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wvParticipantBut I agree with her about not trying to impeach him. With a Repugnant Senate, it would be pointless. It would fail. And we are now close to the election. Let the voters decide.
Here’s the thing, though. Impeaching him, even though it is hopeless to expect to remove him from office, draws a line.
If Trump can’t be impeached for what he’s done, wtf? We have just sat by and accepted, without formal complaint, the most corrupt administration in US history.
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Well, i guess I’m just in a darker-place than you, Z. I dont even know what impeachment would mean in a mega-patriarchal-racist-imperialist-corporotacracy. I mean why shouldnt Obama have been impeached for killing brown humans with Drones? Etc, and so forth. I guess i just agree with Chomsky that every modern President has been a murderous butcher, protected by a corporotacracy and a bewildered clueless herd.
At any rate, even if i was in favor of playing the game, we’d just end up with Pence, right? Or if not him, someone just like him.
But i suppose you are really talking about doing something ‘symbolic’.
I dunno.
I’ll shut up about it. I’m just spreading my darkness. Like a darkness…spreading…. type thing. 🙂
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vwvParticipantAre you talking about poor people?
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vwvParticipant“…i read all the Chomsky i could find…” 🙂
July 17, 2019 at 6:29 pm in reply to: Tulsi Gabbard in One Hour – Edited Interview With Joe Rogan #103023wvParticipantI first discovered Joe Rogan only about a year or two ago. He’s super-into MMA and I got interested in MMA and so i watched him because of that. But then i noticed he does a lot of science/physics interviews, and various other things. I like his ‘curiosity.’ He’s pretty good at ‘interviewing’ and ‘conversing.’
I think he’s really lousy on socialism and feminism, but in general, I’ve enjoyed his stuff.
Anyway, he will give an hour to Tulsi, and an hour to Jordan Peterson. And he’ll treat them both with respect. There’s somethin unusual about Rogan. I cant quite put my finger on it.
I’m voting for Tulsi in the primary, btw, fwiw, if she’s on the ballot in WV. I guess Bernie would be my second choice.
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vwvParticipantYou know, no-one loathes Pelosi more than i do. No-one.
But I agree with her about not trying to impeach him. With a Repugnant Senate, it would be pointless. It would fail. And we are now close to the election. Let the voters decide.
Speaking of voters, i had a discussion with one this morning.
wv-mom — the rightwing-evangelical, trump-loving wv-mom — wondered out loud today, “why is everything i buy made in China, nowadays?”
I made the mistake of reacting. I said, ‘well, your Hero, Ronald Reagan and his rightwing buddies in the Dem-Party, destroyed the American Unions and sent all the jobs overseas, because labor is cheap in China. So now, you are buying things made by cheap labor in China”
And SHE said: “Oh, so the greedy unions caused all this.”
Face-Plant. wv ram changes subject to gardening.
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vwvParticipantbio:http://nozomihayase.com/methodology/decolonizing-psychology/
From depth psychology to liberation psychology
Psychologist Phillip Cushman (1995) saw psychology that developed within the capitalistic framework of the American society struggle to break free from its dominant economical forces. He observed how psychology as a discipline conformed to predominant market ideologies. He noted how this is manifested in the discipline’s “strong tendency to avoid the political and ethical in favor of the technological, to avoid the humanistic in favor of the scientific, to avoid the humanitarian in favor of the expedient, to avoid the needs of labor in favor of the interests of capital” (p. 163)
He recognized the influential position that psychology has attained within this sociopolitical arrangement, noting that:
if psychology is one of the guilds most responsible for determining the proper way of being human, then psychology wields a significant amount of power, especially in our current era, in which the moral authority of most religious and philosophical institutions has been called into question. (Cushman, 1995, p. 336)
Cushman noted how the model of self put forward by psychology has the effect of perpetuating dominant cultural values. He pointed out its role in shaping political structures and policies. He described psychology’s need to adapt itself to the dominant political force of capitalism has influenced the shaping of theories concerning the configuration of self, definitions of normality, and the general understanding of what constitutes mental health and illness.
