#To right-wing men we are private property. To Left-wing men we are public property

[coochiequeens]

Another "male feminist" trying to mansplain feminism, on behalf of men in dresses.

By Julie Bindel APRIL 29, 2024

I am very familiar with men on the Left telling me I’m doing feminism wrong. The musician and activist Billy Bragg is just one in a long line of males telling me I don’t share their precious values. In an interview published yesterday, the double-denimed demigod was asked about his role in the debate on gender and single-sex spaces:

“My problem with people like [J.K.] Rowling, like Julie Bindel, is really who they are lined up with. [Rowling and Bindel] are people who I agree with about women’s rights. I agree with them about abortion. But we don’t agree on this.”

I can certainly say that Bragg and I will both support access to free and legal abortion, but I would imagine we hold these views for somewhat different reasons.

If there’s anything that benefits men, the likes of Bragg will declare it to be feminist. As my friend and comrade J.K. Rowling has pointed out, male Leftists tend to applaud prostitution and stripping, so long as women are doing it and men are in the driving seat. Surrogacy, lap dancing and slut marching are “empowering” activities — a word never ascribed to anything done by men. It is faux feminism for the boys.

Just like his bro Owen Jones, Bragg insists that trans women are women and, handily, this stance doesn’t seem to have any drawbacks for these men. They get cookies for being such great allies, and not an ounce of danger or inconvenience as a result.

Suggesting that silly women who object to men in women’s changing rooms, hospital wards and prisons have joined forces with the hard-Right is ludicrous. Left-wing feminists, such as myself and Rowling, have led the charge against gender ideology because we campaign against rape and domestic violence. For Bragg to bleat about how abortion rights and equal marriage are at risk as a result of these imagined alliances is a bit rich considering that he, as a straight man, needs neither.

Bragg doesn’t like the powerful, Right-wing men who agree with me and Rowling on the trans issue. The inconvenient truth is that neither Donald Trump nor Viktor Orbán would be au fait with feminist politics, but are each aware that there are only two sexes. If to Bragg that means I agree with those men, so be it.

Feminists — all women — have been deeply and profoundly betrayed by Left-wing men. They have preened and postured about being such good trans allies while we have been attacked, abused, harassed, libelled and shunned for standing up for women’s rights. They turned a blind eye when lesbians were told by transactivists that we are bigots for excluding men from our dating pool. These men clapped along as we were losing our jobs and reputations, agreeing with the zealots that we just needed to be more kind.

Men on the Left rarely prioritise women’s issues, and we are expected to dance to their tune in order to be deemed acceptable. As the late feminist author Andrea Dworkin wrote: “To Right-wing men, we are private property. To Left-wing men, we are public property.”

This problem spans many decades and continents. In 1964 Stokely Carmichael, a prominent Black Power activist, was asked about the role of women in the civil rights movement. He replied: “The only position for women in the movement is ‘prone’.”  It is precisely because men on both the Left and the Right displayed such misogyny that the Women’s Liberation movement was founded in the Seventies. Bragg is a modern-day Carmichael, and men like him will always put men first, whether they claim to be women or not.

[dykeulous]

LEFTIST MALES

sometimes they can be a dangerous misogynist in disguise, wearing a red mantle. to many they are well-hidden.

given that the previous socialist countries never dismantled misogyny or misogynist practices, it is no surprise that so many marxist males today seem to have no consciousness of misogyny. they might be working-class, but that doesn’t outdate the visible and blazing male privileges they possess. some of them truly do aim to use it for the good, but the rest ignore & completely walk over the female proletariat. a lot of them even go out of their way to indicate that only the male proletariat should revolt, and that the female proletariat’s liberation lays in going home, cleaning & getting pregnant. their leftist views tend to cover their inner, and often outspoken & outward sexism.

“he’s a marxist, he cannot be misogynistic!”– can he really not be, if he refuses to talk about the numerous ways capitalism hurts women specifically, about female unpaid & underpaid labor, or about the abortion crisis? right-wing males see women as private property, whereas left-wing males see women as public property. some of them do just need guidance & education, but we aren’t on their disposal to do that for them 24/7. if they truly cared about women & oppressed groups of society, they would educate themselves, especially given that so many marxist feminist scholars’ work is available & easily reachable to them. men are not dumb. marxist men even less so. they can educate themselves if they want to. if your leftist boyfriend spews misogynistic bs, calls women slurs & watches porn– i would, please, ask you to stop calling him “one of the good ones”. he cares about oppressed classes only when he is also a part of them, while he participates in the further oppression of the marginalized groups he’s not part of. women weren’t made to explain everything to men. we shouldn’t always run after them & explain to them why calling a woman a bitch is a bad thing.

if he can educate himself on class struggle, he can also educate himself on class struggle of women. if he chooses not to, then that’s all you really need to know. the rest of us also read marxist feminist scholars. we didn’t go out of our way asking others to explain it to us. we also have to work on unlearning our own, internalized misogyny. we have always been expected to explain feminism to males in simpler, and less bitter forms. why are we expected to explain a movement full of bloodshed with a smile imprinted on our faces? how are we supposed to explain a movement that causes pain & gets you killed in “simpler” forms, especially to a highly intelligent male who just refuses to take you seriously & won’t even after you’re done explaining it to him? the burden of educating males is not on us, it is on them themselves, and if they want to, they will. i will not “debate” my basic human rights with a man who just wants to stress me out & covers it with a “oh but i just want to learn” or a “i just want to be a better ally”. i have no problem trying to explain it once, but do NOT expect me to be kind, sweet, or calm about it. we have always been taught to stop doing whatever we were doing so we can calmly, with a bright smile, explain in “simple” forms to misogynist males what misogyny & feminism are.

i can count the numerous times i have seen leftist men tell women how they can be better feminists. they are just telling us how to make our feminism more palatable to them. they want us to dumb our feminism down & make our girls feel comfortable in the asphyxiant arms of the capitalist-patriarchy. i’m so exhausted of having “feminazi” or “terf” or whatever new anti-feminist term of the day is popular shouted at me, having to tell men how no, i actually do not want to execute them all, even though they know damn well i don’t want to do that. they keep on treating feminism as an accessory. it’s like a crystal necklace to them they can wear to make themselves more appealing to women to get laid. they will pick & choose when to be allies in order to gain validation & attention of the women they want to possess, but when they are alone in a room with their male friends, they will show their true colors.

it’s beyond exhausting constantly having to watch men who claim to be our allies be violently misogynistic to right-wing women. they truly want socialism for each other & the patriarchy for us. there is no political standpoint, no worldview, no ideology that is free of misogyny. you cannot look at a leftist male who keeps a flag of the soviet union on his wall & says “proletarians of all countries, unite!” and with safety say he isn’t misogynistic. misogyny isn’t a big deal to them, although it is one of the oldest forms of oppression. we are angry for a reason. we are angry, and we are not going to sugarcoat our feminism just to “prevent them from hating feminists”. they will hate us regardless. feminism isn’t supposed to be comfortable, it isn’t supposed to make you feel good.

once again– the burden of educating males is not on us, it is on the males themselves.

[edonee]

There's nothing I hate more than this brand of Leftist men who flat out refuse to acknowledge misogyny and the importance of radical feminism, and just vaguely advocate for these "workers" which are all MALE. I keep getting these idiots with Lenin pfps in my comments saying dumb shit like "um- actually 🤓☝️ you shouldn't worry about [insert feminist issue] because everything is just capitalists' fault!!! and you cant complain about anything else!!! ever!!!" like if you genuinely believe that speaking out on how transgenderism is harmful to Women is a waste of time because "we need to focus on capitalism 🥺🥺" you can just straight up admit that you don't care about women's issues lol. Not to mention that transgender ideology is a deeply capitalistic phenomenon, but whatever. These BUFFOONS, whose only credentials to being a Communist are having a mullet and a porn-stache, and whose entire ideology crumbles to dust the second you mention prostitution because getting their microscopic dick wet is more important to them then feminism make my blood boil. In the end, the only difference between right wing men and left wing men is that the first see women as private property, the latter as public property

[unsentimentaltranslator]

Things that cause DV according to the TRA socfem I just saw:

*the nuclear family *work as we know it *prisons

Things that do not cause DV according to said TRA socfem:

*men *misogyny *the fact that the structures in our society, including those that she/they wants to abolish, were created by and for men

So she/they says that all we need to do is do The Revolution (on socialist men's terms, of course!) as if socialist men don't also abuse women and as if their own sense of entitlement toward and dehumanisation of women is not such that Dworkin coined the phrase “to right wing men, we are private property. To left wing men, we are public property."

[tricktster]

Honestly, I cannot say enough about my german study abroad program, in no small part because the people i met through it were the wildest bunch i have ever met. We had:

Me, a cursed American stumbling through increasingly unlikely and unfortunate situations, including:

getting arrested and hauled off in a cop car for the serious crime of not transcribing the five digit number printed on the back of my bus ticket onto the front of my bus ticket

slipping on dog poop on a crowded street while running late for class (leading a number of tourists to run over and photograph me in my undignified heap on the cobblestones) only to suffer one final indignity when i had to leave my poop shoe out in the hall outside the classroom, and subsequently discovered after class that it had been (correctly) identified as garbage by the custodian, and had been disposed of

spending the entire month of November with essentially no money after a bank error caused me to be cut off from my US checking account, thereby forcing me to figure out how to survive by my wits alone in a series of schemes, cons, and 1€ sausages

burning my thumb so badly on an oven in an attempt to make the world’s worst stuffing for the world’s saddest expat thanksgiving that my friends all had an intervention where they gave me a single black glove to wear because it was grossing them all out.

Enough about me. There were also my closest friends:

L , a horrendously wealthy New Englander who would drop lines in her stories like “so we were all smoking opium in my parents library,” and, “so every time my room gets too dirty, i just move to the next one down until the whole wing is filthy.” In spite of everything I’ve just said, she was also a genuinely good and incredibly fearless person who would throw fists without hesitation if she thought anyone was insulting her friends. She had a weird sexual relationship with her obscenely wealthy family friend in Frankfurt, which the rest of us suspected maybe been part of a business deal that their parents arranged at birth. It was better than Game of Thrones, honestly.

Y, a four foot tall Puerto Rican that I met when we were both walking down the street kind of near each other and some wild impulse called me to say to her, without so much as an introduction, “Yeah, you walk pretty cool, but if you wanna walk REAL cool, you gotta do it like thissssss,” while kinda lunging around. Just as inexplicably, she chose to continue talking to me, and several months later the two of us ended up making a harrowing 2:00 am escape from the private bar of a frat house that we had suddenly noticed had an awful lot of Nazi memorabilia on the walls for a frat located in a country that had criminalized the display of Nazi symbols. “Why are you leaving?” The frat-nazis complained as we bolted. “You will come back tomorrow afternoon for the barbecue, ja?” “Ahahhahaha nein fucking way, motherfucker,” Y muttered under her breath as we smiled and nodded politely all the way out the private garden, through the enormous iron gates, and out into the night. Once we were in the clear, we stared at each other, shaken, until Y broke the silence. “Welp. Those guys were Nazis. That actually just happened. I can’t.... man, I dunno, i’m still processing, let’s just go get some fucking falafel.”

We did.

S, the Australian, who one time invited me over to her apartment, opened the fridge, grabbed a plate of cheese, shoved it under my nose while going “HERE SMELL THIS!” and while i lurched away, gagging, cheerfully added “IT’S REALLY FOUL, RIGHT? ONE OF THE WOST THINGS I’VE EVER SMELLED!!” She was also absolutely obsessed with High School Musical, and was very disappointed every time the Americans shattered one of her illusions about the US public school system.

K, the girl from New Zealand, who had broken up with her serious boyfriend shortly before leaving for Germany, causing her to mourn his loss every time she got drunk by describing his penis with increasingly strange metaphors, such as “like a big wax candle but part of it’s gone,” and “like one leg off a spider.”

So, i had a pretty solid crew of five big weirdos. But there were, naturally, more people than the five of us in our program. For example:

R, from Minnesota, who dressed like she was about 72 and glared at anyone who was laughing too loudly near her because “i just don’t think jokes are funny.” More importantly, she would post facebook videos of herself reciting, entirely sincerely and in a steady monotone, the worst fucking poems that I have ever heard. She posted them under a pen name that was along the same lines as “the lyrical falcon.” She was in a feud with not one but two poetry clubs at her christian college, and while she never admitted this, all evidence suggested that it was because they both kicked her out. She was the Tommy Wisseau of poems. They were so bad they looped back around to good. Also, one time on the train she told me that she liked to think that she was a very good kisser because she played the french horn so she had strong mouth muscles. when i finally recovered from the mortal blow that she just delivered my soul, I asked her if she blew into people when she kissed them, and she got so insulted that she blocked me from her facebook poetry page. let me back in, R. please, if you’re reading this, let me back in.

