Christian

Also, let’s not forget America’s most famous current anarcho-Capitalist figure Neal Stephenson. I doubt you’d make those same allegations (re: Cato) against Stephenson.

I really don’t think you understand the term “fascism”. Fascists support many Left-Wing economic policies. It’s why fascist parties have so often appealed to the working class.

The Cato Institute supports free trade, abolishment of fiat currency, eliminating all copyright protection, anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-military-industrial complex ...

I’m not sure you understand the term “corporatism” either. It is a combination of the government and corporations, where the government aids the corporation in avoiding the competition of the market. Obama’s health care overhaul was corporatist. The military-industrial complex is corporatist.

Republicans are corporatist, most libertarians are not. Some are though, like Ayn Randians. Many Socialists are also, like supporting subsidies for national corporations.

The only area where the Cato disagree with Left-Wing libertarianism is in their definition of property rights. They don’t believe that ownership in property is based in use, which violates the original tenets of American libertarianism as defined by names like Benjamin Tucker.

The current system is one “where everyone knows their place”, as those born without money have almost zero hope of escaping the system and becoming anything other than a “prole”. Who controls the money supply? The Federal Reserve and the big banks. Who benefits from that system? Wall Street fat cats. What happens to everyone else? They keep working for employers for a wage. Everyone in their place...just like in Huxley’s Brave New World.

The Cato Institute has continually criticized the Trump administration and fascism. So, that really defeats your claim.

As for your second contention, I guess corporate (or State) owned media is the only thing you believe.

The World Socialist Web Site, the largest source for far Left Socialism in the United States, spent three years calling the Democrats attempt to impeach Trump as an attempted coup.

I guess that Socialists are now on your list of Republicans, conspiracy theorists, or cultists. That’s going to come as a major surprise to both sides!

The truth is that the Democrats never produced any actual facts to back up their claims either, outside of some Intelligence agency reports...and everyone knows how truthful and believable those unConstitutional agencies have always been!

What was that about Iraq and weapon’s of mass destruction again?

The impeachment proceedings ruled Trump not guilty.

It’s a matter of Democrats vs. Republicans as to what you believe. Incredibly divisive.

According to the laws enshrined in the Constitution and by those powers of the US Congress, the Democrats made unsubstantiated allegations against Donald Trump since his election.

Check out the WSWS for an actual Left-Wing view of the attempted impeachment of Donald Trump...specifically referred to multiple times by the WSWS as an “ attempted coup” by the Democrats and sections of the US military.

It seems to me that you have a misunderstanding of libertarianism in America, and are mistaking it with fascism or other far Right variants.

Libertarianism isn’t one monolithic view and some of them are distasteful people, there is no doubt. The same is true of any political persuasion though. Hard-line Communists and Stalinists on the Left can be just as bad, for example.

I think you might need to check out Reason magazine or the Cato Institute as those are the two biggest sources for American Right libertarianism today.

I apologize for taking your comment the wrong way.

I still have no clue why “libertarian” comes in to the discussion. The alt-Right and Trump have never been mistaken for libertarians, nor have the majority of Republicans who continue to support Trump.

However, I think once again that because a certain segment of the population says something, if others agree with it, that doesn’t make you part of that group. Everyone has individual views which sometimes clash with the “party line”.

Someone who has been committed to the cause of opposing racism and nationalism for most of his life should never be accused of being the “same as the alt-Right”. That’s a grave misuse of the term. It’s similar to saying that a person who loves Jewish people but supports national healthcare is a Nazi because Nazi Germany had a comprehensive nationalized healthcare program for German citizens.

Something I have seen libertarians accuse Socialists of in the past. “They want a government healthcare system...Who else supported that? Oh, that’s right! The Nazis. How long before Socialists start building concentration camps next?”.

The point that Trump rails against globalization and this is a talking point of the Left doesn’t suddenly place Left-Wing people as alt-Right.

This seems to be a very real contention you seem to want to ignore. It shows a lack of historical knowledge about the rise of fascism. Fascism has always embraced Left-Wing talking points to appeal themselves to the working class.

