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This invocation of Jesus in the Pennsylvania State House seems over the top even by American standards, but if this is the way the US is going, it is the beginning of the end.
Appearing almost in tears, Ms Borowicz sermonised about “overcoming evil” in the name of Jesus – who she mentioned 13 times – and said “every knee will bow and every tongue will confess” in the name of him.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8841446.html
It's certainly the way the Republican party is going - it's takeover by religious nutters, bigots and unprincipled scumbags is almost complete. It's had to see how this mindset can be compatible with democracy and the rule of law at the end of the day. Doesn't God's will have to take precedence over a man-made constitution?Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Since I don't agree in principle with any conservative policies it's difficult for me to see what their platform would look like if they get rid of the most extreme nutjobs. They can get rid of the bigots and the unprincipled scumbags but could they get rid of the religious nutters and still be conservative? Certainly they could have more respect for the first amendment's proscription on religious interference in governance, but being pro-life has been a core policy position for them despite Roe v Wade being a 40 plus year precedent.Quote:
Originally Posted by filghy2
A conservative friend of mine was writing a policy paper on women's rights and wanted to include a section arguing that being pro-life is compatible with being a feminist. I recall saying reproductive rights are so central to women's autonomy that I don't see how the argument could even be made. She ended up avoiding the subject and arguing that left-wing attempts to empower women were really paternalistic and the real obstacle to women's equality....
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure honest arguments can be made in support of too many of their policy positions. Allow the market to determine health care costs because it's the most efficient way to pay for it? Not pass civil rights laws because the free market dis-incentivizes discrimination? Defund social welfare programs because they create dependency and are responsible for the breakdown of the American family? These aren't strawmen. They actually believe this stuff but it's fairly obvious to anyone who thinks about it that their premises are false.
But yes, they can get rid of the most extreme bigots and liars. They can have respect for the rule of law and act in good faith. They cannot provide a remedy for the fact that their policy proposals are fairly easy to knock down with logic.
I don't want to smear the Americans with a tag of ignorance, but how much detail on policy do Americans actually debate? The way the so-called debate on abortion is framed in many media outlets posits the existence of a heartbeat as the origin of life with the simple proposition that it is wrong to end it -according to Paula White, the President's 'Pastor'-the one who tells him what God wants (!)- he confronted a pro-choice Senator with the proposition it is wrong to kill babies, and the US has withdrawn funding from agencies that provide family planning advice as part of the US foreign aid programme. But where is the debate on what famly planning actually consists of in the US, where abortion is just one part of the services that are provided? Where is the debate on women's rights when the defeault position of the President's supporters is that 'women's rights' by definition is some lunatic feminist 'social justice' agenda out of touch with the American Way of Life?
On the matter of health care, where is the debate between a 'service' and a 'business'? The Single payer system is dismissed out of hand as socialism, preventing any rational debate on what it means, and how it mght benefit the USA, while the complex system which revolve around insurance policies that do or do not provide health care are too dense for most people to comprehend.
We have a similar problem in the UK where the Brexit debate has in fact, for most of the time, been based on distortion and lies, reduced to a simplistic notion we are either better off or worse off if we are in or out. Politicians love this, they love nothing better than avoiding the detail, while these days too many powerful poiticians never even bother with the detail, either because they 'don't have time' or in the case of the President are too thick to understand it, and can't cope with lots of words.
Which is why I like what I have seen of AOC, because she has an ability to examine the detail and ask penetrating questions which are a digest of the detail that expose its strengths and limitations, and which is why some people are uncomfortable when being questioned by her. But at some point, when the detail becomes the headline, will the people stop and spend half an hour to find out what it is, or just 'trust' the President has it right and vote not just for or even in spite of him, but vote against the Democrats because their policy is derided as 'socialism', because the Democrats are an 'anti-Jewish' party because they are the 'enemies of the people'?
A fractured media enables politicians and their supporters to fix the 'debate' in advance, while some of what passes for 'news' is just opinion, and not based on analysis or a balanced approach that sees more than one side of the argument. This is the consequence of the end of the Fair Broadcasting rules that Reagan abolished in 1987 on Murdoch's advice and which has caused so much damage to political debate in the US.
Can Boeing survive? Remember this?
Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.c10a4431b3c5
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016
Presumably it would be about the virtues of small government combined with traditional morality and family values. The latter doesn't need to take the peculiar form that American evangelical Christianity has taken. I don't support this position and I don't think the empirical evidence supports it, but I can understand intellectually why people might think that approach is best for society as a whole.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
The striking thing about today's Republican party is that they no longer make any serious attempt to make the case that their policies would benefit most people. It's all about tribalism, where the aim of politics is to benefit members of your tribe at the expense of others and to do down the other tribe by any means possible.
