It could be said that an essential attribute of a successful regime in the age of mass politics is vulgarity.
But there is a considerable difference between the mere vulgarity of style and propaganda of the liberal regimes and the profound vulgarity of values of authoritarian and, even worse, fascist, racist, or Nazi regimes.
And right now many leading Western nations are sliding from the former toward the latter.
Are regimes, parties, or movements of the further left also committed to vulgar values?
Or is that another difference between them and regimes of the vicious right, from the merely authoritarian even to the totalitarian?
Questions that arise while watching on Amazon video Detective De Luca.
Tuesday, December 3, 2019
Friday, November 29, 2019
So like Trump it's scary
Brazil’s president claims DiCaprio paid for Amazon fires
Brazil’s president has falsely accused the actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio of bankrolling the deliberate incineration of the Amazon rainforest.
Jair Bolsonaro – a populist nationalist who has vowed to drive environmental NGOs from Brazil – made the claim on Friday, reportedly telling supporters: “This Leonardo DiCaprio’s a cool guy, isn’t he? Giving money for the Amazon to be torched.”
The spurious accusation – for which Brazil’s president offered no proof – came 24 hours after Bolsonaro made a similarly unsubstantiated claim in a Facebook live broadcast.
“Leonardo DiCaprio, dammit, you’re collaborating with the burning of the Amazon,” Bolsonaro declared, accusing the actor of being part of an international “campaign against Brazil”.
Bolsonaro’s unsubstantiated allegations relate to the controversial arrest on Tuesday of four volunteer firefighters whom local police accused – also apparently without evidence – of setting fire to the forest in order to boost fundraising efforts for an international NGO.
The firefighters were released on Thursday amid widespread public outrage at their treatment and questions over the police investigation.
On Thursday Bolsonaro’s politician son Eduardo claimed on Twitter that DiCaprio had donated $300,000 (£230,000) to “the NGO that set fire to the Amazon” and accused the conservation group WWF of paying the NGO about £13,000 for photographs of the burning forest.
. . . .
In August – as huge fires swept through the Amazon region sparking an international crisis – DiCaprio pledged $5m to help protect Brazil’s rainforests.
Brazil’s president has falsely accused the actor and environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio of bankrolling the deliberate incineration of the Amazon rainforest.
Jair Bolsonaro – a populist nationalist who has vowed to drive environmental NGOs from Brazil – made the claim on Friday, reportedly telling supporters: “This Leonardo DiCaprio’s a cool guy, isn’t he? Giving money for the Amazon to be torched.”
The spurious accusation – for which Brazil’s president offered no proof – came 24 hours after Bolsonaro made a similarly unsubstantiated claim in a Facebook live broadcast.
“Leonardo DiCaprio, dammit, you’re collaborating with the burning of the Amazon,” Bolsonaro declared, accusing the actor of being part of an international “campaign against Brazil”.
Bolsonaro’s unsubstantiated allegations relate to the controversial arrest on Tuesday of four volunteer firefighters whom local police accused – also apparently without evidence – of setting fire to the forest in order to boost fundraising efforts for an international NGO.
The firefighters were released on Thursday amid widespread public outrage at their treatment and questions over the police investigation.
On Thursday Bolsonaro’s politician son Eduardo claimed on Twitter that DiCaprio had donated $300,000 (£230,000) to “the NGO that set fire to the Amazon” and accused the conservation group WWF of paying the NGO about £13,000 for photographs of the burning forest.
. . . .
In August – as huge fires swept through the Amazon region sparking an international crisis – DiCaprio pledged $5m to help protect Brazil’s rainforests.
Too much for me, anyway
I think the fetus is entitled to protection when it resembles a small human being.
An unborn child, in fact.
But I am willing to accept legislation based on the idea it is entitled from conception since that's better than the baby killer position it is never so entitled.
This, however, is a bridge too far.
Ohio bill orders doctors to ‘reimplant ectopic pregnancy’ or face 'abortion murder' charges
Ohio introduces one of the most extreme bills to date for a procedure that does not exist in medical science
That it isn't done doesn't mean it can't be done.
An unborn child, in fact.
But I am willing to accept legislation based on the idea it is entitled from conception since that's better than the baby killer position it is never so entitled.
This, however, is a bridge too far.
Ohio bill orders doctors to ‘reimplant ectopic pregnancy’ or face 'abortion murder' charges
Ohio introduces one of the most extreme bills to date for a procedure that does not exist in medical science
That it isn't done doesn't mean it can't be done.