The same tactics have been used by Conservative pundits for years with Israel. The Left is against Israel, Neo-Nazis hate Israel, ipso facto the Left are Nazis.

Certainly the separation of powers is of utmost importance. I don’t know where you got the idea that I find this “distasteful when one of their guys is in office”, or why I’d suddenly decide to support Republicans when I have never stated that I did in the past.

Nancy Pelosi declined multiple times to try impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush. Remember that.

I have stated multiple times that Trump lost the election to Biden and must step down as president. Never once did I take the alt-Right line of Biden stole the election and Trump should continue to be president.

It annoyed me to hear liberals complain about the electoral college and say it should be abolished (when it is enshrined in the Constitution) because of Trump’s victory. It annoys me to hear the Right saying the same thing after Trump lost.

However, that doesn’t change the fact that Republicans are not willing to vote in favour of impeachment and that Trump has deniability before the law. He didn’t outright say “start an armed rebellion and take over the Capitol”, so there is no smoking gun to force Republicans to vote in favour of impeachment. They are saying that Trump’s words were misunderstood. They are saying he was not responsible for the insurrection. There doesn’t seem to be any upside to this outside of a publicity stunt for the Democrats.

Especially when Trump only has a couple days left of his term.

I think the Democrats have done enough damage with their publicity stunts during the past four years, helping to divide the nation just as greatly as the Trump supporters. There is validity to the conservative claim that Democrats have been trying to overturn the 2016 election since Trump was announced as the winner. That creates a serious credibility gap with the non-Democrat American public.

If I take a soft stance on this one issue in the name of attempting to reach out to conservatives and Republicans and say let’s stop this divisiveness and try to find commonalities and fix the problems facing the US government, then that’s a position I’m willing to take in America 2021.

I wonder if you just feel that way because of the fact that I don’t share the same political views.

I don’t consider any of my views Rightist. I simply like many libertarians because they oppose corporatism, favour free immigration, and support free trade with other nations instead of intervention with other nations’ politics. I don’t see how any of those positions would put me outside of the actual Left. All of these views were part of the New Left movement, but the Left has been quite degraded since the 1960s.

Regardless of being the only US citizen (although I am not currently living there) involved in this discussion, I suppose I will just remove myself from the conversation now.

No worries, Avaunt, we will remain friends.

You actually trust Nancy Pelosi? Everything is a game to her.

We’ll see if the police reform bill she championed when the anti-police protests were the cause célèbre, and knew that the Repubs wouldn’t pass it and Trump would veto the bill, will come up again once Biden (who opposed it) is in power and Congress has a chance of actually passing it. I’m guessing it’ll be totally forgotten once it actually has a chance to pass. I’m guessing she’s stopped caring about the issue totally now that Trump is out of office, considering the Dems did nothing about the issue while Obama was in office. Because that’s Pelosi’s game. She didn’t become a millionaire career politician by not knowing how to play the game for her benefit.

She knows damn well that the Republicans aren’t going to break ranks with Trump and this is all a publicity stunt by her. It will also end up as a publicity stunt for Trump, but she doesn’t care.

Then, the Democrats can say, “Oh! Trump wanted to steal the election, but we tried to fight! Those evil Republicans refused to do the right thing!”

Meanwhile, it will give ammunition to Republicans to do the same. “Trump made one innocent comment that some loonies took to mean something crazy, and the Democrats jumped on that to try to subvert democracy, just like they did the entire presidency of Donald J Trump, but we stood with our president the entire time!”

No one cares about how close this country is to a civil war, because it’s been all about “my side” for the past 25 years.

I am scared to death, because I truly do care about seeing minorities rounded up at gun point by Nazis who were emboldened by a bunch of politicians who care more about votes than anything else in this world.

Because that’s what a civil war in America is going to look like, a lot of non-white people being executed because they were caught in the middle of a political game played by out-of-touch elites on both sides of the political spectrum.

If it means realizing that I cannot win and losing a chance to try to capitalize on events in the hopes of getting more votes, then I’m going to do the politic thing and back out of the entire mess, hoping things will then calm down.

