Progressives (Liberals)

@Real Music,

Both seem clearly obvious, don't they.

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A rather perfect example of why a reliance on social media for information sets one up for disinformation and manipulation. In one history class at university, a fellow who clearly had little familiarity with books suggested that the TA's recounting of some historical matter couldn't be true as he'd never seen such a thing in movies. Using social media for "education" is similarly foolish.

Quote:

A tweet from liberal activists touting Elizabeth Warren drew what seemed like a typical response from one of the Democratic presidential candidate’s fans this September:

“Thank you for endorsing Elizabeth Warren!!!” the user wrote, sharing a photo of black women holding “African Americans with Warren” signs.

The post gained only a single retweet at the time. But it found new life this past weekend, making its way to sharp-eyed Twitter users who realized it was fake, with the campaign placards photoshopped over Black Lives Matter signs.

Twitter users seized on a side-by-side comparison of the doctored version and the original, assailing the Warren campaign for the apparent misrepresentation. What they did not realize was that the account that had propagated the photo has been identified by the Warren campaign as a “troll,” only feigning support for the Massachusetts Democrat as it pushed out falsified content in an apparent effort to undermine her candidacy.

As the image solidified negative views of Warren among some who favor other Democratic candidates, the incident offered a fresh lesson about political disinformation: Homespun operations on social media represent a rising threat, capable of inciting conflict among voters and turning unwitting users into agents of online deception.

Four years after Russian agents weaponized social media during the 2016 election, tech giants are grappling not just with foreign meddling but also with falsehoods spread by less sophisticated, and frequently U.S.-based, online sources. Such actors already have circulated misleading posts, doctored photos and manipulated video around the 2020 race.

WP

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Quote:

Fox News host Tucker Carlson admits media is right about Trump’s lying: ‘He’s a full-blown BS artist’

A leading Fox News host has issued a bizarre defence of Donald Trump, in which he described the president as a "liar" and a “full-blown BS artist”.

Tucker Carlson said the president makes misleading statements because “that’s who he is” and compared Mr Trump to a “salesman”.

“He's a talker, a boaster, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. At times, he's a full-blown BS artist,” Mr Carlson said.

The Fox News presenter also rejected the White House’s claim that Mr Trump’s 2017 inauguration was “the largest ever measured on the national mall”.

“We're not going to lie to you: that was untrue,” he added.

Independent UK

Quote:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

- Hannah Arendt

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@blatham,

The vilification of Warren from the left — and those posing as "from the left" — has been a real eye-opener, although it shouldn't have been. It was quick, too. It wasn't that her plans were impractical or unaffordable or overly optimistic. No, she's a liar, a fake, a thief, and a Republican. And this isn't all originating from bots and trolls.

The criticism of some of the other candidates on an ideological basis could be expected but the unnecessarily high level of personal attacks, moral posturing, and just plain nastiness is instructive. Social media amplify the worst aspects of tribalism.

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@hightor,

Yes. It took me by surprise as well. And as you say, it was the tenor and vectors of the vilification that catches the attention.

We both read quite broadly and I think we'd concur that Sanders, the other "socialist" candidate, has not suffered the same sort of personal or character vilification.

That she would be targeted in this manner makes some obvious sense in that no other candidate posed such an acute threat to some/many? in the Sanders camp which is certainly a key source of these attacks. I gather that is the "tribalism" you refer to. As we saw in the prior cycle where Sanders and Clinton were in contest, a level of viciousness, with similar aspects of character vilification, were wielded within the pro-Sanders contingent (on-going, as we see pretty much every day here).

Clearly, Russian and GOP bad-faith actors played a key role in creating/fostering internecine warfare of this very nasty sort. That's not fully explanatory, as you suggest, but it helps us understand, I think, how a particular culture within the pro-Sanders camp came into being.

But such tactics wouldn't work if some significant percentage of humans were more immune from the siren call of tribalism of the more severe sort.

I'll add that one factor that presents itself in these two cases is gender. And I'm not sure of the influence here but I'm sure as hell not ruling it out.

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Over the past few days we've brought up some of the thinking of the founders of the USA. Factionalism was seen as the greatest danger to a pure democracy, so "anti-democratic" elements are a feature of the Constitution. Now the right to free speech is pretty much unrestricted and this might seem odd because we know how powerful the written word can be when it comes to inflaming the political passions of the people. But Madison felt quite secure that the vast size of our country would limit the reach of demagogues and hotheads. It might take weeks or months for an angry screed written in one city to be disseminated through the country as a whole. The thinking was that by the time most incendiary news reached Atlanta the fire in Boston would already have burned out. Obviously the speed of communication has improved over the years but the rise of electronic social media and the nearly instantaneous global reach goes way beyond anything envisioned in the early 19th Century and our institutions are struggling to deal with the effects of this development. One of the biggest effects has been the growth of factionalism. It's always been ugly but its effect on democracy has now become deadly.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vogue.com/article/bernie-sanders-progressive-presidential-candidate-2020-blackout/amp

Excerpt
But, then again, it was only somewhat surprising that Sanders’s immigration proposal was glossed over by major news outlets, given the general lack of focus on the senator’s campaign throughout this seemingly endless election cycle.

