You know you are a Philistine when...

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blindpig
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Fri May 03, 2019 3:53 pm

Extinction Rebellion removes 'misguided' prison advice
By Georgina Rannard
BBC News

Image
Screenshot of Extinction Rebellion's prison guide before it was deleted from its website

snip

'Not a yoga retreat'
Civil rights activists warned that the advice was "inaccurate and misleading" and added that violence and discrimination are commonplace in prisons.

In England and Wales, assaults in prisons are currently at a record high and in 2018, there were 325 deaths in prison custody - up 10% on the previous year.

And contradicting Extinction Rebellion's claim, 94% of prison officers in England and Wales were white as of March 2018.

"Prison is not - and I cannot stress this enough - a yoga retreat," commented lawyer and anti-prison activist Eda Seyhan.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending ... gn=bbcnews

more at link

A genuine Children's Crusade with similar results
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 15, 2019 8:23 pm

Michael Moore Begs Michelle Obama To Run For President: ‘She’s The One Person Who Could Crush Trump’
The filmmaker breaks down why Michelle Obama should run.
NewsOne Staff
Written By NewsOne Staff
Posted August 1, 2019


While everyone is debating which of the current crop of candidates could beat Trump in 2020, filmmaker says there is only one — our forever first lady Michelle Obama. The Oscar winner is begging her to run for president.


See Also: This Colin Kaepernick Retweet Says Everything You Need To Know About The NFL Players’ Anthem Grievance

On MSNBC last night, Moore said, “If the election were held today, there is one person that would crush Trump. And she hasn’t announced yet. And her last name rhymes with Obama. In fact, it is Obama. Michelle Obama. Everybody watching this right now knows she is a beloved American and she would go in there and she would beat him. She would beat him in the debates, he wouldn’t be able to bully her, he wouldn’t be able to nickname her and she is beloved.”

Michelle Obama said she will not run but Moore insists that if she was asked to serve she would. Watch the clip below:



According to a new YouGov poll she is the most admired woman in the world. Melania was at number 19 with people like Madonna, Oprah, Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton and even Ellen DeGeneres higher than her.

Michelle Obama has had an epic few months. Her memoir Becoming, according to the Washington Post, the autobiography is slated to become the best-selling memoir of all-time.

The book—which was released in November—has sold over 10 million copies to date through print, digital, and audio purchases. It was a part of a two-book deal that the Obamas inked with Penguin Random House.

Becoming was a record-breaking memoir right out of the gate. 725,000 copies were sold on the day it was released and that number rose to 2 million 15 days after it made its debut. Those numbers made it not only the fastest-selling book of 2018 but the best-selling hardcover book of last year as well. It also made buzz globally, topping best-seller lists in places like Greece and Britain. “I’m not aware, in my personal experience with Penguin Random House, that we ever sold 10 million units of a memoir,” said Penguin Random House Chief Executive Markus Dohle in a statement.

Keep slaying, Michelle Obama.

https://newsone.com/3883343/michael-moo ... lle-obama/

SATIRE IS DEAD DEAD DEAD.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

solidgold
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by solidgold » Thu Aug 22, 2019 8:11 pm

Amazon fires “trending” on social media. In twenty-four hours, people have went from “FASCIST government” to “we can do our part by eating vegan.” I wonder what tomorrow will hold.

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Thu Aug 22, 2019 11:17 pm

solidgold wrote:
Thu Aug 22, 2019 8:11 pm
Amazon fires “trending” on social media. In twenty-four hours, people have went from “FASCIST government” to “we can do our part by eating vegan.” I wonder what tomorrow will hold.
A vegan shit sandwich

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kidoftheblackhole
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Thu Aug 22, 2019 11:20 pm

blindpig wrote:
Thu Aug 15, 2019 8:23 pm
Michael Moore Begs Michelle Obama To Run For President: ‘She’s The One Person Who Could Crush Trump’
The filmmaker breaks down why Michelle Obama should run.
NewsOne Staff
Written By NewsOne Staff
Posted August 1, 2019


While everyone is debating which of the current crop of candidates could beat Trump in 2020, filmmaker says there is only one — our forever first lady Michelle Obama. The Oscar winner is begging her to run for president.


