To my father and all the rest…
Thank-you for saving the world.
1. About that Eva Murry story. The last we heard from Eva Murry, she was telling the story of how creepy Joe Biden complimented her on the size of her breasts 12 years ago, when she was 14. Ethics Alarms noted at the time that the woman’s detailed account had no effect on the credibility of Tara Reade’s allegations one way or the other, since we already knew Biden was creepy. However,earlier this week Fox News reported :
A past organizer for Delaware’s First State Gridiron Dinner now says Joe Biden did not attend the event in 2008, after a woman recently claimed the former vice president and senator sexually harassed her there, Fox News has learned….
Local news reports from the time said Biden was having sinus surgery earlier that week — to address issues including a deviated septum — and was scheduled to be out of work for the whole week.
At the time, his spokeswoman said that she “anticipates that he’ll be out for the remainder of the week recovering at his home in Wilmington,” according to a report in the News Journal at the time.
Murry’s aunt, Christine O’Donnell (of “I am not a witch” fame) says she remembers Murry talking about the event at the time, and stood by her viece’s accusation, telling Fox,
“Yes, it could have been another year. So what? She was a teenager when I ran for office. It doesn’t make it okay. It happened when I was running for office against him. If it was 2007, that makes it even worse.”
But it couldn’t have been in 2007 either, because records place him in Iowa that evening.
All anyone can figure out is that young Murry ran into a different creep that she thought was Biden, though that seems unlikely too. What’s going on here? Why would the woman subject herself to national scrutiny and embarrassment by telling her story in such detail when it wasn’t true?
Since the new evidence came to light, she has been notably silent. That’s not right; she made an accusation against Biden, and needs to follow up with either an explanation or an apology.
2. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Martin Tolchin, a veteran journalist who worked as a New York Times reporter for many years before leaving to help found The Hill, authored a letter to his old employer in response to an editorial board article titled, “Investigate Tara Reade’s Allegations.” He wrote in part,
I don’t want an investigation. I want a coronation of Joe Biden. Would he make a great president? Unlikely. Would he make a good president? Good enough. Would he make a better president than the present occupant? Absolutely. I don’t want justice, whatever that may be. I want a win, the removal of Donald Trump from office, and Mr. Biden is our best chance. Suppose an investigation reveals damaging information concerning his relationship with Tara Reade or something else, and Mr. Biden loses the nomination to Senator Bernie Sanders or someone else with a minimal chance of defeating Mr. Trump. Should we really risk the possibility?
So this veteran journalist supports keeping the truth from the public in order to increase the likelihood that it will vote the way he prefers.
What are the odds that his attitude was any different when he was an active reporter?
3. What was your first clue, Sherlock? Nate Silver, the statistics maven who founded and edits FiveThirtyEight, reacted with exasperation to an Axios report asserting that the U.S. lagged behind Europe in coronavirus recovery, with the “number of new cases every day … not going down.” The New York Times this week published a story containing a similar argument, titled, “As Trump pushes to reopen, government sees virus toll nearly doubling.”
Silver: “Not providing context on the increase in testing is such a basic error, and has been so widespread, that it’s revealing about the media’s goals. It’s more interested in telling plausibly-true stories (“narratives”) that sound smart to its audience than in accuracy/truth per se.”
Yes, Nate, the media’s goals have been quite apparent to those of us who were paying attention for some time now, but thanks for your input.
4. Once again, I have to say that I don’t understand this marriage at all, and if I were Kellyanne Conway’s boss, I’d tell her to deal with the problem or resign. Conway’s husband is George Conway, a D.C. lawyer who has partnered with some other NeverTrumpers to form “The Lincoln Project,” an ironic title for a “resistance” organ since the entire resistance effort has been based on the hope that Lincoln was wrong, that you can fool all of the people, or at least enough of them, all the time. Yesterday I saw its latest TV ad that states that the U.S. under Donald Trump is “weaker and sicker and poorer.” This is deceit, and wildly misleading, though it nicely illustrates the “damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t” politicizing of a pandemic that the foes of the President think they can exploit to doom him in November. Like so many other similar attacks, it is based on emotion and assumes, as well as tries to spread, ignorance. It also is aimed at goading Trump, and because he has no impulse control at all and never heard of the Streisand Effect, the ad caused him immediately threw a Twitter tantrum.
He should save his rage for his White House Counsellor. George Conway is free to have political views that differ from those of his wife, but he is using the name recognition his wife provides him to try to put her out of work, and disrupt and undermine her workplace. That doesn’t just cross over a line, it obliterates it. At this point, I see little distinction between Conway’s attacks on the President and the abusive spouse who keeps barging into an employee’s workplace requiring security to throw him out.
What George is doing goes beyond politics to deliberately interfere with his wife’s career. Apparently Mrs. Conway has no influence over him whatever, or, in the alternative, is somehow content to allow him to keep slandering her boss. That’s negligent, disloyal and irresponsible on her part.
