to do originally. Once they learn how to do that, they could be ready for abortion, guns, and so on. (The problem with abortion is that one side argues from a “rights” and self-determination point of view, and the other argues from a position of perceived morality, frequently backed up with sketchy Biblical references. They are just having completely separate conversations. And try telling a student his Bible text has no connection to abortion whatsoever, and furthermore expresses a sentiment that is completely contradicted somewhere else in the Bible).

But that isn’t the part of the post I was interested in getting feedback on because years of experience with emerging writers has already convinced me of that part of it.

What interests me is this idea that guns themselves are so intractably part of a person’s identity that “gun nuts” are actually incapable of holding an open conversation about guns. Guns are an extension of Self for a large number of Americans. Yet that isn’t true of most of the world. Now…why is that? That’s what interests me. Why the love affair with guns that transcends the rational, and moves the conversation into a different realm from…say…seat belt laws, or even smoking restrictions.

And my posit is – and billy disagrees – that the frontier mentality from American history never updated itself.

I read an essay by a guy named Webb on the frontier mentality of Americans a long, long time ago. I could probably find it somewhere. As I recall, he was more focused on the idea that our Frontier experience had contributed to our assumption of limitless resources and opportunities in our culture than on the gun identity aspect, but the piece has always made me think of ways that our Frontier experience shaped our cultural identity as Americans.

After rereading my own response, I should probably clarify. I shouldn’t say that it all starts anew for all of us, without remnants of the past finding their way to us, with or without present-day inputs. Admittedly, I’ve never studied transmission across generations to any great degree, so I really don’t know. On that topic, it’s mostly my gut feeling. But, yeah, we probably pass on bits and pieces of the past, across more than one or two generations. So there’s going be some of that that winds up with us. But, again, my sense is, that without the reinforcement of our present-day cultural landscape, which includes those old movies and TV shows, novels, etc. etc. . . I just don’t see the remnants as being strong enough to keep this thing going.

I think the remnants would lose out to a different media/cultural/educational landscape, if it didn’t include our myths about Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, George Washington, etc.

Why DID we so easily slip into those shoot em up games as a kid? I don’t remember being taught any of that by parents. I just remember the neighborhood kids, together, all of us, running around, playing army with our sticks, hiding, bang bang!! you’re dead!! falling over, etc. etc. We were mimicking what we saw on TV, and using tools we might see in toy stores . . . . though, as children of educators, we weren’t given those toys. We made our own.

Anyway . . . so, I wonder. How does that “frontier mentality” survive in the 21st century, when our lives are so far removed from it? How much is “inherited,” if any? How much comes from other sources (mostly current)?

Good questions and topic, Zooey.

The author makes a lot of good points. But, in my opinion, there is no such thing as a “national psyche.” We don’t inherit a sense of “frontier mentality” or anything else related to our past — at least beyond our parents’ generation. Humans are far too forgetful to retain generational views, and start basically fresh with each life — again, setting aside parental visions. We’re socialized, educated, propagandized by a host of sources into feeling some sense of that “national psyche,” but it’s an illusion.

I was thinking the other day about the massive impact of growing up watching TV and movie Westerns, WWII stuff, and a myriad of media glorifying the use of guns. We played shoot ’em up as little kids, not cuz we came into this world thinking that’s our American heritage . . . but because Hollywood, et al gave us John Wayne and company . . . and we thought it was “cool.”

Cutting right to the chase, I think the desire for, the love of, the belief that, we have the “right” to an AR-15 is just a carryover from our childhood games, amplified by that many more years of media glorifying the gun.

Take away the constant images we grow up with and never escape, and at least that aspect of our perceived “American heritage” dies rather quickly. It really only exists via that amplification. It’s not innate.

wv wrote:

I dont think its about “shutting up about russia”.

I think its about two things:

1) PROVING the case against russia. (and i dont think ‘much’ has been PROVEN)

2) Putting the russian-thing IN CONTEXT.
Ie, think about Rachel Maddow. She goes on and on and on and on about the Russia thing. Hillary calls it a ‘cyber-9-11’. Politicians call it a “Pearl Harbor” and “an act of war”. Etc.
And yet not a PEEP about the billions and billions spent over the decades BY the US on SERIOUS interference in other nations Politix. WAAAY more serious than blog posts and facebook ads.

It surprises we dont agree on this, but its no big deal 🙂

…I’m real inter ested in this ‘issue’ for whatever reason. I’ll move on eventually. Just ignore me 🙂

Greenwald fwiw:https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/a-consensus-emerges/

“…in the U.S., something of a consensus has arisen in the political and media class (with some notable exceptions) that these actions not only constitute an “act of war” against the U.S., but one so grave that it is tantamount to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Indeed, that Russia’s alleged “meddling” is comparable to the two most devastating attacks in U.S. history has, overnight, become a virtual cliché.