See Also: This Colin Kaepernick Retweet Says Everything You Need To Know About The NFL Players’ Anthem Grievance

On MSNBC last night, Moore said, “If the election were held today, there is one person that would crush Trump. And she hasn’t announced yet. And her last name rhymes with Obama. In fact, it is Obama. Michelle Obama. Everybody watching this right now knows she is a beloved American and she would go in there and she would beat him. She would beat him in the debates, he wouldn’t be able to bully her, he wouldn’t be able to nickname her and she is beloved.”

Michelle Obama said she will not run but Moore insists that if she was asked to serve she would. Watch the clip below:



According to a new YouGov poll she is the most admired woman in the world. Melania was at number 19 with people like Madonna, Oprah, Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton and even Ellen DeGeneres higher than her.

Michelle Obama has had an epic few months. Her memoir Becoming, according to the Washington Post, the autobiography is slated to become the best-selling memoir of all-time.

The book—which was released in November—has sold over 10 million copies to date through print, digital, and audio purchases. It was a part of a two-book deal that the Obamas inked with Penguin Random House.

Becoming was a record-breaking memoir right out of the gate. 725,000 copies were sold on the day it was released and that number rose to 2 million 15 days after it made its debut. Those numbers made it not only the fastest-selling book of 2018 but the best-selling hardcover book of last year as well. It also made buzz globally, topping best-seller lists in places like Greece and Britain. “I’m not aware, in my personal experience with Penguin Random House, that we ever sold 10 million units of a memoir,” said Penguin Random House Chief Executive Markus Dohle in a statement.

Keep slaying, Michelle Obama.

https://newsone.com/3883343/michael-moo ... lle-obama/

SATIRE IS DEAD DEAD DEAD.
Bizarre because his last one -- Fahrenheit 11/9 -- was pretty much a satire of exactly this sort of feel good shit

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blindpig
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Fri Aug 23, 2019 11:00 am

Bizarre because his last one -- Fahrenheit 11/9 -- was pretty much a satire of exactly this sort of feel good shit
Which brings into question whether it was satire or not. So hard to tell these days....

I dunno, when I think of M Moore I also think of Mike B, some correlation I cannot put my finger on.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Thu Aug 29, 2019 3:01 pm

Noam Chomsky and the Compatible Left, Part I
Posted on March 4, 2019
Noam Chomsky recently took to the pages of The Intercept to give his blessing to the US military’s occupation of Syria, solidifying his support for the Pentagon after years of having done so in slightly more anguished terms. As far as the occupation, the only concession to what might once have been considered “Leftist” values is the MIT professor’s acknowledgement that the US is motivated by “power considerations” rather than “humanitarian objectives.” Today, the brief nod to realpolitik is what’s supposed to pass for a progressive anti-war stance.

The Intercept is really a natural fit for Chomsky to deliver this message. The nonagenarian professor has limited years left on earth, and when he passes, Glenn Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar’s website will probably become the new face of the permissible Left. That Chomsky lends his radical imprimatur to a US military occupation in its pages is a testament to what kind of a “Left” Chomsky has helped to create and is bequeathing to Greenwald and Omidyar.

To get an idea of the before-and-after picture, consider two recent pieces from Alfred McCoy, a historian who, like Chomsky, has produced radical scholarship for almost half a century. McCoy has done some of the best work on the CIA’s role in the global heroin trade, the relationship between foreign counterinsurgency and domestic policing, and the United States’ peerless role in developing and exporting new forms of torture. McCoy claims that while researching his landmark book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, he came under attack by CIA mercenaries; after its publication, McCoy was monitored by the CIA and audited by the IRS, and ultimately had to move to Australia for 11 years in order to keep working. Here is part of a 2015 article on American hegemony, where McCoy explains how the US’s superpower status shares DNA with Nazi Germany and what effects this has had on the world:

So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power. Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state. Created at the cost of more than a trillion dollars since 9/11, the purpose of this vast apparatus is to control a covert domain that is fast becoming the main arena for geopolitical contestation in the twenty-first century.

