Saturday, March 9, 2019

Stupid Mail "He called you a 'joyless fuck"

I imagine his girlfriend would know all about that.  Ask her, not me, it's foreign to my experience. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Stephen Jones - Northern Lights




Áine takes shelter in Lloyd's flat on a bitter night in Dublin, both ensnared by dark secrets.  As the action plays out it is these dark secrets that ultimately connects and enlightens them.

Cast
Stephen Jones
Séana Kerslake

Directed by Karl Shiels 
Sound design by Mark Dwyer 
Production supervision & dramaturgy by  Gorretti Slavin 

Series Producer of Drama on One Kevin Reynolds 

I remember times like this, I'm too old to do it now.  

Blather From The Affluent "Left" Do You Really Believe Natashia Lennard Or John Iadarola Would Really Be OK With Their Children, Siblings, Parents, Spouses Going Into "Sex Work"?



I clicked on this couple of privileged white people celebrating what they hope is the impending decriminalization of men renting other peoples' vaginas, anuses and mouths and whatever to screw as chosen by the person renting their body and mind and soul.  I posed the question to them, who in their families they would really be OK with going into "sex work," I didn't expect an answer and, as of yet, haven't received one.

Something tells me that neither Lennard (Cambridge University - Columbia University) or John Iandarola (University of Connecticut*) would really be OK with their daughter or son, sister or brother, wife or husband, mother or father going into "sex work" and they really wouldn't be OK with having the "sex industry" at their kids school career day recruiting people to go into that line of "work".  They really wouldn't be OK with it if their spouse or someone else engaged a "sex worker" and picked up an STD from them which they brought home to them - though, obviously, they have no problem with the "workers" being infected by their "customers" as that's an inherent risk of "sex work".  Nor are they really bothered by the real nature of prostitution when it's for people unconnected to them.

Of course, there's little chance other than one of their family members becoming addicted to opiates or the such being forced by circumstances into that line of "work" so the question isn't one they will ever face in real life or have much of a reason to believe they will face in all of the much too real reality that facing that entails.

What we see here is the lower level of the economic elite being OK with the underclass who are the majority of those forced or enticed into the dangerous, degrading, spirit killing institution of temp-enslavement, prostitution, something which they would never be in favor of for their nearest and dearest.  Lennard is clearly in favor of the men who rent women and men and children for such use never having to worry about being arrested for it.  There's some argument to be made to not victimize the victims of prostitution by arresting them but there is no good argument in favor of not arresting johns.   There is nothing liberal, nothing feminist, nothing good about their stand.  This is the depth of elitist "leftism". 

Now that I've given up on the nadir of formerly famous lefty blog communities, maybe I should, from time to time, click on things like this that show up in my side-bar.  It's a good way to keep track of the stupidest things that are being said on the alleged left. If either Lennard or Iadarola answer the questions, I'll let you know.  Don't hold your breath.  The only time one of them ever answered these questions, he was lying.

* His Young Turks bio says: 

After earning his BA in Political Science at the University of Connecticut, John abandoned a promising career in academia, lured away from a Ph.D program in Government at the University of Texas to join The Young Turks in LA to talk about news and politics and — just maybe — become a bona fide YouTube celebrity.

John is, he acknowledges, one of the bigger nerds at TYT – an unapologetic board game enthusiast, volleyball aficionado and krav maga practitioner who spends what little free time remains streaming video games on Twitch and playing with his dog, Helo.

Somehow, I doubt that there is anyone with a close family connection to Iandarola who he'd be really OK with going into "sex work". 

Friday, March 8, 2019

Stupid Mail

I've refuted that lie over and over again, I'm done refuting lies told by the voluntarily retarded and pathologically lying rump community of that blog.  It's sell-by was c. April 2006, all the stickers peeled off and the paint is flaking.   Anyone stupid enough to still be paying attention to it is not anyone who is going to be thinking something important. 

Update:  I don't care what people who are too stupid to read more than a cherry picked sentence from what I said as part of a larger argument think about anything.   You can distort the meaning of anything by doing that, few arguments about complex matters can be condensed into a single sentence.   They really do have no more integrity than Trump followers, it's just they start out in a different place from them.   That they do it while holding a BS or a BA or an MA or something else just makes them lazy liars with credentials from some commercial credentialing firm.  Paul Manafort has those, too. So does Trump.  

About What James Clyburn Said

The use of what Representative James Clyburn said to the hardly Democratic friendly The Hill lays bare a number of issues fraught with all kinds of freight.  Here's what he is quoted as saying :

"I'm serious about that. There are people who tell me, 'Well, my parents are Holocaust survivors.' 'My parents did this.' It's more personal with her," Clyburn told The Hill.

"I've talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain."

