I just can't help myself. I keep leaving online comments and submitting letters to editors pointing out the hypocrisy of liberal Democrats on the Gaza genocide. As I said on Dan Yaseen's Speaking Truth to Empire radio show yesterday, we are told we must support Harris in order to save democracy, but what democracy?
No Palestinian was allowed to speak at their convention. Journalists were arrested covering protests outside in Chicago and their cameras were broken by police.
Prior to the convention, Harris told genocide protesters to shut up with a now iconic condescending statement that has since generated many a meme.
Here's the new thing though -- now my online posts draw a veritable swarm of loyal Democrats. Viewed together their comments makes a comprehensive playbook of the DNC strategy to win this election.
Let's play a game -- which ones do you think are bots and which are actual people?
Here's the wildest one so far:
If you're not steeped in false dichotomy thinking you may have to read that more than once to grasp the argument calling these lies into service. Here's a simpler version:
The orange man is so bad that he's still controlling bad policy emanating from Biden-Harris who have now been in office for 3+ years!
Honestly, it's always vote shaming season in the false dichotomy show that constitutes U.S. electoral politics.
I'm immune to vote shaming for several reasons: I live in Maine where we have ranked choice voting so candidates literally cannot be spoilers; I left the Democratic Party for good in 2008 when Obama got the nomination and his first two votes back in the Senate were to pass the war supplemental bill and to extend immunity to the big telecoms for spying on us all; and Democrats failed to protect abortion rights, pass universal health care, or cancel student loans like Biden promised. They are the ones who should be ashamed.
I'm also immune to being called "Putin's spokesperson" or "you sound like Tucker Carlson." While I might giggle at a cartoon like this one,
I don't agree with the underlying thesis that the ruination of the U.S. can be laid at the current administration's feet. Both parties in the U.S. serve their corporate overlords, and it is they who have gutted both quality of life and life expectancy for working class people.
So this cringe video of white boomers in Philadelphia "dancing" is unlikely to move me in any way other than activating my gag reflex.
I saw it shared on Twitter, but the original video can be found here on TikTok.
Ok maybe you're laughing instead of gagging. Either way, I doubt that you're feeling much shame.
A friend of mine stepped into this quagmire with a letter to the editor of the Portland Press Herald today. They printed her critique of Biden administration complicity in the genocide in Gaza, but did not enable comments.
A vote-shaming letter in the same edition did allow comments, and that is where a lively debate ensued about censorship, media bias, and...vote shaming.
Why am I immune to the common liberal malady, Orange Man Bad Derangement Syndrome? Because the old white boomer Trump and the old white boomer Biden are both very, very bad.
When your "lesser of two evils" candidate is the incumbent who's actively arming Israel's genocide in Palestine, the correct sign between the two candidates is an equal sign.
I'm old enough to remember when the State of the Union address was not a stump speech, not a mud slinging session, but made sitting presidents look like wise elder statesmen even if they were actually no such thing.
Joe Biden got the elder part down last night, but his use of the bully pulpit to fulminate against the boogey man who could not be named except as an existential threat to democracy was just embarrassing.
Then there were the outright lies.
I'll list some of them here paired with links refuting them.
"In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine."
"NATO the military alliance of democratic nations created after World War II to prevent war and keep the peace...welcome to NATO, the strongest military alliance the world has ever known."
"This crisis began on October 7th with a massacre by the terrorist group Hamas.1,200 innocent people women and girls men and boys slaughtered, many enduring sexual violence."
I'm not going to address all the things Biden assured us he was "gonna" do. Those are the type of easy lies that can't be refuted because they are essentially wishful thinking.
Remember how when he was campaigning last time he assured us he was "gonna" protect abortion rights, cancel all federal student debt and enact universal health care? Uh huh.
Our corporate overlords are desperate to keep us believing that there are deep, abiding differences between two parties that serve identical donor class interests.