Thursday, November 28, 2019
He could just give the Taliban in Afghanistan carte blanche
He really believes most of what happens in the region is none of our business and no skin off our nose.
His totally shameless prioritizing of our business relationship with Saudi Arabia over the least interest in the domestic realities of the regime made that pretty clear, eh?
Trump Makes Surprise Afghanistan Visit, Says U.S. And Taliban Peace Talks Restarted
His totally shameless prioritizing of our business relationship with Saudi Arabia over the least interest in the domestic realities of the regime made that pretty clear, eh?
Trump Makes Surprise Afghanistan Visit, Says U.S. And Taliban Peace Talks Restarted
Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Why are O and his former team stabbing Joe B in the back?
Or are these reports mischievous Republican bullshit?
Obama Chides Biden over Failure to Connect to Iowa Voters: ‘You Know Who Really Doesn’t Have It? Joe Biden’
Obama Chides Biden over Failure to Connect to Iowa Voters: ‘You Know Who Really Doesn’t Have It? Joe Biden’
Other things more or less equal
10 years without pain can be 10 very good years.
20 years of agony is a diabolical punishment.
Just thinking where the opioïde controversy is going.
20 years of agony is a diabolical punishment.
Just thinking where the opioïde controversy is going.
Nobody has any right to be surprised.
Trump wants to take his war criminal buddies on the campaign trail
His supporters will love this.
And the leadership of the Republican Party has already implicitly sign on.
Recall that they were the torture party when Dick Cheney - er, GW Bush - was president.
Trump did not start that.
Cheney went there right away, and a lot of the country, and especially the GOP, went there with him.
Trump last week pardoned both Lorance and Golsteyn.
Lorance was serving a 19-year prison sentence for firing on unarmed civilians in Afghanistan, killing two; Golsteyn was charged last year with killing an Afghan bomb maker and burying the remains.
Conservatives have rallied around the pair, suggesting they were unfairly punished for decisions made in the heat of battle, while critics, including some military members and veterans, have suggested the pardons are a slap in the face to those who have served honorably and give soldiers carte blanche to commit heinous acts.
In perhaps his most contentious intervention in recent days, Trump ousted Navy Secretary Richard Spencer to protect Gallagher, who appeared poised to lose his Trident pin following his conviction this year of posing for a photograph with the corpse of an ISIS detainee he allegedly killed.
He’d been acquitted of more serious offenses, including murder, but was still facing repercussions in the SEALs.
His supporters will love this.
And the leadership of the Republican Party has already implicitly sign on.
Recall that they were the torture party when Dick Cheney - er, GW Bush - was president.
Trump did not start that.
Cheney went there right away, and a lot of the country, and especially the GOP, went there with him.
Trump last week pardoned both Lorance and Golsteyn.
Lorance was serving a 19-year prison sentence for firing on unarmed civilians in Afghanistan, killing two; Golsteyn was charged last year with killing an Afghan bomb maker and burying the remains.
Conservatives have rallied around the pair, suggesting they were unfairly punished for decisions made in the heat of battle, while critics, including some military members and veterans, have suggested the pardons are a slap in the face to those who have served honorably and give soldiers carte blanche to commit heinous acts.
In perhaps his most contentious intervention in recent days, Trump ousted Navy Secretary Richard Spencer to protect Gallagher, who appeared poised to lose his Trident pin following his conviction this year of posing for a photograph with the corpse of an ISIS detainee he allegedly killed.
He’d been acquitted of more serious offenses, including murder, but was still facing repercussions in the SEALs.
Monday, November 25, 2019
The thug in the White House
We have known since the 2016 campaign he approves of the third degree, police brutality, torture, and war crimes like murdering the families of terrorists.
His voters like him because they share those attitudes.
Trump issued direct order to halt disciplining of Navy Seal Edward Gallagher
Hitler's Nazis had a mass following. The Italian Fascists were a mass party.
Brutality was part of their appeal, and is still essential to the appeal of modern authoritarians and so-called "populists" in America, Europe, and around the world.
Lindsey Graham and others of the fucking bastard party are now talking about the need to cut, if not to outright privatize, Social Security and to cut Medicare benefits so money gathered by the relevant dedicated taxes can be diverted to deal with the shortfall in general tax revenues created by the Republican wet dream tax cuts so long wanted by the plutes and so well fronted by that pal of the common man, the forgotten man, Bozo the Liar, the Mini-Mussolini in the White House.
Plutes gonna plute.
An entire party whose central task is to fuck over everybody who isn't really, really rich, on behalf of those who are.