The "her" is, of course, Representative Ilhan Omar whose comments about AIPAC and its lobbying and intimidation of politicians on behalf of the Israeli government are getting the typical intimidating response of claiming what she said is "antisemtic" instead of looking at what seems to me to be a far more nuanced and true claim.  AIPAC is in existence to get American support and financial and military aid for the Israeli government, it is, by definition, dedicated to the interests of a foreign government in exactly the same way that the Saudi and other governments maintain lobbying efforts to extract stuff from the American government using every means they can devise to do that, including political lying.  People who lobby on behalf of other countries and their governments have divided loyalty, if for no other reason than they're paid to have divided loyalty.  Only, in this one case, when it's Israel, you're supposed to lie and pretend that's not what it is.  You're also supposed to lie and say that the the effect they have is unrelated to financial pressure in the way of campaign donations and the encouragement or discouragement of other donors.  That's a denial of what lobbying is and what lobbyists do under our system laid bare to that kind of corruption by the Supreme Court, the ACLU and the rest of the "free speech-free press" industry.

Of course, part of the practice of calling every criticism of Israel, of its government and society "antisemitism."  The false use of the label "antisemitism" is a means of trying to suppress such criticism, it is also a way to ostracize and demonize those who raise the most obviously true and justified criticisms of those.  No country, no government, no society should be allowed to have that power to silence their critics anywhere.   I totally reject attempts to make the United States government sacrosanct and safe from criticism and what goes for the government also goes for the society of the United States which, sort of, elects that government.  I would bet you that all of those who are attacking Omar and, now, Clyburn don't hold back when it comes to slamming both the government and society,  you can't do politics without engaging in both, at least not politics that have any effect.

One of the worst aspects of this was shown by the response of the Anti-Defamation League's criticism of Representative Clyburn.

"The Holocaust was a singular tragedy resulting in the death of 6M Jews," the ADL said on Twitter. "It’s offensive to diminish the suffering of survivors & the continuing pain of Jews today. We respect @WhipClyburn’s long record of public service, but he should apologize & retract."

How is Clyburn pointing out that someone who actually experiences a terrible event in history has a direct experience of that as opposed to their children who never experienced it diminishing the suffering of those whose experience is not direct? 

To claim what the ADL does in calling for Clyburn to apologize is dishonest.  If their logic is to hold, it means that those who did directly experience the Shoah, who were murdered, whose family members they knew were murdered, who were tortured, starved, worked to kill them . . .  can be equated with those born ten, twenty, who knows how long after it ended and who never had that direct experience.  It is logically incoherent in a way that invites dismissal and worse.

That line that the Nazi's murder of 6 million Jews is, somehow, more significant than the other groups the Nazis and others target for murder is an invitation to the most vulgar abuse of the memory of those 6 million and a diminishment of the other genocides of history, both before the Nazis murdered even one Jew and after the last of their victims died.  The ADL diminishes the murders of other groups by both the Nazis and by others in doing that.

That is not only wrong, it is exactly the same kind of classification of victims of genocide and murder that the Nazis practiced, the very basis of all of their group murders, including that of the Jews.  It is in the running as the most vulgar abuse of the memory of those murdered by the Nazis and others.  It invites people whose nationalities, religions, and other identities who have been AND ARE RIGHT NOW the victims of such campaigns to practice the same kind of exclusionary concern and ranking of people in that way.

What the ADL holds as its ideological position that the Nazis murder of Jews was "a singular tragedy" is one of the most disgusting abuses of the memory of those who were murdered, it is in no way honoring them.  It also is historically false.  The Nazis began their genocides by murdering the disabled, it was their trial run of how to murder the Jews and others.  It is preceded in history by the German genocide camps in Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, it is preceded by the use of eugenics to try to wipe out populations, some with complete success, such as the British in Tasmania and the total genocide of the Taino population.  It is preceded by centuries of genocides and the biological theories of inequality among different groups of people and the explicit claims that the extinction of entire groups of people, including by conscious governmental programs and by mass murder would benefit the survivors.  The Holocaust is one of the major acts of such murder, it was preceded by Stalin's mass starvation and murder campaign in Ukraine, it was preceded by the Turkish Armenian genocide, both of which were certainly known by the Nazis as they knew those who committed those largely forgotten genocides got away with it and they were little talked about in the world except by those who belonged to those groups.   They certainly knew about the genocides by the German government in Africa before the First World War, some of their scientific and military officers were participants in those.

The holding that the Holocaust is "a singular tragedy" is, first untrue, it wasn't "a tragedy" it was a massive crime, crimes are not tragedies.  It is also an invitation of those whose who themselves, their families, their communities, their group were the subject of similar crimes to choose to hold their "tragedies" are more worthy of notice, especially those which are ongoing even as they make that determination. 

