delrem
delrem's JournalThe mockery is of the behaviors. Not of the individuals as such.
Chaucer presents archetypes of certain hypocritical cynical greedy ... behaviors.
But Chaucer doesn't present these archetypes just so we'll disregard them! He presents them in all their absurdity in his characters, so we can recognize them. When we recognize those behaviors in individuals, and especially if we recognize artistically similar visual patterns (and I mean, there are plenty here) reproduced in front of our eyes, we are prone to comment.
Guns are just the weapon used.
The problem is a culture that believes violence is a solution, and applies it everywhere, internally and externally.
It's a culture that seems to have no reflective capacity.
No capacity to learn.
Violence has always gotten the USA massive profits.
"centrists" don't like that "progressives" have been working on this for decades.
They don't like that the progressive message hasn't changed, as they've wielded their power through successive "centrist" D and R admins to cause untold and exponentially more harmful damage in every sphere. They don't like the word 'progressive' unless it is totally brutalized by them, rendered meaningless, and in that brutally meaningless, forgetful, fictional world, their candidates can claim to be "progressive" even while slandering progressive leaders. Swift-boating them. Playing dirty tricks. Refusing to discuss their own past, refusing to discuss the actual.
eta: when I use the term "swift-boating" I mean it in the original sense first and foremost.
Because to do so is dishonest.
The Clinton family and the Obama family are very different, with entirely different histories and on different trajectories. Obama isn't saddled with the Clinton family past, or the "scandals" and "looks askance at's" that face Hillary Rodham Clinton in this election cycle. There is no "scandal" attaching to Pres. Obama that is in any way similar to the kind of scandals that the Clintons have brought upon themselves.
You're engaged in an exercise of dissembling, to suggest otherwise - and that's why you shouldn't do it. It's OK to try to ride on Pres. Obama's shoulders, but it isn't OK to try to bring him down to your level to do it.
This is a kind of tit-for-tat "I'm a Hillary supporter, but ....."
kind of piece, mirroring the all too many OPs on DU that begin "I'm a Bernie supporter, but ....", which anyone who actually supports Bernie Sanders know are fucking trolls.
A difference is the amazing deference the article gives to Hillary Clinton in the opening paragraphs. Empty fawning.
The article doesn't examine any *issue* that Hillary Clinton actually handled, in government. It just vaguely points at the plethora of sex and money scandals associated with the name. Which, yah, is an issue all right. But e.g. Bernie Sanders supporters don't support Bernie because of Clinton scandals. They support Bernie on the fucking ISSUES.
So I wouldn't even throw Dejevsky a bone for this piece.
This isn't "during construction" phase.
This is the end result of approx. 2 months of VERY well funded swift-boating action. We've seen it played out on DU.
We'll burn ourselves out if we get sucked into these kind of operations and don't learn, but instead continue to feed them with attempts at reason, because no amount of REASON can stop them.
I hear in other OPs on DU that Hillary Clinton will be meeting personally with #blacklivesmatter founders and official spokespeople, in an "in camera" session (which counterintuitively means "private and away from the press" -- probably with signed non-disclosure terms) that's been well publicized beforehand for maximum effect, so no misunderstandings can occur, no brazen attempt to throw Hillary off the stage while calling Hillary's audience "white supremacists", then blaming Hillary for the entire scene, will happen. This has been a professional swift-boating action, 2015 style, and I'm wondering if this is the victory lap of the whole operation and they might be going on to the next phase.
But how could I know about how this post citizen's united total $ domination politics will play out? I'm in the unfortunate position of being one of those "white progressives" being systematically fucked over by it.
No. Hillary can't ride on Sanders' coattails like she rode on Obama's.
She didn't do all that much good for Obama's administration.
I really do load a lot on her and the "third-way" machine that came with her.
His second term is qualitatively superior to his first.
This is it for her.
Within the small demographic that they have left, Trump embodies a large percentage.
Go figure.
I think they'll use Trump as a pinata.
See the idea? They bash the pinata to demonstrate that they're different from it.
In the end, the GOP will choose someone "centrist", investment banker and war friendly to ensure profiteering, but they won't have to defend that against Hillary Clinton. So with Hillary Clinton they get a free ride. They'll be wanting a free-for-all in the arena of abstract "social values" where they can easily imagine something like a jellybean eating white hat wearing cowboy riding in to the rescue of the USA.
+1. Nicely written and your responses have been excellent.
But can I examine this *a little bit*?
I was just listening - for as long as I could bear to (I'm not a masochist) - an interview with Marrissa Jenae, one of the speakers who took over the event (which wasn't a Sanders event, it was just timed to hit Sanders - and that was a choice) in Seattle. The explanation for her use of the phrase "white liberal racists" (or whatever the exact enunciation) was something along the line of -- well, she actually meant *only* those who were trying to shout her down and stop her from taking over the stage and shutting down the event, were white liberal racists. Not *everyone* out there, not those out there who approved of her action.
That's a very loose and self-centered way of categorizing "racists", in my opinion. I don't believe anyone who thinks, talks and makes slanderous judgements like that on such self-centered and outre grounds should be taken seriously as any kind of authority on the subject of "racism".
Another example, following immediately in the interview upon the first, was her assertion that apparently she heard (or someone heard) someone in the crowd say that she should be "tazed". However, she didn't just relate this fact about what someone was heard saying. She described the "someone" as being a "white progressive" and used that allegation to describe *all* "white progressives" in the denunciations that followed.
At that point I couldn't bear to listen any longer.
I think *what* was said by the spokesperson for blacklivesmatter-Seattle ought to be subject to critique.
I won't allow myself to be used as a punching bag in a political battle between primary candidates for POTUS.
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On not quite a tangent, in the same conceptual arc so to speak, I was reminded of my puzzlement on reading Mary Wollstonecraft on the Rights of Women, reading something of her biography, in my youth. Wollstonecraft used impeccable Aristotelian logic to build an airtight case, using the very words of the "progressive" intellectual establishment of her time, yet somehow she didn't get through to even her friends, her "natural allies". By "getting through" I mean a thorough taking up of the cause - or inclusion in the cause - leading to action and an actual change in the circumstances of women.
So Wollstonecraft moved and communicated in the same very progressive political milieu as some of the most brilliant and famous male "progressive thinkers" of her time, but they were "insider progressives" and she, being a woman, was an "outsider progressive", and what dawned on me was that "insider progressives" naturally, by virtue of their circumstances, are myopic. The issues of human rights and justice that progressive thinkers focus on, try to get right, are all life and death, are all Important with a capital 'I', but they are only visceral issues for the outsider. To cross that divide requires more than reason - it requires action, it requires forcing a wakeup.
Bernie didn't stand up and recite, from memory,
a diatribe against same sex marriage. In honor of Christian tradition. To satisfy some Christian group thought necessary to his campaign.
The guy he was back then has been jostled forward by the results of victories.
And don't anyone try to tell me that he wasn't on the right side of those victories.
It didn't take him until 2013 to figure out the proper focus group inspired pass-phrase into political correctness. His entire history shows that he's been an OK guy.
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Member since: Sun Nov 25, 2012, 01:12 AMNumber of posts: 9,688