Much of the torture that became synonymous with the era of authoritarian rule in Asia and Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s seems to have originated in U.S. training programs that provided sophisticated techniques, up-to-date equipment, and moral legitimacy for the practice… CIA interrogation training became synonymous with serious human rights abuses, particularly in Iran, the Philippines, South Vietnam, Brazil, and Uruguay.

The previous segment is in line with the bulk of his scholarship. Now here are some conclusions from McCoy’s 2017 Intercept interview with co-founder Jeremy Scahill, on the subject of America’s imperial decline and the rise of a multipolar world:

The British empire was relatively benign. Yes, it was a global power, there were many excesses, many incidents, one can go on, but when it was all over, they left the Westminster system of parliament, they left the global language, they left a global economy, they left a culture of sports, they created artifacts like the BBC.

So the US empire has been, and we’ve had our excesses, Vietnam, we could go on. Afghanistan. There are many problems with the U.S. exercise of its power but we have stood for human rights, the world has had 70 years of relative peace and lots of medium size wars but nothing like World War I and World War II… Our successor powers, China and Russia, are authoritarian regimes. Russia’s autocratic, China’s a former communist regime. They stand for none of these liberal principles.

So you’ll have the realpolitik exercise of power, all the downsides with none of the upsides, with none of the positive development. I mean we’ve stood for women’s rights [note: Russia passed women’s suffrage 3 years before the US], for gay rights [Russia legalized gay sex 10 years before the US], for human progress [Russia has a higher literacy rate than the US], for democracy [Russia extended the franchise universally 48 years before the US]. You know we’ve been flawed in efficacy, but we’ve stood for those principles and we have advanced them. So we have been, on the scale of empires, comparatively benign and beneficent. And I don’t think the succeeding powers are going to be that way.

Getting radical scholars—and scholars with radical reputations—to sound like they’re writing for Foreign Affairs magazine is very much The Intercept’s stock-in-trade. “The day after Trump threatened to militarily intervene in Venezuela,” writes Stansfield Smith, “Jeremy Scahill posted his interview with Eva Golinger on The Intercept. Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger, the author of The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, is known as an outstanding defender of Venezuela during the Chavez era. She hardly goes as far in anti-Maduro criticisms as Scahill, who may fit what Shamus Cooke characterized as ‘the intellectually lazy ‘pox on both houses’ approach that has long-infected the U.S. left,’” according to Smith. “Yet within her valuable analysis, and precisely because of her valuable analysis, both in the interview and in her article Golinger makes some statements that require correction,” he wrote, enumerating 11 points where Golinger provided Washington-friendly misrepresentations of the Venezuelan government. She responded with the popular twofer of claiming lived experience and accusing her critic of hating women.

The billionaire-owned publication is just the latest loudest voice among the permissible “Left,” an ecosystem of which Chomsky is still the most recognizable face. Since the late 1960s, Chomsky has both reflected and shaped this milieu. A reverent 1997 book on the MIT professor written by Robert Barsky, which advertises itself as the closest thing we’ll get to a Chomsky autobiography, contains a major section titled “the Milieu Chomsky Helped to Create,” attesting to the professor’s privileged place in this world. If one considers radical according to its true definition—solving a problem by striking at its root—then it is a world of dissenters who are less radical than ever.

The “Left” has taken quite a journey from the 1960s, the beginning of Chomsky’s career as a political commentator, to now. During that time, what people perceive as “the Left” transformed from something which was usually opposed to the status quo and genuinely radical into something more like what CIA official Cord Meyer called the “compatible left,” an agglomeration of “liberals and pseudo-intellectual status seekers who are easily influenced” by the elites that they purport to challenge, in the words of Doug Valentine. One of the primary purposes of “courting the compatible left,” according to Valentine, was to “court Socialists away from Communists” and into safe channels. Chomsky is a uniquely useful figure for demonstrating how these changes happened, although his more recent work owes a great debt to Barack Obama. The latter’s presidency was a powerful fulcrum for shifting the wider culture of left-liberalism—of which Chomsky is an avatar and gatekeeper—far to the right.