I would require my Counselor to fix the problem, one way another other. [Pointer: Steve Witherspoon]
Ethics Alarms 
4. Mrs. Conway’s continued employment and continued marriage is really inexplicable. For a guy who is purported to have no impulse control, Trump’s incredibly tolerant of that mess for some reason.
Indeed. He’s fired others for lesser reasons than he has with Kellyanne.
The one time my first husband came in to my workplace and behaved like a jerk to my co-workers, my manager took me aside and told me I needed to tell him to be civil.
And that was at a McDonald’s, not the White House.
I don’t know that Trump’s fired anybody for their family connections. Please enlighten me.
He fired the twin brother of one of his firees for testifying against him regarding the Ukraine.
Heh. Well, that counts, I guess. Still, a pretty short list, and perhaps the word “twin” is more instructive than not. 🙂
That was a weird situation.
1. #22!
2. Bingo.
4
Thank-you for saving the world.
It is a touchy one to comment on, but here goes: this is fundamentally an untrue statement. Yet is a peculiar form of untruth or mistruth. But it is at the core of the classic American conceit that Americans are superior, and that America is superior, and that whatever Americans do must be *good* and also *for the best*. It is a central delusion and it would correspond to an individual always believing that everything they do, in comparison to all others, is always best. It is of course tied to old Puritan notions that the Puritan colonies were established in a way by God and filled with God’s people who bring forward a New Reality, a kind of New Divinity down onto the Earth — America as the New Jerusalem.
America did not so much *save the world* as enter history very powerfully and change the course of the world and eventually become the *director* of the world through an imposition of a geo-political managerial will involving, as I often say, collusion between government, industry, military, intelligence and very importantly the general *propaganda-industry* that naturally includes *Hollywood* as a manufacturer of dreams — and that is very different! It became however part of propaganda narratives to describe American doing in this way, and as I say this is related to a core delusion and self-deception.
There is no doubt that America strongly and definitively altered the course of European and world history. But to describe it as ‘saving the world’ is, I’d suggest, a notion that rubs right up against hubris. Or to put it another way it can allow for power and power-machinations — cold, raw, brutal use of power to gain what one want in the world — to conceal them selves with delusions of altruism.
The nature of this ‘world-salvation’ — the way it is conceived & described — is that America saved the world from fascism. But this term ‘fascism’ would need to be better understood and what it meant revealed more clearly. Any and all *true conservatism*, based in culturally & philosophically (not to mention religiously) defined principles is now understood to be neofascistic or proto-fascistic. This is of course a rhetorical trick and one based in the sophistries of propaganda. This *trick* is used, all the time, by the Marxian Left and the *Progressives* to denigrate all that they are in resistance to. And what they are in resistance to is, at bottom, precisely the ‘principles’ that animate all true conservatism.
Fake Conservatives and Progressives who costume themselves as *Conservatives*, when you examine how they think and see, employ the same *trick*. And every ounce of *Americanism* and the Postwar ideals of America are nearly absolutely progressive values divorced from conservative principles. In this sense then America is a radical nation (in ways that have to be carefully described with subtlety and nuance). As it has crossed the line and become a “perverse nation’ and one involved in the open destruction of true conservative principles, it now begins to operate within the real of *the evil*. As I have said many times one of the principal zones of perversion is in the sexual realm: the use of sexual instinct and of addictive lust as a tool of political control. This realm or zone is one where the *political and social body* is corrupted but with that particular corruption comes along other types of corruption into the political body. I would also mention the connection between forms of social hysteria and sexual hysteria and addiction.
I suggest that a change needs to occur. The *America is the best country in the whole world and God has chosen us to bring Truth and Light to the World* needs to change to another perspective. Something far more humble. Perhaps like a recovering addict at a 12-Step meeting? Because that ‘Noble America’ and a nation and a state capable of ‘salvation’ and bringing anything even remotely comparable to salvation to the nations of the world — sorry to be the one to have to say it! — that America does not any longer exist, though it might have existed at one time, yet not ever as Yankees conceived it. America, even in the mid-19th century, provoked both admiration and suspicion as it lunged around ‘doing good’.
Simon Bolivar put it like this: “The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty”.
To understand why he said that — and hundreds of other intellectuals the world over — requires a shift in self-conception. Seeing things more truly, more really, not through the lens of mistruth and deception.
Just doing my part to help-out! 🙂
It’s not a pro-American statement at all. As I have mentioned here before, in fact, my father joined the British Commandos to fight the Nazis before the US entered the war.
My comment is — obviously — directed as a criticism to certain American attitudes which I clearly identify and explain. But I could also describe it as a set of assumptions and assertions about the American and the British coalition. I started from the notion — very common — that America *saved the world*. Not only have I gotten this sense, very often, in what you write but in what most strong patriots write on these pages. Here, there is ZERO critique of America and America’s use of power.