I don't think the Trump Republican party can any longer be described as conservative. What is conservative about trashing long-standing institutions with little thought as to the future implications? What is conservative about refusing to apply any standards of acceptable behaviour? What is conservative about weakening constraints on executive power?
when I was in uni, one day I was feeling pretty groggy. I think I had some kind of cold, and my lecturer was being an arse. He accused me of not handing in a report, when I clearly did, and I had bought a sandwich which fell out of my hand as I left the shop, and I was late to class since I asked the taxi driver to go to the campus but he went the wrong way, and I was a bit hyper.
I dropped some money on the ground, and as I was picking it up from the corridor floor, some girl came and then literally stood on my hand. She was thinking "oh, I want to hurt this guy so I'll step on his hand!!" So I just got up and shoved her. she fell to the ground, and then she looked so shocked. Some guys in the corridor looked at me and motioned to hit me, i just told them to f off. Even some campus security came and just moved on.
But then some girl who thought she was badass and was above social norms/rules and because i was "nothing" in her eyes - lol. really? what made her the judge of value?
Looking back, i don't really see what I did wrong. I was defending myself. But i'm only asking this since I told my parents, and they said it was understandable but over the top.
tl;dr - some college babe who is the Godly-humanity-judge stepped on my hand as i was picking up loose change, i got irate, shoved her, and then she acted the victim.
Just a random thought I had.
Below is a quote on twitter by a man named Grahame Morris who is a Member of Parliament. He said this while linking to a video of Guatemalan troops abusing children. Notice how he invokes Christianity and particularly Easter. Even if he had not linked to a propaganda video claiming Guatemalan troops were Israelis, it sounds like he's invoking the Christian God's judgment against the Jews, which in the context of Easter is not a terribly thoughtful thing to do.
My understanding is that he has acknowledged they're not Israelis but has not issued a condemnation of Guatemala.
This comes in the wake of a bunch more scandals....and the potential of the European Human Rights Commission investigating Labour for anti-Semitism. If there is a God, he will please let this happen....absolute clowns.
"Marvellous, absolutely marvellous the Israeli Army, the best financed, best trained, best equipped army in the world caught on camera beating up Palestinian children for the fun of it. May God forgive them. What would Jim Royle say on an Easter Monday".
For what it's worth, not much I expect, Morris has apologized for his error referring in his tweet to 'the dangers of fake news online'. Morris lifted the Guatemalan/IDF claim from the now suspended account of 'Rachel Swindon' or Rachel Cousins, a pro-Corbyn member of Swindon Labour Party whose profle you can read here-
https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefa...visive-twitter
I don't know where Rachel Cousins gets her information from, and I doubt that for all her support for the Palestinian cause she has ever been to the West Bank or Gaza and, snob that I am, I doubt she has ever read a book on the subject or the articles in key journals that provide superior in quality arguments for and against the Israelis and Palestinians. For Morris to latch on to something he did not look into himself is his problem, and he has made a fool of himself.
But what this exposes is the way in which people react to something they see online much as they might have done seeing something on tv or listening to the radio before twitter. Without pausing to wonder if what they have seen is true, the emotion is triggered, the buttons pressed, the mistake published for all to see. It can of course in more expert hands be used to cover up the truth on behalf of the person pressing the buttons -the President's instant claims of exoneration being a case in point, even though everyone knows he is America's No 1. Liar, as David Frum described him on the BBC last week.
But, is twitter a genius means of exposing the rank stupidity of people, or a clever way of publishing instant thoughts and reactions to news? I don't use it, only read it if it is part of the news, so if it disappeared at mdnight tonight I would not care, and the world would not be any different. But at least it might halt the incesssant garbage that garbage man in the White House pumps out, labouring under the delusion he is important.
And if there is any justice, Morris will not be an MP for much longer. But a good example of how decrepit the Labour Party has become.
I stopped following all of the accounts that kept me abreast of what was going on because it caused me a little irritation. I had someone reach out to me and I re-followed them and this came up on my timeline. This happened recently with the Trump Mueller stuff as well that I was determined not to follow too closely.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Morris' first response was that it didn't matter if it was not really Israel because Israel has done bad things. So he posted something false with all sorts of strange religious innuendo, was told it was false by hundreds of people, and said it didn't matter to him that it was false and that the people responding were "trolls".
Right-wingers are rightly brought to task for including Christian religious innuendo when discussing military operations in the Middle East because of the sensitive history of the Crusades. While I have no animus towards Christianity or Easter, the God forgive them it's Easter Monday is a little too tone deaf if that's all it is and I suspect whether unconscious or conscious it was motivated by Israel's Jewishness.
I'm hesitant to talk about all of the fringe figures like Swindon who get their hands slapped but the problem is they never stop having influence. Even exiles like Atzmon have an uncertain status to some. People are told to avoid David Icke but then he does have an influence among some in these networks and criticizing the lizard king can be seen as pro-Zionist. There ARE many people on the left who are critical of Israel and do not have an axe to grind but there's also a bubbling cauldron of conspiracy driven crazy.
