zn wrote:

Zooey wrote:

It’s really no mystery why people choose a six-pack and a television rather than read books by John Stockwell.

We are so fucking doomed.

Interestingly enough, Stockwell doesn;t think that way.

I generally find that people with the most negative assessments are just prone to that, personally. I don’t think it’s analysis. I think it’s a predisposition.

Do I have a different predisposition? Yes. Is it BETTER? No, obviously. It’s just different. I see myself as a kind of cautiously optimistic Vulcan.

So, live long and post on.

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

What evidence are you basing your ‘cautious optimism’ on ?

Cause the air, water, and ground are getting more polluted everyday.

w
v

w
v

The scarcity thing was Lee Camp. Funny guy. I have been thinking about Lee Camp, Colbert, and Jon Stewart today. Camp is the ‘leftist’. Cobert and Stewart are the ‘liberals’. 🙂

===========================================
Jeremy Corbyn was just 2,227 votes away from becoming Prime Minister

Winning seven Tory knife-edge seats would have put Labour leader in Downing Street

Harriet Agerholm
@HarrietAgerholm
The Independent Online

Jeremy Corbyn was just 2,227 votes away from becoming Prime Minister in the general election, new analysis has revealed.

If the Labour leader had won seven marginal Conservative seats and formed a so-called “progressive alliance” with all other smaller parties – barring the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) – it would have been enough to command a working majority.

The Labour Party has said it was prepared to form a coalition government, with Mr Corbyn announcing: “We are ready to serve.”

However, if the Conservative Party had won just 287 more votes needed to secure five knife-edge Labour seats, they would have commanded a majority alone.

The calculation comes as the Tories were reeling from the loss of their majority, which it had looked as though they would substantially increase when Theresa May called the election in April.

The DUP, which increased its number of seats to 10, said it was working on a deal with the Tories whereby it would support them on a vote-by-vote basis.

With seven more Tory constituencies falling to him, a coalition of Labour, Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party (SNP), Plaid Cymru, the Green Party and one independent MP in the House of Commons would have held 322 seats — enough for Mr Corbyn to enter number 10.

This figure is based on Labour winning Kensington, where counting has been suspended until Friday evening.

The Green Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru have all spoken in favour of alliances, although the Liberal Democrats – for whom a coalition with the Conservatives has already proved devastating – had ruled out joining with other parties.

Seven Tory constituencies, including those held by Home Secretary Amber Rudd and former minister Stephen Crabb, were won with small majorities in the tens or hundreds, including Southampton Itchen, Preseli Pembrokeshire, Hastings and Rye and Chipping Barnet.

Had the Conservatives seized five seats including Dudley North, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Crew and Nantwich and Canterbury from Labour – seats where Mr Corbyn’s party won by a small margin – Theresa May would have gone into Brexit negotiations with a majority in the Commons.

However, even this would have been a huge disappointment to Mrs May, who claimed the reason she called the election was to secure a more substantial mandate for Brexit, as it would still have represented a much weaker position than the one from which she called the election.

link:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/corbyn-election-results-votes-away-prime-minister-theresa-may-hung-parliament-a7782581.html

—–
The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism
[Red Century]

Sarah Jaffe

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/opinion/american-communism.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

“…..see link…
…….The party inspired loyalty for reasons beyond simply an affinity for Marxist ideas. It was the campaigns Communists ran against police brutality, the practice of lynching and the Jim Crow laws that made their politics relevant to the lives of ordinary people. In the North as well as the South, on soapboxes on the streets of Harlem as well as on plots of sharecropped land in Alabama, Communist organizing addressed the bread-and-butter concerns of black people.

Communists believed that organizing the working class would work only if white workers realized that their liberation, too, was bound up with the fate of black workers. Facing this threat, anti-Communists and segregationists worked hard to sustain the fractures. They blamed Communists for fomenting “race mixing,” evoking sexualized fears that social equality would mean black men having sex with white women — the very fears that put the Scottsboro Boys on trial. In turn, when black people agitated for civil rights, the Bull Connors of the world called such demands Communist-inspired, returning to the same narrative of dangerous outsiders.

Such an argument said, in effect, that black people had to be whipped up by radical foreigners in order to challenge the remnants of slavery in the Jim Crow South, and that without those outsiders, America was, to steal a phrase from the 2016 election, already great. The view also ignores that it was the black members of the Communist Party U.S.A., raised in such circumstances, who made it clear that their struggles for economic independence were bound up with the racist violence they faced from both the police and white supremacist groups.

Those black Communists often had to fight to hold their party accountable to its professed ideals when the party shifted its strategy toward courting white liberals. The debates that resurfaced during the 2016 election cycle, about the primacy of race or class in left-wing organizing, particularly around the primary campaign of Bernie Sanders, echoed these past battles.

In the 1930s, the party taught its members to discuss their problems using the language of exploitation. This language meant that people “understood that racism and what they called male chauvinism wasn’t simply people acting badly or being psychologically controlled or being ignorant,” Professor Kelley said. “It was about the benefits that they derived from exploitative relationships.”…see link…