Cushman (1995) deconstructed the dominant configuration of self in this era and defining it as the “empty self,” characterizing this prevalent modern condition as “a pervasive sense of personal emptiness” that produces “values of self-liberation through consumption” (p. 6). He articulated how this psychological condition was a perfect fit to meet the needs of twentieth century capitalism and pointed out how by treating this notion of self as natural, instead of truly addressing symptoms and causes that relate to this condition of self, psychologists end up serving capitalistic demands and further encouraging an increasingly decadent consumer culture.
Cushman (1995) emphasized the importance of psychologists understanding the cultural and historical context behind the theories they practice.
Our current arrangement of power and privilege create many victims in the course of everyday life. But if our ways of understanding these attacks rob us of our ability to conceive of ourselves as persons who can join together into groups that can work to stop the emptiness, violence, and abuses of our era, then our theories are unhelpful. No, then our theories add to the oppression. (p. 352)
Without understanding the historical context through which their theories emerge, researchers at times blindly exercise psychological imperialism. They enforce predominant cultural values through normalizing the conception of self that was formed by and perpetuates the framework of power and privilege.
A radical departure is now called for from depth psychology as it is situated in the current era. This requires a move out into the world beyond the margins of Western perspectives of the soul and self, into the Global South and Middle East that have been generally pushed beyond the horizon.
Psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994) in Writings for a Liberation Psychology observed how psychology in Latin America is following the same trend as psychology in Europe and North America, with the goal of gaining a social status similar to what North American psychology had attained. Martín-Baró criticized the way psychology holds to the methodology of natural science to legitimatize its field of study, developing a fictionalized and abstracted image of what it means to be human based on ahistoricism and an emphasis on individualism. He argued how this image of man is false, as it presents the individual as cut off from history, community and the social and cultural context through which one emerges.
Martín-Baró (1994) called out modern psychology’s blindness and unconscious compliance with the status quo:
Psychology has for the most part not been very clear about the intimate relationship between an unalienated personal experience and unalienated social existence, between individual control and collective power, between the liberation of each person and the liberation of a whole people. (p. 27)
Martín-Baró further pointed out psychology’s role in creating oppression, showing how it often fails to see individual suffering and illness in the context of history and society and instead places responsibility solely on the individual. This led him to recognize the need for a liberation psychology; one created not from top down, but from the bottom up. He insisted that psychology must truly become a force for liberation, yet to do this it first must liberate itself.
It was this attempt to look critically at the dominant ideas and values that liberation psychology was conceived. In Toward Psychologies of Liberation, Watkins and Shulman (2008) describe how “liberation” is “a holistic term that urges us to consider the links between economic, political, sociocultural, spiritual, and psychological transformation” (p. 46). Liberation psychology is a discipline that emerged in the intersection between socio-political fields and depth psychology. It provides a space where one can “break open one’s normalized assumptions, allowing one to see the interconnections between the psychological, the historical, the socioeconomic, and the spiritual” (p. 62).
Liberation psychology places individuals in a cultural and social context. It allows researchers to critically examine dominant views and biases in American psychology, with notions of progress and individualism, and the psychological consequences of neoliberalism, an ideology that promotes Euro-American economic and cultural hegemony.
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wvParticipantDoes ‘Fascism’ always, inevitably lead to genocide. This guy argues – yes.
Last few mins of the vid:wvParticipantHe’s good on race, Jack. How is he on Gender and Class?
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vwvParticipant“..A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. Also, the Trump phenomenon was about a political and media taboo: class…”
This is one of the aspects of the Trump thing, that the Dem-MSM rarely talks about. The Dem-MSM always wants to argue that the Trump thing was all about racism. But it was only partly about race.
Lots of white folks in WV, who voted for Trump, had earlier voted for Obama.w
vThat does not mean racism isn’t a factor. Voting for Obama does not exempt someone from the kind of ordinary everyday racism that is always present with Trump supporters. If nothing else, since Trump is an obvious dog whistle racist, anyone who votes for him has to excuse or overlook that…and overlooking that is not a simple thing to do if in fact you’re consciously anti-racist.