They’re good poems, R.

Zoolander, from Pennsylvania, who was so, so handsome, but so, so, so dumb. One time he told me about this dream he had, and it was just an entire episode of Dexter’s lab. No changes or anything, he just... dreamed that he was watching that episode, and then the whole thing played in his head until it was done. He said it was the best dream he’d ever had. I once watched him pick up the same coin off the street four times because he couldn’t figure out that his pocket had a hole in it. When he noticed me, he said excitedly “Somebody left money everywhere!”

Juan, who constantly confused all the kids from Spain who went up to talk to him in their native tongue, only to discover that he was a very sarcastic man from Liverpool who didn’t speak a word of Spanish and was sick of everyone trying to bond with him. He only liked the Americans, because that’s where the tv show Family Guy was from, and only the Americans liked him, because we tend to like surly british assholes for basically no reason. At the end of the program while we were all saying our goodbyes, he came up to me, looking really upset. “I can’t believe it,” He said, uncharacteristically serious. “I can’t believe it’s all over and i’ll never...” He looked like he was about to cry.

“Oh, dude, we can keep in touch on facebook or something?” I fumbled. He blinked.

“What? No, no, ugh, it’s just the last day of the program and I’ve LOST MY FOOKIN SCARF!” he roared.

God, I know this is weird, but I still really miss that guy.

The Croatian: There was a dude from Croatia in my apartment building who outright refused to tell me his name, because, “It’s an embarrassing word in English. You’d laugh.” I badgered him for five months, until finally, his defenses down, after many earnest promises that no matter what his name was, I would not laugh, he relented.

“My name is Tin.” He said sheepishly.

His name was fucking Tin.

Beardy, Beardo, Redbeard, and Weirdbeard: four drastically different young men from all across our beautiful planet who had one thing in common: thinking that they’d try out a beard while they were abroad. We always admired them from a distance, and compared their beards’ various unique and bad properties, until one day Beardy (who was australian and had developed a sort of flesh colored goatee) walked up to S, his countryman, in a club. “DO YOU WANT TO DANCE?” he yelled, trying to get her attention, but she was in a dance-off with K, and didn’t notice, so he tapped her shoulder. She whirled around, startled, and upon recognizing him, said without thinking, “OH, HI BEARDY!”

The song faded out.

Beardy stared at S.

“...Did you just call me ‘Beardy?’” he asked quietly. S looked like a deer in the headlights. She glanced towards me, hoping for an out, but I, dear reader, was laughing too hard to be of any use.

“You did,” he went on, “you called me ‘Beardy!’ Why!?”

“Cuz of your beard, probably. That’s a better name for you than Josh.” Zoolander interjected from out of nowhere, strolling out of the club, a beautiful woman on each arm.

“My name isn’t Josh...” Beardy tried to call after him.

“Who’s name isn’t Josh? Oh! Beardy!” A drunk K could be heard deducing from the back of the room.

He shaved it a week later, but the damage was done. He was Beardy for the rest of the semester.

When I look back on that period of my life now, I can’t help but reflect - with the clarity one only gets from experience - that my time in Germany was not as weird as I thought it was at the time. I lacked the perspective to see that it was all, actually, absolutely bonkers batshit nuts. It was some sitcom shit.

All in all, I highly recommend it.

[nicklloydnow]

“A fundamental change in the relationship between the state, natural elites, and intellectuals only occurred with the transition from monarchical to democratic rule. It was the inflated price of justice and the perversions of ancient law by kings as monopolistic judges and peacekeepers that motivated the historical opposition against monarchy. But confusion as to the causes of this phenomenon prevailed. There were those who recognized correctly that the problem was with monopoly, not with elites or nobility. However, they were far outnumbered by those who erroneously blamed the elitist character of the ruler for the problem, and who advocated maintaining the monopoly of law and law enforcement and merely replacing the king and the highly visible royal pomp with the "people" and the presumed decency of the "common man." Hence the historic success of democracy.

How ironic that monarchism was destroyed by the same social forces that kings had first stimulated and enlisted when they began to exclude competing natural authorities from acting as judges: the envy of the common men against their betters, and the desire of the intellectuals for their allegedly deserved place in society. When the king's promises of better and cheaper justice turned out to be empty, intellectuals turned the egalitarian sentiments the kings had previously courted against the monarchical rulers themselves. Accordingly, it appeared logical that kings, too, should be brought down and that the egalitarian policies, which monarchs had initiated, should be carried through to their ultimate conclusion: the monopolistic control of the judiciary by the common man. To the intellectuals, this meant by them, as the people's spokesmen.

As elementary economic theory could predict, with the transition from monarchical to democratic one-man-one-vote rule and the substitution of the people for the king, matters became worse. The price of justice rose astronomically while the quality of law constantly deteriorated. For what this transition boiled down to was a system of private government ownership — a private monopoly — being replaced by a system of public government ownership — a publicly owned monopoly.

A "tragedy of the commons" was created. Everyone, not just the king, was now entitled to try to grab everyone else's private property. The consequences were more government exploitation (taxation); the deterioration of law to the point where the idea of a body of universal and immutable principles of justice disappeared and was replaced by the idea of law as legislation (made, rather than found and eternally "given" law); and an increase in the social rate of time preference (increased present-orientation).

A king owned the territory and could hand it on to his son, and thus tried to preserve its value. A democratic ruler was and is a temporary caretaker and thus tries to maximize current government income of all sorts at the expense of capital values, and thus wastes.

(...)

While the state fared much better under democratic rule, and while the "people" have fared much worse since they began to rule "themselves," what about the natural elites and the intellectuals? As regards the former, democratization has succeeded where kings made only a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elite and nobility. The fortunes of the great families have dissipated through confiscatory taxes, during life and at the time of death. These families' tradition of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership have been lost and forgotten.

Rich men exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortunes directly or indirectly to the state. Hence, they are often more dependent on the state's continued favors than many people of far-lesser wealth. They are typically no longer the heads of long-established leading families, but "nouveaux riches." Their conduct is not characterized by virtue, wisdom, dignity, or taste, but is a reflection of the same proletarian mass-culture of present-orientation, opportunism, and hedonism that the rich and famous now share with everyone else. Consequently — and thank goodness — their opinions carry no more weight in public opinion than most other people's.

Democracy has achieved what Keynes only dreamt of: the "euthanasia of the rentier class." Keynes's statement that "in the long run we are all dead" accurately expresses the democratic spirit of our times: present-oriented hedonism. Although it is perverse not to think beyond one's own life, such thinking has become typical. Instead of ennobling the proletarians, democracy has proletarianized the elites and has systematically perverted the thinking and judgment of the masses.

On the other hand, while the natural elites were being destroyed, intellectuals assumed a more prominent and powerful position in society. Indeed, to a large extent they have achieved their goal and have become the ruling class, controlling the state and functioning as monopolistic judge.

This is not to say that democratically elected politicians are all intellectuals (although there are certainly more intellectuals nowadays who become president than there were intellectuals who became king.) After all, it requires somewhat different skills and talents to be an intellectual than it does to have mass-appeal and be a successful fundraiser. But even the non-intellectuals are the products of indoctrination by tax-funded schools, universities, and publicly employed intellectuals, and almost all of their advisors are drawn from this pool.

There are almost no economists, philosophers, historians, or social theorists of rank employed privately by members of the natural elite. And those few of the old elite who remain and who might have purchased their services can no longer afford intellectuals financially. Instead, intellectuals are now typically public employees, even if they work for nominally private institutions or foundations. Almost completely protected from the vagaries of consumer demand ("tenured"), their number has dramatically increased and their compensation is on average far above their genuine market value. At the same time the quality of their intellectual output has constantly fallen.

What you will discover is mostly irrelevance and incomprehensibility. Worse, insofar as today's intellectual output is at all relevant and comprehensible, it is viciously statist. There are exceptions, but if practically all intellectuals are employed in the multiple branches of the state, then it should hardly come as a surprise that most of their ever-more voluminous output will, either by commission or omission, be statist propaganda. There are more propagandists of democratic rule around today than there were ever propagandists of monarchical rule in all of human history.

This seemingly unstoppable drift toward statism is illustrated by the fate of the so-called Chicago School: Milton Friedman, his predecessors, and his followers. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Chicago School was still considered left-fringe, and justly so, considering that Friedman, for instance, advocated a central bank and paper money instead of a gold standard. He wholeheartedly endorsed the principle of the welfare state with his proposal of a guaranteed minimum income (negative income tax) on which he could not set a limit. He advocated a progressive income tax to achieve his explicitly egalitarian goals (and he personally helped implement the withholding tax). Friedman endorsed the idea that the State could impose taxes to fund the production of all goods that had a positive neighborhood effect or which he thought would have such an effect. This implies, of course, that there is almost nothing that the state can not tax-fund!

In addition, Friedman and his followers were proponents of the shallowest of all shallow philosophies: ethical and epistemological relativism. There is no such thing as ultimate moral truths and all of our factual, empirical knowledge is at best only hypothetically true. Yet they never doubted that there must be a state, and that the state must be democratic.

Today, half a century later, the Chicago-Friedman school, without having essentially changed any of its positions, is regarded as right-wing and free-market. Indeed, the school defines the borderline of respectable opinion on the political Right, which only extremists cross. Such is the magnitude of the change in public opinion that public employees have brought about.

Consider further indicators of the statist deformation brought about by the intellectuals. If one takes a look at election statistics, one will by and large find the following picture: the longer a person spends in educational institutions, someone with a PhD, for instance, as compared to someone with only a BA, the more likely it is that this person will be ideologically statist and vote Democrat. Moreover, the higher the amount of taxes used to fund education, the lower SAT scores and similar measurements of intellectual performance will fall, and I suspect even further will the traditional standards of moral behavior and civil conduct decline.

Or consider the following indicator: in 1994 it was called a "revolution" and Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, was called a "revolutionary" when he endorsed the New Deal and Social Security, and praised civil rights legislation, i.e., the affirmative action and forced integration which is responsible for the almost complete destruction of private property rights, and the erosion of freedom of contract, association, and disassociation. What kind of a revolution is it where the revolutionaries have wholeheartedly accepted the statist premises and causes of the present disaster? Obviously, this can only be labeled a revolution in an intellectual environment that is statist to the core.

(...)

The situation appears hopeless, but it is not so. First, it must be recognized that the situation can hardly continue forever. The democratic age can hardly be "the end of history," as the neoconservatives want us to believe, for there is also an economic side to the process.

Market interventions will inevitably cause more of the problems they are supposed to cure, which leads to more and more controls and regulations until we finally reach full-blown socialism. If the current trend continues, it can safely be predicted that the democratic welfare state of the West will eventually collapse as did the "people's republics" of the East in the late 1980s. For decades, real incomes in the West have stagnated or even fallen. Government debt and the cost of the "social insurance" schemes have brought on the prospect of an economic meltdown. At the same time, social conflict has risen to dangerous heights.

Perhaps one will have to wait for an economic collapse before the current statist trend changes. But even in the case of a collapse, something else is necessary. A breakdown would not automatically result in a roll-back of the State. Matters could become worse.

In fact, in recent Western history, there are only two clear-cut instances where the powers of the central government were actually reduced, even if only temporarily, as the result of a catastrophe: in West Germany after World War II under Ludwig Erhard, and in Chile under General Pinochet. What is necessary, besides a crisis, is ideas — correct ideas — and men capable of understanding and implementing them once the opportunity arises.

But if the course of history is not inevitable (and it is not) then a catastrophe is neither necessary nor unavoidable. Ultimately, the course of history is determined by ideas, be they true or false, and by men acting upon and being inspired by true or false ideas. Only so long as false ideas rule is a catastrophe unavoidable. On the other hand, once correct ideas are adopted and prevail in public opinion — and ideas can, in principle, be changed almost instantaneously — a catastrophe will not have to occur at all.

This brings me to the role intellectuals must play in the necessary radical and fundamental change in public opinion, and the role that members of the natural elites, or whatever is left of them, will also have to play. The demands on both sides are high, yet as high as they are, to prevent a catastrophe or to emerge successfully from it, these demands will have to be accepted by both as their natural duty.

Even if most intellectuals have been corrupted and are largely responsible for the present perversities, it is impossible to achieve an ideological revolution without their help. The rule of the public intellectuals can only be broken by anti-intellectual intellectuals. Fortunately, the ideas of individual liberty, private property, freedom of contract and association, personal responsibility and liability, and government power as the primary enemy of liberty and property, will not die out as long as there is a human race, simply because they are true and the truth supports itself. Moreover, the books of past thinkers who expressed these ideas will not disappear. However, it is also necessary that there be living thinkers who read such books and who can remember, restate, reapply, sharpen, and advance these ideas, and who are capable and willing to give them personal expression and openly oppose, attack, and refute their fellow intellectuals.