Had the Democrats not immediately jumped on Trump after he got elected saying that he stole the election and how Trump only won because of the electoral college (true, but legal and not unusual), maybe they’d be in a better position today when it comes to talking of impeachment again.

If anything Trump’s ideology has sounded a lot like the typical Left-Wing policies that are always being shouted about with how the government has to do something about the evils of neoliberalism. Tariffs, protectionism, nationalization, deficit spending, the “Western” working class under attack by globalization.

Steve Bannon gives a lot of praise to ol’ FDR.

I try to avoid such attacks because I want to try to find common ground. I am on the Left-Wing of the political spectrum, but one that also supports free markets and small government.

If the government really wanted to do something about neoliberalism, instead of resorting to big government and nationalist policies, it could immediately put the kibosh on corporatist globalization by ending government enforced and protected monopolies through eliminating copyright protection laws.

I don’t know exactly what this means, but it sounds like the typical response of the “Right vs. Left” partisanship I would read on Twitter rather than the high-minded ideals I expect from members of this web-site who rise above such petty squabbling using ad hominem attacks in place of intellectual debate.

15 minutes ago, dogpoet said:

Six dead in a failed coup that didn't work out because a few of the police inside the capitol hadn't been told that they should let the lynch mob through to kill any senators or congress staff they don't like is hardly a small issue.

And BTW: the point of impeachment is not removing Trump from office, it's preventing him standing again in 2024. Though if it prevents a mob of armed fuckwits storming the president elect's inauguration, then that's probably a plus.

I never said that those guilty of the actual violence should be allowed to not face punishment.

Trump is just going to make a huge show of how he’s being persecuted and that he never told anyone to do those things and the liberals and the evil media are twisting his words. It’s going to get him a lot more attention.

Then, the Republicans are going to vote against impeachment anyway. They’re going to say, “We are totally against the actions of mob rule, however, we believe Trump spoke in good faith, not expecting anything like what actually happened.” Because they’re going to want to save their sorry asses in their home states, which may vote against them if they don’t side with Trump.

The impeachment isn’t going to pass and Trump is going to use it as more fuel for the fire that he is being persecuted. Just expanding his support.
“See? The liberals and the evil media tried to attack our Trump two times now, and both times it failed. It shows that the real enemies of democracy are the liberals and media who attempt to charge an innocent man with crimes he didn’t commit!”

I’m not sure how it would prevent anyone from doing anything either. It basically takes any hope of using democracy to get Trump back in office away from them and would encourage them to try to keep Trump in office while they still can.

1 hour ago, dogpoet said:

The fun from wednesday continues: apparently the Glastonbury stilt walker who stole Jay Kay out of Jamairoqui's hat mum has complained that he's been starving since he was arrested on Friday because the evil commie stooges in the legal system are refusing to provide him with organically grown food, which is all that he can eat because he's a shaman.

I'm a picky eater myself, but that strikes even me as taking the piss. The only shamanic diet I've ever heard of involves shitloads of magic mushrooms...

I kind of doubt he’s an authentic “shaman”. It’s a New Age term, so he can pretty much claim anything is part of his religion.

The term “shaman” itself is highly problematic. Anthropologists just threw all these different belief-systems from different cultures under an umbrella term because they shared certain traits. The term technically only applies to Tungusic language peoples. The term was unknown outside of these peoples until introduced by later ethnographers to different cultural practices that looked similar to them. It’s basically like saying that Zoroastrianism and Christianity are the same religion because of shared commonalities.

So, there’s no telling what type of “shamanism” he’s adhering to, other than my bet that it falls under “New Age shamanism”, which really has no set definition or practices.

Sort of like these New Age types who read these mass-market magic books claiming that authentic paganism was exactly like Wicca, so now they are “Celtic pagans” even though there’s very little actually authentic in their beliefs.

Pagans were all highly-advanced in all the discourse of modern-day feminism, didn’t you know?

Avaunt-I don’t know. Maybe the fact that you are referencing Napoleon as a role-model may be a good reason why we should all just try to be better.