That in no way is something that Ilhan Omar was guilty of in what she said, it was not what James Clyburn was guilty of, neither of them diminished the deaths, the tortures, the sufferings of those who the Nazis murdered and tried to murder.   I'm tempted to say it would probably have been better if Ilhan Omar had found some other way to say what she did, though all she did was tell the truth about the filthy business of lobbying - it is all about the money, in the end - and that James Clyburn didn't say what he did but, really, if it's not worked through now the situation will continue to fester and those who are not people of good will will make the next iteration of this far worse than it is.  The Republican-fascist scum like Nikki Haley is already lying about it, claiming that James Clyburn is saying the exact opposite of what he did, using the Holocaust in her 2024 presidential campaign. 

To hold that the Holocaust is made singular, separating it from even the other genocides the Nazis were committing at the same time, in the same places, in the same gas chambers, singling out that one genocide as "more special" is extremely dangerous for Jews.  It plays into some of the worst sterotyping of Jews holding themselves to be "chosen" as if that choice was an assignment of superiority, it also diminishes the protection that holding it as part of the universal crime of genocide gives by enhancing its meaning to those who are not Jewish.  The tactic of the ADL is not only wrong, it is stupid, massively stupid and it is immoral.  That is something that many of those who have studied the Holocaust, who practice holding it in memory have learned AND THEY BOTH CITE AND TEACH THE LINKS BETWEEN THAT CRIME AND THOSE COMMITTED AGAINST OTHERS, IN THE PAST AND TODAY.  I can't think of a better way to honor my ancestors who died and who had to flee Ireland as the British government starved Ireland during the potato famine than to link that act of governmental crime to all of those which I've mentioned here and which I haven't mentioned.  There are certainly more of those in history AND TODAY than I even know about.   Either you take all of those people as your people or you dishonor the ones you claim.

T. S. Ellis Should Live Out The Rest Of His Life Knowing His Name Will Be Synonymous With Judicial Bias For The Privileged

Judge T. S. Ellis deserves to be the face of judicial unjustice in the United States, first there was his obvious class and likely partisan bias in favor of a criminal rich, white Republican during the trial which should have been enough to disqualify him to sit in judgement of anyone.  Then there is his ridiculously light sentencing of a serious felon who was not only unremorseful but continued in breaking the law, witness tampering, etc.  Ellis went light on a rich, white male Republican EVEN AS HE BROKE THE LAW UNDER A PLEA AGREEMENT! 

The arrogance and injustice of so many judges isn't something that should be regarded as acceptable, especially as, in what we're hearing about the history of this Reagan judge, he has a habit of going soft on white, white-collar criminals.  It is disgusting that there is no effective means of getting unjust-judges off of the bench and kicked out of the profession of the law.  

The judiciary is as corrupt a branch of government as we've got and unlike those who can be voted out of office, in the federal judiciary and in many state systems, bad judges such as Ellis will be on the bench till they retire or die.  Of course that reaches its nadir on the Supreme Court which has been the major venue of inequality and corruption in our system.  It's time to, among other things, put a term limit on the time that all judges can be judges, it is disgusting that someone as bad as Ellis can remain on the bench for decades.  For every good judge, for every great justice there is a bad one and in the law, their evil accumulates into precedent  and habits.   

It's time for us and the media to stop treating such awful judges with deference,  T. S. Ellis should be used by those who favor equality to attack judicial wrongdoing in its worst aspects.  His history of rulings and behavior on the bench should be looked at very closely.  HE should now experience consequences based on his behavior during this trial and other trials that earned him the reputation as a judge who goes easy on rich, white-collar criminals. 

Update: 


For context on Manafort’s 47 months in prison, my client yesterday was offered 36-72 months in prison for stealing $100 worth of quarters from a residential laundry room.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Paul Manafort Gets Off With A Slap On The Wrist

I'd like to know what kind of other sentences T. S. Ellis has given out to people who aren't rich and white and well connected and Republican (he's a Reagan appointee).   I'd like to know how many much younger, much less experienced, much less guilty poor people, especially people of color got higher sentences for far lesser crimes. 

It was clear during the trial that Ellis was biased in favor of Paul Manafort, this sentence doesn't surprise me one bit.  I could have written this months ago and saved it, the only question being if Ellis would give him no time at all.  Far as I'm concerned, he's just another Republican hack in a black robe. 

Kirstjen Nielsen Makes It Necessary To Hope There Is A Hell For The Likes Of Her

I know I should be dealing with something that's really important such as the fact that the Trump regime is still caging the children of people being denied asylum and killing them as the Bitch of the Baby Gulag, Kirstjen Nielsen lies to Congress about it.

