> On Aug 31, 2017, at 16:06 , Morlock Elloi <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> The bs implication here is that the current POTUS lies more than the previous
> 44, and that this curiously elevated level of lying prompted multiple
> credible academics to engage in credible studies of this singular lying, and
> they all came to same conclusions.
Nothing more dangerous right now than this false equivalence that the far left
is declaring between [neo-nazi / Trump / Republican / Koch brothers] and the
[mainstream media / liberals / Democrats / Soros]. Maybe you don’t like the
Better Deal or even the New Deal but it’s a lot better than “Arbeit Macht
Frei.” Sure there’s plenty to resist in both these camps but if you can’t see
the difference you’re doing it wrong.
Made worse by the deadly division on the left between [antifa / identity
warriors] vs [brocialist / left libertarians]. I wish someone would synthesize
these visions rather than hammering wedges into the divide.
I feel like I’m struggling to understand these divisions, and there’s overlap
and contradictions in these camps of course (in a polity of 300M that’s
inevitable) but I think there’s a real opening for someone on the left in
America to synthesize identity and economics, without privileging one over the
other… I mean the Nazis are doing it on the evil side, why shouldn’t someone
who’s not evil be able to do the same? The New Democrats in Canada are the
closest thing to this synthesis, a social democratic party still too beholden
to Israel and white middle-class labour, but better than anything on offer in
the USA.
American identity folks paradoxically accepted Hillary as a feminist choice,
even if they scowled at the memory of Superpredators and don’t actually like
anything about her - her identity trumped everything for them, leaving them
oblivious to her neoliberal economics and hawkishness, despite their suspicion
of the white male Democratic establishment. Even the fact that Bernie was
better on identity than Hillary was. These ID folks have the energy to
confront nazis in the street but without an economic program they are doomed to
fail, and they foolishly lumped Bernie supporters into the "white male”
category, thus delegitimizing it all in their eyes… and even the women’s march
was weakened by suspicion by intersectional feminism of the white mainstream
bias of the movement…
Brocialist / libertarians meanwhile think anti-racist activism is somehow a
distraction from the class war, as if shooting black people in the street and
protesting against that are both equally “divisive” of the working people
against the 1%. They also resent the fact that Hillary was female, giving
feminists something to cheer for during the election instead of recycling
Republican attacks against her. If they’d put half the energy into attacking
Trump that they put into attacking the loser, meaningless Wasserman-Schultz, we
wouldn’t have World War III starting tomorrow with Korea. But the brolibs
still think Hillary’s measured confrontations with Putin are somehow equivalent
to Trump wiggling his nuclear-trigger finger at PyongYang.
What makes this split worrisome is that the talking points of the [brocialist /
libertarian] camp are quite close to Team Trump’s: Anti-racism is “divisive,”
Putin isn’t a threat to anyone, Soros is financing everything [though the
Trumpies put his name in Jew brackets], antifa is morally equal to neo-nazis,
Hillary is a corporate hawk [ok well I agree], Bernie was robbed, MSM is fake
news, etc etc.
I mean even the trade rhetoric that Trump spouts is straight out of the
anti-globalization playbook, minus the part where we care about workers in
other countries or even brown or female workers in our own. He sounds more
socialist than the identity-politics people, and that is a crippling problem.
The worst of these Trump / brocialist / libertarian talking points is the label
“fake news” applied to anything you disagree with, as if making up slanderous
destabilizing lies in Moscow or Fox News Headquarters is the same as seeing
life from the perspective of a New York moderate. Nothing can move forward
when every discussion takes place across non-intersecting universes.
Especially when many of the people discussing are bots or trolls.
If Trump wasn’t a billionaire I think Assange, Greenwald and Hedges might vote
for him, but they can’t on general principle. I do worry that Trump will win
these people over sooner than later, and we’ll have a serious problem, or a
worse serious problem. In Canada, for instance, where these tendencies spill
over, the loss of the socialists from the social-democratic camp would have
immediate consequences for the New Democrats as our third party… I can see the
white male economics professors throwing up their hands at “political
correctness” and joining the conservative party out of frustration… if poked in
the right nerve...
--
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<http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison>
* FLICK's WEBSITE:
http://www.flickharrison.com <http://www.flickharrison.com/>
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