Of these two requirements — intellectual competency and character — the second is the more important, especially in these times. From a purely intellectual point of view, matters are comparatively easy. Most of the statist arguments that we hear day in and out are easily refuted as more or less economic nonsense. It is also not rare to encounter intellectuals who in private do not believe what they proclaim with great fanfare in public. They do not simply err. They deliberately say and write things they know to be untrue. They do not lack intellect; they lack morals. This in turn implies that one must be prepared not only to fight falsehood but also evil — and this is a much more difficult and daring task. In addition to better knowledge, it requires courage.

As an anti-intellectual intellectual, one can expect bribes to be offered — and it is amazing how easily some people can be corrupted: a few hundred dollars, a nice trip, a photo-op with the mighty and powerful are all too often sufficient to make people sell out. Such temptations must be rejected as contemptible. Moreover, in fighting evil, one must be willing to accept that one will probably never be "successful." There are no riches in store, no magnificent promotions, no professional prestige. In fact, intellectual "fame" should be regarded with utmost suspicion.

Indeed, not only does one have to accept that he will be marginalized by the academic establishment, but he will have to expect that his colleagues will try almost anything to ruin him. Just look at Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. The two greatest economists and social philosophers of the 20th century were both essentially unacceptable and unemployable by the academic establishment. Yet throughout their lives, they never gave in, not one inch. They never lost their dignity or even succumbed to pessimism. On the contrary, in the face of constant adversity, they remained undaunted and even cheerful, and worked at a mind-boggling level of productivity. They were satisfied in being devoted to the truth and nothing but the truth.

It is here that what is left of the natural elites comes into play. True intellectuals, like Mises and Rothbard, can not do what they need to do without the natural elites. Despite all obstacles, it was possible for Mises and Rothbard to make themselves heard. They were not condemned to silence. They still taught and published. They still addressed audiences and inspired people with their insights and ideas. This would not have been possible without the support of others. Mises had Lawrence Fertig and the William Volker Fund, which paid his salary at NYU, and Rothbard had The Ludwig von Mises Institute, which supported him, helped publish and promote his books, and provided the institutional framework that allowed him to say and write what needed to be said and written, and that can no longer be said and written inside academia and the official, statist establishment media.

Once upon a time, in the pre-democratic age, when the spirit of egalitarianism had not yet destroyed most men of independent wealth and independent minds and judgments, this task of supporting unpopular intellectuals was taken on by individuals. But who can nowadays afford, single-handedly, to employ an intellectual privately, as his personal secretary, advisor, or teacher of his children? And those who still can are more often than not deeply involved in the ever more corrupt big government-big business alliance, and they promote the very same intellectual cretins who dominate statist academia. Just think of Rockefeller and Kissinger, for instance.

Hence, the task of supporting and keeping alive the truths of private property, freedom of contract and association and disassociation, personal responsibility, and of fighting falsehoods, lies, and the evil of statism, relativism, moral corruption, and irresponsibility can nowadays only be taken on collectively by pooling resources and supporting organizations like the Mises Institute , an independent organization dedicated to the values underlying Western civilization, uncompromising and far removed even physically from the corridors of power. Its program of scholarships, teaching, publications, and conferences is nothing less than an island of moral and intellectual decency in a sea of perversion.

To be sure, the first obligation of any decent person is to himself and his family. He should — in the free market — make as much money as he possibly can, because the more money he makes, the more beneficial he has been to his fellow man.

But that is not enough. An intellectual must be committed to the truth, whether or not it pays off in the short run. Similarly, the natural elite have obligations that extend far beyond themselves and their families.

The more successful they are as businessmen and professionals, and the more others recognize them as successful, the more important it is that they set an example: that they strive to live up to the highest standards of ethical conduct. This means accepting as their duty, indeed as their noble duty, to support openly, proudly, and as generously as they possibly can the values that they have recognized as right and true.”

[newstfionline]

Monday, January 18, 2021

Post Trump, Republicans Are Headed for a Bitter Internal Showdown (NYT) As President Trump prepares to leave office with his party in disarray, Republican leaders including Senator Mitch McConnell are maneuvering to thwart his grip on the G.O.P. in future elections, while forces aligned with Mr. Trump are looking to punish Republican lawmakers and governors who have broken with him. The friction is already escalating in several key swing states. They include Arizona, where Trump-aligned activists are seeking to censure the Republican governor they deem insufficiently loyal to the president, and Georgia, where a hard-right faction wants to defeat the current governor in a primary election.

The wrong ID (Washington Post) As a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, retired Chicago firefighter David Quintavalle was about 700 miles away, shopping at an Aldi grocery store for the final ingredients for his wife’s birthday dinner. The 63-year-old’s mind was on the menu—filet mignon and lobster—and not insurrection. But a man resembling Quintavalle with salt-and-pepper hair and a “CFD”-labeled beanie was among the rioters. In a video, the man pelted police with a fire extinguisher, striking at least one officer. In the days following the attack, Internet sleuths who have hunted down those who participated in the Jan. 6 riot mistook the man for Quintavalle. Soon, people were calling Quintavalle’s cell and home phone, harassing his son, a Chicago police officer with the same name, and lurking outside Quintavalle’s home. Online amateur investigators have identified and shared information on social media about people in photos and videos at the Capitol, leading to a portion of the more than 100,000 tips submitted to the FBI. The hurried pace of new information has also increased the dissemination of incorrect names and targeting the wrong people. The victims of such false accusations include martial artist and actor Chuck Norris. A photo circulated online of his doppelganger among those storming the Capitol. The baseless speculation was shot down by his manager. Federal authorities allege the man who threw the fire extinguisher is Robert Lee Sanford Jr., 55, a recently retired firefighter from Chester, Pa. But Quintavalle still receives hateful calls and messages calling him a “murder” and “terrorist.” A police officer is stationed outside Quintavalle’s home for his safety.

Pre-inauguration jitters (Washington Post) The nation is holding its breath as state capitals around the country brace for possible violence in the coming days. State officials are activating National Guard troops and closing off Capitol grounds in response to F.B.I. warnings that armed protesters and far-right groups are preparing to act in the days leading up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday. Law enforcement officials are vetting hundreds of potential airplane passengers and beefing up airport security. Federal officials say a militarized “green zone” in downtown Washington is necessary to prevent an attack from domestic extremists. Because of security concerns and the pandemic, Inauguration Day will be more subdued than usual.

U.S. pundits keep comparing Washington to a war zone. People who know war disagree. (Washington Post) A massive security operation is underway in Washington ahead of President-elect Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, two weeks after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol. As images of National Guard troops circulate online, some in the United States have compared the capital to a war zone. The commentary has drawn pushback from people who have lived or worked in areas actually beset by conflict, who say such remarks are misleading and trivializes the reality of war. “It’s extremely degrading to people who have actually lived through war and foreign occupation and have actually seen tanks rolling down their streets and foreign soldiers occupying their land or their own soldiers deployed against them,” said Jasmine el-Gamal, a former Pentagon adviser who worked in Iraq as a translator following the U.S. invasion in 2003. “That’s a conflict situation. That’s a war zone.” Faysal Itani, an adjunct professor of Middle East politics at George Washington University, called conditions in Washington “qualitatively different” from conflicts in places like Lebanon, where he is from, and elsewhere in the Middle East. Americans, Itani said, often view their country in one of two modes: “It’s either a pristine place … that somehow functions according to different rules” than the rest of the world, “or it turns out it’s imperfect and we’re back in Baghdad.”

Biden Seeks Quick Start With Executive Actions and Aggressive Legislation (NYT) President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., inheriting a collection of crises unlike any in generations, plans to open his administration with dozens of executive directives on top of expansive legislative proposals in a 10-day blitz. Mr. Biden’s team has developed a raft of decrees that he can issue on his own authority after the inauguration on Wednesday to begin reversing some of President Trump’s most hotly disputed policies. On his first day in office alone, Mr. Biden intends a flurry of executive orders that will be partly substantive and partly symbolic. They include rescinding the travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries, rejoining the Paris climate change accord, extending pandemic-related limits on evictions and student loan payments, issuing a mask mandate for federal property and interstate travel and ordering agencies to figure out how to reunite children separated from families after crossing the border. The blueprint of executive action comes after Mr. Biden announced that he will push Congress to pass a $1.9 trillion package of economic stimulus and pandemic relief, signaling a willingness to be aggressive on policy issues.

Leaders in Mexico and Poland look to curb power of social media giants after Trump bans (Washington Post) In the aftermath of President Trump’s banishment from social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, a handful of world leaders have expressed alarm over the power of private companies to decide if and when to ban elected leaders from key parts of the public arena. At least two ruling governments—on the left wing in Mexico and the right in Poland—have since suggested pursuing policies to prevent what happened to Trump. In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday in a daily briefing shared on social media that his government would reach out to other G-20 nations to seek a joint proposal on such bans, which he compared to the “Spanish Inquisition.” In Poland, meanwhile, the conservative-led government is pushing a draft “Freedom of Speech” law, first announced last month, that would regulate speech restrictions on social media. Without mentioning Trump, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki likened the power of the social media companies to state control in the country during the Communist era. Sebastian Kaleta, Poland’s deputy minister of justice, said in an interview this week that the Trump bans “could even be called censorship.”

Mexico’s female vigilantes (NY Post) The Michoacan area of Mexico has gotten so lawless, a band of female vigilantes are taking it upon themselves to protect their friends and family. The state, which is the world’s largest supplier of avocados and limes, has recently been overrun by the violent Jalisco drug cartel that hail from the neighboring state and so the women are fighting back, according to The Associated Press. The women carry assault rifles and post roadblocks, often while pregnant or carrying small children with them, to combat the growing homicide levels, which have skyrocketed since 2013. The majority of the women have lost family members to the cartel, like Blanco Nava who told the AP her son Freddy Barrios, a 29-year old lime picker, was kidnapped by presumed Jalisco cartel gunmen in pickup trucks; she has never heard from him since. “We are going to defend those we have left, the children we have left, with our lives. We women are tired of seeing our children, our families disappear. They take our sons, they take our daughters, our relatives, our husbands.” It is left to the women to fight as most men are being carted away to work for the cartels (willingly or not). The vigilantes say they have to resort to these tactics as the government and police fail to do so.

Guatemala cracks down on migrant caravan bound for United States (Reuters) Guatemalan authorities on Saturday escalated efforts to stop thousands of Hondurans, many of them families with children, traveling in a migrant caravan bound for the United States just as a new administration is about to enter the White House. Between 7,000 and 8,000 migrants have entered Guatemala since Friday, according to Guatemala’s immigration authority, fleeing poverty and violence in a region battered by the pandemic and back-to-back hurricanes in November. Videos seen by Reuters showed Guatemalan security forces clashing with a group of hundreds of migrants who managed to break through a police blockade at the village of Vado Hondo, near Chiquimula in eastern Guatemala. Between Friday and Saturday, Guatemala had sent back almost 1,000 migrants entering from Honduras, the government said, as the caravan moved towards Mexico.

England Isn’t Listening to Johnson’s Lockdown Orders Any More (Bloomberg) People across England are about to be hit with a deluge of new government adverts on television, radio and social media containing one blunt demand: Stay at home. It’s a familiar message—and that may be why the public seems to be shrugging it off. The data shows Britons are far more active during the current third national lockdown than when the first emergency “stay at home” order was given last spring. There’s more traffic on the roads, more people on trains and more shoppers making trips out. The picture is not unique to the U.K. Elsewhere in Europe, people have grown tired of wave after wave of restrictions. What makes England different is that even from the start, the messaging was mixed from a government that was reluctant to curb people’s liberties. In Spain and Italy, which imposed harsh lockdowns from the beginning, entire families became accustomed to living with life-altering restrictions. In Madrid and Milan, everyone wears a mask outside, and children must wear them at school. In London, face coverings outdoors are still optional. But in recent surveys people insist they are still following the rules. Stephen Reicher, a U.K. government adviser and professor of social psychology at the University of St Andrews, dismissed the concept of lockdown “fatigue” as a way for the authorities to shift the blame onto the public.

