SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Friday, January 29, 2021
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Monday, January 25, 2021
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Saturday, January 23, 2021
The Logic Of Bootlickers Is The Logic Of Too Many Americans
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https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-logic-of-bootlickers-is-the-logic-of-too-many-americans/
This is sweet and lovely in the purity of its boot-licking authoritarianism:
BELOW IS A RECREATION OF A TWEET:
Repeat after me:
I am not smarter than Joe Biden.
I am not smarter than Kamala Harris.
I am not smarter than Nancy Pelosi.
I am not smarter than James Carville.
But if I l stand back and watch and learn,
I will be smarter than I am.
The account then goes on to insult those who do not worship at the Biden altar.
The authoritarian personality is
simple: it slurps up; kicks down. You know the type. You’ve seen them
wherever you’ve worked, and you loathe them.
What is true is that Biden, Harris and Pelosi people are good at politics. They are good at seeking and getting political office.
But this is a category error; a profoundly stupid and harmful one.
First, this says nothing about their intelligence. Trump became President, is he smarter than you? (Or, if you’re dumb, smarter than many philosophers, scientists and so on who never earn any political office?)
What about George Bush Jr. smarter than you?
These people are good at getting political office, that doesn’t mean they are good at anything else. Pelosi is good at raising money and intra-caucus politics, but the House Democrats haven’t had a great electoral record while lead by her. She also passed almost all of Trump’s bills, including terrible ones like massive tax cuts and so on. She has renewed the Patriot Act multiple times. She refused to reign in George Bush when she got a majority in 2006.
She may be a good politician, but so what?
Harris did terribly in the primaries. She attacked Joe Biden as a segregationist (he was) and earned the VP slot, as best I can tell, by a campaign of backstabbing all the other possible candidates. She helped keep people known to be innocent in prison when a prosecutor.
Biden, in addition to being a segregationist, was one of the main Democratic boosters of the Iraq war. He was a driving force behind the bankruptcy bill which made it impossible to to discharge student debt. The Patriot Act was based on a bill he tried to pass in the 90s. He threatened Cuba with devastation if they dared give Snowden asylum. He’s apparently a great boss and a loving family man, but he’s filth. He’s also a known plagiarist.
Being able to get political power implies nothing more than an ability to get political power. Becoming rich implies nothing more than an ability to become rich.
Being good at A does not mean you are good at B to Z.
It certainly doesn’t mean your getting political power or money is good for anyone else. In most cases, the rise of most billionaires has been bad for other people. They have made money because they found a way to impoverish other people. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Grow some self-respect and a spine. Your leaders are only better than you in one sense: they are better predators than you are.
“Oh, I so admire the wolf,” simpered the sheep.
In fact, much of why you aren’t them is because you have morals. You aren’t willing to lock up people who know are innocent, like Kamala. You aren’t willing to destroy a foreign country and kill a million people like Biden. You wouldn’t go along with Trump’s massive tax cuts like Pelosi.
You have some ethics; some morality. You wouldn’t run a huge scheme to defraud millions of people and/or steal their homes like almost everyone senior on Wall Street. There are limits on the evil you are willing to do for money or power, and that means, in America, you can’t have either.
Whenever someone who has ethics gets anywhere near power, (Corbyn or Sanders) everything possible is done to destroy them. The media lied over 75% about Corbyn. Every single candidate dropped out in a period of a day to deny Sanders the Democratic nomination; an effort coordinated by Obama (who may well be smarter than you, and whose evil was carefully concealed behind his smiling sociopathy.)
The elites have spent the last 50 or
so years driving 97% of Americans into the dirt, and rewarding
themselves with billions. They are predators, and nothing else. You are
the sheep, and the cops and military are the sheepdogs: still animals,
and discarded the moment they aren’t useful. (Check those military
veteran homeless stats.)
Biden, Harris and Pelosi (who cares about Carville?) aren’t smarter than you, odds are, and unless you’re Stalin reborn, they’re worse people than you in every way except their ability to get and hold power and use it against the American people and foreigners.
Hopefully they’ll be less evil rulers than Trump (though note, he didn’t start any new wars), but that’s not a bar.
Have some self respect. Your system elects not the best of you, but the worst.
