zn wrote:

wv wrote:

The obsession with race and gender involves the striving for privileges by a layer of black and female professionals, determined to carve out careers and incomes—under conditions of an intensely competitive “marketplace”—at the expense of their white or male counterparts.

This is such bullshit.

Who wrote this?

This is not the time to be divisive that way.

With people striving for doctrinaire ideological purity and the divisions that entails.

A real left is a collection of affiliations. Different interests and viewpoints, acting in alliance.

This guy sounds like a goose-stepping “let’s be uniform about this” type.

There will never be an successful american left that approaches it that way. That just means in-fighting.

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You are rarely so emotional, zn 🙂

I actually agree with a lot of what the writer says. And i also agree with what you have said.

And i agree with bell hooks. Again.

w
v
“… I’m actually for a more communal division of labor. If we have a community where people seem to be more hip about gender, but not very hip about class, then I think that we need to strategically go for that framework of understanding which is missing, rather than to assume that one framework should always be centered on. I believe that Black women are very susceptible to bourgeois hedonistic consumerism because women are so much the targets of mass media. So, clearly, a lot of critical thinking about materialism in our lives is crucial to engaging Black women in revolutionary struggle. So that class, again, comes up and we haven’t had enough Black women leaders.
But the point is, we need to also know how some of these women, many of whom came from bourgeois families, began to acquire a more revolutionary consciousness–if, indeed, they have acquired that consciousness. It’s also easier, a lot of times, for Black women to talk about gender and ignore class because many of us are non-divesting of our support of capitalism and our longing for luxury. I think that it’s one thing to enjoy the good life and to enjoy beauty and things, and another thing to feel like you’re willing to support the killing of other people in other countries so that you can have your fine car and other luxuries. …” bell hooks

“We don’t hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they’re not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo. They’re a small minority, but they are there and they are useful allies in the struggle. So I try not to use those monolithic terms anymore that I used in the beginning with Ain’t I A Woman…’ bell hooks

nittany ram wrote:

I wish I could get motivated to exercise. I’m heavier now than at any point in my life. But I just hate it so much.

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Have you tried zooey’s cussing program?

I think he’s coming out with a video.

w
v

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Journalists Denounce WaPo Fake News Blacklist as Red Scare Redux

“Basically, everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum is guilty.”
by
Lauren McCauley, staff writer
link:http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/11/28/journalists-denounce-wapo-fake-news-blacklist-red-scare-redux

The Washington Post’s promotion of a new, “McCarthyistic” so-called black list has journalists aghast over what appears to be a red scare redux, as independent news outlets critical of U.S. foreign policy are being smeared as “Russian propaganda.”

“Now that we have entered a New Cold War, I suppose it makes sense that we should expect a New McCarthyism,” writes Robert Parry, investigative journalist and editor of Consortium News, which was one of the websites flagged by the anonymous organization PropOrNot as a “Russian propaganda outlet.”

Last week, the Washington Post published a feature story citing PropOrNot and other supposed “experts” who allege that “Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery” was behind the rise of “fake news,” which they say spread false information about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, fueling the rise of Donald Trump.

The fake news was disseminated and amplified by an “online echo chamber,” WaPo’s Craig Timberg reported, which included players who “were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign…while others were ‘useful idiots’— a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.”

PropOrNot claims that stories planted or promoted by this campaign were viewed on Facebook more than 213 million times.

But the outlets being singled out by the group, and thus smeared by the Post, run the gamut politically, with the only seeming connection being that they “do not uncritically echo a pro-NATO perspective,” as journalists Ben Norton and Glenn Greenwald point out.

In a searing take-down published at The Intercept on Saturday, Norton and Greenwald accuse PropOrNot of committing “outright defamation” for “slandering obviously legitimate news sites as propaganda tools of the Kremlin.”

While some, namely Sputnik News and Russia Today, are funded by the Russian government, those sites are listed alongside a host of others who do not warrant this categorization. They write:

Included on this blacklist of supposed propaganda outlets are prominent independent left-wing news sites such as Truthout, Naked Capitalism, Black Agenda Report, Consortium News, and Truthdig.