Switzerland to Hold Referendum on Covid-19 Lockdown (WSJ) Switzerland’s system of direct democracy will be put to the test again later this year, this time with a referendum on whether to roll back the government’s powers to impose lockdowns and other measures to slow the Covid-19 pandemic. The landlocked Alpine nation of 8.5 million people is unusual in providing its people a say on important policy moves by offering referendums if enough people sign a petition for a vote. Last year, Swiss voted on increasing the stock of low-cost housing, tax allowances for children and hunting wolves. The idea is to provide citizens a check on the power of the federal government, and it is a throwback to the fiercely independent patchwork of cantons, or districts, that were meshed in the medieval period. Now, the country is set for a referendum on whether to remove the government’s legal authority to order lockdowns and other pandemic restrictions after campaigners submitted a petition of some 86,000 signatures this week—higher than the 50,000 required—triggering a nationwide vote to repeal last year’s Covid-19 Act. The ballot could come as soon as June, and it appears set to mirror disputes in the U.S. and elsewhere over how far governments should go to limit social interactions in a pandemic—or whether to lock down at all.

Gunmen kill two female Supreme Court judges in Afghanistan (Reuters) Unidentified gunmen killed two female judges from Afghanistan’s Supreme Court on Sunday morning, police said, adding to a wave of assassinations in Kabul and other cities while government and Taliban representatives have been holding peace talks in Qatar. Government officials, journalists, and activists have been targeted in recent months, stoking fear particularly in the capital Kabul. The Taliban has denied involvement in some of the attacks, but has said its fighters would continue to “eliminate” important government figures, though not journalists or civil society members.

Israel OKs hundreds of settlement homes in last-minute push (AP) Israeli authorities on Sunday advanced plans to build an additional 780 homes in West Bank settlements, an anti-settlement monitoring group said, in a last-minute surge of approvals before the friendly Trump administration leaves office later this week. Peace Now said that over 90% of the homes lay deep inside the West Bank, which the Palestinians seek as the heartland of a future independent state, and over 200 homes were located in unauthorized outposts that the government had decided to legalize. Israel has stepped up settlement construction during President Donald Trump’s term. According to Peace Now, Israel approved or advanced construction of over 12,000 settlement homes in 2020, the highest number in a single year since it began recording statistics in 2012.

Starvation haunts Ethiopia’s Tigray (AP) From “emaciated” refugees to crops burned on the brink of harvest, starvation threatens the survivors of more than two months of fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. The first humanitarian workers to arrive after pleading with the Ethiopian government for access describe weakened children dying from diarrhea after drinking from rivers. Shops were looted or depleted weeks ago. A local official told a Jan. 1 crisis meeting of government and aid workers that hungry people had asked for “a single biscuit.” More than 4.5 million people, nearly the region’s entire population, need emergency food, participants say. At their next meeting on Jan. 8, a Tigray administrator warned that without aid, “hundreds of thousands might starve to death” and some already had, according to minutes obtained by The Associated Press. “There is an extreme urgent need—I don’t know what more words in English to use—to rapidly scale up the humanitarian response because the population is dying every day as we speak,” Mari Carmen Vinoles, head of the emergency unit for Doctors Without Borders, told the AP.

Children’s Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers (NYT) Nearly a year into the coronavirus pandemic, parents across the country—and the world—are watching their children slide down an increasingly slippery path into an all-consuming digital life. When the outbreak hit, many parents relaxed restrictions on screens as a stopgap way to keep frustrated, restless children entertained and engaged. But, often, remaining limits have vaporized as computers, tablets and phones became the centerpiece of school and social life, and weeks of stay-at-home rules bled into nearly a year. The situation is alarming parents, and scientists too. “There will be a period of epic withdrawal,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, an addiction expert and a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama on drug policy. It will, he said, require young people to “sustain attention in normal interactions without getting a reward hit every few seconds.” Scientists say that children’s brains, well through adolescence, are considered “plastic,” meaning they can adapt and shift to changing circumstances. That could help younger people again find satisfaction in an offline world but it becomes harder the longer they immerse in rapid-fire digital stimulation.

[hansoulo]

“A pandemic has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Americans and put more than 30 million out of work, and to top it off, there has been an almost 30-day, caught-on-tape spree of police and vigilante violence against black people. For some, it may feel like the nation is on the brink of near-biblical levels of chaos.

The responses across the nation, whether you call them riots (and you shouldn’t) or whether you call them protests, uprisings, unrest, or rebellions, are being covered by local and national news and social media. As a journalism professor who has studied and experienced media coverage of protests for years, I have watched repeatedly how poorly these events are conveyed by the media and understood by the public. Here’s what people watching the news must understand in order to get what’s truly going on, and keep your faith in America nominally intact in the process.

First, it’s important to understand the mandate of the news, and that is to get eyeballs on the screen, whether that is your television screen or the one in your hands. Networks focus on spectacle: fires, people crying, and broken windows, instead of the larger story. In most cases (such as with the Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, protests a few years ago), property damage and fires are limited to a small area, and even during those times many people are just milling about, but shaking camera angles and tight shots want you to believe that every reporter is an extra in Saving Private Ryan and every protest looks like Kanye’s “No Church in the Wild” video.

In reality, these protests are usually not completely consumed with chaos. Nighttime coverage will seldom show a full city map demonstrating that, two blocks over from a street that looks like a “city engulfed in flames,” there’s a CVS still open for business. The press flocking to dramatic images as a protest metaphor is not a new phenomenon.

Further, much of the property damage attributed to protesters is often the result of police action or inaction in the face of lawful public behavior, something I’ve witnessed from Ferguson to the far-right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tear gas canisters can still burn your hand hours after they’ve been launched by police, flares are thrown by riot response teams with reckless abandon, let alone live munitions and flash grenades.

Sometimes buried at the end of post-protest reports by local authorities is the fact that police munitions often start fires at protests, but this is seldom reported by the press, and there have been surprisingly few protesters arrested for arson relative to the fires that erupted during the unrest. Which is more likely to set row houses ablaze, three teenagers in face masks with “No Justice, No Peace” signs or two smoldering tear gas shells sitting on a pile of dry leaves and newspaper for two hours?

This is not to suggest that some protesters don’t cause violence or property damage, but observers, let alone journalists, should be making distinctions between the various actors that are actually on the scene during civil unrest. You have the aforementioned police who are armed. Then you have chaos agents and anarchists who infiltrate peaceful protests with their own agenda. This isn’t conspiracy theory; in Minneapolis alone, videos have emerged of strangely dressed people just engaging in wanton property destruction. No one knows who they are, but it seems unlikely that they are protesters.

Then you have your run-of-the-mill opportunistic criminals. When the police are so occupied harassing and corralling peaceful protesters and the streets are filled with smoke, it’s pretty easy to break into a Verizon store, a beauty shop, or a grocery store and take what you want. These people are often conflated with actual revolutionaries, who are protesters that target actual structures and symbols of abuse and oppression. For protesters who are angry about violent, unaccountable police in Minneapolis, overtaking and burning down the Third Police Precinct is a specific act of revolt. This is a fundamentally different action than using the chaos from two blocks over to raid a liquor store.

And, of course, none of these actors should be confused with the hundreds of men and women peacefully protesting who are usually subjected to violent reprisals by police. Which is why “they’re burning their own community” narratives are so misleading and dangerous. It’s irresponsible to not distinguish which “they” is being talked about.

Which brings us to perhaps the most important thing to understand about how to watch protests: the context of what kind of protest garners police response. Over the past three months, the 24-hour cable networks have extensively covered mostly white armed men and women threatening police and politicians at state capitols across the nation over coronavirus lockdown policies.

How often have you seen police in riot gear? In fact, police seldom use force or even present in force (protest shields, black helmets, etc.) when conservative or right-wing groups protest. When is the last time you saw a group of anti-abortion activists get tear-gassed? Yet with left-leaning groups, and especially groups of minorities, their protests are often met with shows of force. Right-wing groups spit in the faces of police in regular gear in Michigan, while SWAT teams show up like Storm Troopers for chanting teens in Minneapolis.

This lack of context is even more corrosive when national press coverage chooses one staging area of protest over another. People are marching in Phoenix, Arizona; Columbus, Ohio; and New York City in solidarity with George Floyd, and in Brunswick, Georgia, for Ahmaud Arbery, and in Louisville, Kentucky, for Breonna Taylor. Seven people were shot during the Louisville protests, but 24-hour news coverage is blanketed with images of burning buildings in Minneapolis as if that’s the default of protests instead of the outlier.

So what should be your main takeaway as an American concerned about the future of the country? Protests are not simply stories of “good guys” and “bad guys” no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. There are actors all operating simultaneously, and all too often local and even national reporting only covers the story of the local politicians and police who have a vested interest in presenting themselves as overwhelmed and beleaguered as opposed to negligent and incendiary.

Former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, who pinned George Floyd by placing his knee on the man’s neck for almost nine minutes, has been arrested and charged with murder and manslaughter by local authorities. By all accounts, whether it’s Minneapolis (or Louisville or Brunswick), if the police and vigilantes who committed these acts of violence were consistently arrested and charged, it’s highly likely that these protests would be less volatile.

More importantly, the focus and amplification of property damage over the lost lives that sparked unrest to begin with is a reflection of the press’s ghoulishly misplaced priorities. As a news consumer, you don’t have to feed the beast. You can choose to follow men and women on the ground covering events as concerned citizens. You can sift through the dross of hot-taking, moralizing pundits and pay attention to the data on the ground about what causes protests. (This was all but predicted five years ago.) You can refuse to submit to goodthink and stop using words like riot, protest, and resistance interchangeably.

In other words, you can be a sincere, informed American citizen, and recognize that your fellow Americans are hurting and expressing their pain. It does not have to be filtered and sanitized through the state or the press to be legitimized.”

[atheistforhumanity]

Why I Vote Blue

When Abraham Lincoln bravely embraced the liberal philosophy at the time that African American's should not be property conservatives responded by saying:

South Carolina

“...A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

Mississippi

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world...These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Louisiana

“The people of the slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.”

Alabama

“for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South...to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.”

Texas

“...in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states....”

Conservatives are still waving the flag of these people today! To anyone who says I don't understand what that flag represents, you need to learn more history.

Source

After the Civil War, when the Democratic party was the conservative wing in this country and dominated the south, confederate veterans formed the KKK-an American terrorist group-to fight the peaceful integration of African Americans into our society. People like to bring up the KKK and Dixie Democrats to deny that the Republican party is the home of racism, but the fact is that in the 1960's the two party's switched platforms. Mainstream Democrats broke ranks with the southern Dixies and all of their conservative and racist values. The south flipped to the Republican party in support of Goldwater and his vicious attack against civil rights. LBJ won the presidency and lead Democrats toward the liberal end of the spectrum we operate on today. That is why the south, which waves the confederate flag and is a stronghold of racism today votes solidly Republican. This is also why the KKK and white nationalists vote Republican, because they find support for their causes in their policies. In fact, in at least 5 races happening right now there are self-avowed Nazis, white supremacists, and holocaust deniers running as Republicans. We have a racist Republican president who called white supremacist demonstrators “very fine people.” It's seriously hard not to see where conservative values live.

When women wanted to vote:

When women wanted to vote men lost their minds and were not having it. Truth be told, women largely had to make this happen on their own because men were hostile to the idea. As far as which party supported women's suffrage it was truly a mixed bag with lukewarm support from both sides. However, I'm focusing on ideological mindset, not party labels. It was a liberal idea to support women voting, just like it was liberal to support feminism in the 70's. Conservatives today are still using the same talking points used by anti-suffrage proponents in the 1920's. 

Here is a anti-suffrage political cartoon from the 1920's. This is mirrored by Senate Candidate Courtland Sykes. He doesn't want his daughters to become "career obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic[sic] hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they think they could have leaped over in a single bound – had men not ‘suppressing them’."

The GOP largely embraces an anti-women platform. Trump famously claimed he had the right to grab women by the pussy at any time, and with nearly 20 accusers of sexual assault he was still elected President. Republican Todd Akin famously said “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Modern Republicans have proved that they know nothing about rape and it's not surprising given their anti-feminist platform. Republican Clayton Williams flat out said to reporters that "If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it." He said he was “joking.” Even Republican women are breathtakingly ignorant of the concept of equality for women. Republican state lawmaker from Florida, Kathleen Passidomo, made the worst victim blaming statement I've ever heard in support of a school dress code: “There was an article about an 11-year-old girl who was gang-raped in Texas by 18 young men because she was dressed like a 21-year-old prostitute," she said. "And her parents let her attend school like that. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to create some areas where students can be safe in school and show up in proper attire so what happened in Texas doesn’t happen to our students." Notice that was in Texas, a strongly conservative state. I could literally write pages and pages of quotes against women by conservative figures. The point is that we can see very plainly the conservative minded citizens of our country are not advancing the equality of women and never have.

The Civil Rights Era

Remember when I said the parties switched platforms in the 1960's when the south supported Goldwater for President? Well, Goldwater was a serious opponent of the civil rights act, another conservative man running for president became the face of racism and anti-equality. That mans name was George C. Wallace and he made a fiery speech denouncing LBJ and the Civil Rights Act. Here are some snippets:

“It is therefore a cruel irony that the President of the United States has only yesterday signed into law the most monstrous piece of legislation ever enacted by the United States Congress.