The way America and Americans describe them self, see them self: these are parts of very large *narratives* (as we say today). There is a sound reason why I critique them, and those reasons are expressed in what I write and what I wrote.
Whatever our foreign policy flaws are (and this isn’t a foreign policy or a particularly political blog, which is partially why we don’t critique such here), I think it should be easy enough to agree that the world is better off WITHOUT the Axis powers in charge. If you don’t agree, then with all due respect, you’re living on a different planet than the rest of us.
Not a political blog, that is true, yet politics is dealt with every day and with intensity. Politics and political concerns so dominate the present that it is impossible to discuss our life without reference to political realities. Instead of dealing on these themes so shallowly I might suggest a bit more seriousness.
Notice, Gamereg, that you have set up a binary as a rhetorical trap. This is what you-plural do. Your position, in essence, is exactly as I said. You view your selves exactly as I said. You see the world through that lens alone. And any critique, even mild critique, of your self-view calls forth the same, predictable reaction with the same assertions. It always resolves to the same. And through this manoeuvre you avoid the necessary, the essential, self-critical spirit needed.
Indeed — INDEED — I live on a different intellectual planet. I bring you a presage of what lies in the future. I try to alert you to changing views, reorganizations of perspective. To different schools of political theory. I also say that you-plural are fake Conservatives. Progressives in Conservative’s clothing.
Comments like that about “the rest of us” indicate a plea to the herd, an appeal to the herd.
I admit, it was a rhetorical trap, and you walked right into it. It would have easy enough for you to say, “Of course we’re better off without Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Imperialist Japan, but…” and establish at least a SLIVER of common ground before going on to elaborate about why that doesn’t merit the chest-thumping we tend to think it does, but you couldn’t bring yourself to do it.
You say I make a plea to the herd, I say your insistence on standing apart from the herd, implying that you are smarter than us dumb sheep, is your biggest obstacle to being understood here. If our reaction to your contrarian view is so predictable, then if you’re honest in not having malicious intent, if you truly want us to buy what you’re selling, then perhaps you could use those predictions to formulate arguments we find more persuasive.
Right!
So here we go . . .
It is true that you set a rhetorical trap. It is also true that I recognized it and avoided it. And by doing so I achieved my objective — and this objective I have made clear since I first began writing here. So, perhaps you will understand that by opposing you, by declining an invitation to chime in and recite from a list of agreements, or complaints, that I have opened, or kept open, a door to actual learning and conversation. In order to achieve my objective I have to a) be willing to take a stand against a group of people who are so damned certain that their perspective is the right one that any opposition to that herd-like perspective is seen as assault, or meanness, or the raving of someone mentally ill, and b) to avoid any sort of *teaming up* together in a herd-like assembly.
I have to be willing to offend, contradict, and suffer the consequences of inevitable insult, as well as the consequences of being set-up to perform a role. This role I have both been assigned and have chosen for myself. In this sense I *walked into the trap* but there really was no way to avoid it.
If you were here 6 years ago it was Spartan who assigned the *mentally ill* label. But it was also Jack who set me up with the *winning* of the honor of a comment of the day that was, in fact, an express condemnation. (A thread having to do with my opinion that homosexuality should not be encouraged). Once the herd applies the given labels everyone then uses those labels as they are convenient. These are typical dynamics of forums and similar spaces but I suggest that you can see how *social coercion* works. This dynamic must be considered and thought about within the realm of determining what is true and what is false.
Imagine a university advertising a given course by saying “You will be sold on certain established perspectives and we plan to introduce you to all the sophistical and rhetorical traps in order to *sell* you on a specific, predetermined perspective! Dumb yourself down because we intend to trick you! Our purpose is to create a nation of idiots who no longer even care to think things through!” I suggest to you that what I have just described, ironically, is in fact how *thinking* actually occurs. It is not really thinking. Just like you-plural are aware that the kids at the universities today seek *safe spaces* and a so-called *learning environment* free of conflict, you-plural also show that you have a relation to the same tendency.
What you wish to do — I call this ‘rehearsal’ — is to read from a list of established agreements. To chime in together just to recite them, but with no real purpose. But to say that you have no purpose in this is not so. Your purpose is to shut down conversation so that you do not have to do much difficult thinking, and of course you-plural seem to do very little reading.
‘Slivers of common ground’ did you say? Whatever is your *ground* — you struggle to define it in fact — but whatever it is I am not sure I want to ‘share’ it. The reasons are just as I say. Your Americanism is a disguised form of progressive radicalism. You are not conservatives and you are, in varying degrees, radicals. This I can PROVE. But you-plural do not have that consciousness and self-understanding. Because you have never really been challenged to investigate your selves. I always say this because it is true: you lack self-reflection. You lack self-interrogation. Those you oppose so adamantly are those you are tied to in ways that can be easily demonstrated. But showing you this arouses a tremendous ire! But I have said this a thousand times: you are used to giving lectures, not receiving them. You’re an American after all! You tell the entire world what is right & true! And then hypocritically demonstrate the near exact value-opposite of what you propose. That is why I say you have become PERVERSE PEOPLE. Here of course I veer into really large generalisms (these are unfair). But these are necessary.