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I dont disagree with that.
Btw, is it my imagination or is Trump being more obviously racist than he used-ta-be?
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vwvParticipant“..A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. Also, the Trump phenomenon was about a political and media taboo: class…”
This is one of the aspects of the Trump thing, that the Dem-MSM rarely talks about. The Dem-MSM always wants to argue that the Trump thing was all about racism. But it was only partly about race.
Lots of white folks in WV, who voted for Trump, had earlier voted for Obama.w
vwvParticipantTaibbi referring to Manufacturing Consent in a positive way — a rare and lovely thing, from someone who often writes for the MSM.
I have enjoyed watching Matt Taibbi’s drift further and further to the left over the years. Same thing happened with Bill Moyers. I enjoyed ‘that’ too.
Sometimes ‘liberals’ just learn too much. And they kinda break thru. Sometimes.
Anyway, I havent finished the article. I only read the first page or so.
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vwvParticipanti stumbled across it while i was doing a search for somethin called ‘leftube'(sp?). In a vid, Contrapoints was asked by an interviewer about lef-tube. Contrapoints acted like it was an alternative to rightwing-internet. But i googled leftube and nuthin came up.
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vwvParticipantwvParticipantI dont foresee any regression in his game. I just think losing Saffold, and Sullivan, and relying on the aged Whitworth, combined with an eroding-Gurley, is going to regress the whole offense.
Granted, they get Kupp back, and Noteboom shows promise, and they drafted a RB.
Goff is fine, imho. Good enough to be a top ten QB. Good enuff to win a Ring.
My biggest hope lies in the Defense. Holding the Pats to 13 points and shutting down the Saints in the second half, and dominating the Cowboys — all in playoff games — was impressive. Wade came through.
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vJuly 13, 2019 at 5:38 pm in reply to: Most Veterans Say America’s Wars Are a Waste. No One’s Listening to Them. #102919wvParticipant“…Among veterans, 64% say the war in Iraq was not worth fighting considering the costs versus the benefits to the United States, while 33% say it was. The general public’s views are nearly identical…”
===========Well this is one of those things i really dont buy into anymore. These kinds of stats. Same with surveys on Health Care, etc.
I dont buy them because Americans continue to vote for Imperialists year in, year out, for their entire lives.
Hillary, Bill, Obama, Bush, Trump, Reagan…all Imperialists. Drones, cluster-bombs, invasions, CIA-Torture, Coups, Imperialist-plotting, spying blah blah blah.No-one twists americans arms to vote for imperialists. The Green Party and other non-imperial parties and candidates were always there.
So all those strange numbers never make it into the voting booths.
Americans vote for CIA-Loving, Pentagon-loving, Deep-State-loving, Imperialist Politicians.
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vwvParticipantWell, the right-wing view is that AOC is a brain-controlling demon from hell with the power to force her ideas on people.
Well…maybe that’s true.
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So you’re saying we are living out a Doctor Who episode.
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“Fourth Doctor: You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views.”
― Dr Who no. 4wvParticipantYes, but it is gratifying at least to see that just those few people are making the establishment very uncomfortable.
For being a freshman congresswoman in her first 6 months of time on the hill, AOC has waaaayyyyy disproportionate influence on the national conversation. While it is true that the attention she receives does not directly translate into policy, it is at least giving mainstream… .
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I think about this a lot. WHY does the Dem-MSM and the Rep-MSM give AOC so much air-play?
Why dont they each just ignore her?
Well, the Rep-MSM (Fox, Talk-radio)really do just hate her policy-ideas and they relish painting her as ‘the enemy,’ the Great-Socialist-Satan, etc. It great for ratings and riles up their base viewers.
Ok, but why does MSNBC, CNN, NPR/PBS, etc (The Dem-MSM) give her so much attention? What are they up to? I know they are pro-Pelosi, pro-corporate-centrist, etc — so why not just ignore AOC? Why give her such a huge platform all the time? I know they wanna control the debate, and smear her when they can, but why not just ignore her? If they ignored her, problem solved. Yes? No?