During her first hearing before the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insisted that the cages Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used to detain migrant and asylum-seeking kids aren’t really cages.

“Sir, they are not cages, they are areas of the border facility that are carved out for the safety and protection of those who remain there while they’re being processed,” Nielsen said during an exchange with House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS).

Thompson, unimpressed with Nielsen’s euphemistic description, responded by telling her, “Don’t mislead the committee.”

Thompson wasn’t the only Democrat who didn’t buy Nielsen’s semantic games. Under questioning from Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) a short time later, Nielsen had a hard time differentiating between CBP’s facilities for detained kids and dog kennels.

“Does it differ from the cages you put your dogs in when you let them stay outside?” Watson Coleman asked.

“Yes ... it’s larger, it has facilities, it provides room to sit, to stand, to lay down —”

“So does my dog’s cage,” Watson Coleman interjected.

I was going to write another fluff piece about how Google doodles are a sort of later day version of the silly French Revolutionary Calendar because I'm not feeling well with this chronic illness I've got.  But the news is too serious to waste time on making fun of that aspect of materialist scientism holding up scientists and mathematicians whose work the tiniest fraction of their audience will understand (hands up, all of those who understand Hilbert's 19th problem or the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations,  I know I don't) but will understand they are to held in mystical awe.  Maybe I'll do that another day, maybe after Lent is over, maybe after the Trump regime are all in prison.

You Have To Be Really Stupid To Not Understand That You Don't Have To Listen To Music You Don't Like

I got into a bit of a spat over a composer whose music I don't especially like, though, once in a while, I'll listen to it.  The composer is the British Brian Ferneyhough, known as one of the more well known composers of "the new complexity".   If you want some idea as to what that means, at least in Ferneyhough's case,   Here's a video of his Lemma-Icon-Epigram with the score of very knotty rhythmic problems and not a few of articulation, as well.


I have mentioned a few times over the years that one of the reasons I decided not to smoke pot was because I found I couldn't count Milton Babbitt's Post-Partitions which I wanted to study if I smoked pot.  If nothing else I would guess that Brian Ferneyhough's music might keep some musician, somewhere drug-free because his music makes Post Partitions look like the contents of the Grade 2 volume of a piano method.

I didn't argue in favor of Ferneyhough's music which has a certain charm as to sound to it but which isn't anything near my favorite listening.  It sounds a lot easier than it would be to play. It wouldn't tempt me to go to the bother of counting it out to try to play it.   My argument was with a really arrogant, pissy French-Brit piano player, "Pianopat" who is a total asshole and too stupid to be intimidating who used Ferneyhough to sound like some mid-20th century arch-conservative who blames the financial problems of symphony orchestras on "modern music".   Given what symphony orchestra programs have been like all through that period, very very heavy on a very limited playlist of alleged audience pleasing masterworks, chestnuts and a list of a couple of hundred such pieces, a stupider argument about music has never been made.  I'd argue that it's over-hearing of that limited number of mostly 19th and early 20th century masterworks that might have more of a responsibility for audience indifference, since that's what's been being played, not what hasn't been.   I would imagine the performance of Brian Fernyhough's music is rare enough so it wouldn't produce a discernible effect of the kind that "Pianopat" attributes to it.

My question is why these idiots who are so impressed with themselves and who make such displays to impress others don't seem to realize that:

A. there has never been anything like a mass audience for "classical music" that compares with pop musics or TV or the movies.   That's with a possible exception for opera in the 19th century in some places.

B. Anyone who wants to avoid "classical music" they don't like is entirely free to avoid it because, unlike pop music and FOX, its presence isn't ubiquitous in the modern world.  Of no music is that more true than "difficult music". *

C. That their claims don't prove they're smart, they prove they're too stupid to get either of those points.    I wouldn't want the kind of people impressed with such statements to be impressed with me.  They're too stupid to care about.

Such people are endemic to what is alleged to be the educated class who think they're impressive when they make such condemnations, they're also not uncommon among the lower ends of the scribbling class.

I would go into the war that this idiot has with those who take composer's intentions seriously when performing their work but that's a whole story in itself.  The guy's an ass.

Composers whose work I don't like have every right to go right on composing the music they want to write, those who like listening to it have every right to go right on listening to it,  those who don't like it have every right to not listen to it.  They even have the right to go on blathering in the way "Pianopat" does, they just shouldn't expect smart people to be impressed with them.

*  You can contrast the lather such people of style get into about the totally innocuous character of listening to "difficult music" with the one they don't get into about the ubiquitous ad campaign of inequality, violence, exploitation and criminal assault that the porn industry is, with the promotion of racism in the media.  There's something to be learned about which stuff such people champion, generally some of the most demonstrably dangerous content and that which they condemn which is not only innocuous but rare to the point of obscure in the everyday lives and social and political environment.

