zn wrote:

ProFootballTalk@ProFootballTalk
Russell Wilson wants Antonio Brown in Seattle, reports @JohnClaytonNFL

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Wow. Geezus.

That would either give Seattle the Division,
or it would destroy the whole team.

Antonio is kinda like the Ring Of Power. Or a Zombie-Ice-Dragon. Or somethin. I dunno.

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waterfield wrote:

Where we part is your belief that this was all a result of a “system” for profit.
If the system influences people how is that you, me and others here are not so influenced ?

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Well yes that is where we diverge. I blame systems for how the system’s people are ‘treated’ and how the system’s people ‘turn out.’ If the people of a nation are ignorant and/or greedy, yeah i will blame the circumstances they grew up in. Ie., the system.

I do that for every system, not just the corporotacracy in America. Just seems natural to me to look at ‘the conditions.’ And the conditions are set up by the ‘System’ whether its the Nazi system or Rwanda or Finland or the US or whatever.

At any rate, I know I’m being totally reductionist and over-simplifying, but ya know, its a message board.

Also, i dont blame ‘everything’ on the system. There’s always human biology. Though the system even morphs that, at least somewhat. There’s also god-knows-what random, unknown, weird factors involved, I would think. But who can talk about those?

As to this: “If the system influences people how is that you, me and others here are not so influenced ?”

We ‘are‘ influenced by the system. We are products of it.
But, when i talk about the system shaping people I dont mean it in some black-and-white cookie-cutter way. I dont mean that the system just stamps people out in exactly the same shapes. I think it ‘nudges’ people, to various degrees. The system isnt like a ‘hammer.’ Its much much more subtle/pervasive than that.

I mean…oh…. just think about that whole Kaepernik incident. The National Anthem. The Kneeling. Look at how the system handled that.
Think about the mainsteam tv and mainstream radio and government and business and advertising responses to that whole thing. The way that all turned out was very predictable. It was a microcosm of the way corporate-systems work/handle-things.

There were indeed various kinds of resistance to the corporate-influences during the Kaepernik thing. There’s always resistance. There was resistance to the Nazi-Capitalist-System in Germany.

There’s systems. And there’s resistance to systems. The systems are dominant though. …until they’re not.

Btw, Waterfield let me ask you this — WHY do YOU think the far-left is so very small in America? I mean compared to Italy, Spain, France, Central and South America, etc? I’m talking about actual Socialist Parties. Social-Democrats. That sort of thing. In America its just Corpoate-Dems and Corporate-Reps, and a very very small number of everything else. You said it was natural for Americans to be scared of Communism, etc. Why was it so natural for Americans to be frightened away from socialism when the Europeans, African, South and Central Americans were, apparently NOT so ‘naturally’ scared of the Red-Beast?

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———–
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society

———–

“Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely. Noam Chomsky
“What’s public opinion? It’s the education system plus the media.”
-Mark Green (President of Air America radio)

————-
“…Because the schools serve an economic system rather than a
political or philosophical idea, they promote, not unreasonably
, the habits of mind necessary to the preservation of that system,
which is why an American education resembles the commercial
procedure that changes caterpillers into silkworms instead of
butterflies. Silkworms can be turned to a profit, but butterflies
blow around in the wind and do nothing to add to the wealth
of the corporation or the power of the state. “ L.Lapham

————–

“The assault on education began more than a century ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has a right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness… is those who are useful.” The arrival of industrialists on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business offered the first academic credential in business administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start, complained that universities were unprofitable. These early twentieth century capitalists, like heads of investment houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue writes “motivated by an ethically based anti-intellectualism that transcended interest in the financial bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate on a different set of principles from those governing the liberal arts.”
― Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
——————–

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
————–
For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

Zooey wrote:

FDR.

And Sanders basically matches his policy positions, though being more modern, Sanders would include minorities in his programs from the beginning.

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…if ever there was a time when a country needed to turn to a new FDR its now, right? But who do the American voters choose? Herbert Hoover.

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waterfield wrote:

<

… I agree that a capitalistic society inherently breeds selfishness.
Human nature is to gather and protect what we’ve accumulated.
And of course that means it is profit driven.
But each known economic system has its own darkness.
I don’t think any system be it communism, socialism, capitalism has a monopoly on the concern-or lack of- for the sufferers among us. It’s part of human frailty.

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Yes, I would think that every human system has its weaknesses or darkness.
We are talking-monkeys, after all.

But there are places in Europe and Scandinavia that do seem to have more concern for the poor. So, while no human-system is perfect, some human-systems are doing better than others. It would be nice if America could take the best of each major system and adapt it to work here. If nothing else, it would be nice to have a better safety net. If we are gonna live under capitalism, it would at least be nice to have a Green-New-Deal and FDR type leadership, etc. I mean, thats a pretty low bar. And we dont even have that. Voters didnt want it. They had Bernie right there in the race — and twice now, they have said “No, we want the Corporate-Dem.” So, progressives lose, again. Just like in the 1920s 30s, 50s, 70’s, 80’s, 90s, 00s, 10s, and so far in the 20s-again.