Initially I thought it was an unsolvable problem because random people keep popping off with this sort of thing but I feel more conviction that it's the tolerance of it. The party sometimes acts against these people but really identifies more with them than the people who are complaining about it. Jim Sheridan can say he used to respect and empathize with Jews but now doesn't and he's a well-meaning lovable guy who got carried away out of his anger at Israel. Jewish people complain that this is unacceptable and and they are vindictive, enemies of the party, and as I heard one Corbyn supporter with a large following say "Corbynophobic". In fact, this person said Corbynophobia is a bigger societal problem than anti-Semitism.
I had gotten it wrong about the commission. Apparently they're the Equality and Human Rights Commission and I don't know what authority they have. The only thing I hope is that there's a full list of the people involved in these scandals, with notes analyzing each issue because frankly I'm tired of the obfuscation. If it's really just criticism of Israel that's being stigmatized, then transparency would show that, but of course that's not what it would show.
I know politicians talk rubbish, it comes with the job, but I wonder if I have ever lived through a time when the volume of rubbish is at such staggering proportions. That it comes from a 'vox pop' that seems to have no rules other than self-belief and self-promotion is the price we pay for free speech, just as once a week if it still happens, Sunday in the Park in London was crowded with inflammatory speakers and the crowds they loved to wind up.
But then you have Rudolph Giuliani making the most outrageous statements in defence of criminal behaviour and you realise the poison has infected the head, these are not normal times, that elementary facts are discarded and truth is no longer valued. The worst thing is people may actually believe him, though I wonder how Republicans would have reacted in 1980 had Jimmy Carter publicly called on Brezhnev to help his campaign, not missing out Putin who was a KGB officer at the time, and a member of the Communist Party -and has he changed his views since 1991?
On the lunchtime news Sir Anthony Meyer, a former ambassador to the US justified the State Visit on the grounds it is about the country and the Office of the Presidency rather than the incumbent, yet this is a President who has no respect for that very office and even less for his country. We can list all the undesirable thieves, liars and murderers who have been given State Visits, but that doesn't mean we must maintain a tradition of inviting the worst to ride with the Queen and have trumpets announce their arrival at dinner -we should not be giving this sack of shit a welcome of any kind, not least because of the way he insulted and abused Theresa May in the newspaper owned by the soft-porn publisher and criminal hacker Rupert Murdoch on the eve of his last visit. Who knows- if the Tory part has its way, she won't be Prime Minister by the time he arrives, we may have left the EU (but I doubt it), and when the Queen sees what the President wants, she may decide to 'go sick' and lumber Chuck with the problem.
Trump practically blows Putin onstage at Helsinki, …….where the fuck is the outrage?Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
Tolerance doesn't mean you cut your balls off, somebody's got to start calling balls and strikes because Conservative Media is playing by their own set of rules. I've always thought Trump wouldn't make it four years in the United States of America, maybe something truly nefarious is going on above and beyond the usual bullshit.
And... the cold fact is all I know is what they tell me. Shooting the messenger is where we're at now. In the USA, a dozen or two indictments against Trump for money laundering would be like killing that blue White Walker on Game of Thrones, all Trump's underlings would shatter like glass. I imagine Brexit's situation is more like groping the air, more complex than 3-D chess, with a blindfold.
When I used to get Viagra from Canada, the mis-information about competing clinics was off the charts, My urologist asked me what the best clinic was! Any time huge amounts of money are at stake, the competition is going to be epic.
Surely the problem you now have in the US is that the President can break as many laws as he chooses to, deny he is breaking the law, maybe even boast he is breaking the law, because nothing will happen as a result -the mere fact that none of the Republicans who went ape when Bill Clinton committed one offence now see nothing, hear nothing and do nothing. It underlines the extent to which Congress is a useless vessel, a talking shop that has ceased to be a branch of government. Pelosi can't be bothered, and why should she insist the rule of law and democratic accountability shape the politics of the USA?
Admit that reason has all but disappeared in public life and you can retire your morals. States are passing laws to limit abortion by claiming that evidence of a heartbeat confirms and protects life when science could inform them there is not even a heart at 6 weeks to beat, but why would an American believe science is anything but bullshit? You might as well argue that when a state chops the heads off 37 people in one day it may be worse than Daesh but why should the US care what Saudi Arabia does as long as it is paying the President to keep his trap shut and bend the knee to MSB?
It remains to be seen if the US can recover from the most sustained attack on its Constitution, its laws and institutions since the attack on Fort Sumer in 1861, or be now forever divided against itself. Who needs the Greys when you have a degenerate moron in the White House protected by men utterly bereft of elemetary decency and respect for all that the US has achieved? Brexit is a poltical mess, your Republican party is a fatal disease. The UK may break up into its parts, England, Scotland and Wales, and Ireland be re-unified, but are you ready for the break up of the USA, and does anyone actually care?