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Elections Have Consequences, So Should Hypocrisy When Acting As A Spoiler In An Election

I remember being told in 2016 that making the argument for Hillary Rodham Clinton on the basis of keeping any Republican president away from the federal judiciary was tantamount to blackmail. Interestingly, the refutation to this nonsense will take place in real time over the next four decades.

That's the estimable Charles Pierce at the end of a piece documenting the young legal hacks and ideological thugs that the Trump regime and the Republican-fascists in the Senate are putting on federal courts,  the Federalist-fascists, American Enterprise Institute doing the selection for them.   It's a line I heard from Greens and their like in the past, in the last election it was Bernie Sanders' campaign and his cult I heard it from.   That's the kind of idiocy the play-left cooks up as slogans, "blackmail" in response to reality. 

Contained within the the piece by Pierce is this relevant passage in describing the history of the young right wing hack Kenneth Lee

After law school, the nominee advised Republicans to “appropriate the language and logic of liberals’ most sacred shibboleth: affirmative action,” in order to obtain better representation of Republicans and Christian conservatives at universities, in a 2002 article in The American Enterprise. Lee, who has been tapped for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit based in California, also wrote in favor of denying felons voting rights and critiqued U.S. immigration policy.

That would be exactly how the Republican-fascists on Republican courts from the time of Warren Burger to Rehnquist to Roberts have adopted liberals' language and logic on such things as free-speech, free press to enable the domination of our media and, so politics by billionaires domestic, and now foreign.  I will give them this, Republican-fascists, through their well endowed and financed funding of fascist intellectuals have been a lot smarter at stealing such language and turning it on the heirs of the creators of that language. 

The idiocy of the left is a real problem for the left, there is no greater idiocy than that which comes from the non-Democratic left which, in most cases, is the play left, the left of those who are the centers of cults of personality who don't want to share power and the focus of attention which would come with being members of a party.  That, I have concluded is the explanation of why Bernie Sanders will not really join the Democratic Party where he would be one of many prominent members, or why he wouldn't start his own party where he would have to share power and attention with other people within that party.

If you want to see more evidence that Sanders, once again,  has no intention of remaining in the Democratic Party, he provided that, himself, because after he filed his intention to run for the Democratic nomination as president he filed papers to run for the Senate again in 2024 as an independent.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is officially running for two different federal offices under two different party labels. On Monday, Sanders filed for re-election to the Senate in 2024, listing his party as “independent.” Team Sanders said the filing was an automatic renewal of Sanders’ candidacy, a standard move for victorious congressional candidates ahead of anticipated reelection contests. That came a couple weeks after he threw his hat in the ring for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. 

Certainly the history of Bernie Sanders "membership" in the Democratic Party, in 1989 (when he and his cult members joined "for one night")  in 2016 and now, which he ended as soon as the fiction no longer was of use to him shows something about his insincerity as well as his ego and his hypocrisy every time he appeals to Democrats for their support in him gaining a nomination as a Democrat.   What Bernie Sanders should be is the last straw before Democrats reserve the possibility of the nomination for president to those who are really Democrats.  As with the Republican-fascists such as Kenneth Lee, there will be others who copy what Sanders has done, there will be such cult figures from the play left in the future, they're pretty much all the play-left ever produces. 

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

I Doubt He's Aware Of My Existence But If Sam Means Me He's Awfully Thin Skinned - Hate Mail(?)



First, the reason Bernie Sanders is the "frontrunner" according to the pseudo-scientific BS of opinion polling is that there isn't any clear "frontrunner" among the way too many real Democrats who are running.  Bernie Sanders has what Joe Biden has, name recognition and he has a cult. Everything about Bernie Sanders has been based in his cult of personality.  I don't doubt that what he's saying is popular - I like a lot of it, myself - but I can guarantee you that Bernie Sanders will not have the support of a majority of Democrats who vote for the nomination because a. he didn't the last time, not by a long-shot, b. his behavior and, even more so, the behavior of his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, his wife, other members of his campaign in 2016 and the damage they did to the Democratic Party. c. HE CUT TIES TO THE PARTY AS SOON AS THE ELECTION WAS OVER, BERNIE SANDERS ISN'T A FUCKING DEMOCRAT, HE HAS NO RIGHT TO THE NOMINATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

Sam Seder and his crew and his fellow Ring of Fire podcasters are obviously perfectly willing to do what the play left has done over and over again for the past fifty-one years and longer, enable the election of Republican-fascists over the promotion of unrealistic lefty cult figures and slogans.   With that they do what Ralph Nader did in 2000, they discredit themselves and destroy the very things they allegedly support in real life.  It is what Bernie Sanders did for what I have concluded are reasons of his own ego gratification and the enrichment of himself and his family.  I will ask, has he disclosed his finances in the way that we are all demanding that Trump reveals his, even today as he is mounting what will certainly be another in a series of disastrous stunt-candidacies.

