The Refreshing Frankness of the Younger Generation

     

Russia Gate: no "golden ticket" for clueless Democrat Leaders?

I think even most Democrats see it for what it is, even if their party leadership is clueless. A case in point:

Russia-gate Flops as Democrats’ Golden Ticket

The national Democratic Party and many liberals have bet heavily on the Russia-gate investigation as a way to oust President Trump from office and to catapult Democrats to victories this year and in 2018, but the gamble appears not to be paying off.

[...]

Indeed, the Democrats may be digging a deeper hole for themselves in terms of reaching out to white working-class voters who abandoned the party in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin to put Trump over the top in the Electoral College even though Clinton’s landslide win in California gave her almost three million more votes nationwide.

Clinton’s popular-vote plurality and the #Resistance, which manifested itself in massive protests against Trump’s presidency, gave hope to the Democrats that they didn’t need to undertake a serious self-examination into why the party is in decline across the nation’s heartland. Instead, they decided to stoke the hysteria over alleged Russian “meddling” in the election as the short-cut to bring down Trump and his populist movement.

A Party of Snobs?

From conversations that I’ve had with some Trump voters in recent weeks, I was struck by how they viewed the Democratic Party as snobbish, elitist and looking down its nose at “average Americans.” And in conversations with some Clinton voters, I found confirmation for that view in the open disdain that the Clinton backers expressed toward the stupidity of anyone who voted for Trump. In other words, the Trump voters were not wrong to feel “dissed.”

It seems the Republicans – and Trump in particular – have done a better job in presenting themselves to these Middle Americans as respecting their opinions and representing their fears, even though the policies being pushed by Trump and the GOP still favor the rich and will do little good – and significant harm – to the middle and working classes.

This article, I could argue with that last comment or any number of assumptions and assertions that the author makes throughout. But I'm not going to bother. Because far more interesting to me, is the arguments he makes about how the Dems are out of touch and really screwing things up. Read on:

By contrast, many of Hillary Clinton’s domestic proposals might well have benefited average Americans but she alienated many of them by telling a group of her supporters that half of Trump’s backers belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” Although she later reduced the percentage, she had committed a cardinal political sin: she had put the liberal disdain for millions of Americans into words – and easily remembered words at that.

By insisting that Hillary Clinton be the Democratic nominee – after leftist populist Bernie Sanders was pushed aside – the party also ignored the fact that many Americans, including many Democrats, viewed Clinton as the perfectly imperfect candidate for an anti-Establishment year with many Americans still fuming over the Wall Street bailouts and amid the growing sense that the system was rigged for the well-connected and against the average guy or gal.

In the face of those sentiments, the Democrats nominated a candidate who personified how a relatively small number of lucky Americans can play the system and make tons of money while the masses have seen their dreams crushed and their bank accounts drained. And Clinton apparently still hasn’t learned that lesson.

Citing Women’s Rights

Last month, when asked why she accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking to Goldman Sachs, Clinton rationalized her greed as a women’s rights issue, saying: “you know, men got paid for the speeches they made. I got paid for the speeches I made.”

Her excuse captured much of what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party as it moved from its working-class roots and New Deal traditions to becoming a party that places “identity politics” ahead of a duty to fight for the common men and women of America.

Demonstrating her political cluelessness, Clinton used the serious issue of women not getting fair treatment in the workplace to justify taking her turn at the Wall Street money trough, gobbling up in one half-hour speech what it would take many American families a decade to earn.

While it’s a bit unfair to personalize the Democratic Party’s problems, Hillary and Bill Clinton have come to represent how the party is viewed by many Americans. Instead of the FDR Democrats, we have the Davos Democrats, the Wall Street Democrats, the Hollywood Democrats, the Silicon Valley Democrats, and now increasingly the Military-Industrial Complex Democrats.

To many Americans struggling to make ends meet, the national Democrats seem committed to the interests of the worldwide elites: global trade, financialization of the economy, robotization of the workplace, and endless war against endless enemies.

Now, the national Democrats are clambering onto the bandwagon for a costly and dangerous New Cold War with nuclear-armed Russia. Indeed, it is hard to distinguish their foreign policy from that of neoconservatives, although these Democrats view themselves as liberal interventionists citing humanitarian impulses to justify the endless slaughter.

Earlier this year, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found only 28 percent of Americans saying that the Democrats were “in touch with the concerns of most people” – an astounding result given the Democrats’ long tradition as the party of the American working class and the party’s post-Vietnam War reputation as favoring butter over guns.

Yet rather than rethink the recent policies, the Democrats prefer to fantasize about impeaching President Trump and continuing a blame-game about who – other than Hillary Clinton, her campaign and the Democratic National Committee – is responsible for Trump’s election. Of course, it’s the Russians, Russians, Russians! [...]