I wish I could explain it, more importantly, I hope there's enough sanity left in the government that they understand at least. I heard a bit of the Mueller Report today ...they intercepted Russian phone calls on election night 2016 saying "Putin has won"
Maybe the insanity we see hides the greater insanity that we don't see.
I'm hoping one of the Democrats on the Mueller team is getting all his notes together to leak at the appropriate time. The Mueller Report did kill Trump, he just doesn't know it yet.
No fucking way does Putin not wake up the sleeping giant.
Not only is he ignoring the laws himself, but there are reports that he has encouraged officials to ignore the law on the promise that he will pardon them. He has done this sort of thing publicly on several occasions already.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...eenan-dhs.html
It's also clear that Trump's strategy on HoR attempts to investigate his administration will be to refuse cooperation on dubious legal grounds and try to tie it up in the courts until after the election. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...gation-1289645
Could the presidential power to pardon (combined with court-stacking and a compliant party) be the Achilles heel in the US system of democracy and law? I guess we'll find out over the next couple of years.
The real reason to impeach Trump is this systematic pattern of law-breaking and not the specific question of collusion with Russia. I think one thing that history does tell us is that when would-be autocrats succeed it is usually because their opponents have been too timid in taking them on.
In the Federalist Papers you can find discussion about misuse of the pardon power and how impeachment is a remedy for that. They were aware of the possibility of self-dealing but thought impeachment would be a check on that. It doesn't mean they got it right, but if the Federalist Papers are any guide to what is impeachable, it should be that sort of pattern of corruption. Which leaves your next point about a compliant party.Quote:
Originally Posted by filghy2
The Russia investigation was always about getting to the bottom of what their campaign was to influence our election, what dirty money got into our system, what cyber crimes were committed, and what sorts of fraudulent and illegal actions took place. Trump may think that because the investigation did not find a smoking gun connecting him to Russia's campaign that such fact-finding was not necessary, but that's because he has no sense of responsibility to anyone other than himself. His actions were objectively corrupt, not part of normal partisanship, and threatened national security by interfering with attempts to uncover espionage.
I'm curious what you think Democrats could do to be less timid. I'm not saying this defensively, but there was a time when the criticism from some quarters was that Democrats had become shrill and obsessed with this issue.
Before he entered office he was given the arguments by 'literalist' advocates that there are details in the relationship between the President and Congress that have never been codified or tested in law, and if there is one thing he learned froom Cohn it is to always attack and use the law as the weapon. Either this is a strength for the Democrats so that they can overhaul the legal relationship between the President and Congress, or he will simply get away with it, and frustrate any attempt to call his staff to testify by issuing a blizzard of writs or rejections of subpoenas (just say no!) and wait for the other side to get stuck in the legal process. But it does mean, as if we did not know it already, that everything is about HIM, not the law, not democracy, not Congress, not the Constitution, not 'norms and values', and certainly not basic decency. HIM, His Imperial Majesty.
Nancy Pelosi needs to think hard about the consequences of doing nothing and relying on the voters -but surely now their public campaign must be to put key Republican Senators in the spotlight to expose their hypocrisy in their refusal to impeach on clear evidence of illegality, so that it is the Republican Party that becomes responsible for participating in the demolition of the Constitution and the rule of law. It is quite extraordinary what this man is getting away with, but just as depressing is the relegation of Congress to an irritant to the King's Rule.
Watergate was often a confusing sequence of claims and revelations about the way individuals behaved after the break-in, and it ended with the sense that Nixon had undermined public trust in him, but not the Presidency. Then and since it was believed the system had shorted, but corrected itself, primarily because Nixon had lost the trust of his party in Congress. The situation we have now, as Biden suggested in his declaration video today, is one approaching existential levels, where the indifference of the GOP to law breaking theatens the basic purpose of government, and what's more, I really don't think they care if the system falls apart.
I was thinking of Nancy Pelosi's reluctance so far to contemplate impeachment. I know there's an argument that it's better to focus on things that directly affect people (like health care) but at some point protecting the system has to take precedence. If Trump continues along his current trajectory they will probably have no choice but to proceed.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
My worry is that impeachment will only consolidate Trump's support, not diffuse it. Even if successful, it would leave Pence (who may not be as ignorant as Trump, but is certainly more backward) the incumbent in the next election. So far I'm siding with Pelosi on this matter.
Consider the following hypothetical: a country has a process in place to remove a leader from power when he has demonstrated unfitness for office. Should the predicted outcome of that process dictate whether to initiate it? I think most people would say no. In the abstract I would say if you believe he's done something impeachable then one should initiate impeachment hearings even though the result is that the senate almost definitely would not remove him from power by 2/3 vote.
But the way this entire investigation has unfolded has made it an extremely unpopular political fight. The corrupt way Trump has conducted himself doesn't trouble his supporters and Democrats probably would be less popular as a result.
I don't know the right answer. You both have good points. Maybe if this country's founders did not want the process to be political it should not take place in a political branch! It's like we've had a nationwide referendum on corruption and the result is that it's okay if you knew your guy was corrupt when you voted for him.