I respected Bernie Sanders up and until he started pulling this bullshit, I was prepared to let bygones be bygones over 2016 but with this stuff as far as I'm concerned, it's the definitive parting of the ways.   If I'm willing to face that about Bernie Sanders, you can bet I'm willing to face it for Ring of Fire in all its various podcasts.   I might like Michael Brooks and Sam Seder in many ways but them taking a part in joining the long and terrible history of play-lefty real life aid to the real life success of Republican-fascism, it's all over.

On The Shelf-Life Of Labels

I used to know what "neo-liberal" meant and I was opposed to it.  It meant someone who was allegedly for anti-discrimination laws and other such things but who were, essentially, someone who favored some flavor of neo-classical economic bullshit as taught at the U. of Chicago and other universities and as pushed on PBS starting in the late 1970s.  That was what I understood it as being and I rejected it.  I still do.

Hearing and how the word "neo-liberal" is used on the left, today, it seems to mean pretty much whatever the person using it doesn't like.  I've been accused of being a neo-liberal even as I reject neo-classical economics over my realistic rejection of Bernie Sanders' insane candidacy for the nomination of a party he is not a real member of and . . . well, name it.

I wonder if there is some phenomenon in which those ignorant of the meaning of a neologism will, eventually, reduce it to a meaningless term of invective or approval.  I think the word "meme" has certainly undergone that in a mild sense.  Something like that happened to the word "socialist" which is why I think it is the unfortunate label for what is a series of great ideas.   As I recently pointed out it has been destroyed though its appropriation of gangster government systems, Marxism, Nazism, the Brit upper class atrocity of Fabianism, various impotent and/or violent political cults and the anti-socialist-fascist use of all of those to discredit the word "socialist". 

It's a fools struggle to regain the reputability of a brand name once it has undergone such a thorough, century long discrediting.  I don't care how it sells in Europe, it won't sell in the United States.  In its use I sense a kind of, I don't know, macho bravado, an attitude which doesn't work for what "socialism" is supposed to be about.  It's supposed to be about decency and equality, not some sociological alpha-beta manhood bullshit thing. "Socialism," the word is not worth losing the most modest election, it is certainly not worth it to defer the adoption of single-payer, universal healthcare and all of the other things which are the real substance of an egalitarian society. 

The Terrible Truth Is That Trump Will Not Be Removed Through Impeachment

There is no rational and informed person who believes that even if the House of Representatives impeaches Donald Trump that the Republican-fascist controlled Senate will reach the 67 votes to convict him that would remove him from office.  As things stand removal of Donald Trump would result in the likely criminal and totally incompetent and sleazy fascist Mike Pence taking the presidency and choosing a Vice President who you can be certain will be at least as bad as he is so to impeach Trump would be an exercise in futility. 

Under the United States the impeachment of even the most criminal of presidents is one of a number of widely believed in Constitutional myths.   That is especially true if by "impeachment" you ignorantly believe they will be removed from office and punished.   That has never happened with a president, the only time that the threat of impeachment resulted in the removal of Nixon, that depended on a far different Republican caucus in the Senate, one which contained patriots who had fought fascism and who don't aspire to fascist, one-party governance in the United States.  I can't think of any Republican Senators like that, today, there weren't all that many back then. 

The people who will, I guarantee you, rail against House Democrats who are realistic about the futility and danger of impeaching the most massively incompetent and lavishly criminal* person to hold it in our history, Donald Trump, are too childish to know the reality that impeachment is just another of those dumb ideas that came with the Constitutional system that was set up by the deified "founders".   In countries with a parliamentary system, in some countries, governments have fallen through things such as lack of confidence votes which sends the question back to voters.  The founders, eager to consult The People as seldom as possible, to give them only limited direct influence in the government, put the then unelected Senate in charge of stopping the impeachment of even a criminal president, setting the bar so high that even if Nixon had been impeached, we don't know if he would have been convicted in the Senate and removed from office.  It's a virtual certainty that the degenerate Republican Party of 2019, on the eve of an election, would not vote to remove Trump from office no matter how criminal or insane or even treasonous he is. 