In the grand scheme of events, this ended up being a very small issue, mostly because Trump’s cult ended up being made up of a bunch of clowns.

The point of justice is to set an example in order to show behaviour that is to be prevented in the future. I don’t think allowing Trump acting like a cry-baby is going to influence future presidents to feel they can get away with trying to force their way in to staying in office. So, it’s really just revenge to remove Trump from office when he only has a few days left and has admitted that he did lose the election.

The majority of Trump’s supporters aren’t fascists. The goal is to not turn large numbers of Trump’s followers in to violent fanatics; where instead of a bunch of idiotic clowns, they are truly a danger of becoming the next Napoleon or Mussolini. That’s the most worthy of goals.

Tonight’s pet peeve: Who decides there is one true and objective version of history?

Unless one has lived through it, all versions of history are, at heart, conjectures.

Now, I’m not saying all versions of events are equally true.

Of course one can always argue that facts change as new information is discovered or reinterpreted, and that’s completely acceptable.

However, I know of a time when Charles Beard and the progressive historians were considered the greatest minds on the subject of American history.

Then, that changed, and they were mostly forgotten during the 1950s (the New Left were still influenced by them though).
You think that the reason for this might be changing ideological allegiances?

The 1950s were known as the height of the Cold War, with American superiority over the USSR of paramount importance. Beard and the progressives weren’t exactly considered patriotic or nationalistic enough to retain acceptance.

New historians gained official acceptance while an often sanitized (and less complex, I’d argue) version of American history took its place.

I think, just like in other disciplines, these figures don’t like to give up the work and prestige they have gained with their theories and interpretations. Of course they are going to be hesitant to see changes/corrections in the accepted wisdom.

Which isn’t to say that important new trends haven’t been introduced to American history since the 1960s. That’s not my contention.

If there can be an ideological break between Charles Beard/progressive historians and a new paradigm of American history, that puts serious doubt on the proposition that there is an unchanging and inviolate understanding of history.

I don’t want to contradict my own assessment, but I’d say that it’s important that more Americans today be exposed to the work of Charles Beard/progressive historians (as well as the New Left historical revisionists influenced by them) as a corrective to other versions of American history being promulgated currently.

They’re all dead.

There’s a lot to compare and contrast, which I argue is of utmost importance for an education.
For all the recent arguments about “erasing our history” from concerned citizens (snicker), the real travesty is the very real erasure of our history in a truly Orwellian manner. “Who is Charles Beard?”, indeed.

I ask, why is the name most associated with American history from the first half of the 20th century nearly forgotten? Could new information have required the change of some of his ideas? Certainly. However, the most important American historian...a complete break...? Yet history is objective. That seems a major contradiction.

Yeah, Pence has tried to distance himself from Trump now that Trump has declared that the way presidential elections have been decided since 1789 and is codified in the Constitution is a sham, plus attempting a really pitiful coup. So, they’ve turned on Pence.

The results of the election in Georgia won’t go in to effect until January 21st also though. The current term of Congresspeople will still be in office if they decide to vote on this.

I sort of just wish they’d let it go and ignore him going forward, since he’s leaving office in less than two weeks, and has now agreed to leave office.

It may allow him to get away with his acting out, but this is just going to get him more attention and add fuel to all these “everyone is out to get us” victim-mentality types, and right now, calming fires is the best action.

Also, he he. These crying Nazis are always the best. “All we did was use violence in the name of our white supremacist beliefs, and now everyone is against us! Why won’t you like us? We are the master race, please pass me another tissue.”
For being “genetically superior”, the far Right sure do spend a lot of time moaning over the fact that they’re victims.

Apropos of nothing. Just an observation.

I thought that Conservatives would give up their “meritocracy” ideology after Donald Trump when it comes to race, at the very least.

It seemed like it would be hard to continue to argue that Black people are just lazy and refuse to take personal responsibility after having four years of lower class white people coming forward to say that the system is biased against them.

Then having a Republican president admitting that they were right, everyone has been working to screw the working class in America for decades; regardless of the lies and obfuscations he came up with to explain these factors.