He's nailed it! Read the whole thing for even more about the deep roots of the problem, and the serious errors the Democrat Party are continuing to make.
     

A final blog post

Not from me, but from the Being Human blog, which I had been reading because of the interesting links to philosophy. His last entry talks about his terminal illness, and the final things he had to say. It's quite sobering:


Is it finally time to say goodbye?

The Being Human -blog that you are reading just now is at the moment a collection of 434 smaller and larger essays. Their subjects range from the nature of our universe to things like the reasons why masturbation is seen as a sin in Christianity. I started this blog in December of 2007, and this blog has since had over 860 000 visitors from all over the world.

During all these years, I have told very little of myself. My aim has been to air my ideas and not promote myself. This blog is not weblog, but a collection of little essays. Not a single posting has been tied to a particular daily event or happening. They try always to be reflections on ideas on a bit wider perspective. How I have succeeded in this, remains for my readers to judge, of course.

Things are about to change. Just now I see a need to record some of my personal history also here in this blog that has always been the favorite child among my blogs. The basic reason for this is that was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in November of 2011. Cancer was by then already deeply embedded in my liver and lungs. It simply cannot be removed from liver without destroying the liver also, anymore.

I am still here thanks to chemotherapy that has given me an additional year and a half, but the therapies were terminated a week ago because their ability to fight my cancer has waned off. I am on my own now, but nobody knows how soon the end will come. However, it is quite certain that I will not see my 56th birthday in January of 2014. [...]

There is much more. He talks quite a bit about the things that were important in his life, and that helped him. I had linked to some of his posts in the past, and am very grateful for his contribution to my education, about things I've wanted to learn about.

Thank you, Jaakko Wallenius. R.I.P.
     

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” - George Orwell

I found the above quote in this long, rambling post by Takuan Seiyo at the Brussels Journal:

From Meccania To Atlantis - Part 16: Exodus 1: Reality for Radicals

[...] Insane governments have turned a crisis of imprudent banking into a crisis of imprudent sovereign debt. To cure a disease of debt they have issued more debt. To address a fundamental crisis of insolvency, they are pumping the stock Keynesian emetic as though this were a crisis of liquidity. Like Michael Crichton’s environmentalists (1), destroying Nature they arrogantly wanted to manage, pedigreed economists at the helm of the West’s fiscal and monetary destiny have engaged in ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention that will be followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repair.

One after another, fiat currencies are catching fire, as all paper promises by lying governments must. Flight into the perceived safety of U.S. Treasury bonds buys the debt paper of the biggest Greece of them all. Stocks have crashed. If money printing brings them up again it won’t last, for consumer demand itself has cratered. Flight into gold leads into a blind alley foreclosed by the evil vampire squids either through naked shorts that suppress the price as a favor to Leviathan or through fictional fractional business that allows them to sell 100 bars of paper gold against each one they own.

Naked shorting, i.e. selling commodities you neither own nor borrowed is simply a con job akin to selling the Brooklyn Bridge or Eiffel Tower. That such an institutionalized swindle is allowed attests to the fundamental disconnect from Reality and moral bankruptcy not merely of the greedy Crooks but of the governments that have abandoned their few needed and legitimate functions, salient among which is being the honest cop in the bustling marketplace.

Instead, governments are busy pulling off their own mega-swindles, such as promising too many costly entitlements to too many people and misspending enormous funds on social engineering at home and stupid pet causes abroad. Those funds are raised through confiscation from legitimate citizens via onerous taxation, borrowing in international Ponzi schemes, and diluting the currency through “quantitative easing.” The latter forfeits the government’s second needed function: to preserve the value of the currency it issues.

Throughout the West, Karl Marx is smiling even as gangster financial manipulators loot the world with impunity. It’s from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

In the U.S., the government has coerced banks to grant mortgages to millions of favored minorities, irrespective of prospects of repayment. When, inevitably, the mortgages went sour and the banks crashed, the government transferred all that fictional finance onto its own books underwritten by the taxpayers’ money. In Europe, the Northern people who work, produce and save have been forced out of their sound currencies to enable their Body Snatcher (2) elites to subsidize via the common euro the Southern people who play, consume and borrow. When the inevitable happened, the Eurocrats are transferring further trillions from the Northerners, to bail out the Southerners.

As each level of fiction collapses before the onslaught of offended Reality, many more levels of lies remain. The massive foundation of social, economic, cultural, biological, political and geopolitical illusions on which the modern Western state perches as though on a layer of sweet and airy meringue is already so pitted and fissured that all but diehard Snatchers perceive it. Alas, frank public debate of the underlying phantom crossbars is proscribed by Snatcher laws and speech codes. Moreover, the majority of the population is hostile to such debate, for it’s guy-wired by Pod mental chipsets implanted by the state’s compulsory education and remotely controlled by all other major social institutions nonstop for the last 45 years.