The claim that Russian meddling in the election is “an act of war” comparable to these events isn’t brand new. Senators from both parties, such as Republican John McCain and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, have long described Russian meddling in 2016 as an “act of war.” Hillary Clinton, while promoting her book last October, described Russia’s alleged hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email inbox as a “cyber 9/11.” And last February, the always-war-hungry Tom Friedman of the New York Times said on Morning Joe that Russian hacking “was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event.”…see link

w
v

I think we actually agree about a lot of stuff pertaining to this, especially the context . . . the history of our own meddling, coups, covert and overt wars, expansion of empire, etc. etc. As in, our imperialism. Our atrocities on the way to becoming the hegemon, and staying there. And we definitely should “hold a mirror up to ourselves” regarding all of that. I’m with you and NC there. No question.

And, if I thought the accusations against Russia and the probe were bogus, I’d be outraged about the entire thing. But I think that it’s mostly true, and that what we read in the NYT, the WaPo, the Guardian, etc. is pretty close to what is publicly knowable on the subject at this point. I think that we’ve had enough hearings and enough consensus, even from Trump appointees, to lend it credence. Not every last bit, of course. But most of it. Which, to me, means the probe is a legit thing and it’s important to let it proceed without interference.

Another place where we’re on the same page: I definitely think it’s stupid and wrong to call what Russia did “an act of war.” It’s actually highly irresponsible. So the few people who have said that, or things like it? Yeah, they deserve the term “hysteria.” But where I part with some of the people you’ve posted is that I just don’t see that from more than a tiny few — and, again, I watch, read and listen to waaay more of this shit than is good for me. I’m just not seeing the pervasiveness of this kind of “focus” as some of your videos portray. In short, I think it’s exaggerated. But, yeah, anyone who tries to compare this with Pearl Harbor is nutz.

More on this in the next post.

zn wrote:

I think, instead, that there’s a type of hypocrisy that consists NOT acknowledging the Russia thing.

I am never guilt-tripped by the “we did it too” routine. Yeah I know, and I spent time in the 80s for example drawing attention to all that. Iran, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua….

I still abide by this take:

. https://www.salon.com/2015/04/06/we_should_recognize_that_there_are_other_imperialisms_a_marxist_dissident_explains_what_the_left_gets_wrong_about_russia/

For the American left, of course for them only American imperialism exists, yes? I can’t understand it. . . . In Russia, there are a lot of leftists who also believe that Russia is the main evil in the world, it’s a reactionary empire, and it should be destroyed. Or, at the same time, you have a lot of leftists who believe somehow Russia is resisting American imperialism [and] who support these “republics” in the East of Ukraine.

But you have a huge provincialization of the left as a whole because they can’t even understand each other and every leftist community, they believe in their own national reality. And that’s why they can be so easily manipulated.

I’m a bit confused by the focus on hypocrisy as well in this case, and what they want us to do to rid the land of that. Or, is it their view that it can never be purged? That would be my guess, given the history of our imperialism. But if they do think we can gain a kind of redemption of sorts, if we just shut up about Russia, I’d really like to know who would benefit from this, aside from the people who feel the tug of guilt in this case. The vast majority of the nation doesn’t, and I can’t see how shutting up about Russia makes one single life better here.

Will it help the working class, the poor, minorities, women? Will it help the planet? No. Not in the slightest. Shutting up about Russia means we’re very likely to get hacked again, including voting registration databases, and maybe this time they’ll alter things instead of just looking around. Shutting up about Russia means we’re likely to see an even greater influx of bots and fake news in our social media systems, and even more attempts to stir up racial tensions, white supremacist groups, alt-right gun nut groups, etc. etc.

Frankly, I’m not worried about tensions with Russia due to the probe and any kind of focus on what they’ve done and will do. But I am worried about tensions here as a result of what they’ve done and will do. America and Russia aren’t going to go to war. They weren’t going to go to war if Clinton had won, either. Why? Cuz, unlike other nations Trump has threatened militarily — Venezuela, Mexico, Yemen, Syria, Iran, North Korea — we understand that Russia/America are locked in a guaranteed mutual destruction scenario. It aint gonna happen.

Again, I think the use of the word “hysteria” is misplaced in this case. IMO, it’s in the narrative that says if we don’t stop talking about Russian interference, we’re going to have WWIII. Frankly, I’m betting Putin couldn’t care less about the probe and the “focus” on his machinations here and in Europe. He probably even likes the attention.

Zooey wrote:

Attack the messenger.

Easier than addressing the message.

Bunch of fuckers. I am sick and tired of it. I’m done with it. I cannot take opposition to gun control laws seriously. All arguments against restrictions on these guns are morally bankrupt.

Kids are being killed. Again and again and again and again and again and again. Kids.

There is no legitimate defense of these weapons. They do not belong in circulation. I’ve had it.