What was then called the Generation Gap was a feature of my own youth. Was it driven by mainstream media? Hard to say for certain, but we experienced it viscerally as a culture gap with our WW2 or Korean war veteran fathers and our housewife mothers. The draft that condemned 58,000 young men to die and thousands more to suffer a lifetime of moral injury over terrorizing and slaughtering millions in Vietnam drove the disconnect between our generation and theirs. This spilled over into negative attitudes toward "the Establishment" in general and the government in particular (which attitudes, incidentally, eliminated the viability of the draft in the U.S.).
Today's Boomer v. Zoomer, or Millennial, or Gen X, is a different divide. Mostly, it's economic.
For example, a poverty draft is what replaced the "universal" draft, and the desire to pay for a college education is a very common reason young people give for enlisting in the military today.
The boomers who tuned in, turned on, and dropped out often did so cushioned by family money. I'll always be grateful to an artist friend who heard my millennial teenager say he wanted to live like the artists who moved to the country and spent all day in their studios. Friend to my son: "We had trust funds."
Other boomers invented the derivatives they used to get rich while crashing the housing market in 2008. Some become obscenely wealthy investing in information technology that drove the boom that preceded the bust.
Boomers got college educations with loans we could easily pay off, we bought houses with incomes from full time jobs with lavish perks and benefits, and younger generations got the crumbs of that. They are often disparaged by oldsters because they evince no loyalty to the corporations who exploit them and toss them aside. Retiring after decades of service with a comfortable pension is rare nowadays outside the upper echelons of management.
Most working families today have two full time jobs, astronomic child care costs, and a rent or mortgage payment that is staggering. Add health care that is unaffordably out of reach for many youngs, plus a climate emergency rampaging out of control, and its easy to see why respecting their elders is not in the cards for young people today.
Today, boomers are generally considered to be more racist, more selfish, and ruder than everyone else.
Some of this is undoubtedly true, while some of it is perception. I remember a family dinner where the millennials were unpacking #MeToo and one of the males opined that it was payback for boomers being dicks and proud of it. His wife responded, "You think I've never been sexually harrassed by someone our age?"
How much generational conflict is driven by mass media in 2022? Quite a lot. Type in the search term "boomers v." and get 15 million hits.
The oligarchs who own and operate corporate media would far rather have young people resenting the boomers as a group than eating the specifically rich ones.
Did I mention that slogans like "eat the rich," and images like guillotines, are common in spaces where younger people congregate?
A very interesting generational divide has been the steady movement away from binary gender identification. My grandmother bemoaned the fact that hippy long hairs made it so her generation couldn't tell the boys from the girls (really? I could). Now, boomers crack jokes like the one above. But younger generations are on to something: the need to reject the mind control of false dichotomies that begin at birth with gender assignment.
Ultimately, the U.S. war of generations reflects the absurd situation families are in: it takes a village to raise a child, and the nuclear family is no substitute. After covid took an ax to already inadequate child care structures, working mothers especially are struggling.
Who can blame them if many don't want to have children at all?
This message is from NYC Emergency Management, "not The Onion." It would be virtually impossible to parody something that is already this ridiculous.
Pretending that the nuclear option is a viable option is galloping ahead of our species' ability to survive.
Part of this strategy is pretending that the nuclear option is survivable.
The claims in this video would not have been true in Hiroshima or Nagasaki 50 years ago, and they're even more false today. Today's nuclear weapons, which our corporate overlords have gone on building while people went without health care, are vastly more powerful than the old school versions.
Meanwhile, sabre rattling at other nuclear powers is ramping up steadily.
Does it really matter which branch of the corporate duopoly is in power?
Unarmed Black victims of police violence (may their families know peace), L-R from the top: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown Image source: trauma doc Dr. Andre Campbell on Twitter
Live By The AR-15, Die By The AR-15
For AR-15 in that sentence, you could substitute drone, missile, or nuclear bomb.