It’s doubtful that there’s some sort of media conspiracy going on to misrepresent Sanders’s standing in the 2020 race, but the numbers speak for themselves; for example, between October 28 and November 8, the New York Times appeared to have published more than four times as many articles about Warren than it did about Sanders, despite the fact that Sanders is consistently polling just a few percentage points behind Warren (in fact, a Reuters poll this week found Sanders ahead of Warren by 4%, crediting the rise in support for Sanders to a post-debate spike). Sanders’s top aide Jeff Weaver criticized the “undiscriminating coverage of polls that fit existing narratives” from CNN, MSNBC, and major newspapers in August.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that much of Bernie’s base is younger and more diverse than the myth the “Bernie bro” implies; as usual, there seems to be a disinclination to amplify the voices of young people, women, and people of color, particularly when they’re telling a story that deviates from expectations.

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Quote:

Nation's Progressives Give Thanks That They Have So Much To Be Angry About This Year

Just the title is enough.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/nations-progressives-give-thanks-they-have-so-much-be-angry-about-year

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/27/amid-national-surge-new-poll-shows-bernie-sanders-top-democrat-new-hampshire%3famp

Amid National Surge, New Poll Shows Bernie Sanders Top Democrat in New Hampshire

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@hightor,

It's a damn good point. The volume and rapidity of information flows facilitated by the internet allow much less time for tempered consideration than in the periods prior. And a sense or feeling of disorder seems to be a common and understandable response. I think that one consequence is the urge to grasp something, anything, and to hold on to it tenaciously for mental/emotional stability while rejecting in an almost violent way other apparently conflicting ideas/values/etc.

I was thinking the other day of Buckley's famous description of conservatism as "Standing athwart history, yelling Stop". It's an accurate description of this state of mind which, clearly, conservatives commonly experience, more so than liberals. Buckley wouldn't disagree with that even if he'd think differently about causes and consequences than I do.

Given all that, would it make sense to understand the more absolutist corners of the pro-Sanders movement (or any movement) as a fundamentally conservative phenomenon? To see it as an emotionally/psychologically defensive posture in the face of complexity?

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@hightor,

Such a smart guy, Chomsky. Lately, for my own peace of mind, I've been listening to a lot of Chris Hitchens' speeches, discussions and debates. I have to feed my brain. I can't just set it out on the front porch and have it yell at stupid strangers walking past.

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This certainly has some surprises, for me at least. Do visit the link as there are good graphs included which really help clarify the relevant polling.

Quote:

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to tax the assets of America’s wealthiest individuals continues to draw broad support from voters, across party, gender and educational lines. Only one slice of the electorate opposes it staunchly: Republican men with college degrees.

Not surprisingly, that is also the profile of many who’d be hit by Ms. Warren’s so-called wealth tax, which has emerged as the breakout economic proposal in the Democratic presidential primary race.

NYT

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@blatham,

He is brilliant. I agree with his pointed observation that we’re lulled into thinking we are actually accomplishing something by being allowed to vote for two very similar representatives of the Business Party every four years.

I also agree with his observation that the real work of making substantive changes in this country is the work that happens between elections—like the activist grassroots movement Bernie has created.

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More progressive news:
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/11/obama-socialism

Excerpt:

What does Barack Obama want? To ask the question is both to wonder how one of the world’s most influential people chooses to dedicate his time and to consider to what ends he thinks it is best put to use.

As Nathan Robinson and I argued a little more than two years ago, a post-presidency offers us the ideal heuristic for doing exactly that. In office, or so it has often been suggested, Obama’s fiery progressive spirit was endlessly stifled by a combination of events, GOP obstruction, and the inherent conservatism of the American legislative process. Having left such constraints behind, many believed, post-2016 Obama would now be free to do just about anything he
wanted — meaning that the former president’s real self could finally surface from beneath the depths of institutional necessity under which it had hitherto been submerged.

This prediction turned out to be true enough, just not in the way many Obama partisans assumed.

Equipped with fame, wealth, and a vast reservoir of residual goodwill Obama now has more power to do good in an hour than most of us do in a lifetime. The demands of etiquette and propriety notwithstanding, he no longer has intransigent Blue Dog senators to appease, donors to placate, or personal electoral considerations to keep him up at night. When he speaks or acts, we can be reasonably certain he does so out of sincere choice and that the substance of his words and actions reflect the real Barack Obama and how he honestly sees the world.

It therefore tells us a great deal that, given the latitude, resources, and moral authority with which to influence events, Obama has spent his post-presidency cozying up to the global elite and delivering vapid speeches to corporate interests in exchange for unthinkable sums of money.

Though often remaining out of the spotlight, he has periodically appeared next to various CEOs at events whose descriptions might be read as cutting satire targeting the hollowness of business culture if they weren’t all-too real. As the world teeters on the brink of ecological disaster, he recently cited an increase in America’s output of oil under his administration as a laudable achievement.