It is a fraud, a sham, and a hoax.

This bill will live in infamy. To sign it into law at any time is tragic. To do so upon the eve of the celebration of our independence insults the intelligence of the American people.

It dishonors the memory of countless thousands of our dead who offered up their very lives in defense of principles which this bill destroys.

Never before in the history of this nation have so many human and property rights been destroyed by a single enactment of the Congress. It is an act of tyranny. It is the assassin's knife stuck in the back of liberty...

...Ministers, lawyers, teachers, newspapers, and every private citizen must guard his speech and watch his actions to avoid the deliberately imposed booby traps put into this bill. It is designed to make Federal crimes of our customs, beliefs, and traditions...

...Yet there are those who call this a good bill.

It is people like Senator Hubert Humphrey and other members of Americans for Democratic Action. It is people like Ralph McGill and other left-wing radical apologists...It was left-wing radicals who led the fight in the Senate for the so-called civil rights bill now about to enslave our nation.

We find Senator Hubert Humphrey telling the people of the United States that "non-violent" demonstrations would continue to serve a good purpose through a "long, busy and constructive summer..."

...I am having nothing to do with this so-called civil rights bill. The liberal left-wingers have passed it.”

Okay, we will stop there. If you think listening to Donald Trump makes you feel like you've entered another reality where everything immoral is cherished, then I suggest you read Wallace's full speech. It makes modern Fox News hosts sound rational. Do you think he is just the remnant of a distant past when conservatives didn't know any better? Well, let's compare his statements to modern conservatives.

Wallace called the Civil Rights Act “an Act of tryanny,” and Donald Trump called Black Lives Matter “purveyor's of hate.” In fact the knee jerk reactions of Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter deny the core issue of constant racial violence against black people in America today, both by police and right-wing terrorists.

When Wallace says that the CRA made crimes of “our customs, beliefs, and traditions,” this is echoed in the defense of the confederate flag today and confederate monuments. Conservatives deny that rejecting those symbols of slavery and oppression are a moral action, therefore denying the true dynamic and pain they cause. That's exactly what Wallace was doing by framing civil rights protections for minorities as turning traditions into crimes. Modern supporters cry about the civil war soldiers who will be dishonored, completely ignoring that their cause was dishonorable to begin with and not caring about the disrespect and fear those symbols represent for non-whites.

Wallace mocked the protests of the era and the idea that they were a force for good. What's ironic about that is that Conservatives today always talk about the non-violent methods of MLK and condemn modern protests as being violent and destructive, but that's exactly how conservatives in MLK's day talked about him. Republicans have come out strong with legislation against protesting, taking a page out of the 60's play book. On top of police brutality and violent lash back against protestors, they want to make protesting as illegal as possible.  

Will Herberg in the 60's made scathing comments about MLK and his protests, “in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority.” He spoke of King inciting anarchy and chaos.

Does this sound familiar? It should, because conservatives on Fox News have been pushing the same narrative that the left has devolved into mob rule, that they are violent people, and protests are illegitimate. The similarities go on and on. Nothing has changed.

LGBTQ

It is unquestionable that support for LGBTQ people is a liberal value, and conservatives have fought tooth and nail to resist granting these citizens fair and equal treatment both socially and legally. 

This graph illustrates my entire point I've been making about voting blue, about being liberal. Modern conservatives will reject the label of bigot while still rejecting homosexuality. We can see that consistently through the past liberal supported LGBTQ FIRST! Every civil rights issue you can think of was pushed by liberals first. I've laid out evidence showing where conservatives and liberals stood for some of the most important issues of our time and where they are today. Conservatives are always playing catch up. They are morally regressive, but always eventually giving in to a moral standard made in the past by liberal minded people. Now, you look at this graph and see that not even all liberals support homosexuality, but the point is not that liberals are perfect only that they are further ahead. Every value that liberals push for eventually becomes a moral standard. Democracy was a liberal idea in the face of conservative monarchists, capitalism was liberal compared to feudalism, religious freedom was a liberal idea compared to state sponsored religion. To be conservative is to be fundamentally against moving forward.

I don't vote blue for the Democratic party, the party may change, I vote for who represents the liberal spectrum. Liberal ideology has brought us everything good in this country and conservative voices have done nothing but hold us back. Whenever conservatives win it is on a campaign of fear. I vote blue because I know that one hundred years from now the people who call themselves conservatives will have accepted much of what we fight for today, but will be refusing to accept new advances. I know the liberal values of today are the values of the future.

I apologize for not going into as much detail about LGBTQ, but I felt that it’s less contested as far as who supports the movement and Pew Research shows where we are at today. It’s no secret who fights against marriage equality, and equal rights.

I hope everyone voted blue today, because you can see what a major impact it has on our lives.

[kksingh11]

Nationalization Vs Privatization (Vis a Vis Socialism in India)

 At first look, it seems both are antagonistic; where the first one is for the people, for the “country”, while the second one is for the capitalist class. Hence, Congress, during the Nehru era was pursuing socialism, and after neo-liberal policy, undertaken by Rahul Gandhi government, known as Manmohan Singh’s economic policy (He was the then Finance Minister), was pursuing capitalism. Neo-liberalism came with various masks, like globalization, perestroika, reform, cure of bureaucracy and ailments killing the public sectors, worker’s apathy with the work, loss of profit and unnecessary expenditure on welfare and subsidies.

Let us analyze the past, immediately after Indian independence, in fact even before that. The “smooth” handing over of power to Indians (and Pakistanis) was not to the working class, as envisaged by the HSRA, founded by Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Ashfaqualla and others, and Communist Party of India. In fact, when the Indian Constitution was being made, there were four participating groups, one of them was represented by the Communist Party of India and who were forced to quit, when it was clear that the Constitution was to be in the service of the private property and was to safeguard the capitalist class (even the remaining feudal class). This was a tacit understanding between the British Raj and the bourgeois class and Congress Party, Muslim league, USA, and others who mattered.

Two examples must be studied to understand the characteristics of the Indian bourgeois class; first, how it dealt with the Telangana movement, which was against the British Raj as well as its accomplice Nizam and Feudal Lords and the Rajakars (Nizam’s Army), under the leadership of CPI, which fought very valiantly since 1945 to 1952 or 53, till the leadership abandoned its own cadre to favor Nehru/Patel’s government and signed the pact of peace treacherously, one sided, favoring the Indian State. The UNO had raised the Human Right’s question, where more than 2000 local women were raped, tortured and 1000s of fighters and their sympathizers were killed in fake encounters as well as in jails by the Army of GOI and Nizam, but somehow was quashed. After the peace pact followed and the Telangana Movement finished, the Nizam and his Army men were rehabilitated, in the most possible “honorable” fashion.

Similar was the Bombay Mutiny in 1946, which spread to Lahore, Bengal, Madras and was supported by the workers, peasants, youths, various Unions and organizations across the country. However, Congress, Muslim League officially and openly opposed the mutiny, advised their respective followers to remain away from the “law and order” problems, as they never wanted to share the power with the working class. CPI seems to have chickened out or failed to analyze the situation correctly.

However, after the independence was secured, despite all the bloodbath between the two new emerged nations, India and Pakistan, India preferred to follow industrialization and modernization of all the industries, services, and superstructure and new industries, factories. The Indian bourgeois class was unable to take over these concerns, enterprises, due lack of capital as well as technical knowhow and other much needed wherewithal.

Hence, the GOI had to intervene and build all the “Navratans”, superstructures and other parts of public concerns; Airlines and Airports, Shipping (Jahajrani, SCI), Power, ONGC, BSNL, Research works (DRDO, etc.), super specialty medical services, ISRO, ASI, Highways, Railways, and many others. 5 Year plan may sound like having borrowed from the USSR, but it was supported by Tata, and other big capitalists. USSR was happy in providing cheap technical knowhow as well as big machineries, like Thermal Plant in Patratu (Jharkhand), Defense equipment, with the help to build and repair facilities (BRD), etc., which was its foreign policy, to keep the imperialist powers away, as much as possible, in the new rising nations.

Was socialism being constructed in India? No, as the state power was in the hands of the bourgeois class and the working class, though much united than today and militant, was in back seat, “satisfied” with the “facilities and labor laws” in its favor. The situation gave a brilliant ideological framework to the CPI to support the ruling party, Congress, in name of building socialism, which of course was strengthening industrial as well as finance capital. The bureaucracy (red tapeism), corruption and other ailments penetrated into the public concerns in a natural fashion and “Socialism” was blamed. In the meantime, capitalist restoration in USSR gave “moral” support to the opportunist Communist Parties, the world over, to shun class struggle and followed Parliamentary Struggle, a path to build Socialism peacefully. An open class collaboration followed and these parties happily accepted opportunism and revisionism, the leadership which opposed these political lines, had to break away from the old parties, but in most cases that lead to “revisionism vs revisionism”, like CPI(M) or Left Wing adventurism, like Maoists (the earlier version, Naxalite movement did connect question of state power to the struggle, more appropriately class struggle, but that was the end of its break from the past revisionism and we know, finally this movement was crushed by the Indian State.).  

Well, the nationalization, end of Privy system, etc. were accelerated during Indira Gandhi regime, and the “Left” was euphoric, Garibi Hatao (Remove poverty), inclusion of the word “Socialism” in the Constitution and other rhetoric were nothing but part of capitalist society and capitalist politics, the political economy, that was being followed, was nothing but steadily empowering capital and the concentration of wealth in hands of few was accelerating. The nationalization of 14 largest banks in India in 1969, when Indira Gandhi was PM (And even FM) did not work towards the upliftment of the poor. Compare with this:

“The ownership of the capital wielded by and concentrated in the banks is certified by printed and written certificates called shares, bonds, bills, receipts, etc. Not a single one of these certificates would be invalidated or altered if the banks were nationalised, i.e., if all the banks were amalgamated into a single state bank. Whoever owned fifteen rubles on a savings account would continue to be the owner of fifteen rubles after the nationalisation of the banks; and whoever had fifteen million rubles would continue after the nationalisation of the banks to have fifteen million rubles in the form of shares, bonds, bills, commercial certificates and so on.”

(Lenin in 1917 on Bank’s Nationalisation)

 The so called “Socialism” through nationalization never attacked the production field, where the means of production was in the hands of the capitalist class, and where the surplus value was created by the workers and usurped by the capitalist class. A small part of the surplus value (or rather through more exploitation of the workers) was used in circulation through welfare measures and subsidies. This allowed a small section of the working class to enjoy the bourgeoisie big heartedness towards its social duty, on the cost of the others. Today, the others, the workers in unorganized sectors are approximately 93%.

To jump a few decades, we see the “opening” of the economy, reforms, globalization, changes in labor laws, introduction of laws for land acquisition, dilution of environment acts, etc. followed in 1980s, accelerated in 1990s, so far all by the “Socialist” Congress government, in between (RSS) BJP Government, under Vajpayee and now Modi government. Modi government has much freedom to work due fascism, a social movement, where a section of the mass is supporting most of his anti-people economic and political policies, in hope of crushing the minorities and Dalits and building Hindu Rashtra and India becoming a World Leader.

The building up of the Indian property in many compartments, but mainly in government and in private hands, was all for the capital and its various forms, and now, when the world economy in plunging into economic crisis, even before Coronavirus Pandemic, and is almost in Economic Depression (Resembling 1928-31 economic recession), the capitalist class, with no love for the working class and the oppressed people, has thrown the country under the yoke of fascism, and is ruthlessly “re-appropriating” the created public funds and concerns! See the rate of privatization of almost all the public concerns, where they are in loss or are inefficient, is of no more a concern, all are to be privatized, as soon as possible!

There is bridge between the earlier “Socialist” construction, better say it resembled a welfare state (providing social security but, in reality, far from it) and now the capitalist “restoration” in India, but with a violent break, qualitative change, from a masked “democracy” and constitutional government to open fascism, where constitutional methods have been thrown into the dustbin. The world imperialism, IMF, WB, etc. have full support to the Indian bourgeois class and its tirade against the proletarian class, with a sizable pie in the plunder.

The nationalization in a capitalist society or country is for the capitalist class and not for the working class. The unemployment, poverty, inequality continues rising in both the bourgeois state, namely anti people state or pro people (Welfare state) state, but during the crisis, either political or economic or any other kind, the bourgeois state comes down heavily on the working class legally, illegally, socially (A section of the mass supports it, for some perks or for some regressive ideology), through police, military, bureaucracy, etc.