I almost thought that at least this would change the Conservative narrative about race going forward, so maybe Trump’s four years of lunacy would serve some purpose.

Nope. The Conservatives are as tone-deaf as ever. They’re right back to talking about how “If Black people are facing greater poverty and unemployment than it is solely their own fault and they need to stop whining about the system.”

If only more poorer white people would wake up and realize that Conservatives are indirectly speaking about them too.
Except, Conservatives are clever enough to talk about how “all liberals are the real elitists” and also couching their views in racialist terminology to distract from the reality of their views.

————————
For people who say that racism is negligible in the US or doesn’t effect African-Americans’ chances to succeed, a sobering figure shows that schools in America are more segregated today than they have been since the early-1970s.

Meanwhile, an inconvenient new statistic shows that recent Black immigrants from Africa are more likely to succeed in the US today over African-Americans (being defined here as those who have been American citizens for multiple generations).

I think this is inconvenient for a lot of political persuasions. It puts the lie to the racist Right, who claim that minority immigrants are inferior to white folk. It shows that there is systemic racism in America. However, it also shows that racism isn’t the all-pervasive problem that some want to claim (not to discount racism, mind). It does show that African-Americans (again, see above definition) are still facing a persistent systemic racist legacy in modern-day America.

Basically, the “forgotten ones” and the “left behind” spoken of by Trump, Bannon, and the alt-Right indisputably includes lower class African-Americans. That may be a very Inconvenient Truth for many.

——————

There are three pivotal moments in American history still oppressing the African-American population.

1.)Reconstruction being a bald-faced lie after the Civil War. African slaves were promised a plot of their own land after the war, since they were the rightful owners based on land use equaling ownership. Instead, most of them were forced to migrate to the north in search of work. This outright betrayal led to the creation of the still-existing ghetto system.

2.)1960s-Civil Rights era white flight to the suburbs. Speaks for itself.

3.)The 1970s recession:African-American people saw their incomes and employment increasing through the 1950s and 1960s. Once the recession hit, African-Americans’ accomplishments began to go backwards again.
The entire world economy basically broke down at this point and never truly recovered. African-Americans were hit the hardest, but white working class people have been seeing the same trajectory. 

Ontario?

No. It can be bad not being able to get enough sleep. Not good for the mind. It can correlate with anxiety or depression. I understand.

You should ask him about melatonin supplements though. They are non-addictive. It’s a hormone already produced in the human brain. It’s sold over-the-counter in North America, but I don’t know about other countries.

It’s part of the Hickman Krakoa revamp.

He was Catholic. The idea is that Krakoa is a nation for mutants, who are different from humans, so mutants should have their own culture.

Nightcrawler felt that he should create a religion specifically for mutants.

Characterization is sketchy with Hickman’s new direction. It may be poor writing, but it also may play in to a larger meta-plot. 
So, it’s not really spelt out about why Kurt might have given up on his Catholic beliefs.

Si Spurrier’s X-book has been announced. It is titled Way of X and will star Nightcrawler.

It will also feature Dr. Nemesis, which I speculated about when Spurrier was announced for a X-title. He’s a favourite of Spurrier.

It will be about Nightcrawler wanting to start an unique mutant religion for the mutant-nation island of Krakoa.

Could be quite interesting.

It is scheduled for April release, but may see delays as some of Hickman’s plans have been delayed.

Moving on from the (hopefully) dead and gone past...
God, Biden’s nominations for offices in defense, foreign policy, and intelligence are just scary.

Names Mitch McConnell will also love.

It’s time to give up America. The world has been ravaged by a pandemic, the country is drowned in debt (think Noah’s flood).
All that nineteen years of non-stop wars have done is lead to China, Russia, and Iran rising up while America has been sinking in quicksand. The EU and China have signed a free-trade deal. The “Cold War”/colonialist mentality looks even more and more insane in the modern world (not that it wasn’t always pure insanity). The American Empire is on life-support, almost flat-lining. Time to move on.