Although I have to say I'm leaning towards impeach; think they would impeach in the House, not convict in the Senate and would have a negative political outcome for Democrats.Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
Views about the political implications of impeachment seem to be based largely on the public response to the Clinton impeachment. I think there are some key differences between that episode and this one.
First, Clinton was a much more popular president than Trump is. Second, it was more clearly an abuse of the process because it was based on an isolated incident (lying about an embarrassing sexual affair) rather than a systematic pattern of abuse of power. Third, the Starr investigation was more clearly politically-motivated than Mueller's investigation. Fourth, Clinton's response to impeachment was relatively measured, whereas Trump's response is likely to be over the top. Is another year and a half of increasingly unhinged ranting really going to work in Trump's favour?
Also, Bush still won the 2000 election despite the advantages that Gore inherited, so it's not clear the Republicans paid a big price.
Even if the Dems don't proceed with impeachment they will still have to pursue Trump on abuse of power. The political challenge for them will be to highlight both the conduct of the Trump administration and the ways it has damaged the interests of most Americans, while drawing the links between the two.
You make all fair points. I was basing it on the fact that while obstruction really should be the quintessential impeachable offense along with abuse of power, it doesn't resonate with the average person the way disloyalty does. The media kept looking at the sequence of Mueller's indictments and predicting that he was setting everyone up for a big reveal. But Mueller is a professional and was not paying attention to optics.
What happened is that expectations were ratcheted up, rhetoric about Trump being a traitor and there being a quid pro quo and backchannels generated excitement. What we have in the Mueller report is more detail about Trump's corruption but it should have already been priced in to expectations. That's just one observation, but there is the fact that the investigation was substantive and did reveal a lot of wrongdoing and that the obstruction of it impeded something that was essential to protect our electoral process.
You could impeach Trump for any behavior unbecoming of a President of the United States, but good luck getting any Republicans to sign on, Trump signs their paychecks now. Which in itself should be enough for impeachment, but that's my opinion.
Somewhere in a locked drawer, or a safe, or on a shelf is a document, a tax form, or a recording that could take down the entire Trump Organization, I'd stake my reputation as a world class asshole on it. Before he had the military protecting him, and the Republican Party protecting him, when nobody was looking, Trump fucked up and Mueller found it, and Barr's hiding it. Or the Southern District of New York is investigating it.
I'd prop Trump up long enough to find it, even if it takes a year. If Trump keeps blocking Oversight, and looks like he'll pull it off, you'll have all those Democrats on the Mueller Report singing like a heavenly choir.
Keep those subpoenas coming, I heard Trump on Hannity last night, he sounds like a nervous wreck. Let's speak plainly, the Republican Party is to blame for everything, not partisanship. If you get the chance to cripple them, take it.
If you're an American, you probably can't name Trump's Cabinet or all the Democratic Presidential Hopefuls, but you do know Flo, Gecko, Mayhem, and based on their jokes you're supposed to decide which Insurance is best for you and your family. For three weeks we heard the Mueller Report proved no collusion, no obstruction, then we got the report and the headline was again President not guilty, finally Barr bored us to death with his 5 minute filibusters. Lindsey Graham announced he hasn't even read the report, because it's over, time to move on. I didn't grasp until a couple of days ago that Barr oversees the 14 counts referred to New York. Oh, shit.
Looks like it's up to Mueller to decide the future of the Country, will he talk??? Maybe the one mistake Barr made was to call him "snitty"......I hope Mueller spills his guts on National TV and declares Trump a Danger to the Country. Because "The People" seem like the only thing they know is what they're told.
Two Cents:
Now that Trump has been vindicated, if the Russians offer him dirt on Joe Biden, is that Kosher now? Like you can't charge him twice because of double jeopardy? No crime to charge? What's the verdict, Fatboy?
On a completely different topic, there is not a list that grades everyone who has ever lived from best to worst. Some lives are better than others, and while we're all in this together, every life is different, and every life's existence is separate from the mass and reasonably could be rated by it's own existence, so while the list doesn't exist, all the people who aren't on it do exist or have existed. Sadly, and perhaps unfairly, the bottom five people probably aren't there because they were slackers, they probably all died at childbirth. The top five people would be even harder to imagine.
I just read some internet blurb that said "Angela Merkel fears dark forces in Europe"...hmmm, me too. I wonder how much of that fear is the threat to the Caucasians as the leaders of the Western World. In the 1950s an American GI could get a job as a milkman, get married, buy a house and have five kids. Now that same guy drives two hours a day to get to a job that pays well, his wife works, and he's lucky if he can afford two kids. Would the World be a better place if the White Man lost his mojo??? Is the USA the best badguy the world has ever bowed to, or the worst?