While we, the revolutionary forces, work with the proletarian class and its oppressed allies, we do join their struggle, protests, rallies, it is our task to educate them on political economy, telling them how such concessions, which they may bargain due balance of struggle in their favor, is temporary. These concessions are taken away, when the enemy class becomes the dominant bargainer, especially during the crisis and when the unity of the working class is weakened. Nationalization in any bourgeois society or state is not confiscation of the means of production, albeit taking over the management from the private hands by the state, after giving away the full compensation to the earlier owners. Yes, that dose facilitate few well paid and even other employees for a comparatively peaceful life and save the wrath of their erstwhile capitalist masters. Here nationalization, as we can see, blunts the class struggle.

The real emancipation of the exploited class is its own state, by defeating the enemy class and smashing its old state apparatus, and by building a socialist society, where the private property is converted into social wealth. Nationalization of industries and land and other resources, in a country, where the state power is in the hands of the working class, through its revolutionary party, is a transitory method to control the production, as long as state exists and later make it part of social wealth. We call it socialization, and that is our aim.

 “The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.”

[cameoamalthea]

Child Sexual Abuse, Consent, and What I believe

When I was little, a toddler in water-wings, my mother encouraged me to press my genitals against the pump jet of a swimming pool. She said to let it tickle my private parts.

I only had abstinence only education and didn’t know what masturbation meant for girls until I was 19 years old. I didn’t understand what my mother had taught and encouraged me to do, in public, as a toddler, until I was an adult. It horrified me, and I still don’t know how to feel about it.

My mother was abusive, but I didn’t think she was a child molester. The men she dated...not so much. She liked men that hurt her, she choose men that weren’t safe and she didn’t think about safety.

When I hit puberty things changed. I was outgrowing being her baby and she got back into  heavy drug use. Since I couldn’t be her baby, she saw me all grown up. At 12.

She encouraged me to drink, to do drugs, to have sex. She set me up with her friend’s kids, other drug users who she sold too, who has sons around my age. She wanted me to do sex work, but didn’t want to force me. I think she thought if she could get me into sex and partying, I’d agree. 

She guilt tripped me about it a lot. She abused and neglected me and put my life in danger (I almost died so many times) but would always insist she was a good mom, because she’d provided for me for all these years, and because she never sold me. Her friends, the ones with teenage daughters, they helped their moms earn money on the street, but she wasn’t making me do that. I should be grateful. She owed the cartel a lot of money, she could sell me, but she wasn’t. She said I was ungrateful when I refused to come home and started staying on a relative’s couch because I was afraid. If I really loved her, I’d die with her. After all, she’d never sold me. Never made me do what she’d done plenty of times.

Just the threat. And the reality that she left me alone with even more dangerous men and pushed me to do things I was too young to do.

It was fucked up. Sometimes it’s hard to wonder if I’m fucked up, but rationally I know the child isn’t responsible for the parent’s choices.

For my part, I survived by focusing on school. I’d pretend to have essays I needed to do so I could stay over at my relatives to use their computer (and do the extra work I made up, in case she checked). I got into praying the rosary, and became Christian. I vowed to be abstinent until marriage.

I kept my vow. On my wedding night, I discovered I couldn’t consummate the union until I had surgery to repair some internal damage.  Even after I’d healed, I didn’t want sex. Last year I did a year of pelvic floor therapy and it helped. I’ve blogged about it, tagged recovery. I’m also doing DBT and other therapy.

I was sent to live with out of state relatives at 14, and I was on my own at 18. I went to college and earned a degree in Creative Writing, with a minor in pre-law. My pre-law minor was a blend of criminal justice and social justice, with a focus on crimes against women. I wrote research papers on the impact of porn on violence against women (none - as far as I could find). I wrote a research paper on sex trafficing. I wrote a research paper criticizing Twilight romanticizing abuse. I compared U.S. laws to international laws and thought about what policies protects minors from abuse. 

I went on to law school. I loved Constitutional law and became Vice President of my school’s chapter of the ACLU. I agreed with the Comic Book Defense League on censorship cases. Stories don’t have to be perfect. You can and should criticize media for how it reenforces harmful norms in society, but not insist that some things shouldn’t be depicted. Questioning what’s being presented is inoculation against continuing to follow harmful norms without thought. 

I’m deeply anti-censorship and pro-art. I’m deeply pro-criticism. I’m deeply anti-child abuse and exploitation. I’m in favor of looking at norms and policies and asking, is this helpful.

I never wanted to be sexual as a teenager. I wanted to be good and pure and have something about me that was valuable despite the fact I had nothing in the world.  Abstinence Education taught me that. 

But when I looked at classmates who had sex as young as 14 or dated college guys at 17, I didn’t like that I was judging them.

I didn’t agree with the idea that gay people were going to hell, or a girl was somehow dirty if she had sex. The more I studied feminism in college and moved toward pro-sex feminism and rejected rad feminism, the more I was exposed to actual sex education and unlearned shame, I couldn’t judge people. 

If someone wanted to have sex at 14, it was their choice. Not necessarily a smart choice, but still their choice. What was bad was when they weren’t really given a choice. When they were forced into sex or pressured into sex, and taken advantage of by older partners or abused by people their own age. 

The more I learned, the more it bothered me that we don’t really emphasize the importance of consent. Our culture doesn’t value educating people so they can recognize abuse and make informed choices. American age of consent laws don’t criminalize exploitation of young people, instead they treat them like their parent’s property to control - we haven’t outlawed child marriage.

I’ve represented children in CPS custody. In my state, the children get their own lawyer, and I argue what’s in their best interest to the Court. The cases drag on forever because the law requires doing everything possible to reunite parent and child. To give the parent every chance. Because the parent has a fundamental right to their child. 

What other relationship do we have a mandate that the victim has to reconcile with the abuser?

My belief is that children are people, and they should have their own rights. The right to have their best interest come first and not be forced to be with parents who don’t take care of them. That when they’re old enough to make informed choices, they should be able to make choices. Including not being forced to drop out after 8th grade because of the parent’s religious belief, not being forced into marriage, not being punished for their sexuality or sent to institutes because of it. The right to consent to sex when they’re old give consent. The right not to be exploited, coerced or taken advantage of adults in power. (I really like Germany’s approach). 

[xtruss]

Opinion/Racism

On Ahmaud Arbery and the Video

What does the video of Ahmaud's murder show and was it wrong to post it?

"A white supremacist public will not be moved to action after viewing videos of anti-Black murders. It is their cinematic tradition," writes Yannick Giovanni Marshall for #AJOpinion.

— by Yannick Giovanni Marshall | May 11, 2020 | Al Jazeera English

Ahmaud Arbery, who was shot and killed by two white men in Brunswick, US on February 23, 2020, is seen in an undated photo provided by Marcus Arbery

One of the first things one notices when looking at the photographs of lynchings in America in the first half of the 20th century is the faces in the crowd. They are smiling.

Although the more popular descriptors used when referring to anti-Black terrorism are "sad", "tragic", "horrific", the word that should most readily come to mind is "pleasure". Lynchers smiled. They enjoyed the killing. They divided up the body, kept parts as souvenirs and used photos of the lynching as postcards. White supremacist society takes pleasure in the display of prostrate, vulnerable, tortured and murdered Black people.

In such a culture, it is easy to think of the circulation of the Ahmaud Arbery video as continuing that tradition. And it is. Most viewers watch the video with sadistic curiosity in their private spaces even if they later declare their outrage and let people know that they are upset in public.

Despite what some activists will argue, a white supremacist public will not be moved to action after viewing videos of anti-Black murders. It is their cinematic tradition. They are the directors, the producers, the stars and the consumers.

Images of Black people dead and dying is the raw meat that sustains a Negrophobic world. Kenyan social media was livid when photographs of the dead bodies of African people during the Dusit Hotel attacks in Nairobi last year were published before the friends and family of the dead were notified. Black people are not seen to be property owners of their own deaths. Their deaths are meaningless but their dying is clickbait and newsworthy. The Black corpse is a spectacle - not private, not wept over.

Of course, Black people are humans and there are many who share the racist erotophonophilic curiosity of the wider society, even if they represent their circulation of the video as an effort to demand social change. But appealing to white supremacist society betrays a faith in white supremacist society. It is faith in a society that has demonstrated a profound disinterest in the value of Black life every hour of the past four centuries. It is faith that this society is now on the cusp of being anti-racist.

That faith is misplaced.

It was misplaced when groups of enslaved people argued that if they smiled wide enough they would be let go. It was misplaced when new Black political representatives in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era believed that a non-racist America was on the horizon. It was misplaced when Civil Rights marchers believed that their singing sounded the death knell of racial discrimination. It was misplaced when people shouted "never again!" after Trayvon was killed. And it is misplaced now.

Racism does not grow old and die. It metastasises. This public will not be moved to action by Ahmaud any more than it was moved by Trayvon, by Sandra, by Eric, by Aiyana, or by the name we will hear two weeks from now, or the name we will hear two weeks after that.

This public can pull the plug on the economy, it can take the planes from the sky, but it will not willingly disband its lynch-mobs - uniformed or non-uniformed.

Do not offer up the bodies of the killed to win the sympathy of an unfeeling public. Decommission your hope. It polices you.

Many Black people have demanded and pleaded that the video of Ahmaud's murder not be shared due to its re-traumatising effects. They are hoping not to discover what they already know is the reality - that Black pleading is about as action-spurring as Black killings.

Black trauma is, however, real, intergenerational, and should be taken seriously. Our ancestors were gathered and forced to witness lynchings and floggings as well, be they in Basra, in Nairobi, in Cape Town, in Bahia, in Port-au-Prince or in Alabama. This is to say nothing of the millions of Black people who at this moment are being groped by police, separated from their families in prisons, or condemned to suffer the indignities of American totalitarianism in housing projects and ghettos.

Racist murder was the knife-point of racial oppression that drove waves of Black people from the American South during the Great Migration. Black people fled both the murderers in pick-up trucks and the local courts and governments that harboured them. They fled because the men who owned the white gun stores refused to sell them the arms they needed to defend themselves after Black-owned gun stores were broken into and the guns confiscated. Black people fled Ahmaud's killers tens of thousands of times.

Conservative media, like the white supremacist rags of the centuries before them, will instinctively search for a way to protect the murderers and to dehumanise and criminalise the victim. It does not matter how the Black person was killed.

The right-wing intelligentsia will try to frame them for their own murder. They will demonise and tar and feather the body, and problematise the dead person's choices in order to feed white supremacist talking points to their yapping audiences.

This while the mainstream liberal press will try to pass white supremacist bothsidesism off as objective journalism.

But these efforts work less effectively on most Black people. We can still see that a person is being killed. Killed arbitrarily, in broad daylight, and in the open. We see a family being killed. We see us being killed.

Still, Emmett Till's mother said leave the casket open.

Parallel to the radical desire for the protection of Black mental health and wellbeing runs the demand for the interruption in the regular procedure of sweeping Black corpses under the rug. To show their faces, #saytheirname, stay the broom. The discourse of white innocence and the notion of America's fundamental goodness are accomplices in white supremacist murder.

They work in tandem to quickly paint every incident of anti-Black violence as an exception to the rule. When this is persuasive, the anger is defused, and the incident no longer threatens to become a catalyst.

Mamie Till flung open the casket. In pain, she interrupted their arguments and forced a stop to the slow-walking of change.

It should not be assumed that all Black people who ask for the video not to be circulated are acting out of concern for Black mental wellbeing. Some of the loudest voices asking not to circulate the videos have made a career out of preaching the possible rehabilitation of the settler-colony. They too, do not want to be interrupted. Every open casket drops into their "HOPE" mugs and they recoil like an English lady finding a Hottentot's skull in her soup tureen.

These people know very well that Ahmaud was killed in February to absolute silence. They know that it was this very same video that led to the arrest of the killers, led some Black people to become genuinely fed up, led to #justiceforahmaud's trending, and led some to speak openly of revolution.

These people are whom Frantz Fanon, the pre-eminent theorist of the white supremacist settler-colony, called the colonised intellectuals. These are the Black academic influencers who are always nearer in proximity to white power than they let on. It is their task to compose the dull prose and type out the hot takes with which they intend to barricade the doors of the state against an incensed people.

It falls to them to convince the outraged natives that the abattoir in which they have been living - and which has not for one hour in the last 400 years churned out anything other than their misery - will one day spew out roses.

I have not made any determination about whether, in the end, it is good for this video to be out there or not - but I don't have to. It is not my decision to make. The decision about whether or not the video should be circulated (or whether it should have been published in the first place) rests with Ahmaud's loved ones. Only Ahmaud's loved ones.

But it is folly to think that bringing about the end to the circulation of videos depicting racist murder is an achievement. Whipping people in the privacy of the slave quarters rather than publicly against a plantation tree in front of the enslaved is not the victory we might think it is.