That the U.S. leads the world in mass shootings, especially at schools, is a fact no one disputes. Regular people see a clear connection between a Pentagon budget that gobbles up more than half of annual expenditures by Congress. Regular people also see the pretense of elected officials who take millions in campaign contributions from weapons manufacturers and pro-weapon lobbying groups like the NRA and then tweet "thoughts and prayers" when the inevitable next mass shooting occurs.
Why then is social media is full of people blaming one of the two corporate parties for the massacre?
With the Ukraine war party in power right now controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives why is our federal government still failing to enact gun control? Fund universal mental health care? Rescue from poverty the 20%+ children without housing or food security?
“All we have to do is elect more Democrats and we can stop these mass shootings” pic.twitter.com/QgP2RSp59B
— Revolutionary Blackout Network🥋 (@SocialistMMA) May 25, 2022
Who is falling for using the deaths of children to further the false dichotomy our corporate rulers think will deliver civil war (we're well on our way) rather than the revolution we need?
Though I do support stringent gun control I don't think that alone will reduce mass shootings. Other countries that are overrun with guns do not see 18 year olds cutting their own faces, shooting their own grandma, and then massacring little kids while local cops let them proceed.
Did you know that in other countries, people with schizophrenia have auditory hallucinations that may be benign or even loving? In the U.S., people with schizophrenia hear voices urging them to violence.
Of course other nations weren't built on genocide of indigenous people (not all nations, anyway) and enslavement of kidnapped laborers.
We are a traumatized nation. And trauma begets trauma.
The vast majority of mass shooters are men, around 98%. Men and boys have no more access to guns and ammunition than women and girls do, so what’s the explanation?
It could be something most analysts overlook: adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs.
Back in 2019, researchers studied every mass school shooting from 1966-2018. “The vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying,” wrote criminal justice professors Jillian Peterson and James Densley for the Los Angeles Times.
The ACEs questionnaire and scale were developed to quantify and name the cause that creates such devastating effects: high levels of stress are toxic for our nervous system as humans. If experienced in childhood, they can lead to actual changes in the structure and function of the brain. And researchers say the effects of stress on male brains is different.
Additionally, if high levels of stress lead to acting out behavior, this can often trigger additional stress as authority figures respond violently to the behavior. Ask any teacher if they’ve seen this in their school.
Forensic ACEs reveal that the vast majority of violent criminals have a high ACEs score. Poverty results in ACEs e.g. children experiencing eviction, hunger, or lack of medical care for themselves and their caregivers. Being targeted for one’s race or ethnic identity also raises the ACEs score.
Nearly 1 in 6 people in the U.S. reported four or more ACEs as adults in a study by the CDC with Kaiser Permanente which found, “ACEs can have lasting, negative effects on health, well-being, as well as life opportunities such as education and job potential. These experiences can increase the risks of injury, sexually transmitted infections, maternal and child health problems (including teen pregnancy, pregnancy complications, and fetal death), involvement in sex trafficking, and a wide range of chronic diseases and leading causes of death such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and suicide.”
One a national level, our ACEs are through the roof. Using nuclear bombs on Japan after letting the Holocaust proceed, producing a zillion big budget films glorifying this and other violence, police murdering Black, brown, and indigenous people with impunity, illegal invasions that killed millions and which the pepetrators later laugh about in public...
I could go on but it would fill volumes.
Live by the sword, die by the sword is an old idea found in the New Testament (an account of radical truth-telling in the face of the brutal occupation of Palestine by the Roman Empire). One translation reads "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword."
The U.S. Empire has some very bad karma. And it's breaking our hearts that children pay the price.
But as long as violent patriarchy is the organizing principle of our culture, nothing will change.
My husband, Mark, who has opposed any and all wars since evading the draft during the Vietnam War.