You say I make a plea to the herd, I say your insistence on standing apart from the herd, implying that you are smarter than us dumb sheep, is your biggest obstacle to being understood here.
. . . if you truly want us to buy what you’re selling,
You need to determine how it is that you have been reduced to being the *dumb sheep* that you describe. I have outlined the rhetorical and sophistical tactics that you regularly employ. I have shown that there is a better route. At the very least I have indicated the value in taking a contradictory stance. But here is another very important thing: in my way of understanding ideas, ideology, thinking and intellect: I have no interest in ‘selling’ you an idea-product! In my understanding of the way that ideas should be communicated you can’t simply roll up to the *filling station* have have ideas poured into your head! You have to struggle for knowledge and understanding! You have to fight for it! If a *teacher* existed, and if there were really a *student*, the student has to work very very hard in relation to the teacher.
The biggest obstacle to your understanding ANYTHING is, in fact, in yourself. I have nothing to do with it. As a culture, and as I say, you have obviously been dumbed-down. You can’t think! You refuse to do it. You want to have your idea-cans filled up from the herd assembly plant!
All I can do is to function as you have asked me to function: a wrench in the works; an oppositional stance; throwing up some contrary comments in the hope that some part of it gets through. But you are going to have to do the work. It can’t be done for you.
This is what you’ve come to. This is America. Do you think I am just being mean here?!? Look at what you wrote! And try to understand my necessary response.
If our reaction to your contrarian view is so predictable, then if you’re honest in not having malicious intent, if you truly want us to buy what you’re selling, then perhaps you could use those predictions to formulate arguments we find more persuasive.
Here I have to say a couple of things. One is that I do not have ‘absolute certainty’ about a great many things. I can say though that I have made an effort to take my own self-education processes seriously. Over the last 6 years I have done little else but read.
I have already made it clear that learning cannot be *selling*, though your reference to *persuasion* is not lost on me. Here I’d have to refer to Richard Weaver (and through Weaver to Plato). If there is something that is true, what is true is true because it is grounded in a principle. However, with that said, if the principles are not known, or not understood or shared, the rhetor (to use it in the best sense) will have no success in ‘persuading’ the listener. We often refer to California Chris as a sort of ’emblem’ of one that can’t be convinced. He simply will not hear it. He’ll have no part of it.
How do you convince those who refuse your terms? Whose predicates are very different, or even ‘radically different’? But let me say again: you are Americans and this means that you are radicals, and progressive radicals, of a specific sort. This ‘Americanism’ can be, and needs to be, examined more closely. You cannot define conservatism through radical predicates!
Therefore, and here I am trying to answer your question (insofar as it was a question) I am not sure if I can convince you or persuade you. And in fact I am somewhat shaky myself. I have a sense about what a *proper foundation* in real principles is, or should be, but I am just as much (and in some ways more) of a product of the radicalism I describe.
But you see I confront *you* (plural of course) and my only option is to turn back on myself and try to figure out how it happened that I turned out like this. That is, that we all turned out like this; that we are exponents of Hyper-Liberalism and have absorbed it.
If I had ‘malicious intent’ — and this is simply impossible to even suggest! — you would have recognized this ages ago.
What I can say is the following: the great powers in our present, the great coercive powers that have succeeded in molding thought (through academia, through media, through Hollywood) have achieved a tremendous rhetorical and sophistical success. Trickery and deception are so pervasive that in order to be a sincere intellect one has, in my opinion, to start from a rather paranoid assumption: I am being lied to at every juncture and in every situation. If this is true, then our object can only be, and must be, unraveling lies. But this extends well beyond — far beyond! — politics and into other realms of consideration.
My weakness is that I still have to get clear about the foundations in defined principles. It is quite possible, indeed probably, that these are — ultimately — spiritual values and principles. Therefore, to understand *deviation* and *decadence* is both an external endeavor (to understand what went wrong and when) and an internal one (to understand how we have become victims of these things).
You can’t turn the world around just in a day or in a decade even. If there is going to be a recovery in our world — people do speak of this as you know — it will only come about when principles are rediscovered, re-emphasized, and re-believed.
Reading the multitude of tangents that you concoct from thin air and then extrapolate to absurdity are, at some level, entertaining but certainly not worth feeding.
Troll: Those that post inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion, often for their own amusement.
Your comment is classic trolling.
If I am a troll — I certainly am not — then your next steps must be to advocate for banning me from commenting here. That would be the right and proper thing for all concerned. If I really were a troll or had been acting like a troll I would not mount any self-defence.