Thinking the worst are the best: that’s the problem. They’ve indoctrinated you like farm animals “they feed us, and I’m sure the beating are because they love us, and I’m sure when they loaded Thelma and Fred and George on the truck last week and they never came back, well they were taking them to a better place.”
Except you don’t even get that good a deal, since they’re happy to see you starve and don’t try and heal you when you’re sick.
Grow up.
These people feed on you, and that’s all you are to them.
Friday, January 22, 2021
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Saturday, January 16, 2021
Dems Reject Bigger Survival Checks, Float Tax Breaks For The Rich - The Daily Poster
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Dems Reject Bigger Survival Checks, Float Tax Breaks For The Rich - The Daily Poster
EXCERPT:
And yet, Democratic lawmakers are also considering a new tax break
that could cost nearly as much or more as the savings gleaned from
reducing the survival checks — and the tax break’s benefits would
primarily go to the rich.
Friday, January 15, 2021
Thursday, January 14, 2021
ZZ's blog: Twenty Twenty-one: An Arresting Start
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ZZ's blog: Twenty Twenty-one: An Arresting Start
Excerpt:
At the same time, there is a palpable relief that Donald Trump’s four years of policy improvisation, emotional instability, and outbursts of racial and gender animosity are now coming to a close. The idea that a person of Trump’s impulsiveness and shallowness had a hand in US foreign and military policy would keep any sane person awake at night. Sadly, it escapes most pundits’ and politicians’ short memory that previous Presidents, like Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, were equally, if not more, dangerous.
Where Trump’s self-delusion as a master in dealmaking led him to seek rapprochement with some of the establishment’s designated enemies, he was invariably thwarted by the establishment’s fail-safe mechanisms. If the four years of Trump taught us nothing, it was that the rules of the game were carefully protected by the mechanisms long established by the capitalist ruling class to contain politics within a narrow range of action. Trump’s unorthodox policies ran headlong into the firewall created by what Marx described as the “...committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” They were stalled, ignored, or subverted by the system’s defenders.
Four years ago, before the 2016 inauguration, James Comey of the FBI-- representing the capitalist Praetorian guard, the security agencies-- advised Trump that his behavior was and would be carefully scrutinized. He was to understand, as other newly elected Presidents had customarily learned from J. Edgar Hoover, that embarrassing information could be produced to discredit his tenure. The infamous Steele Dossier was meant to demonstrate the power of the Praetorian Guard, should Trump get out of line. Through sheer arrogance or ignorance, Trump defied the message and fired the messenger. Consequently, he battled the security services throughout his Presidency.
Too often the center-left, the decaffeinated left, sided with the snoops, torturers, and killers of the security services in their ruthless campaign to get Trump-- a dangerous game of opportunism that surrenders the few remaining restraints on the police and judicial system. Those who can protect us from Trump will protect us from real social change with even more zeal.
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Sunday, January 10, 2021
Saturday, January 09, 2021
Wednesday, January 06, 2021
Tuesday, January 05, 2021
Monday, January 04, 2021
The Assange Extradition Ruling Is A Relief, But It Isn't Justice - Caitlin’s Newsletter
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The Assange Extradition Ruling Is A Relief, But It Isn't Justice - Caitlin’s Newsletter:
Excerpt:
British Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled against US extradition for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but not for the reasons she should have. Baraitser's frightening ruling supported virtually every US prosecutorial argument that was made during the extradition trial, no matter how absurd and Orwellian.
Sunday, January 03, 2021
Saturday, January 02, 2021
ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Legal Teams Likely Informed Already of Judge’s Decision – Alexander Mercouris -- Consortium News
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ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Legal Teams Likely Informed Already of Judge’s Decision – Consortiumnews:
In accordance with a British magistrate court’s usual procedure, Julian Assange’s Judgment has almost certainly already been written and sent in draft form to the respective teams of lawyers, probably early on Friday evening.
The lawyers therefore already know what the decision is, as well as the British government and at least the Department of Justice in Washington.
Under established procedure, Assange’s lawyers are not supposed to tell Assange himself what the decision is so he and his family are probably the only people who are directly involved in his case who don’t yet know its outcome.
The purpose in sending the Judgment in draft form to the lawyers in advance of the Court hearing is to give them an opportunity to check it for factual mistakes.
The public will not know the outcome until Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser reads out the Judgment in its finalised form, with any factual mistakes corrected, when Court convenes on Monday at 10 am London time. The Judgment should then be published online by the Court Service directly after she has finished.