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vwvParticipant“…They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”
Pelosi is right about this. It ‘is’ a very small group of leftists in the system.
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vJuly 13, 2019 at 8:12 am in reply to: informal poll…name your favorite non-Rams qbs from league history #102887wvParticipantKurt Warner-when he was with the Cardinals.
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Lol
Ok, then lets add Roman Gabriel when he was an eagle.
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vJuly 11, 2019 at 10:36 am in reply to: post-draft power rankings, projected wins, how Rams look in the division, etc. #102837wvParticipantWell, who knows about the Future, but my gut tells me, the Rams have been awfully lucky as far as injuries go, during the McVay years. And the 49ers have been awfully unlucky. Stuff like that has a way of evening out. Ya know.
I just cant fathom a Ram team having three years in a row of damn good health. (granted Gurley was not healthy, but still, all in all, they have been remarkably healthy for two years, and the other teams in the West have been a shambles)
Kupp was they one key injury in the last two years, I’d say. Put Kupp in that Super Bowl, and…well…Goff would probly still get clobbered. Lets hope McVay learned somethin.
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vJuly 11, 2019 at 10:26 am in reply to: informal poll…name your favorite non-Rams qbs from league history #102836wvParticipantSo many, for an old man like me. My favorite players are often from the 70s. My football-formative years.
Jim Hart, John Brodie, Archie Manning, Stabler, Fouts, Sipe, Len Dawson, George Blanda, Namath.
I probably woulda liked Don Meredith, and Bart Starr but they were a bit before my time.
Quarterbacks today should just wear dresses. In fact the whole league should just wear dresses now. Pretty soon, no-one will even have a concussion till, like, game ten.
Put Brady on the teams Archie Manning had to play on, in the League Archie Manning had to play in. Then see what a genius ole Tom would be.
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vwvParticipantI dunno. But if i were the dem nominee, I’d find out who was the most popular person in Wisconsin,
and whoever it is, would be my VP candidate.w
vwvParticipantKuechly? Ha. Aaron Donald would have made the tackle in the backfield.
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vJuly 9, 2019 at 12:33 pm in reply to: so. cal gets a 7.1 quake…here's local news during the quake #102798wvParticipantI’ve never been scared during a quake, but there is once when I should have been. San Francisco in 89. I was thinking, “Cool. Earthquake!” Then the house creaked, and plaster flew off the corners of the walls while water sloshed out of the teetering aquarium, and I started rethinking how cool it was, but it stopped abruptly.
This one in LA went on a long time.
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Maybe if you Californicans hadn’t turned your hearts away from Jesus, and
towards gay whales, just maybe the Lord wouldnt be about to cast you people into the fiery pit of the ocean.w
vwvParticipant…. But I need to get in better shape than I am right now. Sooo…
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Yeah, time to get in shape. Make the dive.
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wvParticipantwvParticipantPolitics is dirty-plain and simple. It shouldn’t be but it is and will always be. And I don’t think most people care. .
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Yeah, humans are a mess. Btw, Bobby Kennedy and Ted Kennedy were heavily heavily implicated in the vote-buying and bribing that went on in WV back when JFK was running. Seymour Hersh has written about this.
I’ve discovered in some circumstances, i can vote for a weasel, but I am never gonna pretend like they are beacons of light.
Mainly though, its gotta be about policies. I wish they were ‘clean’ candidates but I’d vote for a weasel if i knew they’d fight for Universal Health Care and fight against Imperial-Wars/Murder.
Thats a pretty low bar, I think. Just give poor people health care, and dont bomb-murder foreigners.
Pretty low bar.
So, do you exercise these days, W? Stayin in shape? Still surf?
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vwvParticipantWV: Who was your favorite President in your lifetime, W ?
In my adult life it was JFK. In my non adult life I think it would have been Ike.