People clamoring for Democrats to impeach Trump should grow up and face the awful truth, he might be forced to leave through means not mentioned in the Constitution,  danger to his fortune, his brand, perhaps his daughter perhaps maybe his sons being imprisoned might get him to leave - I find it more credible that he would successfully set off a bloodbath by his automatic weapons armed cult followers.   It's not Nancy Pelosi's fault it's the fault of Madison and Hamilton and John Jay,  etc.  It's the fault of the succeeding generations that didn't admit that that Constitution is fundamentally flawed and failed to get rid of the Electoral College and the anti-democratically constituted Senate.  They did manage to get Senators elected, perhaps that kept us from getting to the terrible place we're in now.  I think the ability of billionaires to misinform a margin of voters and to, in other ways, ratfuck elections has swamped that modest early 20th century reform.  The Senate we have now is as bad as any in our history.  The court is as bad as the worst and it will soon be worse.  Constitutional anti-realists who believe it will remove Trump will soon have far worse to deal with, they should wake up now and get used to the terrible truth.

*  I would remind you that Nixon illegally expanded the war in Vietnam into Cambodia, something which resulted in, literally, millions of deaths.  Despite that the articles of impeachment that dealt with that, Nixon's most terrible crime, wasn't passed in the House committee.  Face that sobering truth of history and what it tells us about the American political system and our character.   If the victims had been White Europeans I have little doubt that they'd have passed.

Monday, March 4, 2019

Judge Jim Jordan According To The Standards Of Judgement He Has Advocated For Others

I don't believe at all that Jim Jordan was ignorant of the reported acts of sexual assault and sexual harassment of college athletes at Ohio State University, he spent eight years as a coach there and that is after having been a graduate student there. I doubt most of the students who participated in his wrestling program for four years, probably even those who were in it fewer years, were unaware of the reported abuses, especially those of random creeps showering with the athletes to ooggle them and worse.  It's not as if it was unknown to many of the students who were there, it's not credible that a coach who was there far longer than they were would be unaware of what was going on.  The biggest difference is, he had a legal and moral obligation to do something to stop it and he clearly never did.  I think he's the kind of congressman that ethical and criminal investigations were made to expose and prosecute (if possible). 

If I were to hold that scumbag in shirtsleeves and a tie to the standards of judgment he and his fellow Republicans and their media operation followed, I'd have said he was guilty of far more than I've said I found credible to believe, I'd pretend to know it and I'd pretend he was guilty of everything else I could think of to raise.  I think he should be judged by the same standard that he and his fellow Republicans held Hillary Clinton and others to when they held the majority in the house.   I think we need an understanding of justice that holds those who have held power to the same standard of judging guilt and innocence that they advocated and practiced. 

I think it's prudent and fair and just to hold politicians, judges, prosecutors, the police to the same standards of judgment and suspicion and punishment that they practiced in their professional careers.  If the administration of justice isn't held to that standard of acting justly, it is an exercise of self-interested power, not justice. In the United States, it so often is that.  That's especially true of politicians and those who aspire to hold political power as prosecutors so often do.  Judge them by the standards they hold others up to, that should be encoded into the law for those professions, especially the white-collar ones here they seldom face the exigencies of making instant decisions that the police so often have to.   The luxury of time in deliberation in the case of politicians and judges and prosecutors makes it even more necessary to hold them to the same standards they advocated.   I would hold Trump should be held to the same standard that he, as a rich White Man advocated in the newspaper ads he took out calling for death for innocent Black Children.   Though I'd only advocate sending him to prison, not state murder of him. 

Sunday, March 3, 2019

Hate Mail - Why Would Anyone Care What An Ignorant Liar Thinks Of Them?

It's one of the things I learned from being online and interacting with many times more atheists than I ever did in real life, the only thing worse than interacting with an habitual liar is interacting with one who is also very stupid.  I'm not going to spend the rest of my life doing that.   

Please don't tell me what such idiots are saying about me, if their fellow idiot liars want to believe them, I'm powerless to stop them.  Luckily, it doesn't matter.   I'm only interested in what honest people think of me, the ones who bother to know what I've really said.  

Update:  Well, it's simple, I never said what is being claimed as anyone who bothers to check this blog would see.  I've come to see that the play-left is as addicted to lying as the Trumpian right, only they lie about different things.  I've come to believe that when you don't believe in sin you don't believe it's wrong to lie if you figure it will get you want you want.  That's as true of the pseudo-left as it is the real right. 

The Democratic Party Has To Protect Itself Against The Bernie Sanders Of The Future

The irrational enthusiasm on the play-left for Bernie Sander's second bite at an apple that doesn't belong to him after what happened in the election in 2000 and in 2016 is the last proof that the play-left is not really of any left,  if that left means anything.

I have been through Bernie Sanders disqualifications to be the PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE of a party he has pointedly refused to join except to run presidential campaigns and to cynically use the anti-democratic caucuses and the total idiocy of open registrations that enable non-Democrats like him to ratfuck wins in those.  As was seen in that call-in show from 1989 I posted a video of that tactic is something that his Burlington Vermont based Sanders cult used before.  