In addition to the Judgment – and obviously to the decision whether or not to extradite, which will be set out in the Judgment – the public may learn immediately afterward whether either of the two sets of lawyers intend to appeal. Either side has seven days to appeal the judgment.
While the intent of allowing both sides to see the Judgment in advance is not to help facilitate an appeal, having the judgement before it is read to the court affords attorneys to a chance to consider whether or not to launch one.
If It’s a Split Decision
One possibility that must be considered is that Baraitser may decide to extradite on one indictment and not on the other, for instance, if she rules against extradition on the Espionage Act charges, but decides in favour of extradition on the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge (which carries a maximum five year sentence as opposed to 170 on espionage.)
I think what would happen in that case is that the British authorities would accept Baraitser’s decision and would try to reach an agreement with the DoJ whereby, in return for Assange’s extradition, the U.S. would commit itself to try Assange only on the computer intrusion charges, and not on the Espionage Act charges.
The British over the course of the negotiations would tell the U.S. that if the U.S. were not willing to give that commitment then the British would not be able to extradite Assange to the U.S.
Of course the British (if Assange were extradited to the U.S. on such a basis) would be in no position to compel the U.S. to abide by such a commitment if the U..S were to go back on it once Assange was on U.S. soil.
Since that has to be a very likely possibility, one would think it would be a point which Assange’s lawyers would make in the appeal they would be bound to make to the High Court against Baraitser’s decision.
In fact in such a scenario it’s not impossible that both sides would appeal to the High Court:
(1) the U.S. against Baraitser’s decision to refuse to extradite on the basis of the Espionage Act;
(2) Assange’s lawyers against Baraitser’s decision to extradite on the computer intrusion charges.
It would be a fascinating battle and it would be fascinating to see how it would play out.
Logically, the balance ought to tip in Assange’s favour since Baraitser would presumably have rejected extradition on the Espionage Act charges because they were not properly made out and because they were overtly political.
In light of that, would the High Court be prepared to allow Assange’s extradition on computer intrusion charges to a country which had tried unsuccessfully to bring overtly political charges against him which the lower Court had rejected?
Nothing is predictable in this case.
Appeal Scenarios
In the event that Baraitser decides the case in Assange’s favour, and the U.S. government decides to appeal, there is also the question of whether or not Assange will be released pending the outcome of the appeal, or whether he will continue to be kept in detention in Belmarsh.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald in his latest article assumes that Assange will remain in detention throughout the appeal process, but that is not certain.
Since there would be a Court Judgment saying that extradition had been refused, and since Assange is not being held because of any crime committed in the United Kingdom, and as there is no outstanding prison sentence imposed on him by any British Court, one would think that Baraitser in her Judgment would order his immediate release.
British authorities might take steps to rearrest him (perhaps on still more, new U.S. charges) immediately as the order for his release is made. But it seems certain that Assange’s lawyers would make an prompt application, either to Baraitser or to a High Court judge for Assange’s immediate release, which given a hypothetical decision in his favour, Baraitser or the High Court judge would probably grant.
Given Baraitser’s demeanour in court during Assange’s hearing, and given several of the decisions she made, the greater likelihood is that she will rule in favour of U.S. extradition on both indictmments, in which case Assange would almost certainly remain in Belmarsh prison while his legal team appeals. If she should pursue a split decision there would be a stronger likelihood that Assange would continue in detention until the appeal were decided because the Court would have decided to allow his extradition to the U.S.
However even in that case Assange’s lawyers would still be in a position to apply for bail on the grounds that the most serious and important part of the case made by the U.S. for his extradition (the Espionage Act charges) had been refused, and that his appeal against the remaining part (the computer intrusion charges) was likely to be successful.
The public and Assange himself will know in less than 48 hours.
Alexander Mercouris is a political commentator and editor of The Duran.
On pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will [We need optimism of the intellect]--Mike Marqusee]
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On pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will - The Social Science Collective:
In the voluminous writings he composed during his eleven years imprisonment under the fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci repeatedly cites the aphorism, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” (which he ascribed to the novelist Romain Rolland). In one of his letters, he expanded the idea: “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned … I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” In the context of Gramsci’s life and work, the phrase had a particular resonance. He was suffering isolation and deprivation in prison, from which he had no hope of release. The left, and with it, for Gramsci, the prospects for humanity, had suffered terrible reverses. In these conditions the aphorism was a formula for survival. It also has to be seen in relation to the major concerns of his prison writings: the connection between theory and practise, the role of intellectuals, the dialectic of subjective and objective factors.