When someone says that Theresa May has a Zionist slave master agenda it is not criticism of Israel. It is not even coherent unless you consider what they must really mean, and you can figure it out by reading early 20th century anti-Semitic tracts. If the same person liked facebook posts where people are saying this or that Mossad created Isis it is not an accident.
That you find this in the same feeble-minded political movement where people who openly say they do not like Jews are given a slap on the wrist and Jews who object to the culture of anti-Semitism are run out of the party it is hard to believe it's a coincidence.
There have literally been dozens of cases like this, many of which I posted, where the excuses for the anti-Semitism are so pathetic and unbelievable that one has to have forsaken all attempts at good faith to even make the excuses.
This comes not long after Peter Willsman on the NEC said that 68 British Rabbis who complained about anti-semitism were working for the Israeli Embassy. There is no evidence of this at all, unless your standard for evidence is that of a conspiracy theorist. The Labour rank and file by the thousands defended this with the same expose from 2016 where an Israeli bragged about his influence. Apparently because Israel does lobby the government it means anyone can be accused of being in the lobby so long as they're Jewish and you want to discredit them. This represents the total deindividuation of Jewish people among pretty significant proportion of the public there.
Can someone explain to me what it means to say Theresa May has a Zionist slave master agenda? I don't see it as containing content. Is this actually defensible? I'm looking at this stuff and the responses to it and it is something out of a nightmare.
BTW, I've heard the excuse is that Lisa Forbes only liked the post. It is an obvious anti-Semitic dog-whistle, and has become part of mainstream Labour discourse to engage in conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Someone running for office has no business signaling support for hatred like that.
From soft to hard Holocaust denial, pseudo-scientific racism about the genetic origins of Jews, financial conspiracy theories usually invoking the Rothschild family, and just wanton abusive language to anyone Jewish who will not provide cover for them. Take a look at some of Lisa Forbes' fellow signatories for a letter she signed opposing the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism if you think this is an accident.
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/labour-s-peterborough-candidate-signed-letter-opposing-ihra-antisemitism-definition-1.485060
It must come from the claim made by Jackie Walker in 2016-Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
Walker faced complaints after writing on Facebook in February 2016, in which she said: “Millions more Africans were killed in the African holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews… and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean.”
https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com...the-holocaust/
Walker has since modified her remark to admit she ought to have added the word 'amongst'-
But she made one mistake. She should have said 'amongst the financiers ... and many Jews, my ancestors too, were amongst the chief financiers of the slave trade', because that is a fact."
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/j...burgh-1.442461
Jackie Walker has since been expelled from the party.
I don't know much about Lisa Forbes, other than that she must now undergo 'anti-semitism training' (! what?) and was selected from an all-female shortlist of candidates, and that whoever allowed her name to be on the list knows nothing about 'due diligence'. Given the prolific amount of information we leave about ourselves on social media, the time must come when candidates be subjected to that due diligence to uncover what they have said or written or approved of in the past. Even if she is not anti-semitic, to approve of that kind of statement is not 'radical chic', it is brainless. And if she acts without thinking first, how can she be fit to be an MP? Peterborough Labour Party has had, shall we say, an 'interesting' approach to election organization in recent years, and their scrape through last Thursday can not hide the serious problems this party has with Corbyn as leader.
It actually wasn't in response to Jackie Walker's comments. I don't think slave-master here was used to comment on the role of Jewish people in the slave trade but rather to mean "overlord". I think the person whose video she was responding to was saying Theresa May is controlled by a cabal of Jews and that she herself was a puppet or in more extreme terms, slave to these people.Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
I think what's missing is the gestalt when someone actually looks at the networks that you find this information in. Yes, as a general matter it is possible to like ugly stuff online without reading it carefully. But the density of conspiratorial ugliness in which these comments are found often means one has sought out the information.
When the comments are plucked out of the networks in which they're found, it sometimes looks like a one-off, even if it's the zillionth occurrence of similar behavior. But when you see thousands of accounts, travelling in the same circles, posting the same memes, and following the same accounts of people who have been suspended (and should have been expelled) it has a different appearance. What it looks like is a network of people trading in poorly thought out conspiracy theories engaging in persistent low level harassment of Jewish people who didn't ask to see the stuff.
I'll give a couple of examples of what I've experienced, though it couldn't be used formally as evidence, it gives some clue why each individual case doesn't look independent to a statistical though I acknowledge not unanimous, majority of Jewish people.
1. A Corbyn supporter responding to the Willsman stuff saw a tweet of mine and called me a Khazar. The Khazar hypothesis is something people can speculate about, though there's not much support for it and it's not provable at this point. But it's different to respond to a random Jewish person by insisting that they shut up because they're a Khazar phony.
2. Corbyn supporter who told me it's not anti-Semitic to say American Jews run the world because it's as much a criticism of Americans as Jews. When I said it is, they told me I'm shameful and that calling this anti-Semitic trivializes real anti-Semitism.
3. Someone who insisted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is true. Again, I was told I should be concerned about real anti-Semitism.