It’s time for the rest of the world to give up on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. America is a total mess. Look at the coronavirus figures. Look at an attempted coup. This is supposed to be the world’s superpower? It doesn’t make sense anymore. America is quickly sinking in to the past.

America can never get its interest rate to a normal level again. Multiple corporations are heavily in debt and only holding on since the 2008 collapse due to being able to borrow at a low interest rate. The national debt is completely unsustainable at this point, and increasing interest rates will bankrupt the country. The only reason America isn’t dealing with devaluation and inflation is due to the dollar being the reserve currency. Other “poor” countries which manage their economy this way face massive inflation.

So many corporations have been losing money for years, but they’ve been borrowing money with the cheap interest rates on the expectation that they’ll eventually see profits sometime in the future.

It’s time for America to cut the cord and find its place in a different world now. The American Empire has already been lost.
If it weren’t for multiple global wars and the concomitant refugee crisis, we could celebrate this fact; except politicians haven’t figured out the reality yet. An attempt to continue the Empire like Obama did after W. Bush is just going to hasten the end of the nation.

The refugee crisis (outside of everything else it represents for the people facing this nightmare scenario) has only served to bolster the resurgence of the racist Right in Europe, presaging more dark days.

Trump’s pathetic posturing has been embarrassing. It’s simply the goodwill of countries like China and Iran that we aren’t facing a larger crisis. If Iran decided to respond to Trump’s militarism, the US would face a war that would make all these decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq look like a cakewalk. If China had responded to Trump’s bluff, they could have discarded the entirety of America’s foreign debt they’ve been holding. The global economy today can’t afford to buy up that much debt hitting the market at one time. China and Iran have both played nice and that’s the only thing that has saved America.

Ha, ha! The far Right going in to damage control mode over trying to set up a dictatorship in the US is hilarious.

The conspiracy theorists are claiming that Antifa did this in disguise to try to give Trump cultists a bad name. Yeah, I think Antifa is a few years too late for that!

Meanwhile, the idiots took selfies of themselves in the Capitol and a number of them have been identified as alt-Right members.

Maybe Antifa has cloning technology?!

Outside of the lunatic fringe, other apologists are trying to say, “These guys are the same as the BLM protests. So, if you supported them and condemn this, you are a hypocrite!”

Uhh...yeah, no. One was a protest against the government killing people. The other is a bunch of sore losers, taking a hissyfit because democracy didn’t go their way this time.

Also, even some Right-Wing sources are reporting about the way the anti-police protestors were treated versus the almost hands-off way the attempted-coup-plotters were treated by authorities.

There is melatonin. I’ve never tried it myself, but it works well for some people.

I deal with insomnia at times.
I have trouble falling asleep most nights. I am up to 3 or 4 am every night, so I sleep late. I have other nights where it’s a worse type of insomnia, but usually, it’s the trouble falling asleep part. I can sleep until 11 am, so I haven’t been bothered to try to find a proper sleep aid.

In my younger days, when I had to be up early, I resorted to Benadryl and later on was given a prescription for Xanax. I didn’t get addicted, but I don’t recommend Benzo-class drugs. They can be highly addictive.
I don’t use medication anymore.

Obviously. Right is right though. We cannot go outside the bounds of the law simply because Trump has been allowed to operate outside of the law at times. Otherwise, we are admitting that Trump was in the right all along.

I’m by no means a strict Constitutionalist. However, there are certainly positive and moral precepts laid out in the Constitution which can help (but not perfectly prevent, no) keep back some of the more egregious abuses of government overreach.

The US Constitution is very strict in its definition of treason, so that the law cannot be misused to support tyranny.

It’s one of the strictest laws in the nation and is punishable by death. It’s not to be defined lightly.

If the intent had been the actual violent overthrow of the US government, it probably would be defined as treason. However, the goal was to ensure that the current administration be kept in power, which isn’t an outright attempt to wage war against the US government. Therefore, it’s not considered treason by US law.

Treason is defined in America as the crime of betraying one’s own country. No one was operating under the auspices of a foreign power or with the intent to wage war for secession from the US federal nation. It cannot be considered as treason by the US’ legal definition.