At any rate whatever you think of this Corporate-Capitalist-System, W,
its not sustainable. Corporations are killing the life on this planet. For profit. Amphibians, Birds, Fish, Trees, Bufferflies, Polar Bears…

Yes, Corporations make nice things. But what is the cost?

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waterfield wrote:

You guys are all wacko. It seems so evident to me that the big boogeyman (corporate culture) feeds on and uses the unintelligent, uneducated, ignorant, to accomplish their own goals. But they didn’t create that vehicle. To deny this just smells of agenda driven opinions.

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Well keep in mind, W, I am not saying the Corporations dummed down the public ON PURPOSE. I have never once talked about a Corporate CONSPIRACY. Or a Capitalist CONSPIRACY. Sometimes i think, that you think, I am talking about some secret cabal of rich people who sit around deciding how to make the masses ignorant.

I have no doubt there ‘are’ a gazillion conspiracies among the powerful in all parts of the political spectrums. But thats a separate subject and no-one is ever going to have much evidence of that.

I’m just saying, if you have an entire system based on profit, then the profit motive is going to…oh….’Snowball’ for lack of a better word. As Corporate-capitalism consolidates its gains, and as fewer and fewer giant corporoations own more and more and more and more…THEIR message dominates more and more and more.

And what is their message? You tell me.

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noam:https://billmoyers.com/content/noam-chomsky-part-2/
….BILL MOYERS: Are you suggesting that there’s a conspiracy’? That there are people who gather and decide we’re going to eliminate unions’? That we’re going to eliminate popular participation in political parties’? We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that? Is there a conspiracy’?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, my point is, in fact, exactly the opposite. I mean, I think, and stress again, that these are institutional effects. These are the ways the institution functions.

Let’s go back to the chairman of the board. There’s no conspiracy in the world of managers to try to raise profits and market share. In fact, if the world of managers didn’t pursue that program, they wouldn’t be in business any longer. It’s part of the structure of the social system, and the way in which the institutions fw1ction within it, that they are going to be trying to maximize profit, market share, decision-making capacity and so on.

BILL MOYERS: Doing what comes naturally.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s not that- you might say it comes naturally, because they would never have gotten to that point unless they had internalized those values, but it’s also constrained. If they stop doing it, their stocks start to decline and so on and so forth, then somebody else- it’ll be bought up and so on. Now, pretty much the same is true of these other institutions. If some segment of the political system- suppose we had an authentic political party reflecting the needs of the special interests, the population, it would no longer be supported. It would be denounced by the information system. It would be condemned for being anti-American or subversive and so on. It would not even have the minimal resources to keep functioning. And since we don’t have a network of popular structures to sustain it, it would disappear.

BILL MOYERS: You’ve said that the primary function of mass media is to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector. That’s not how the media see it. They claim, we claim that our news judgments rest on unbiased, objective criteria. That’s how we see it.

NOAM CHOMSKY: But, in fact, the chairman of the board also sees what he is doing as service to humanity.

BILL MOYERS: I mean, are we like a lobster in a trap- we can’t see it close behind us?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the point is that no one would even make it to a high decision-making position in the media, whether as columnist or managing editor or whatever, unless they had already internalized the required values.

BILL MOYERS: Internalized?

NOAM CHOMSKY: They believe them. There are a number of things you have to believe to make it to top managerial positions. You have to believe that the United States is unique in history in that it acts from benevolent motives. Benevolent motives are not properties of states, whether it’s the United States or any other one. It’s meaningless to talk about it.

waterfield wrote:

zn wrote:

The fact that most people don’t have the slightest idea of how a bill gets passed in congress has nothing to do with Democrats or Corporations. I’s ignorance. The fact that more than half our population refuses to wear masks has nothing to do with democrats or corporations. Its pure selfishness and a lack of care for others. The fact that a huge part of our society still does not believe in man made climate change has nothing to do with the Democratic party or corporations. Its ignorance. The fact that there exists an ever increasing number of people who refuse to vaccinate their children has nothing to do with the Democratic party or corporations. Its ignorance.

At some point we have to stop deflecting our own ignorance by blaming the big targets and look to ourselves and ask -how did we become so ignorant. Otherwise we are trapped into being helpless victims of overpowering forces.

======

Well, I respectfully disagree. Those things all have to do with a Capitalist-System that has failed American Citizens. And yes, the Dems AND Reps ARE that system. Together. They make up the system.

So again, for the umpteenth time — I blame systems that shape individuals.

You just blame individuals.

You will say ‘individuals make up the system’. And i will say, the system shaped the individuals…..

Anyway. Its bad.