Both have played large roles in turning the Western “Left” into what it is today.

https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2019/03 ... ft-part-i/

Much more to this at link. Very informative on what was wrong in the 60s.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Sun Nov 03, 2019 2:53 pm

Behind those "morons" sits the ruling class. What gives the ruling class their power is pandemic fear, fear of loss. Until each of us faces fear, it will control our lives. Who then are the "morons"? The ruling class instills fear and then offers, at a price, the illusion of security. I, as well as all of us, can not be free until fear is dealt with. A lasting revolution, both internally and externally, is a necessity to defeat the ruling class for they know that the real War is for the public mind.

Sorry to break the news but the "real war" is for material resources, human labor and the profits those bring etc....

...everyone's minds could be beautiful and that "real war" would and will continue unabated until the juggernaut of capitalism is halted.

chlamor
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by chlamor » Thu Nov 07, 2019 2:47 pm

Again, a gross failure to discern the contradictions in all natural and social phenomenon; esp. politics, and what they portend..

No one has to remind any real student of U.S. politics about the origins and history of the duopoly. . . .Originally called the Democratic Republican Party, the Democrats were the organized political alliance of the major capitalist chattel slave owners. As the antagonisms around slavery intensified and the Whig Party dissolved, a new political configuration called the Republican Party emerged in1854, as an anti-(spread of)chattel slavery alliance.

Then, as now, the Repubs were dominated by capitalist interests, esp. wage slave capital. Using your broad brush and blunt instrument of 'analysis', that alliance could have easily been dismissed as irrelevant. (Some of your 19th Century counterparts did just that). What was not lost on other deeper thinkers was that, despite the dominant forces, what was actually developing, within and under and around, the RP was
an alliance - albiet shaky - of Northern unions of (white) working class men, nominally free and escaped slaves, Suffragettes (none of whom could vote!), small farmers hoping to set up farms in the Western (stolen) territories, radical abolitionists, etc.

It was that eclectic and unlikely political alliance, racked with seemingly insurmountable contradictions, with arms, that defeated the chattel slave owner-led insurgency in 1865!

Things change. .

A hundred years later we see new political configurations developing, from old ones, not overnight but over many decades.

By the early 1970s, the Democratic Party - still dominated, like it's duopolist partner - by capitalist interests, now consists of many more working class unions, African American and the multicultural veterans of the heroic Civil/Human Rights Movement, reproductive rights and environmental activists, etc.
Was it benevolence on the part of the ruling capitalists that created this? Of course not.
It was a development, set in motion by the Republican betrayal of Reconstruction, the 'promise' of the New Deal, the concessions capital had to make to the Movement in the 1950s and 60s, , Nixon's 'Southern Strategy', among other things.
Even MLK, from a long line of Republicans - "the party of Lincoln"- joined the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, by 1980, under the teflon figurehead of Ronald McCarthy-stooge Reagan, the Republican Party was clearly becoming a political alliance of capital (the ones not dominating the DP), antireproductive rights activists, libertarians (not in the LP) unabashed white nationalists, nazis, etc. . . What BAR now calls: the White Man's party.

Dems/2019. . . A large socialist and social democratic contingency, organized primarily through the DSA, has emerged within the DP alliance. Sanders, for various contradictory reasons, heads that contingency; a political bloc objectively, if not subjectively, opposed to the capitalists/imperialists at the helm.

Quintessential American class struggle, by any measurement.

In light of all of this, at least THREE burning questions have become, again, relevant for many of us, on the left:

1. How do we organize a viable independent anticapitalist political formation to further the development of a 'critical mass' to eventually overturn the rule of capital?

2) What should be our relationship to the duopoly? Should it be the same with both parties just because they remain dominated by capital? Isn't that what we're always up against, everywhere (in unions, civic groups, liberal formations, social justice orgs, etc) . . .capital?How do those intraparty
- RP and DP - contradictions aid our cause?

3) What forces, within those parties are potential allies? Is it wise to conflate all of them?

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blindpig
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Re: You know you are a Philistine when...

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 08, 2019 4:08 pm

do I smell stealth lesser-evilism? Bet it blossoms in a couple more posts from wherever that was. They gonna organize behind Bernie.

Sorta thing am seeing more of, lesser-evilism is all the Dems got.

RP vs DP contradictions are small change, in fact misdirection. DP contradictions vs reality are insurmountable

The more I see of these 'potential allies' the more I despise them as class enemies.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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