Enslavement in prisons and on prison farms is allowed to grow in size and atrocity because they are imagined to exist in some hidden away place, somewhere else. They are thought to be outside of society - even if they are located in the centre of Chicago. Hiding anti-Black atrocity from Black people is a poor substitute for ending anti-Black atrocity. Worse, it dulls our ability to see its full magnitude. If prisons were in the town square, their walls knocked down and their conditions and demographics were laid bare, there would be a Watts uprising every day.

It is also true that we must make a world where the photos of Mike Brown Jr's body left on the street for four hours inspires at least as great a bodily shudder as the mental image of a white person, say Shirley Temple, dangling from a lynching rope - an image many would find more disturbing. But that world is not made through silence. It is made through trauma.

The video, and the debate surrounding it has also, for me, revealed something about how I have been trained to see (and not see). It has taken me a while to recognise what is so clearly there in plain sight. The video is not a video of a Black person being killed.

The video is a record of a Black person fighting back despite being outnumbered and out-gunned. A Black person who fought back against the white supremacist culture that attacked him from nowhere and for no reason. It is a record of Ahmaud standing up, like Trayvon Martin, like Mike Brown, like Sandra Bland, like Eric Garner, like countless others who defended themselves against a murderous culture that has never in its existence been able to conceive of the noble, nor a fair fight.

It is disingenuous to pretend to know Ahmaud outside of the few seconds of tape that is circulating. We did not know him as he lived and so we cannot claim to know him in death. It is for this reason that it is crucial that we not reduce his life to his death. He lived and fought in that video. He lived and fought against overwhelming, unfair odds. In this, he embodied another tradition that has always run counter to white supremacist culture - resistance.

Ahmaud is not reducible to his death and the video is not merely or even primarily a record of his murder. It is a record of him outgunned, outnumbered, and valiant.

100 years ago, Ahmaud might have been the inspiration for Jamaican Harlemite Claude McKay's poem If We Must Die, written during the Red Summer of 1919:

"If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot...

Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!"

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

— Yannick Giovanni Marshall is an academic and scholar of African Studies.

[yasbxxgie]

$52M lottery winner plans to use chunk of fortune to transform Sistrunk Boulevard

A childhood in the black community of Memphis. A cruise line career that delivered him to a life in South Florida. And a lottery ticket he bought at a gas station.

A winning lottery ticket.

They are the factors in Miguel Pilgram’s life that bring him now to Sistrunk Boulevard, a corridor the county calls the “historical heartbeat of Fort Lauderdale’s oldest black community.”

Pilgram, who won a $52 million jackpot using quick-pick numbers in 2010, is investing some of his winnings in Sistrunk in a way not seen in years. Pilgram said he wants to breathe new vibrancy into the boulevard, building on its rich history as a place that nurtured civil rights leaders and pioneers and attracted people to its lively nightlife and music.

“I was raised in a similar environment,” Pilgram said. “There is a need, and in my mind, an obligation, to invest there.”

The 48-year-old Coral Springs resident and father of two is rolling out plans for a New York Subs and Wings restaurant with a Memphis Blues club upstairs, on one side of Sistrunk.

On the other, his company, The Pilgram Group, plans a retail complex with a bank, Jamba Juice and other shops on the ground floor. On the second floor, a performing arts center will offer below-market rates for instructors of dance, arts, and music.

“Do you know how impactful that is for a child from any of these areas, who is like me, to come out and see people actually painting in the window, or performing on a saxophone?” Pilgram said. “That creates a fire under most children. Now they say, wow, anything out there that’s creative, I can be. Whatever artist I want to be, I can be.”

Back in Memphis, Pilgram said he had role models who shaped him.

His father was hard-working. His mother was a devout Seventh-day Adventist who had him in church several days a week. When he got older, he joined the Navy. Then he embarked on a career in the cruise line industry, climbing to a top position, and learning to work with large budgets like the one now under his own name.

In his world travels, he said he visited cultures where people marveled at his “beautiful” brown skin. He said he wants children in Fort Lauderdale’s historic black community to experience that feeling of value as an African American.

But he also saw what can happen when private investment is lacking, he said, and government comes in to rebuild. In Memphis, he said, his grandmother’s apartment was razed, and the residents displaced. He feared it could happen here, and said that’s one thing that drew him to Sistrunk Boulevard.

‘It could be you’

Every week, Pilgram spent $20 on lottery tickets. But he wasn’t good about checking them.

Then one night he ran to the Shell gas station in North Bay Village where he bought his tickets. He left chicken cacciatore and his girlfriend at home, and was in a hurry. He just needed a bottle of wine.

David, the gas station employee, was insistent. Someone had bought the winning Florida Lotto ticket at that gas station, he told Pilgram, and “it could be you.”

Pilgram got the tickets from his car, and one of them hit: 15-16-20-32-45-50.

David started “jumping up and down,” Pilgram said.

“$52,000?” Pilgram thought he heard through David’s Spanish accent.

No, not thousand. 52 million.

Reviving history

Sistrunk Boulevard hasn’t had a nightclub with live music like Pilgram plans in at least 25 years, City Commissioner Robert McKinzie said. Back then, the property Pilgram bought, at the southeast corner of Northwest 15th Avenue and Sistrunk, was the buzzing Night Owl lounge.

The boulevard was once vibrant. Now, vacant lots and empty buildings sit on many of the blocks. The city, a major landowner on Sistrunk, has worked for years to encourage private investment. McKinzie said the pieces are finally falling into place, and he’s “excited” about Pilgram’s role in it.

“Now that we are reviving it,” McKinzie said of Sistrunk Boulevard, “his plan and concept fit right in.”

Next to Pilgram’s planned performing arts center, on the north side of Sistrunk between Northwest 14th Way and 14th Terrace, the city recently agreed to spend $10 million building a new YMCA where the old Mizell Center is. Development has finally come to public land at Sistrunk and Northwest 7th Avenue, a grocery store and shopping plaza that took decades to come to fruition. A developer is now proposing micro-residential units and retail directly across the street, McKinzie said.

Longtime members of the community around Sistrunk have heard for years that an economic revival was right around the corner. Standing in his crossing guard gear at Pilgram’s building, Charles Zeigler, 67, said he believes it.

“It’s coming,” he said after Pilgram told him his plans. “It’s a process.”

The restaurant and blues club — a renovation of the original 1940s building — will be open in about a year, if all goes according to Pilgram’s plan. He purchased the property in May.

His vision next to the Mizell Center, where he’s still working to purchase multiple pieces of property that span the block, could come to fruition in Spring of 2019.

Winning was ‘confirmation’

The Sistrunk investment isn’t his only endeavor.

Pilgram is working on a clothing line of men’s shirts, has other real estate dealings, bought a condo at Fort Lauderdale beach to renovate and make his home, and is renovating a two-story building at 107 SW 6th St., next to his office, just down the street from the Broward County Courthouse. It will open in the coming months as a New York Subs and Wings restaurant and jazz lounge.

Outside his office, the license plate of his black BMW reflects what’s on his mind: “AMB1SHN.”

He said he feels an urgency that many people don’t. When he was in his late 20s, Pilgram intervened when a man outside the blues club he managed in Memphis was being beaten and robbed. Pilgram chased the man, who pulled out a gun and shot him.

When he reflected on his survival, Pilgram said he felt a conviction that he was going to have a “positive global impact.”

Though he’s often called lucky, Pilgram said he doesn’t believe in luck. He didn’t know what the numbers on the winning ticket were, saying he never really looked. Rather, he felt that winning was “confirmation” from his Creator, he said, after treating people “with such integrity and honor my whole life.”

Lottery winning history is a mixed bag. Many winners have seen their lives pulled apart, their winnings sapped. Not so for Pilgram.

“It’s been 1,000 percent positive,” he said. “Whatever you are before you come into success, you’re going to be more of that when you get there. … The only thing you require more of is discipline, and the Navy gave me all of that I would ever need.”

Aerial:

Pilgram's planned developments along Sistrunk Blvd

[ruthpastor46]

Buried in “Hilariously Stupid” White House Attack on Socialism, An Accidentally Strong Argument for Medicare for All

This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1540 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and what we’ve accomplished in the last year, and our current goal, more original reporting

Yves here. It appears Republicans have noticed how popular socialism is with the young and felt compelled to Do Something about that, in the form of a 72 page soi disant report by the Council of Economic Advisers on the “Opportunity Costs of Socialism”. Apparently no one told them that Basque region of Spain, dominated by the worker-owned Mongragon, which has strict curbs on executive pay, had the lowest post-crisis level of unemployment in the country.

Even this post, however, misses the idea that there are different types of property rights, even with supposedly private property, as Jerri-Lynn’s discussion of the “right to repair” illustrates. Sandwichman at Econospeak made a similar point by hoisting this matrix from Elinor Olstrom:

By Jake Johnson, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams

From its heavy-handed comparisons between mild-mannered democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and militant communist revolutionary Mao Zedong to its bizarre assertion that the Scandinavian economic model is a failure due to the high weekly costs of owning a pickup truck in Finland and Sweden (seriously), a White House attack on socialism was roundly mocked almost as soon as it was released on Monday, with informed critics arguing that the report reads as if it was plagiarized from a college freshmanwith a serious Ayn Rand obsession.

Titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” the Council of Economic Advisers’ (CEA) new 72-page paperpurports to offer an empirical analysis of socialist policies—but what it actually does is make what analysts described as “hilariously stupid” and “intellectually embarrassing” claims accompanied by charts and footnotes that give off the appearance of scholarly diligence.

Characterizing the CEA’s report as a “truly bizarre document,” Vox‘s Dylan Matthews notes that the paper’s bibliography contains “a mix of books about mass atrocities in Communist regimes, economics papers on the distortionary effects of taxation, and works by socialists, like the essay Voxpublished by Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day defending democratic socialism.”

But a look beyond the CEA’s hysterical rants against socialism’s supposedly totalitarian nature reveals that the White House accidentally makes a strong case for Medicare for All, which the paper describes as the “headline American socialist proposal.”

After attempting to discredit single-payer healthcare programs—which multiple polls now show most Republicanvoters support—as “similar in spirit to Lenin and Mao,” the CEA produced a chart showing short wait times for seniors under the current U.S. healthcare system compared to those under the Canadian and Nordic systems.

As Vox‘s Sarah Kliff notes, the CEA conveniently omits the fact that “America’s seniors are essentially in a single-payer system”: it’s called Medicare.

“The Trump chart doesn’t say what the White House seems to think it says,” Kliff concludes. “It isn’t telling us that single-payer healthcare has long wait times. If anything, it says that it is possible to build a single-payer system with short wait times—and our Medicare program has already done it.”

So, um, a new @WhiteHouseCEA report ostensibly written to argue against Medicare for All uses… the success of Medicare (!) to argue against it. https://t.co/irnkIlNzbh pic.twitter.com/RhndXzAHzE

— Steve Goldstein (@MKTWgoldstein) October 23, 2018

In a tweet, Sanders offered Trump his congratulations for making such a good argument in favor of Medicare for All:

Congratulations to Donald Trump for unintentionally making the case for Medicare for All. https://t.co/De09BEVq2s

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) October 23, 2018

The CEA’s Medicare for All faceplant was just one of many ludicrous components of the White House’s latest effort to ratchet up fear of the coming socialist menaceahead of next month’s midterm elections. According to recent survey data, a growing number of American voters prefer socialism to capitalism—hardly a surprising finding, given that just five men own almost as much wealth as half the world’s population and tens of millions of Americans are just one emergency away from economic peril.

In a Twitter thread, Public Citizen highlighted a couple more of the report’s egregious lies:

Here’s one embarrassing claim from the report: Restraining drug prices will lower life expectancy. Yes, that’s right – in the country where 1 in 6 ration drugs because of price – they argue that restraining price gouging would cost lives. 5/

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) October 23, 2018

The report is dead wrong on the cost of Medicare for All. Medicare for All is MORE efficient than wasteful private insurers. We would spend the same or less on health care while providing better treatment to all. 6/

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) October 23, 2018

The report twists and turns to claim that US health care is superior. But we do worse than other rich nations on infant mortality, access to care, lifespan, overall health and quality. Private insurance makes things worse in each dimension. 7/

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) October 23, 2018

But as the left-wing magazine CurrentAffairs pointed out on Twitter, no detailed breakdown is necessary to recognize that the CEA’s paper is total bunk.

“The White House paper on socialism can be dismissed in a sentence: it defines socialism as state ownership rather than worker control, and therefore does not have anything to say about socialism,” the publication noted. “Sorry that you wasted 72 pages and a bunch of hours, White House CEA.”

This entry was posted in Free markets and their discontents, Guest Post, Income disparity, Politics, Social policy, Social values, The dismal science on October 24, 2018 by Yves Smith.