And they are delighted to find a front as effective as Trump.
They are like German and Italian plutes and capitalist sympathizers between the wars happy to find so effective a bulwark against the dreaded socialists and communists.
Warren and Sanders are, on this matter of excessive individual wealth, right, just as both Roosevelts were.
And I could live with a cap on individual private wealth.
Might be a good idea, like trust busting.
Too much individual wealth is also too much market power as well as too much political power.
And that's why Obamacare for all is better than Medicare for all.
Not a good idea for just one insurer to be effectively the only customer of all medical providers in the country, and that one under the direct, immediate, and constant control of bourgeois politicians of only weak, unreliable, minority, and limited loyalty to the masses.
Still, he's wrong to urge actual socialism as better than capitalism and she's right to urge what's needed is capitalism run by progressives for the social good.
All the same, a lot more Americans need to learn that Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and libertarian ideology are just bullshit really handy for the plutes.
They need to stop thinking, in effect, that the rich have every right to screw them to the wall.
Marx was certainly right that the moral and political convictions of the many are to far too great an extent a duperie, a false consciousness, an ideological smokescreen that makes the 90% - or more like 99.99% - their own class enemies.
But this is not.
There is no reason for the 90% to accept any version of capitalism that doesn't work as well as possible for them.
Even such a capitalism will work just swell for the remaining 10%, don't you worry about that.
Not as much as they want, but then there is no limit to what they want.
It goes way, way beyond anything remotely like rational self-interest, except on the most ludicrous construals of what is or might be rational.
Homo homini lupus, not because of need, but because of human nature.
The idea that there is no human nature, that "socialist man" is a social creature so much superior to "capitalist man", is part of the bullshit the left, unwilling to face the horrid truth, have sold themselves.
That it's all nurture, the stuff that matters, and none of it nature.
His voters like him because they share those attitudes.
Trump issued direct order to halt disciplining of Navy Seal Edward Gallagher
Hitler's Nazis had a mass following. The Italian Fascists were a mass party.
Brutality was part of their appeal, and is still essential to the appeal of modern authoritarians and so-called "populists" in America, Europe, and around the world.
Lindsey Graham and others of the fucking bastard party are now talking about the need to cut, if not to outright privatize, Social Security and to cut Medicare benefits so money gathered by the relevant dedicated taxes can be diverted to deal with the shortfall in general tax revenues created by the Republican wet dream tax cuts so long wanted by the plutes and so well fronted by that pal of the common man, the forgotten man, Bozo the Liar, the Mini-Mussolini in the White House.
Plutes gonna plute.
An entire party whose central task is to fuck over everybody who isn't really, really rich, on behalf of those who are.
And they are delighted to find a front as effective as Trump.
They are like German and Italian plutes and capitalist sympathizers between the wars happy to find so effective a bulwark against the dreaded socialists and communists.
Warren and Sanders are, on this matter of excessive individual wealth, right, just as both Roosevelts were.
And I could live with a cap on individual private wealth.
Might be a good idea, like trust busting.
Too much individual wealth is also too much market power as well as too much political power.
And that's why Obamacare for all is better than Medicare for all.
Not a good idea for just one insurer to be effectively the only customer of all medical providers in the country, and that one under the direct, immediate, and constant control of bourgeois politicians of only weak, unreliable, minority, and limited loyalty to the masses.
Still, he's wrong to urge actual socialism as better than capitalism and she's right to urge what's needed is capitalism run by progressives for the social good.
All the same, a lot more Americans need to learn that Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and libertarian ideology are just bullshit really handy for the plutes.
They need to stop thinking, in effect, that the rich have every right to screw them to the wall.
Marx was certainly right that the moral and political convictions of the many are to far too great an extent a duperie, a false consciousness, an ideological smokescreen that makes the 90% - or more like 99.99% - their own class enemies.
But this is not.
There is no reason for the 90% to accept any version of capitalism that doesn't work as well as possible for them.
Even such a capitalism will work just swell for the remaining 10%, don't you worry about that.
Not as much as they want, but then there is no limit to what they want.
It goes way, way beyond anything remotely like rational self-interest, except on the most ludicrous construals of what is or might be rational.
Homo homini lupus, not because of need, but because of human nature.
The idea that there is no human nature, that "socialist man" is a social creature so much superior to "capitalist man", is part of the bullshit the left, unwilling to face the horrid truth, have sold themselves.
That it's all nurture, the stuff that matters, and none of it nature.
Friday, November 22, 2019
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
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