The phrase has long appealed to activists, who recognise in it something true to their own experience and find it sustaining. It’s a powerful warning against wishful thinking, like Amilcar Cabral’s command to “Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.” And at the same time it’s a counsel against resignation. It proposes a determined, open-eyed engagement with history, something we’d all aspire to.
But presented baldly as it often is, as a complete answer to a persistent question, I’ve found it increasingly problematic. I’m not sure that either “will” or “intellect”, “optimism” or “pessimism” represent the realities of our situation, or are categories that can do the work the aphorism assigns to them.
Left activism surely calls for a relationship between “intellect” and “will”, not their separation into opposing camps. In any case, they never exist independently of each other and at times can infect and distort each other. I think everyone on the left knows that an unbending optimism of the will can corrupt or compromise intellectual clarity. And no one should pretend that relentless pessimism of the intellect is not debilitating.
“Optimism of the will”, as a duty, turns us into divided people. It’s one of those impossible, unreal injunctions, like “live every day to the fullest” or “always look at the glass half full instead of half-empty”. It’s a recipe for denial, with all the neuroses that accompany it. If optimism is made compulsory the danger is it becomes compulsive. It breeds a voluntarism that is compelled to exclude unwelcome thoughts or feelings.
Where is the logic of optimism if there are no rational grounds for it? If there really is no chance of effecting change, then why bother with activism? Is it self-vindicating, something pursued for its own sake, or is it goal-orientated? We’re often reassured that “the process” is what matters. And yet essential to that process is “keeping your eyes on the prize”. How is that possible if you’ve decided the prize is an illusion?
And what is “will”? It’s not passion or emotion but is clearly grounded in them. It’s presented as a faculty of consciousness, as consciousness imposing itself over habit or environment, as a mastery of self and circumstances. But can “will” ever be entirely an entity of consciousness? Its sources lie in the sub-conscious. And in reality, as any therapist will tell you, “will power” or “mastering the self” requires recognition of precisely that sub-conscious grounding, and indeed of the illusions of “mastery” and “will”.
Pessimism of the intellect, as a principle, can be as distortive in its way as wishful thinking. It is as irrational to deny possibilities, to foreclose developments, as it is to imagine they exist where they do not. There is of course the pessimism of the intellect of the right, which discounts human capacities and sees capitalism as the end of history. That is most definitely not what Gramsci was talking about. But on the left, pessimism of the intellect sometimes takes on a pseudo-authority, it becomes exactly what Gramsci warned against, a form of self-protective “disillusionment”, that preserves itself and its authority by not investing in immediate or medium term hopes.
Over the years, in the wake of defeats or disappointments, I’ve been told by “wise men” of the left that of course it was inevitable. With professorial condescension, they’ve informed me that given the balance of forces, etc. it could have only worked out this way and it was naive to think otherwise. These days I see that posture as a defence mechanism, a way of denying pain or despair or frustration – and sometimes a way of imposing a personal superiority by claiming to embody objectivity and historical acuity. To make hope real, to exercise an optimism of the will, you have to invest in it: your time, your energy, your sense of self and your role in the world. Without that, movements cannot move.
In light of these considerations, how does the aphorism apply to our current situation? Looking to the future, there seem extensive grounds for pessimism. It’s more than possible that capitalism will resolve its current crisis at the expense of the working class and to its own historic advantage. It will unburden itself of past compromises. Levels of social support of all kinds will be reduced. Much of the workforce will be casualised and outsourced. Struggles for social justice will then have to be waged from the lower, weaker ground created by these defeats. In Britain, the NHS will be dismantled and not reassembled by a future Labour government.
Meanwhile, the hopes of the Arab Spring have been blighted by imperial and sectarian violence. Climate change continues unchecked, as recent news of the accelerating retreat of the Arctic icecap shows, while governments nearly everywhere downgrade the issue and shrug off responsibility. Global crises in both water and food supply are said to be imminent, the result of the pressure of capitalist priorities. Altogether it’s a dismal prospect. It seems all we can hope for is the dubious pleasure of being able to say “we told you so”.