When Obama has spoken about or intervened in politics, it’s most often been to bolster the neoliberal center-right or attack and undermine the Left. Having emerged from seclusion to endorse the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau, Obama also rang up Britain’s austerity-loving Conservative prime minister Theresa May on election night in 2017 to offer reassurance and trash the Labour Party’s electoral prospects. Only last week, while denouncing the Democratic Party’s “activist wing,” the former president who had once introduced himself to the nation as a progressive, community-minded outsider inveighed against those pushing for a more ambitious direction — contemptuously instructing a group of wealthy donors not to concern themselves too-much with the irrational zealotry of “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds.”

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Rob
@philosophrob
·
Nov 25
"Notice... they're going after Trump not on his major crimes but because he went after a leading Democrat. Does that remind you of anything? Yes. Watergate. They didn't go after Nixon on his major crimes... It was because he had attacked the Democratic party."

– Noam Chomsky

1 Reply

@Lash,

What were Nixon's major crimes?

1 Reply

@InfraBlue,

Similar to everybody else’s.
https://historycollection.co/10-crimes-of-the-nixon-administration/

Here are ten crimes committed by Richard Nixon and his administration.

Excerpt:

Lyndon Johnson had evidence that then candidate Richard Nixon was deliberately impeding the Vietnam Peace Talks, calling it an act of treason. The White House
Lyndon Johnson accused Candidate Nixon of Treason

In December of 2008 tapes of telephone conversations recorded in the Oval office during the administration of Lyndon Johnson in 1968 were released to the public. In one of these tapes, Johnson reports to Senator Everett Dirksen, then the leader of the Republican’s in the Senate, that Nixon, the GOP nominee for President in the thick of a campaign, was committing treason. Dirksen did not argue or defend the Republican nominee. The Nixon campaign was deliberately acting to impede the progress of the Paris Peace Talks, which were then attempting to find a peaceful solution to the Vietnam War

That October, 1968, Johnson ordered a stop to the bombing which had pounded North Vietnam since 1965, Operation Rolling Thunder, in response to the North Vietnamese agreeing to engage in Peace Talks. Nixon, who had seen a large lead in the polls over his Democratic opponent shrink alarmingly, publicly announced that he supported the idea of peace talks. Privately he opened a channel to the Vietnamese government with the intention of sabotaging the peace talks and postponing any breakthroughs towards a settlement until after the election.

Nixon established a firm working relationship with Henry Kissinger, who also had contacts within the White House and the campaign of Nixon’s main opponent, Hubert Humphrey. Through Kissinger, the Nixon campaign kept apprised of the status of the peace talks and the Johnson administration’s efforts to move them forward. A prime sticking point of the talks was the insistence on the part of the North Vietnamese that the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) be included in the negotiations. The South Vietnamese government under President Thieu did not recognize the existence of the NLF and refused to enter into negotiations with them, effectively blocking any progress.

[...]
Read more at the link.
Practically all presidents commit crimes. They kill innocent people. They sell off our rights.

You know this.

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https://news.yahoo.com/kamala-harris-suffers-blow-aide-165844171.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=tw

Kamala implodes.

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Free stuff by Bernie Sanders
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanders-america-needs-free-college-now/2015/10/22/a3d05512-7685-11e5-bc80-9091021aeb69_story.html

October 22, 2015
Bernie Sanders, an Independent, represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate and is a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president.

Excerpt:

In 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes became the first president to make a strong case for universally available public education. “Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education,” he said in his inaugural address, adding that “liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools.” Hayes, a Republican, didn’t worry that some poor kid might benefit from access to “free stuff,” nor did he believe that the children of wealthy elites should be excluded from the universal nature of the program. For him, education was the basis for full economic and political participation, and full participation was the basis for all prosperity. An education should be available to all regardless of anyone’s station.

Today, there is universal access to free, public schools across the United States for kindergarten through 12th grade. That didn’t happen by presidential decree. It took populist pressure from the progressive movement, beginning in the 1890s, to make widespread access to free public schools a reality. By 1940, half of all young people were graduating from high school. As of 2013, that number was 81 percent. But that achievement is no longer enough. A college degree is the new high school diploma.

[What Bernie Sanders’s rise means for American politics]

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was possible to graduate from high school and move right into a decent-paying job with good benefits. Strong unions offered apprenticeships, and a large manufacturing sector provided opportunities for those without an advanced degree. A couple with a sole breadwinner could buy a home, raise a family and send their kids to college. That was the American dream. Unfortunately, today, for too many Americans, it’s not a possibility.

An important pathway to the middle class now runs through higher education, but rising costs are making it harder and harder for ordinary Americans to get the education they want and need. In 1978, it was possible to earn enough money to pay for a year of college tuition just by working a summer job that paid minimum wage. Today, it would take a minimum wage worker an entire year to earn enough to cover the annual in-state tuition at a public university. And that’s why so many bright young people don’t go to college, don’t finish or graduate deeply in debt. With $1.3 trillion in student loans, Americans are carrying more student debt than credit card or auto-loan debt. That’s a tragedy for our young people and for our nation.

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