What I do Steve, and the reason I do it, is beyond your capacity to understand. How this came about can be explained. In fact I do explain it. I take strongly critical postures, that is true, but I do not have malicious intentions. And that is an important distinction to make.
Steve,
Abort! Abort!
Honestly La Sylphide, when I think the action fits the word I have absolutely no problem using it, I just call’em as I see’em.
Roger that.
Thank-you indeed.
1. Eva Murray
A perfect example of why we should be skeptical of every such claim absent substantial evidence.
Would that the news media had been as careful when the likes of Julie Sweatnik came forward. Christine Blasey-Ford at least lived in the same state at the same time, and in roughly the same social circle as Bret Kavanaugh, even if no evidence whatever shows that she ever met him.
I am still skeptical of Tara Reade, but mainly in the details. I am never sure these days that sexual harassment is what a given woman says it is, let alone sexual assault, given some of the things I have seen. I have seen too many examples of women apparently mis-remembering encounters and deriving more from them than a rational person would have at the moment of the interaction. I’m not necessarily calling sincerity into question, but memory, and “believe all victims” is an unethical position to defend.
Unfortunately for Biden, he has a long history of uninvited touching on camera, and anecdotally from other women, so it’s hard not to lend more credence to Reade’s story than most. Still, I recommend a heavy dose of “please convince me more.” Note that I am deliberately not addressing Biden’s profound hypocrisy, as that does not incriminate him in a sexual assault charge — merely as a presidential candidate and leader.
2. Media bias
I applaud him for honesty while being revolted by his Doomsday License.
Further reading on this topic: Bernard Goldberg today at Real Clear Politics.
3. Nate Silver
Perhaps he should suffer the nickname, “Captain Obvious.”
4. Conway family
Well, James Carville, a Democrat firebrand, and Mary Matlin, a Republican partisan, have made this work for years, and she was similarly employed by presidents Regan and G.W. Bush.
I think it’s impressive, and honestly, an inspiration for two people to overcome this level of disagreement on any topic and not have the marriage collapse.
The difference, as you point out, is that but for Kellyanne, George Conway would be unknown. That was never true for Carville and Matlin. Why Kellyanne would stay married to scum like George Conway is beyond my ken. Must be “Wuv, true wuv…”
This is very different from the Carvilles though, who were well short of the line. Carville and his wife were both political consultants. being partisan was their job.George Conway isn’t a consultant. He’s using his wife’s name to get publicity, and using the publicity to attack his wife’s employer. Completely different, and despicable.
Do you think the Washington Post would give just any lawyer an op-ed for a standard issue Orange Man Bad rant? Carville and Matalin built their reputations and careers on their own—many never figured out they were married.
I think I mentioned that about the Carville-Matlin team. And Matlin was more than a consultant, she was an assistant to GW Bush and counselor for Dick Cheney.
As to the post, no, probably not unless he were a) a republican and b) someone who should ordinarily be pro-trump to the extent his dissent is extraordinary.
Kind of like Conway…
But Carville had an independent reputation and public image…and was mostly engaging in free lance punditry by the time W. was in office. And he never engaged in the kind of vicious rhetoric toward Bush that Conway aims at Trump, not even close.
Again, the analogy is a rogue spouse disrupting the workplace. I cannot imagine a situation where my spouse set out to publicly harm a client of mine where I would not say, “Stop this. Or I have to fire the client.” Without Conway in the white House, her husband holds no interest to the public.
I’d dispute your assertion about the rhetoric, and keep in mind that the level of acceptable rhetoric has changed since then. I think you are marking a distinction without a difference given the differing political eras.
I don’t think political office really fits the generic “workplace” model, nor people not employed but related to employees voicing their opinion. To me, this argument is a stretch, and not very convincing.
I reckon this is just one of the perils of modern politics.
It’s one of the modern perils of being married to an irredeemable asshole.
You really think the standards of acceptable political rhetoric has changed since Bush?
Yep, they’ve just gotten looser, when a president can openly refer to his opponent as a bullshitter and a comedian/pundit can call him a cockholster…
But still shouldn’t in both cases. See: “A Nation of Assholes.”
Oh believe me, I agree with you 100% that this nation is spiraling deeper and deeper into being a nation of assholes, because, as you pointed out long ago, a lot of folks are using the current president as an excuse and a justification for being not just unapologetic but justified assholes. Assholery on one side begets assholery on the other, because by now almost everyone grasps that taking the high road or maintaining a dignified silence in the face of assholery gets you nowhere, just like taking the lazy teacher’s advice to just ignore teasing didn’t get you too far, but fighting back was fairly effective. That said, to paraphrase something my former music teacher (who was at one time a session musician for A Flock of Seagulls) now turned superintendent of schools once said in an assembly he called to deal with an outbreak of school fighting: who thinks who’s right or wrong, who likes or hates who, who said what about who or what are all secondary things. The primary thing is that everyone focus on the reason you’re here in the first place. Kids can’t learn in an environment where they are constantly throwing insults or punches, and people can’t achieve much in a society where attacking one another and denying those you disagree with a victory are the only things considered worth doing.