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Source: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/buried-hilariously-stupid-white-house-attack-socialism-accidentally-strong-argument-medicare.html

[joyful-voyager]

Today's Massive Political Rant

Y'all mind if I rant a little bit? No? Good. 'Cause I've got some crap to get off my chest. There's a whole lot of Democratic handwringing going on right now about the Russia/collusion story along the lines of, “Why aren't more Republicans outraged? If this had been Obama, they'd be calling for his head! Why aren't people abandoning Trump in droves? Why aren't the politicians walking away from this dumpster fire? Why are most Republican voters still supporting this abomination of an administration? Do they just think collusion and intent to commit election fraud and possible freaking treason are all just okay?" No. Of course they don't think it's okay. But they do think it's acceptable. Let me explain. I grew up around people like this. My teenage daughter once described my Midwestern hometown thusly: “It's about the size of a watermelon, and the people are the pits." Yeah, she's not far wrong. With a few exceptions — which thankfully include my very moderate immediate family members and their spouses and adult children — the people I grew up with are right-wing, regressive, reactionary, undereducated, and over-religious. Trumpers, in other words, and proud of it. I went home for a visit last weekend, and within 10 minutes of leaving my parents' house for a walk with my husband, I saw no fewer than three Confederate flag bumper stickers on pickups barreling down the main street through town. Don't get me wrong; it's a nice little town, with a great public school system and not a single private school within 20 miles, lots of cute little antique shops and boutiques, a beautiful public park and town pool, a massive Little League and Girls Softball league, wonderful town heritage celebrations, and the best damn donut shop on the planet. It was a good place to grow up … until I actually grew up and left, and looked back on it much later, with much clearer vision. And I can pretty confidently say that of course no one there thinks collusion with Russia to rig an election was an okay thing to do. But they do think it was acceptable … in return for an administration and Congress that will rubberstamp fixes for all the institutions and concepts that make them feel bad. In other words, as long as Trump can install enough Supreme Court Justices to deal with the things that make them feel … … sad (abortion, all those dead babies) … … wronged (a poor person might be able to eat or see a doctor for free or at a reduced cost when they have to pay for it outright) … … icky (the existence and establishment of rights for LGBTQA people) … … embarrassed (they might have to go back to school to retrain for a new job because their old industry doesn't exist anymore, and school sucked for them the first time) … … scared (a brown person might break into their house at any second to steal their stuff so they need to keep their guns and have a quasi-military police force to protect them) … … doubtful (their preferred religion might not be more valid or peaceful or Truthful than a different religion or, horror of horrors, no religion at all) … … inadequate (a woman can have ideas and property and autonomy and a life without being wholly dependent on a man) … … angry (paying taxes to send kids to school when they don't have any of their own) … … unsure (kids these days are learning things in schools and universities that they don't understand) … … dumb (climate science is full of eggheads who use really big words they didn't learn in school and climate change can't be real because: snow) … … outnumbered and insignificant (the U.S. will be a majority minority nation within a generation or two and white people, especially middle-aged and older white men, will no longer be trusted or even needed to steer the Ship of State) … … what's a little collusion among friends? As long as the current (mis)Administration appeals to their fears and promises them that women (read: sluts) will be forced to carry their poor babies to term but they won't have to pay for those babies' care and education … as long as they don't have to pay for some poor person getting treated for heroin addiction or any other “sin-related“ health problem … as long as they can keep their guns so they feel safe and powerful when things go bump in the night … as long as they are never the ones who have to retrain for jobs in new industries but they can glibly demand it of poor black and brown people … as long as women cover up their tasty, tasty shoulders and don't get all uppity at university when they get drunk and get themselves raped by some innocent white frat boy who just couldn't control himself (and should never be told to control himself because boys will be boys and male sexuality is 100% in the control of temptresses who want to lead boys from the godly path) … as long as boys who kiss boys and girls who kiss girls and people whose gender identity doesn't match their genitals stay firmly away from them because just thinking about all of that makes them feel weirdly tingly in the pants … as long as nobody ever tries to regulate the emissions of their 20-year-old pickup with Confederate flags all over it, nor the outdated auto manufacturing plant that built it … as long as white men are still seen as the top of the earthly hierarchy, second only to their god … everything else is okay. Everything, right up to and including treason, because it's all a means to an end. They will never see what's right in front of their faces. They will never think past “I think abortion is bad" and get to “so we should make birth control as available to as many people as possible," because that sad emotion associated with abortion has been appeased before that thought can even form. (And also because birth control empowers women to control their own sexuality, which should be firmly in the control of their husbands or fathers, but that's a whole other issue.) They will say they don't like the Affordable Care Act because it supposedly put small business owners in a rough spot, but that's just what they've been told to say by Fox News to mask the fact that they just don't want to pay for anybody's health care other than their own, especially not poor people or brown people or addicts or undocumented people. Russian collusion is way too complicated for them to understand, and as long as Trump makes all the icky stuff go away and makes all the bad feelings feel better, then by god, they will overlook every single damn thing he does otherwise. And they call us “bleeding hearts." It's a sick, stunted, lizard-brain worldview. I know. I grew up having it shoved in my face every single damn day of my childhood. But it may explain why most Trumpers are just not talking about what's happening right now. Trump told them what they wanted to hear: That they have nothing to fear because white men will be on top in his (mis)Administration, brown people will be sent back to where they came from or never allowed to enter the country at all, women will be subservient to men so we can tell them how sexy (or not) they are and get away with it, political correctness won't be a thing anymore so they can speak freely without fear of repercussion, climate change regulations won't hamper manly industries anymore, you might lose Medicare but you won't have to pay health insurance for anybody who isn't able-bodied and morally pure, poor people's kids won't eat or go to school on your dime but you can send your kids to religious schools on the government's dime, the country has only one real religion, and ignorance is not just bliss, it's the American Dream. He told them what they wanted to hear to get their votes. Yes, he appealed to their racism, their fears, their vanity, their isolationism, their stupidity, and their zealotry to get those votes. He got those votes. He paid them back by installing Gorsuch, who they think will make all their lizard-brain emotions feel better and establish the reactionary, regressive government they think they've always wanted. Nothing Trump does after that matters to them, and Trump and his minions know it. Which is why they will get away with all of it — violating the emoluments clause, enriching his family using the Oval Office as his place of business, slashing Medicare to give tax breaks to disgustingly wealthy people, selling our government to China and Russia, ad infinitum. They're going to get away with it until Republican politicians start to think Trump's actions will keep them from getting reelected … but those same politicians know that as long as they and Trump give those lizard-brain voters what they want — conservative policies and Justices who will ease their fears but never, ever ask them to think or learn or change — their jobs are in no danger whatsoever. So please, Democrats. Stop asking why half the country isn't as incensed about this as we are. They just don't care. Furthermore, they're not going to care until we figure out how to appeal to their fearful lizard brains and their latent authoritarianism. I don't claim to know how to do that. I'm not sure anyone does. I'm not sure anyone can. And that's what terrifies me about the future of this country.

[stopkingobama]

To Stop the Violence, Shrink the State

Photo credit: Facebook, James Hodgkinson

The shooting yesterday of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, several aides and capitol police officers serves as a chilling reminder as to the state of American politics. We are no longer a nation of civil public discourse. We have finally seen someone take matters into their own hands and express how they feel justice and policy should be made.

This is an act of domestic terrorism from one point of view. It is an act of patriotism from another. It is clear that we as a nation, do not agree on what it means to be patriotic.

Disgusting but Not Surprising

James Hodgkinson’s actions are only a real physical outburst of acts that have been mimed in the media and on college campuses across the country. Violent outbursts, such as the burning of debris and destruction of property at Berkeley College in California over an appearance of right-wing pundit, Milo Yiannopolous, Kathy Griffin’s gruesome photo depicting her beheading the President and, most recently, a version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which replaced Donald Trump for Caesar are all only the roots of the cause spurring someone like Mr. Hodgkinson to commit terrible acts.

If the people who displayed this faux violence were completely alright with those displays, why should they be outraged now? My guess is that this shared sentiment of the removal of individuals you find to be in stark opposition to your viewpoints has not and will not fade from our public and private discourse anytime soon.

As someone who is fairly vocal about their political views, I have received and have witnessed others that I know receive death threats through social media channels for expressing differing views than many members of the left. This is not uncommon in our society today. Many internet trolls or those who fancy themselves champions of left or right leaning policy and their causes use hateful and inflammatory rhetoric to make their points.

When your entire political philosophy is built on the principles of command and control through force, why would your rhetoric be any different? Mr. Hodgkinson’s action in light of his beliefs is only a further escalation in a string of events that we have seen unfolding in this nation. Are we really surprised that is has come to this?

There are two political ideologies at play in this country. Some who believe that command and control through socialistic and perhaps fascistic means is the only way to achieve a great society and others who believe in more limited government, empowering citizens and all that entails.

The independent middle of this nation is rapidly evaporating. More and more people are galvanizing themselves to the farthest left or right of their worldviews and are continuously willing to take strong action to make their points heard. Battle lines are being drawn, and future conflicts in this country may not be hashed out in a television studio alone.

An Assault on Freedom

Patriotism is in the eye of the beholder. The majority of Americans both left and right will agree that Mr. Hodgkinson’s actions are heinous and despicable. Anyone who attacks another individual, no matter your motivation, has violated the principles of individual liberty and our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is clear. However, aren’t there many people in this country who most likely still do agree with the alleged politics and could potentially hold similar motivations to this man?

In America, we only punish crime after the fact and motivations and actions are two separate things. But the motivations to incite violence or depict violence against members of an opposition party, that is a serious problem.

If James Hodgkinson believed that he was taking the phrase uttered by Thomas Jefferson, ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,’ as justification for his actions, what then is our recourse?

Many people have already expressed they’d like to see the President and potentially his administration dead. They want to and have expressed that free speech will not be exercised on their campuses. Numerous stories can be found where people with strong political beliefs rail against those in opposition to them. This is not a one-sided partisan issue although the level of hate and anger on the left seems to have escalated to a fever pitch.

Our founders put in place a government founded on the principles of individual liberty and freedom. Our Constitution and system of government enshrine individual representation. Mr. Hodgkinson’s assault on GOP leaders is an assault on the individuals who voted for these men. It is an assault on freedom. It is an assault on the way of life that those men seek to set in law for the rest of America.

Mr. Hodgkinson’s actions were designed to strike fear and put an end to discussion. We are witnessing the same rhetoric of hate both on social media and in the mainstream media.

We are a divided nation. The differences are becoming starker. When will we be ready to admit that we have two facets of the same religion at war, at least intellectually, and now in small parts, physically, in our nation? Both sides of the aisle who support increased governmental control in our lives are participating in state religion.

The problem is that when you believe the state is the one necessary for making your life into the life you want, you can only see those who would stand in the way of the state’s ability to do so, as someone who is a direct threat to your way of life. Mr. Hodgkinson allegedly saw Steve Scalise and the rest of the Trump administration as that. He simply had the courage to put action to rhetoric. This is an extremely dangerous and frightening development.

So What Do We Do?

Only one solution exists to truly end the vitriolic nature of media confrontation and now physical confrontations of ideals. We need to limit the power that government has to influence our lives. Give power back to the people. We need to start championing individual rights, and our government should empower people to succeed outside of government interference. If you need to use force to impose your will on others, that will is inherently infringing on the rights of others.

Once we understand this fact, we will be able to limit this type of violence in this country and around the world.

I do not believe Mr. Hodgkinson is a patriot as I disagree with his views but I believe him to be honest in his beliefs. He was truly willing to act on his agenda and achieve his ends through force. If Mr. Scalise had perished, Mr. Hodgkinson would have removed someone who has the power to oppose his political viewpoints and impose his political will on him. This is a scary and dangerous environment.

Anyone who is motivated to put cause above self is for that cause a patriot or, if you prefer, a zealot. Mr. Hodgkinson’s actions are no different than those of ISIS. With so many depictions and small acts of aggression against people of differing political views in this country are we truly surprised by his actions? If we are, we are naive.

Numerous posts on social media today prove that there is little sympathy from certain individuals and groups for GOP lawmakers and staff who were injured today. With death threats against right-leaning individuals rampant, is everyone who shares the similar beliefs of Mr. Hodgkinson willing to condemn his action? I hope so. However, the political climate in this country would suggest otherwise.

A man lost his life for his cause today. Several individuals were injured defending their cause. It’s time we decide whose side we are on and if we’re willing to use force or allow force to be used to achieve whatever political ends we follow. Perhaps it’s time we realized that the use of force to achieve political ends is inherently evil.

Reprinted from Medium.

John Bianchi

John Bianchi is a marketing professional and the Chapter Leader for America’s Future Foundation in Raleigh. You can keep up to date with his articles on Medium here: https://medium.com/@johnmbianchi21.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.