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You know we had a strange case in WV not too long ago. A legal-scholar-type-guy wrote a long book detailing the long sordid history of corruption in WV politics. It went all the way back to the Hatfield/McCoy days. One chapter was about JFK and his vote-buying in WV back in 1960 and his smearing of Humphrey etc etc etc.The book is pretty good.
Now the muckraker who wrote it later became Chief Justice of the WV Supreme Court.
But. Irony of Ironies, the guy who wrote with so much passion and detail about Rep and Dem corruption in wv, was Indicted by a Fed Grand Jury and later was convicted of eleven offenses of Fraud. Facing impeachment he resigned in 2018. Below is a link to his book and a short reader review with a reader-edit.
book:https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Another-Vote-Wont-Landslide/dp/0870127489
Don’t Buy Another Vote, I Won’t Pay for a Landslide: The Sordid And Continuing History of Political Corruption in West Virginia Hardcover
book reviews
“Robert Bolton comment:
When Allen Loughry wrote this book, there was another review I encountered in print that stated whatever political ambitions the author may have had within the state were now dead. Against all seasoned political observers’ predictions, Mr. Loughry now serves as a justice on the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Although I am not friends with Justice Loughry, I did meet him during my swearing-in as an attorney, and afterwards he told me he wrote this book in part because he felt it was necessary to give the citizenry a detailed history of their elected officials’ misbehavior to avoid such mistakes in the future.As for the text itself, it is a thoroughly interesting read and extremely well footnoted. The book was originally a dissertation in pursuit of a S.J.D. and there are occasions when the writing comes off as somewhat wooden. Nonetheless, as a compendium for the history of corruption in this state, there is no better source. While the main focus of Mr. Loughry’s book is the second half of the twentieth century, he is still able to effectively mention the names of judges and congressmen from the early days after the state’s founding. Among the most notable sections (and the one from which the book derives its title) is the description of the obscene amount of money spent in the West Virginia Democratic primary in 1960 when John F. Kennedy was running against Hubert Humphrey. More recent events described include the fall of state treasurer A. James Manchin for the loss and likely embezzlement of state funds, the imprisonment of Arch Moore in a federal penitentiary for bribery in the early 1990s, and a plethora of circuit judges that seem unwilling to behave and avoid being on the other side of the bench.
Within the past five years, one could open their newspaper and see a Lincoln County sheriff who pleaded guilty to ballot stuffing, a judge from Randolph County removed from the bench for an affair with another court official, and Kanawha County’s inability to retain a lead prosecuting attorney beyond two terms because of malfeasance. That said, I think West Virginia has seen a marked increase in the honesty of its elections in recent decades, and I do not doubt Mr. Loughry expressed the voice of many who seek a more honest political life from their representatives.
At well over six hundred pages in small print, this book will take quite a while to read. There are some minor printer’s errors regarding spelling or particular dates, but these subtract very little from the crash course in West Virginia politics you will receive from reading this book. On the whole, I highly recommend it.
Edit: Since I initially wrote this review nearly five years ago, Justice Loughry has been indicted and convicted on federal charges of false statements to an officer, witness tampering, wire fraud, and other criminal counts. In addition, he was facing impeachment before he resigned his office. He is now serving his sentence in a South Carolina penitentiary. It is a bitter irony that the man who wrote the book on West Virginia’s culture of corruption would face charges of similar malfeasance. As one of our local media commentators, Hoppy Kercheval, noted when the news of Loughry’s indictment first broke, “t’s evident now that another chapter needs to be added.”
wvParticipantSo, where am i wrong here?
I guess we are just talking past each other. You think Tulsi/Bernie are UNELECTABLE, and if the Dems choose them it leads to more Trump. Maybe. Could be. But it could also be that NOT choosing a progressive Dem is what leads to Trump. I mean thats what happened last time.
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Lets assume I’m correct-that taking away private insurance from over 180 million Americans will insure another Trump term. Do you believe its ethical to take a stand on an issue that guarantees another 4 yrs of a President who will continue to push-w/ the backings of a Senate-for the destruction of any programs that would advance the health care for the poor and less fortunate among us ?