4. In response to the Chris Williamson circulating a petition for Atzmon someone yelled at me "He's a SEMITE, you're an anti-Semite for criticizing Atzmon." Atzmon has said such appalling things, it's not controversial..I don't really care about Atzmon's background as much as his views...but it's notable this person didn't insist he's a Khazar.
5. Being put on a list of Tory Zionists.
6. A half dozen times when I've responded to something, getting a meme in my notifications of an Israeli woman saying "anti-Semitism is a trick" that the Israelis use. This meme has circulated on neo-Nazi forums for years, and is often used in response to unambiguous anti-Semitism pointed out by a non-Israeli Jew.
7. Being called a baby killer and apartheid lover apropos of nothing, except for the cases we're talking about, which hardly raises the issue of Israel's foreign policy.
There's also the fact that I've seen low-level twitter celebrities who support Corbyn, have follower numbers in the thousands, and have engaged in Holocaust denial.
Now someone might think: is this as bad as Neo-Nazis who talk about killing Jews, as well as other minority groups. Why not focus on that? They should be a focal point for law enforcement and be kept away from political positions. But it's extremely alienating to see such widespread tolerance for conspiratorial anti-Semitism, that has made its way into the mainstream networks and is propagated by people who claim to be anti-racist.
This is what I've seen and experienced when I've tried to discuss some of these cases on twitter. But it's not just what I've seen and experienced, it's been documented and forwarded to Labour by other people in many cases.
Broncofan, you are plugged into this more than I am as I don't have a twitter account and registered a Facebook account but have never used it. I assume that Walker is part of this trend that distorts historical evidence, or just makes it up, and that her remarks on slavery and the Jews is part of this stuff about 'Zionist slave masters'. I can't say I want to know more than that, other than to wonder how we got to a situation where this kind of comment has become so common.
I can understand when it is part of the once-redundant, now revived conspiracy theory concerning the Jews, because in a real sense that never went away, but was discredited for so many years because of the Holocaust. It was also the preserve of the 'right' which meant those who felt sorry for Hitler, and who retain theories of race that privilege white people over all the others, and which tend to regard Jews as part of a long-established plan to take over the world, just as Black people are condemned to a life of crime because they have criminal genes, or some such rubbish. How anyone on the left can subscribe to such theories is beyond me, and as a critique of Israel it is nonsensical, as Israel did not exist during the slave trade, to take that example, and Israel has enough problems without dragging in the Protcols of the Elders of Zion, the Khazar thesis or some worn out claim about 'the Rothschilds'.
The growth of the internet is clearly making this easier to happen than before, when Lyndon Larouche was a notorious figure but his crazy and offensive ideas limited to publications and obscure radio shows. I am not sure what the purpose of twitter is, it seems to me to reduce complex arguments on every subject you can think of, to slogans and shouting matches which retard any progress in debate.
And I believe every generation needs to know what the Holocaust really was, what its roots were, and how the ideas that gave rise to it can, if not challenged at every event, flourish again. Hegel's belief in a long, progressive journey of enlightenment may have had its moments of negation, but it seems to me the negation of actuality at this level today, runs the risk of turning the clock back. If the trend that has seen the emergence of the rhetoric and the laws emerging from the US is part of a wider trend across Europe, Asia and Africa, the advances we thought we had made in the 1960s are in real peril. The phrase 'Never Again' that was attached to the Holocaust has been attached to Obama, and not just because he was a Democrat. So far, the violence has been sporadic and episodic rather than co-ordinated, but on more than occasion I have read of dire warnings that if Brexit is not deilivered 'the people will rise up' or words to that effect. 'Tommy Robinson' is seen as part of this potential vanguard, alleged supporters of the English Defence League which he used to lead, have been blamed for football hooliganism the other day in Portugal, he himself was involved in a punch up the other day yet he is a hero to an organization like the Middle East Forum in the US because Daniel Pipes regards anyone campaigning against Islam as a friend.
To make it worse, there are radical Muslims in the UK who are a gift to Pipes and people like him. The current allegation in Peterborough is that a Muslim who was part of the election organization for the by-election has been engaged in a rigged postal vote which secured Lisa Forbes victory. These Muslims are also being accused of having links to Anjem Chaudhury and promote anti-semitic views. I don't know what the truth of this is, but it has been known for some time that the literature produced in Saudi Arabia that is used in some Madrasas in the UK and across the world is deeply anti-semitic, but Saudi Arabia is now in alliance with Israel and Tom Kaine has alleged the US foreign policy on the Kingdom is determined by the money they give to the President to get what they want (nuclear technology) -so the duplicity of Saudi Arabia goes unchallenged, becoming part of a conspiracy theory too.