Trump values loyalty. Kellyanne Conway has been ardently loyal from the beginning. Trump fires those that disagree or contradict him. Kellyanne has never done that to my recollection.
Her husband’s extreme disloyalty to his wife makes Kellyanne’s loyalty to Trump look all the more impressive. Cognitive dissonance in an unexpected direction; dragging himself down elevates his wife by comparison. Trump, being on marriage number 3, is also likely sympathetic to the mess her relationship must be.
Not the point, though. Every employee has the minimal duty of not allowing family issues to disrupt the workplace. She is not powerless in this matter.
“He’s your husband. Fix it. You have 30 days.”
George is an incredible asshole.
That’s not loyalty, that sycophancy.
1. Welp, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. John Tower was pretty much brought down by anonymous accusations that he was seen drunk in Washington on days when he wasn’t even in the US. Never mind, it was enough to raise enough questions to disqualify him as a potential SecDef. Please explain to me why this much more serious accusation isn’t enough to raise enough questions to get Biden kicked off the ticket? I’ll wait.
2. If nothing else, it’s kind of refreshing to hear this. It’s a look behind the mask. With your permission, I’m going to repost, with some modifications, something here that I posted on January 31, 2018, but that got lost among a VERY long thread consisting mainly of Chris fighting with everyone else.
I think the left isn’t being totally honest…yet. The left are at heart totalitarians, but not just nanny-state totalitarians who want to “put it my way but nicely.” Every so often, as it did here, the mask slips and they are revealed as the bullies and tyrants they really are. A good chunk of them don’t just disagree with the right, they hate and loathe the right and want the right gone.
I’ve twice reposted Jim Wright’s unhinged rant from stonekettle station calling for destructive rioting and the beating up of anyone who disagrees with the left’s campaign of historical airbrushing. I won’t repost it yet again, first because looking at it makes my face turn purple and my blood pressure spike, secondly because twice is probably one time too many. But go ahead and look it up if you want a look behind the mask.
Actor Michael Shannon posted the following after the 2016 election:
“There’s a lot of old people who need to realize they’ve had a nice life, and it’s time for them to move on, because they’re the ones who go out and vote for these assholes. If you look at the young people, between 18 and 25, if it was up to them, Hillary would have been president. No offense to the seniors out there. My mom’s a senior citizen. But if you’re voting for Trump, it’s time for the urn.”
“And if your parents voted for Trump? “Fuck ’em. You’re an orphan now. Don’t go home. Don’t go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Don’t talk to them at all. Silence speaks volumes.”
This isn’t talk of totalitarian rule. This isn’t even eugenics. This is talk of liquidation of all those a certain age and/or all those who voted a certain way. It’s also a VERY revealing look behind the mask. In 2004 Michelle Malkin accused Ted Rall, then about the farthest left you could get, of being “an ideological streaker” for publishing a cartoon that said that the proper fate for Condoleeza Rice was to be sent to “inner-city racial re-education camp,” and that statements like that reflected the real thinking of the left at the time, without the drapery of “diversity” or “multiculturalism” that was usually used to cover it.
A look behind the mask in 2004, during the contentious Bush/Kerry election revealed some outrageous enough thoughts. A look now doesn’t show harsh humor with racial overtones (of course it’s ok for the left to use racial overtones). It shows naked hatred with politicidal (killing because of politics) and geriatricidal (killing because of age) intent. Now we also get admissions that justice takes a back seat to advancing the one side. This isn’t amusing, it isn’t witty, it isn’t even fun to read, unless your idea of fun is to get yourself frothing with hatred and talk of tyranny, politics over justice, and mass murder.
Look, I get that when one side in a political contest loses there is going to be anger and frustration. When one side in a political contest loses badly AGAINST what all the predictors and indicators show, there is going to be a LOT of anger and frustration. When that side has rallied around candidates who never accept the blame, and has made a habit of never accepting the blame, while at the same time feeding itself hatred of the other side as racist, hateful, xenophobic, it isn’t going to look inward, ask where it went wrong, and plan to do better the next time out. It’s going to blame the other side for selling evil and everyone who voted for the other side for buying evil and declare both evil. You don’t debate with evil, you don’t negotiate with evil, you don’t try to get along with evil, you destroy evil, because it’s evil.