For the past five and half years, liberals in the U.S. have salivated on command in response to the messaging "Trump bad" ==> "Trump supported by Putin" ===> "Putin bad" even unto the absurdity of "Putin = Hitler." The president of the Russian Federation's speech about trying to achieve the "denazification" of yes, actual Nazis in Ukraine, fell on deaf ears. Because false dichotomy is about as deep as liberals' analysis is able or willing to go these days.
The void previously filled by daily outrage at 45 has been ably filled by fresh hate for an associated villain.
When I showed up yesterday at an antiwar vigil in Oakland, California with this sign, about 100 participants saw it but many didn't get it. Some got it and scowled; I was the turd in the punchbowl. The messaging of this crowd was all over the place, but I was the only one with an obvious anti-imperialist message.
This man in a U.S. Air Force jacket saw it and was inspired to add NATO YES to his sign which had previously said only #closethesky. (He added #noflyzone also, possibly for clarity.)
Two older ladies approached me individually to say, "I don't understand your sign."
They were polite and that helped me resist the temptation to be snarky about what's not to understand. For all I know they really don't know what NATO stands for.
One of them had clearly been to the ribbon store and was bedecked head to toe in Ukrainian yellow and blue (kudos to whoever conceived of the color revolutions strategy). USAians have been in training for color-themed "revolutions" all their lives as their televisions told them to wear the colors of one sports team in opposition to another sports team. They have derived their identities from which teams they cheer on and which hats they wear while cheering.
The banner you can't quite read here says WELLSTONE Democracy Renewal Club. I believe it makes reference to Paul Wellstone, U.S. Senator from Minnesota who died in a mysterious plane crash while campaigning for re-election as a progressive Democrat.
The lady who was yellow and blue all over asked me why I had brought a "no NATO" message to the event. I explained that I was not supporting Russia's attacks but that I hold NATO's instigating responsible for the suffering of the Ukranian people. She didn't appear to agree but she did nod thoughtfully and thanked me for explaining.
The other lady was not color-themed but looked like a garden variety old hippie. A lot of retirees live in this neighborhood and I'd say the average age of the crowd hovered around 60. Why the organizers had decided to hold the vigil right next to the all day Sunday drum circle held each week by Black drummers and dancers is a mystery to me.
The older woman listened to me explain my sign and asked a few questions. She appeared to actually be interested and at the end she commented, "You sound like you really know what you're talking about." I detected no sarcasm.
How is it that such a mature and affluent crowd doesn't know what I'm talking about? Even if they disagree with my analysis, how can it be that they've never even heard of it?
Because if all your news for the last 50 years came from NPR and the New York Times, you end up quite ignorant.
Educational level notwithstanding, you have swallowed false dichotomy hook, line, and sinker.
I'm not sure if either woman noticed the reverse of my sign. I see "no NATO" and the symbol for peace derived from symbols for nuclear disarmament as two sides of the same coin, not opposites.
This was one of the more nuanced messages at the vigil (side 1 and side 2):
Before my husband and I had even walked the few blocks back home this tweet I sent from the vigil
had drawn the fire of about twenty Twitter warriors for the status quo. I didn't know any of them and we had not been in contact before yesterday. Most of them insulted me and/or my analysis, usually with name calling. It took a few minutes to block them but was probably time well spent. There are enough liberal Democrats harrassing me online who I actually know, mostly from the Native mascot retirement campaign in Maine.
A few of the comments were ambiguous so I left those. ("Oy" was one and #derusification was another.)
I welcome disagreement and actual argumentation, but I have no reason to tolerate abusive, denigrating language. Nor do I need to provide a platform for people putting words in my mouth. I challenge them to find a single example of my supporting Putin or the Russian attacks on people in Ukraine.
Information control is powerful and pervavasive. As of this weekend I can no longer access RT on my chromebook (still can on my phone) which consequently restricts access to lefty commentators like Lee Camp and Chris Hedges. Here's the error message below:
Once the views of folks like those two humanitarians are "forbidden," we're all in deep shit.
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