Unlike in the financial area, social and martial crashes are still avoidable in theory, but will not be avoided because the ruling elites refuse to discern their true causes and the majorities that vote them in are too far-gone to change that. In the decohered Inverse Reality foisted on the West by its ruling class, nothing can make sense or is ever predictable. It’s all a series of random events while we, free of the burden of facts and their patterns, can proceed gloriously toward a vision of ever more perfect Justice, Equality and Peace.

[...]

To discuss Reality, one does not have to deploy polysyllabic words with Greek and Latin endings. A PhD dissertation written in German is not needed. Reality is what is. We have known for a hundred thousand years what is.

Repeat empirical evidence of Reality is programmed into our genes; for instance the “flight or fight” response. Your body will rarely make the error of trying to wrestle down a grizzly bear, yet your postmodern nation is committed to spawning horrific grizzly bears forever and forcing you at the point of the government’s gun to wrestle them every day of your life.

Reality is also encoded in our cultural legacy. Consider Genesis 3:15, God’s curse on the serpent: “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in vain for her heel.” I call it time-tested advice for survival, if needing some caveats for various garter and black (e.g. Coluber constrictor) snakes. But modern-day Loons would call it prejudice, racial profiling and hate speech. And Gnostic Loons who hold the levers of power will deliberately force you to venture barefoot among the vipers, to cure you of your prejudices.

Reality does not need a battery of sociologists to tabulate and ameliorate it. Hear the Welsh priest George Herbert, who counseled in his 1651 Jacula Prudentium, "He that lies with the dogs riseth with fleas." How do the liaisons of your country with the rogue nations of the Third World look in light of this apothegm? Or consider what Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard's Almanack sometime in the 1740s: "Nine men in ten are suicides." How does the theory and practice of the neo-socialist “social justice” redistributive state look in light of this six-word crystallization of Reality?

[...]

Reality Renaissance

The title of this Part, “Reality for Radicals,” is a play on the title of the book Rules for Radicals – the clever manifesto by Saul Alinsky at whose virtual feet sat the leaders of the ruling elite, starting with the Community Organizer in Chief, B. H. Obama, America’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and probably the entire nomenklatura of Socialist International.

Nevertheless, this opinion channel, this writer and these readers are no Radicals. They are Regulars. On the major issues of life and society they stand roughly in the same zone where stood the Greatest Generation -- their Nazi-smashing grandparents. It’s just that the Snatchers have snatched the goal posts too, and moved them to the far left corner of the field.

The Regulars are radical only in the sense that George Orwell prophesied when he wrote in 1984: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” [...]

And telling the truth is what we must do. Someone's gotta do it. What's the alternative? We can see where the lies are taking us. It's not sustainable. Reality will only continue to be offended for just so long, before it strikes back.


Also see:

This is not a Depression or a Recession

Modern Gnosticism's disregard for reality

The wind caused by the slamming shut of one door often opens another door
     

Modern Gnosticism's disregard for reality

Is that what's driven us to this financial crisis? There is a case to be made for it:

From Gnosis to Sepsis

[...] Bertonneau adduces the current American economic crisis as an example of modern Gnosticism, where “the magical spending of money that does not exist [snip], stubbornly fails to result in the rescue of an economy whose collapse stems, in the first place, from pathological, non-reality-related super-spending of money that did not, even then, exist.” But here I take exception. With respect to the profession of economics, addled by the Keynesian opium that prosperity ensues from spending money one (including government) does not have, yes, that is pure Gnosticism. But with respect to the governing elites that have pushed the U.S. and Europe into this miserable mess, no. The fingerprints of the Crooks on this thing are much bolder than the Loons’ are.

The illness that’s crippling the Western colossus derives from three main pathogens: greed, cowardice and lying. All three are an eternal part of the human condition. What’s unique now is that up to 100 years ago every Western country had an elite bred to suppress those vices as a matter of noblesse oblige. But the elite now is the locus where greed, cowardice and lying fester and from which they flow downward.

The lies allow the Loons -- and they are the majority -- to cover up their cowardice and to perpetuate their Gnostic illusions. Latching onto the same lies enables the Crooks to rule and steal. The result is the same: sepsis.

Sepsis, a Greek word implying a process of rotting, is a medical term denoting the penetration of harmful bacteria or other pathogenic organisms into the body. The lies on which the Progressive’s Gnosis is based are the infection paths by which Western society has become riddled with pathogens. The lies have been pointed out by several reactionary-conservative writers, including in the previous chapters of this work. But that won’t be enough.

It cannot suffice, because the ruling elite is wedded to the lies. [...]

There are so many lies, false premises being promulgated, that's it's becoming impossible to fix problems because so few are looking at the reality that underlies them. We disregard reality at our own peril.