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link:http://normanfinkelstein.com/2020/05/17/a-little-humor/

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters has his own take on the ‘situation’ fwiw:

NLR:https://newleftreview.org/issues/II122/articles/mike-davis-in-a-plague-year
Mike Davis, of New Left Review.
April 5

The Monster Enters
“…..It’s disappointing that in the primary debates, neither Sanders nor Warren highlighted Big Pharma’s abdication of the research and development of new antibiotics and antivirals. Of the eighteen largest pharmaceutical companies, fifteen have totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers and treatments for male impotence are profit leaders, not the defences against hospital infections, emergent diseases and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza—that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus’s surface proteins—has been a possibility for decades, but never profitable enough to be a priority.

As the antibiotic revolution is rolled back, old diseases will reappear alongside novel infections, and hospitals will become charnel houses. Even Trump can opportunistically rail against absurd prescription costs, but to combat this scenario we need a programme to break up drug monopolies and provide for the public production of lifeline medicines. (This used to be the case: during wwii the us Army enlisted Jonas Salk and other researchers to develop the first flu vaccine.) As I wrote fifteen years ago in The Monster at Our Door:

Access to lifeline medicines, including vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals, should be a human right, universally available at no cost. If markets can’t provide incentives to cheaply produce such drugs, then governments and non-profits should take responsibility for their manufacture and distribution . . . The survival of the poor must at all times be accounted a higher priority than the profits of Big Pharma.

The current pandemic expands the argument: capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically unsustainable in the absence of a truly international public-health infrastructure. But such an infrastructure will never exist until social movements break the power of Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare. This requires an independent socialist design for human survival that goes beyond an updated New Deal. Since the days of Occupy, socialists have put the struggle against income and wealth inequality on Page One: a great achievement to be sure. But now we must take the next step of advocating social ownership and the democratization of economic power, with the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries as immediate targets.

The left must also make an honest evaluation of our political and moral weaknesses. As excited as I have been about the leftward evolution of a new generation and the return of the word ‘socialism’ to political discourse, there’s a disturbing element of national solipsism in the us progressive movement that is symmetrical with the new nationalism. We tend to talk only about the American working class and American radical history (perhaps forgetting that Debs was an internationalist to the core), in what sometimes veers close to a left version of America Firstism. In addressing the pandemic, then, socialists should stress the urgency of international solidarism at every possible occasion. Concretely, we need to agitate our progressive friends and their political idols to demand a massive scaling up of the production of test kits, protective supplies and lifeline drugs for free distribution to poor countries. It’s up to us to ensure that Medicare for All becomes foreign as well as domestic policy.

San Diego, 5 April 2020

joemad wrote:

i’m glad that my mask has the old Rams helmet on it…..

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Indeed. I’ve left instructions that should i need a ventilator, it has to use the old-school, blue and white helmet emblem.

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Just an odd little snippet:https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m810/rr-0
Rapid Response:
Flu shots and the risk of coronavirus infections

John Watkins is right; we need to think beyond containment, but he overlooks the possibility that seasonal flu shots are potential contributors to the current outbreak. (BMJ 2020;398:m810—February 28)….A randomized placebo-controlled trial in children showed that flu shots increased fivefold the risk of acute respiratory infections caused by a group of noninfluenza viruses, including coronaviruses. (Cowling et al, Clin Infect Dis 2012;54:1778) From Table 3, vaccine recipients had 20 noninfluenza virus-positive ARIs and 19 virus-negative ARIs; non-recipients had 3 noninfluenza virus-positive ARIs and 14 virus-negative ARIs. These figures yield an odds ratio of 4.91 (CI 1.04 to8.14).

Such an observation may seem counterintuitive, but it is possible that influenza vaccines alter our immune systems non-specifically to increase susceptibility to other infections; this has been observed with DTP and other vaccines. (Benn et al, Trends in Immunology, May 2013) There are other immune mechanisms that might also explain the observation.

To investigate this possibility, a case-control study is in order as we study and care for the victims of covid-19. Influenza vaccines have become sacred cows in some quarters, but they shouldn’t be.

ALLAN S. CUNNINGHAM 2 March 2020

I think that was the best version of what he’s been saying for decades. Makes a ton of sense.

But i think its a little light on just how all this left-activism is going to move the Dems to the left — if the dems think leftists will always just fall in line and vote Dem.

And what headway has been made on Imperialism? None, that i can see.

I prefer the Krystal Ball approach, of demanding concessions before just falling in line. Or somethin like that.

Post-modern Amerika. Its like a living, red and blue Guernica painting.

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Zooey wrote:

Okay. So. Dead serious. I have been thinking for YEARS that preventing sociopaths from working in the government is the ONLY hope for humanity, and I just thought it was logistically impossible to do. I am very interested in this…

But this is seriously the only hope.

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

Well, what about at the other end of things. Why would people VOTE for sociopaths? They dont have to.

The problem is way bigger than sociopaths at the top, right.

Non-Sociopath-People PUT them at the top.

I dunno. Its a Bio-Pathic system, zooey. It got that way, in a slow, step-by-step process of
advancing-technological-steps,
and advancing-corporate-ization-steps (ie, moving away from socialist ideas, toward capitalist ideas).

How could you eliminate sociopaths from a bio-pathic system?

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