Universal health care is a critical need but IMO it needs an elective component otherwise we insure the draconian efforts of the idiot child in the WH.
BTW I think your wrong when you say that NOT choosing a progressive Dem is what caused Trump to win. Any expert on that election would also disagree with that statement. Clinton ended with millions of votes ahead of Trump. She lost the electoral votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Sanders would not have won those votes either. Besides it wasn’t that Clinton was not a progressive-it was because Clinton was Clinton. She did not have her husband’s ability and charm to talk to people. It was far more about her personality than her political views-as it always is in such a race. Few voters know enough about policies and equally important how they become enacted. Ask anyone how a bill gets passed and you will understand how truly backward we are. People don’t know and they don’t care. Its all about personality. People disliked Hillary not because she wasn’t progressive enough-they disliked her because she was not likeable.
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Well, I think you are being too sure of yourself here. You say ‘any expert on the election’ would agree with you, but the polls themselves had Bernie beating Trump if I’m not mistaken. Didnt the polls show that Bernie would have beat him? Yet, the DNC cheated to ensure the Hillary win. (Granted she might have beat Bernie in a fair fight, but we’ll never know)
I also dont think its totally accurate to say millions of people will lose their insurance, without also adding that they will still get health care. It will just be a nationalized system that insures everyone.
Its not like the ones that lose ‘insurance coverage’ wont have health care. So maybe they wont be as upset as you seem to think. Maybe they will. I dunno.My point isnt that “I’m right” or that “I’m sure” about any of this. I am not sure about any of it. I cant predict the future. But I also know that you cant predict the future either. But you seem to be so sure about the “Only a centrist can win” scenario. But you cant really know.
I can see how a centrist such as yourself would say: “well, Gore came super close to winning, and Hillary came super close to winning and Obama won, and Bill Clinton won, and they are all pro-corporate-centrists. So, lets just stay the course and try harder and be a tad smarter, and the next centrist will win and the evil Trump will be gone.”
I think a LOT of centrists and prettymuch all of the corporate-MSM believe that.
I dont know. I mean we are talking about the ‘horse race’ here. I dont study that. I’m no expert at that.
Maybe its true. The horse-race part. Maybe only a corporate-centrist-type-Dem can win an election in this sad, destructive wasteland of a nation.Could be.
But its possible that a true ‘progressive’ Dem might just be the best candidate.
A while back, I predicted Bernie would be the next president. (and I’m no Bernie fan, btw) But I only based that on a gut feeling.
Who was your favorite President in your lifetime, W ?
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vwvParticipantYou need to pick the hill your going to do battle on. We now have the single most “UNETHICAL” President in the hx of this nation. Period ! The most “ethical” thing we can do is getting rid of this imposter of a President. We won’t do it if over 180 million people who have private health care are told they will need to give it up-even if its for a higher calling. It just won’t happen….
Safe and enjoyable 4th to all.
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I dunno if Trump is the most unethical President of all time. Bush started a war based on lies, and Trump hasnt done that, so, its difficult to weigh these things, etc, and so forth.
I know Universal Care is totally ‘do-able’ in America.
I know that because many many Nations do it in various ways.
I know its the only ethical thing to do. Its a life and death issue.
I know ‘most’ americans (according to surveys) SAY they are for Universal care.
I know that despite the surveys american keep voting for politicians that DONT want Universal Care.
I know Trump wont save those lives of the poor Americans without coverage.
I know Biden, and the other Corpse-Dems will also let those poor Americans without coverage Die.
I know Bernie and Tulsi will fight for the lives of the American who will die without coverage.
(I also know, that Tulsi, unlike Bernie opposes Imperial wars)So, where am i wrong here?
I guess we are just talking past each other. You think Tulsi/Bernie are UNELECTABLE, and if the Dems choose them it leads to more Trump. Maybe. Could be. But it could also be that NOT choosing a progressive Dem is what leads to Trump. I mean thats what happened last time.
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