To the left, trying to deal with the right now is like the firemen trying to deal with the fire instead of putting it out, or the Allies negotiating a peace with Hitler. Maybe Kurt Schlict wasn’t using hyperbole when he said we on the right should fear being knocked down with a Birkenstock stomping on our faces forever. I’d take it one step farther and say we on the right should fear a future where liberal bulletproof limousine convoys traverse highways past collapsing barns and farmhouses, orchards and fields growing wild, and shops and stores with dark windows, empty shelves, and slowly collapsing roofs on their way from New York to Boston or DC, while inside pantsuited women and suave nonwhite men eat smoked almonds and raise glasses of champagne that cost more than whole meals to a future without the right.
3. To coin a phrase, Nate, DUH!
4. Me either.
You’re of course talking about yourself and your own violent fantasies.
Are we expected to forget that you’ve called for death squads to go around the US murdering those you don’t like?
https://ethicsalarms.com/2017/09/04/dcac-ethics/#comment-466502
Haha, that’s not what I called for, valky. I called for the use of force to end the threat of Antifa, and if they had to get a little extralegal, then so be it, same as Operation Banner in Northern Ireland, where militias finally rose up against an organization that was a large criminal gang with good publicity, the police finally decided it was time to stop playing, and ultimately the military had to enter the situation to keep it from getting still worse. I would also respectfully remind you that you talked about murdering governors in the wake of the 2016 election.
Look, valky, I don’t want this nation to become a tyranny. I’m getting enough of a taste of that right now with a governor who sneered that the Bill of Rights wasn’t even on his mind when he put the whole state into lockdown, and is one of the most resistant to the idea of reopening even a little, as though social distancing will cure this. I don’t see how open hatred of both sides here, at a time when we need to pull together helps.
ANTIFA
New Yorker article 2017:
On October 4, 1936, tens of thousands of Zionists, Socialists, Irish dockworkers, Communists, anarchists, and various outraged residents of London’s East End gathered to prevent Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists from marching through their neighborhood. This clash would eventually be known as the Battle of Cable Street: protesters formed a blockade and beat back some three thousand Fascist Black Shirts and six thousand police officers. To stop the march, the protesters exploded homemade bombs, threw marbles at the feet of police horses, and turned over a burning lorry. They rained down a fusillade of projectiles on the marchers and the police attempting to protect them: rocks, brickbats, shaken-up lemonade bottles, and the contents of chamber pots. Mosley and his men were forced to retreat.
Antifaschistische Aktion can also be looked into.
The origin of an antifascist movement is directly tied to the ideas that were spread in the schools that you have to take direct and militant action against fascism when it manifests. The question “Why did you do nothing when Hitler came to power?!?” is answered by idealistic youths who decide to ‘do something’.
Now though, they have identified *you-plural* as part of the problem, and they take action against YOU.
The nature of these struggles of today are harmonic echoes of those of Europe in the 20s and 30s.
That is a very interesting comment! And the whole exchange there is interesting.
If it was up to me I would put together a nationwide task force from a whole alphabet soup of agencies, including seconding people from the CIA, including infiltration specialists, spies, analysts, and a few teams of counter-terror operators who can break in a door or hit a camp, kill or grab everyone there, and be GONE before the echo fades, leaving anyone else in the area none the wiser.
This describes, without any masking, how power functions and how it conceives of itself. I am not necessarily judging it. But if Steve and whatever faction of politics he resides in can support it, or carry it out, then any other faction can do the same and ‘be justified’ in doing it.
This is a conversation — the conversation about Power and how, when power decides, it can violate any and all Constitutional guarantees in order to secure those ends it has identified as the truly, and not just the superficially, important — this conversation cannot be developed in its fullness here. The ‘patriotic American’ refuses to examine these things.
The other aspect of this (assassinations, extra-judicial killing, and other extra-political means to silence opposition) is now what YOU-PLURAL are having to deal with. And only now, really & truly, are you-plural up in arms about it. Then you go nuts talking about *Constitutional abuses* and we find you sniffling in the corner — so violated!
This is called HYPOCRISY of course.
I find Steve Witherspoon’s comments about Sealioning to be deliciously hysterical! The questions Chris asked and the ironical comments he made were 100% appropriate. Except that you-your selves should have done it. not relied on a California Nut-Job to act as a moral and ethical authority.
I love you all despite your mind-boggling and intense moral & ethical confusion!
#4 Their marriage clearly is an unexplainable anomaly and I suspect that when people are clearly on such opposite ends of the moral and political spectrum, their marriage won’t last.
As far as requiring her to “fix the problem one way or the other” I think that is outside the bounds of her job and outside the bounds of employer and employee relationship. As long as she does her job to the complete satisfaction of the President then the political views of her husband are off limits in the workplace regardless of what he does.
As for the Lincoln Project…
The The Lincoln Project’s put together an article called WE ARE REPUBLICANS, AND WE WANT TRUMP DEFEATED and it reads like a continuous screed of hate and like a good anti-Trump resistance media outlet the New York Times published their screed last December.
The following quote is straight from their screed that I linked to above, this is The Lincoln Project’s reason for existing, their core thesis…
“we must stem the damage he [President Trump] and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.”