In the case of Brexit, which is part of this trend, I see the prospect of failure becoming part of the narrative -not because it is a badly managed process with impossible goals, but because when it fails, it will be the fault of 'those people' who wanted it to fail - in the UK 'the establishment', in Europe, 'George Soros' and, of course, 'the Germans'. The division of 'them' and 'us' is not just designed to identify different segments of society who have benefited or lost from globalization, it uses those 'markers' to suggest that what has been lost is an original identity -that 'mass immigration' has diluted the 'national character' to the extent that 'our white christian' civilization is now at risk.
It is in effect, a revival of fascism in its original form, not the desperate measures Mussolini took to make it work -you can see it in the campaigns of Steve Bannon, and in the writings of Roger Scruton, where, without a trace of irony, people who are part of this trend claim they are protecting a 'Judeo-Christian' civilization from the one threat that has superceded Communism as the greatest threat of all -Islam. That Christians slaughtered Jews, expelled them from the country, allowed them back in but to live in ghettoes, limiting their participation in the economy -precisely what the Nazis did prior to the Final Solution- does not to me create in Judeo-Christian civilization the basics of civilization itself: respect for human life, equally valid for all.
The left has lost political representation across Europe at a time when economic disadvantage ought to be succeeding at the ballot box -which it has in Denmark but not in Germany, France, the Netherlands or Italy. It seems to me that by falling into a culture of victimhood and blame, the left has lost any positive agenda for the future which it needs if it is to counter the current 'populist' trend -instead of being part of this nauseating anti-semitism, it should be fighting it; instead of calling for reparations and impeachment, it should be laying out a plan for the next 25 years that everyone can relate to and support. I cannot believe some of the paper thin drivel I often hear from Labour, it is as if they have been so battered by Brexit they cannot think at all. I am still not sure if the Labour Party is a Leave or a Remain party. What I am sure about is that I am glad I severed my ties to it in the 1980s and have no voted for it since Blair. It has become a party of cowards unfit for public office, and I see no hope for the UK over the next 5-10 years only instability and economic decline.
There are all kinds of smart, and all kinds of stupid, and Trump is about to unveil his latest stupid gift to his flock, the mass deportation of illegals. The final solution.
Suggested reading: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
https://www.newsweek.com/barack-obam...arrett-1444717Quote:
A former senior adviser to President Barack Obama has said that the president is deeply concerned about the direction of the U.S., and that the two-term president plans to be involved in Democratic efforts to defeat President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
ummmm... not a good idea.
I wish Obama was Prez like I wish I was 21 again, that ship has sailed.
I honestly don't see any Democratic hopeful that is up to the real task of maintaining LBJ's great society, even Obama had to skyrocket the national debt to get along, maybe it was BIG BUSINESS who killed Hillary, not PUTIN, they're sure reaping the benefits now.
When Bernie is President, we will all be friends again, and we will all be broke.
No one from this forum would be allowed to babysit the kids of Trump's base.
Yeee-haw!!!!!
Twitter is exciting because its format permits so little text that the interactions actually seem like face to face conversations. With so little written it also permits the viewpoints of hundreds of people to fit into a very small space. But what does it do for complex arguments? Imagine trying to write what you wrote in 280 characters, about three sentences?Quote:
Originally Posted by Stavros
It also allows for an exquisite combination of sophistry and bullying. Imagine asking someone to provide you evidence or disprove a logical fallacy in such a small space. Anyone earnest who wants a conversation is swamped by any liar and their cohorts who prefers to repeatedly ask for evidence they don't want to see.
For an example of how twitter obliterates nuance, consider this common comeback. When someone concedes something but uses the word "but" to disagree in part, twitter users will point out they've used the word "but". To them the use of the word "but" means that the other person isn't even conceding the part they are in fact conceding. What they are demanding is complete endorsement of what they've said without any distinction or clarification. The format of twitter does that already, where thousands of views are crammed into a discrete set of categories.
I'm telling you the demand that other people disagree without using the word but is a twitter tic. An example:Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan
Imagine someone is accused of being an embezzler and you want to acknowledge that embezzlement is a very serious crime while disagreeing with the particular accusation:
Me: "I think embezzlement is a very serious crime but I don't think party C actually embezzled".
Person B: He just said "I think embezzlement is a serious crime BUT"....lol doesn't sound like the words of someone who takes embezzlement seriously lol
You can imagine that is not a worthwhile or honest conversation...:)
(Twitter) is terrible for all the reasons you mentioned BUT
I’ve no first hand experience with twitter. I only see the tweets that make it into newspapers, television broad casts etc. and those are usually particularly egregious examples. I can’t imagine (without cringing) what Trump’s twitter coverage of the Democratic Debates is going to be like. The format is terrible for all the reasons you’ve mentioned, but in the hands of a first-rate liar and troll it can become an effective propaganda machine. It seems almost forms of social media have become weaponized and designed to fractionalize us beyond recognition. (I’m in the middle of reading Neil Stephenson’s “Fall: or, Dodge in Hell” which develops a extreme variation of this issue).
I agree with you, but...Quote:
Originally Posted by broncofan