Also included are popular libertarian hubs such as Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and the Ron Paul Institute, along with the hugely influential right-wing website the Drudge Report and the publishing site WikiLeaks. Far-right, virulently anti-Muslim blogs such as Bare Naked Islam are likewise dubbed Kremlin mouthpieces. Basically, everyone who isn’t comfortably within the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum is guilty.

Norton and Greenwald also lambast the Washington Post for its “shoddy, slothful” reporting. Among the piece’s shortcomings, they note, is that Timberg failed to include a link to PropOrNot’s website.

“If readers had the opportunity to visit the site,” they write, “it would have become instantly apparent that this group of ostensible experts far more resembles amateur peddlers of primitive, shallow propagandistic clichés than serious, substantive analysis and expertise; that it has a blatant, demonstrable bias in promoting NATO’s narrative about the world; and that it is engaging in extremely dubious McCarthyite tactics about a wide range of critics and dissenters.”

What’s more, The Intercept notes, the problematic exposé “was one of the most widely circulated political news articles on social media” following its publication, which has far-ranging consequences.

Fortune columnist Mathew Ingram similarly lamented the dangers of lumping “anyone who shared a salacious but untrue news story about Hillary Clinton as an agent of an orchestrated Russian intelligence campaign.”

“Has the rise of fake news played into the hands of those who want to spread disinformation? Sure it has,” Ingram wrote. “But connecting hundreds of Twitter accounts into a dark web of Russian-controlled agents, along with any website that sits on some poorly thought-out blacklist, seems like the beginnings of a conspiracy theory, rather than a scientific analysis of the problem.”

joemad wrote:

I do my best to do 105 push ups per day and walk 2 miles.

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105 ? Wny 105 ?

Thats a lot, btw. How many can you do in a row?

I used to be a big ‘pull up’ guy. I liked pull ups. But now, at my age, its tough to get my elbow joints to go along with pullups. But I’m still gonna try and see if i can get my body to go along with them.

I rewatched a dvd of ‘Pumping Iron’ with Arnold and Ferrigno a while back. On the special features they kinda hinted that a lot of the drama was kinda ‘created’ just to add some pizzazz to the film.

w
v

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

First John Oliver attacks Jill, and now Taibbi falls in love with Obama’s charisma. Gag me.

You can’t separate Obama the person from Obama the tepid center-right empty politico?

I think he would have made a great university president. When he spoke up as a moral spokesman on certain issues I thought he was tremendous.

His policies, such as they are, were Clintonista sameole sameole.

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Nah, I’m not interested in that kind of separation. I think focusing on his personal traits is just a diversion from his hideous murderous neoliberal policies.

w
v

canadaram wrote:

I’ve started cycling over the past 5 years. I used to run regularly, but my calves no longer handle it well at all. I still run occasionally, but during the summer I usually ride 5-6 days per week. I lift light weights a couple times per week as well. In the winter I x-country ski. I have a fat (tire) bike now, so I plan to ride that this winter as well as ski.

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How old are ya, Canada ?

w
v

Now this is worth watching. Really.

nittany ram wrote:

<I always think of you when I see Moonrise Kingdom. When I was watching it in the theater for the first time I thought this was a film you would like. I could picture you fitting in quite nicely in that universe. 😉

I’m also a fan of the ‘mockumentaries’ done by Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Michael Mckean, etc….This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind…

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O shit. Thats probly true. I would fit into a Wes Anderson movie.

What kind of movie would you fit into?

w
v
Elrond: Put aside the Ranger, become who you were born to be.

Well, i still maintain the MSM is a more sinister problem than the ‘fake news’ problem. Both are problems, but which one will the MSM NEVER talk about and which one will they try to solve ?

——————
“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.”
― A.J. Liebling

The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”
― Gore Vidal

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“We are intellectual prostitutes.”
John Swinton, New York 1890.

John Swinton, the foremost journalist of his day, was asked to toast an independent press at a New York banquet given in his honour by other journalists. His response was clear and forthright:

“There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Other of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

“The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men.

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