Yet none of this is cast in stone. Probabilities are never certainties. The odds can alter with astonishing speed, depending on the shifting conjunction of variables – among them our own actions, our “will”.
There are other sides of the story, notably in Latin America, where inroads have been made on neo-liberalism with significant benefits for the poor. In Europe, levels of resistance may well rise, including here in Britain, where we’ve only begun to feel the brunt of the cuts. As austerity is seen to fail, more people will seek an alternative. As for the Arab Spring, it is of course far too early to tell. The popular aspirations that entered the political arena, that opened up that arena, are still working themselves out, subject to intense pressures from various directions. The democratic revolutions in Europe of 1848 were mostly unsuccessful or rolled back or co-opted. Nonetheless, the year did mark a leap forward, one which was the indispensable condition for the progress that eventually did take place.
It’s only in our own time that capitalism has fulfilled the destiny Marx ascribed to it, becoming a truly global system and subjecting an ever-wider range of social relations to its imperatives. But at this moment of climax it has imploded. Even as it reaches its global apogee and maximises its penetration, capitalism stands exposed as crisis-prone and anti-social. It no longer even offers the prospects for individual social mobility that have won it such allegiance in the past.
The important break-through of the last few years has been the spread of a critical view of capitalism – a system which for many years we weren’t even allowed to name (as it masked itself behind euphemisms like “the market” or “free enterprise”). It might be said that we have learned to name the system, but not its alternative. As Gramsci said in his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”
Optimism of the will, the willingness to sacrifice for a larger goal, has been made harder by the collapse of existing alternatives, both Communist and social democratic, as well as by the retreat of liberalism into a capitalist ‘realism’. Utopianism in general, as a mode of thinking, has been banished from mainstream discussion. In this situation we need a kind of ‘optimism of the intellect’: a determined search for the levers of change in the here and now, coupled with the imagining of a just and sustainable society, a better human future, which is a necessary prelude to making that future a concrete possibility.
Our hopes lie in the unresolved nature of the present. Life is fluid and contradictory. Any moment contains multiple possibilities, which in turn generate further possibilities. We do not and cannot fully know the whole that is currently evolving, and we have no right to foreclose the future. Had that been done by the radicals of the past – abolitionists, feminists, trades unionists, democrats – we wouldn’t even be talking now. As Blake said, “the ratio of all we know will be different when we know more.” Blanket injunctions either to pessimism or optimism deny the inherently mixed, multi-stranded character of social reality.
The human faculty for cooperation, along with the unalterable facts of human interdependency, remains a perennial source of hope (more important I think than ‘optimism’). History attests to our capacity for creativity and compassion as much as our capacity for destruction and hate. The reality is that value is still created outside the mechanisms of exchange, in relationships and in creative and cooperative acts of all kinds. These are real – in some ways more real than the exchange value worshipped by capitalism – and they permeate our lives and nourish us.
I ask myself how Palestinians address the pessimism / optimism equation. They face as grim a present and as unpromising a future as anyone on the planet. Their long struggle for freedom is for the moment a struggle for survival – against a ruthless opponent backed by the world’s superpower, encumbered with a corrupt and ineffectual official leadership, under daily political, economic and environmental attack. In a way, Palestinians have been living with this for years. Much of Palestinian literature is a record of a struggle against despair and dissolution. Despite everything, they have held to their aspirations, sustaining not just an ‘identity’ but a political project. Their injunction is “Samoud” – steadfastness. Here the present is a moment of duty to past and future, a link between the two. This is an approach we can emulate, remaining “steadfast” in our opposition to the current regime and in our vision of a better future.
In a sense, pessimism of the intellect is always in order because we are up against titanic forces, whose powers, reach, resources dwarf our own. The only things we can match them in are motivation, determination and imagination. Radical politics always involves redefining the possible, freeing it from the circumscription of received ideas. Today that means rejecting the faux-realism which construes the imperatives of capital as supra-human law. It means replacing capitalism’s hubristic claim to be ‘the end of history’ with a revival of Marx’s idea that only with its abolition will we see the beginnings of a truly human history. Without doubt, what we do or don’t do now will shape what others are able to do in the future. In calculating the odds of success, remember Archimedes on the power of the lever: “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.”
Friday, January 01, 2021
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