Here are my questions for the authors and supporters of the Lincoln Project…
1. How is President Trump and his followers damaging the rule of law?
2. How is President Trump and his followers damaging the Constitution?
3. How is President Trump and his followers damaging the American character? To answer that one they have to first define what is American character.
I’ve seen people on Facebook sharing information on the Lincoln Project and when I’ve ask supporters of the Lincoln project these questions I always get back the same things, deflections, nonsense and personal insults. It appears that they simply can’t answer the questions. They know they hate President Trump, the Lincoln Project hates President Trump and that’s good enough for them – the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The whole “project” appears to be about attacking the President and his supporters with unsupportable accusations, they’re bigots and that sounds just like a 21st century progressive.
We are not objecting to his views. He is exploiting his wife’s job to disrupt his wife’s job. I don’t see why this distinction eludes so many.
And I would remind you that is a lie. I spoke of my fear that governors would be murdered by angry mobs. I did not speak of doing it, I did not speak of encouraging it, I did not speak of wishing it to happen.
What you spoke of–speak of–is murder.
I prefer my political victories occur sans body-count. Killing is habit-forming and I’d lief not build my palace on a foundation of bones.
” We’re not living in an age of states raising militias to go fight. We live in an age of high performance aircraft, infantry in the field is meat for the grinder. In this day and age if there’s a rebellion it’ll come in the for of an angry mob throwing bombs, losing thousands to militarized police and still coming. Storming state houses. It’ll be with impromptu people’s courts and governor’s being hanged. It’ll be the president hiding in an undisclosed location while the White House is burned. A bacchanalia of violence with people on each side going hunting the other.
And that word, other will be an important one because hunters on either side won’t consider their prey human.
Basically the worst thing that can happen short of someone pressing a button and burning us all with the nuclear fire”
“Unacceptable. Full stop. I’ll take the civil war.”
Both posted by you November 18 after the election. Still say I’m lying? I know that was right in the wake of the election, and that was hard on the left, but every so often you go completely off the rails. Don’t let this be one of those times.
So I said governors being hanged is the worst thing possible short of nuclear armageddon and you want to claim that’s approval? After your call for extralegal force–a cute little euphemism for murder.
That’s really where you want to go with this?
How about “I’ll take the civil war?” That’s called a call for insurrection, maybe even treason. I really don’t want to go anywhere with this. I’d prefer not to engage with you at all, since it’s going to produce a lot of heat and no light, but, here we are.
If you really don’t want to quote mine without citations pushing out of context snippets like gosh the breakdown of civil order is bad as glorifying the breakdown of civil order there’s a simple solution.
Don’t do it.
You are perfectly free to back down and leave me in possession of the field.
Haha, you know what you said, and there’s no way around it. You and your talk about how you want to castrate and burn Mitch McConnell are well known, then there was that stupid comment about the prince electors, and a bunch of other bitter and vicious comments. Like I said at least twice, every so often you go off the rails and start writing like your twelve year old has gotten a hold of your account. You’re also perfectly free to withdraw until you can get your venom under control.
Steve-O-in-NJ wrote, “Like I said at least twice, every so often you go off the rails and start writing like your twelve year old has gotten a hold of your account.”
If you’re honest you’d have to acknowledge that most of us, you and I included, do that same thing once in a while.
Oh, I admit it. Being behind a keyboard often brings out the worst in people.
Citation Needed.
We’ve already shown that you quote mine and try to spin. Disingenuous is your nature.
Paste the link, let people read the context.
Maybe we should expand our conceptual toolbox with the Karpman drama triangle
It seems more and more relevant for this blog
I nominate Alan Dershowitz for an “Ethics Hero” designation for this piece. He spares neither side of the debate, and I think he’s spot on.
Regarding the resistance.
It’s amusing. Resistance conjures up romantic visions of French freedom fighters sabotaging Nazi occupiers and submitting to torture and not snitching on their compatriots. The evil oppressors having subjugated all their basic rights and liberties. The free press crushed.
This modern resistance is the strangest in world history. Not a single aspect of freedom of speech is abridged or even remotely in danger of abridgment.
These freedom fighters, contrary to all freedom fighters in world history, actually spend most of their efforts upholding honesty and virtue of the various unelected agencies of national State security and policing force such as the CIA and the FBI.
Idiots. All of them.
Are you intentionally quoting Mrs. Peachum, or are YOU Mrs. Peachum?
I’m afraid I’m about to reveal cultural ignorance. But, who?
My rant was inspired by something Glenn Greenawald said on the Fifth Column podcast.
Then HE is Mrs. Peachum! The line comes at the end of this song, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” from the Marc Blitzstein adaptation of “The Threepenny Opera.” The singer is Chalotte Rae, who played the nice head of the girl’s school in “The Facts of Life”
Guess I’ll have to put my rant to music then.