Listening to what Sanders said in 1989 led me to the conclusion that he wouldn't join a political party or start his own party because that would mean that the party and not Bernie Sanders was the center of things, I think he wouldn't join one because it would not be the Bernie Sanders party, it would diffuse his cult into a group effort.  

When I hear a David Packman or a Sam Seders or a Jamie Peck or Michael Brooks, etc. go on and on about Bernie Sanders in 2020, when, by the way, Sanders will be on the cusp of 80 years old, I hear the echo of "real" lefty delusion that extends into the past for decades before I was born.  AND THEY NEVER, EVER SEEM TO LEARN NO MATTER HOW MANY REPUBLICANS THEIR DELUSION ENABLES WE HAVE HAD TWO OF THE WORST WITHIN THE FIRST TWO DECADES OF THIS CENTURY.   

Bernie Sanders looks to me to be ready to do even more damage to the chances to defeat Republicans this time than in 2016 which his cult is still wining and lying about today.   Bernie Sanders should never have been eligible for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party because he has not been a Democrat except when it suited his ego and his ambition.   He has openly gloated about the ability of his cult to throw caucuses (look at the clip of him at the link above) to candidates who would never have a chance of winning the general election.  It is exactly what he did in 2016, he belatedly endorsing the real Democrat who beat him in the primaries which are a far more legitimate means of nominating someone than the guaranteed-low-turnout caucuses.   

But Bernie Sanders will likely die in the near future, as people nearing their 80s have a tendency to do, this isn't about him this is about the continuing idiocy that the play-left in America has been and still is.  I call it the "play-left" because that's all it ever has been, the real left is a left that does something in real life, something the play left never has and never will do.  Politically, since the 1930s, that has meant the Democratic Party, extending back even before then, it has been the traditional American style of liberalism based in the morality of the Mosaic Law and the Gospel, based on egalitarianism and charity to the least among us.   That starts in the colonial period with the abolitionism of Quakers such as John Woolman and others.   It has never, for any significant time included Marxists because Marxists discredited themselves by their devotion to some of the worst gangster dictators in human history and, domestically, futile, stupid, attention seeking hijinks that turned off a majority of the electorate.  That left, which, I'm sorry to say, all of the above associate themselves with to one extent or another, has been better for Republican-fascism, for the neo-confederate racists and the oligarchs than they have ever produced a single thing in reality, in law through to implementation, they've produced blather and, on occasion, blood, not real good.   

Bernie Sanders proves he is entirely willing to blow whatever modest accomplishments he's had a part in as a politician on this ridiculous money-shot that America is going to elect a very old socialist who will be running against the hurricane of wild lies and nonsense that even a Democrat with a chance of winning will face.   In that he mimics the last play-lefty to do that, Ralph Nader who was quite willing, for reasons of petty resentment and ego and, perhaps, profit to himself, to destroy the legacy he got some credit for - a legacy that was made real by Democratic politicians of the past.  I said Sanders only had a part in anything he did because the Bernie Sanders party has never done anything on its own except wreak havoc in 2016. 

That's what we're seeing and we're seeing the same play-left that got serially suckered by all of the cult figures in that long history of political failure going back to  . . . well, pick your cult figure of the past, Eugene Debs, John Reed and his fellow idiots who took orders from Lenin and Trotsky, Robert La Follette, Eugene McCarthy, (Wisconsin lefties, ha!) all of the combined "third-party" candidates, all of the many commie and socialist parties, all of the Green and Citizens parties (I'll bet you don't even remember that last one, a cult that formed around Barry Commoner) nothing has ever been done by any of them, not one law made, passed or implemented, not one program run, not one.  And we're supposed to consider that some admirable, heroic history that is worth repeating, again and again and again, onward into an ever worsening future.   

The Democratic Party has got to protect itself against this because these "lefts" always end up figuring they'll wreck the Democratic Party and they'll pick up the left of Democrats and, in their fevered calculations using numbers more imaginary than imaginary numbers, they'll win.  Only they never have and they never will and even if they did, they'd blow it massively.  Blowing it massively is the only thing that secular style of lefty politicos have ever done.  

The Democratic Party has to adopt rules that only people who have been Democrats for at least the eight years before the election they want to run as Democrats in are eligible for the Democratic nomination for president or vice-president.  It is insane, after the experience of 2016 that the Democratic Party has left itself open to Sanders doing the same thing, that would be Bernie Sanders WHO LEFT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ALMOST AS SOON AS THE ELECTION WAS OVER.   He has no legitimate claim to the nomination, he has no credibility as a candidate, he is counting on a coalition of the delusional and unrealistic to carry him and enrich him.