They don’t. Other nations don’t allow them, and they have a fraction of our gun violence.

There is no defense for weapons that can shoot 50 rounds a minute (or more), like the AR-15. Rubio said a ban on assault weapons wouldn’t have prevented the latest slaughter, but it would have limited the carnage, saved lives, at least. My own view is that Cruz never would have tried to shoot up the school if he didn’t have the firepower to do so. So, it actually would prevent it. Take away the power rush of high capacity weaponry, and folks who snap might just reconsider. Keep them in circulation and every owner is a potential mass shooter, or a potential target for a B and E job which THEN leads to more gun violence.

Most criminals get their guns from break-ins to begin with.

They need to go.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Well, MSNBC is The Left as far as the MSM is concerned. Off the charts leftie. Dore knows perfectly well they aren’t the left. The entire bit is ripping MSNBC.

MSNBC deserves all the ripping he gives them, and more. Much more. And I hope you’re right and that he knows they’re not “the left.” But I didn’t hear him say that, at least in that video.

To me, the reason why this is important, and why real lefties shouldn’t “go there,” is because it echoes right-wing framing and narratives from the last few decades on up to the present. The main gist of that framing and those echoes is that the Democrats are “far left,” and when they propose and/or implement their policies, and they fail, it’s a failure of “the left” . . . even the “far left,” even though all of us here know the Dems propose and/or implement centrist to center-right stuff, predominantly.

I’ve argued in the past, for instance, that Clinton and Obama governed from the center-right on most issues, and this has often left right-wingers gobsmacked. They’re convinced that both presidents, and the Dems in general, are “far left,” if not flaming commies. I’ll present a list of center-right stuff they’ve pushed/done and it still doesn’t seem to register. The narrative of Maoist, Marxist, Commie Dems is too strong for them to get past.

. . . .

Anyway, to make a long story short, folks like Dore obviously don’t go to that extreme. But when he talks about “people on the left” attacking him, he’s unwittingly helping the right-wing frame. He’s really being attacked by Clinton bots who at best are corporate centrists, and more than a few, true conservatives. I think it also weakens the already fading chances of an actual left to fight back and oppose the center, the center-right and the far-right.

Just my take. It’s tough enough to be a leftist in America. We don’t need to add to our struggles by blaming portions of our side of the political/philosophical aisle for stuff we don’t even do.

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

BT, not that its an important point, but, trust me, Dore knows that MSNBC is not really ‘left’. He was just being ironic, etc. I watch him enough to know 🙂

…on an unrelated tangent, I watched a bit of a long interview between Dore and Rogan a few days ago. Dore said he has a bone disease where his bones have been kinda disintegrating. He said he used to be two inches taller. He said he thought about suicide for a while.

w
v

I missed the irony/sarcasm. Should have known, cuz he’s a comedian, etc.

. . .

Sorry to hear about his illness. He’s obviously a fighter and courageous, doing what he does. My cancer is bone deep too. I think I may have lost a bit of height, but can’t be sure if it’s the cancer or just getting older. I should ask the oncologist.

Thanks, WV.

That was one of Dore’s best. And Jill Stein kicked butt.

I can’t believe they had that headline underneath the host that whole time. No, the Mueller indictment didn’t say Stein was a Russian tool. Sheesh. I loved that she also said that votes didn’t belong to Clinton in the first place. I’ve mentioned that all too often in my battles with her bots. It never seems to register with centrist Dems.

My only quibble with Dore in this one is that he labels MSNBC as “the left.” They aren’t. They’ve never been. They have a couple of center-left hosts on in Prime Time, but their daytime news shows are decidedly center-right. That particular daytime host is decidedly center-right. They’re owned and operated by Comcast, a conservative corporation, which installed a conservative (Andy Lack) to run the network. He, not so long ago, purged it of several hosts who espoused center-left views, and added conservative Republicans to the lineup like Hugh Hewitt and Nicole Wallace.

Anyway . . . a minor quibble overall, especially cuz it was very well done otherwise.

Also: I think some on the left have invented a moral trap of sorts for themselves that really doesn’t exist. They seem to think that if they don’t dismiss the Mueller probe, or go even further, as the author of the article above does, it somehow absolves corporatist Dems, Clinton, etc. etc. How could it? It’s a completely separate issue. Trump’s guilt is totally separate from Democratic Party idiocy.

It’s also a totally separate issue when it comes to American empire and imperialism. Wanting to see Trump and company held to account in no way, shape or form justifies our own history of imperialism, or our empire. We can and should condemn BOTH. It in no way justifies our own election interference around the world to do our best to hold Russia and their helpmates to account for theirs. The only people who suffer when we don’t are American citizens/voters, not the ruling class anyway. Saying we should just take it cuz we did it too serves the purposes of the ruling class, not our own.