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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
"How can there be pleasure in 'divisioned' and 'you're fired', and he's trying to tell us that he cares about the middle class? Give me a break, and to repeat myself, it's such a bunch of malarky!"
not to distract from the conversation but the way biden said this made me laugh
edited 12th Dec '16 9:36:00 PM by Draghinazzo
"Look, if we're all fantastically lucky, then they'll just turn out to be a pack of remorseless crooks who will greedily stuff their pockets off the fat of our nation."
And we won't be that lucky. Not with people like Bannon on board, who have actual ideological agendas.
Bannon the neo-Nazi Leninist. Bannon who has voiced his desire to destroy the government. Bannon who has voiced his admiration for the likes of Darth Vader and Satan.
edited 12th Dec '16 9:40:56 PM by RBluefish
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."Also this from that article: “Even at moments like now, when this country seems so divided, we can still find common hopes and aspirations. There need not be this false choice that’s being debated now on my side of the political ledger, between social justice and economic opportunity,” said Biden. “They go hand in hand, they’re not different.”
That's our Biden, when he broke for LGBT rights he set into motion the events that led to obergefell.
edited 12th Dec '16 9:45:17 PM by JulianLapostat
The above reminds me a bit of the false impression that a bunch of people have about Black Lives Matter. Its opponents think there's an implicit "only" at the beginning when there's actually an implicit "too" at the end.
Biden's got the right idea. Why can't the Democratic Party care about both? They go hand in hand. And just because the Democratic Party tries to address the problems faced by minorities, it doesn't mean they are ignoring the hardships faced by everyone.
Granted, if I were him I'd point out that it was the GOP who really pushed identity politics this year. Specifically, white identity politics. But then, I'm a pretty vindictive person.
edited 12th Dec '16 9:47:55 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedBannon is a hack-y studio wheeler dealer and crony capitalist with pseudo-intellectual pretensions. Nothing else.
Egad...The man who sponsored the First Anti-Racist Campaign in the 20th Century (Lenin) is not to be put in the same sentence as Bannon and Neo-Nazism no matter how much Bannon wants to rewrite history.
The man likes the Sound of his voice. You look at his actual career and there's nothing in his profile until the 2000s to suggest anything other than a boring capitalist opportunist. He was a Reaganite in the 80s which by itself is not disqualifying. He also believes in the Lost Cause of the Confederacy...which is unexceptional among American conservatives.
Basically Bannon is an alt-righter...he packages familiar right-wing tropes under a new facade and model.
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Besides the whole white supremacy thing the problem is a common one faced by social jusitce in general, which is the implicit assumption that things are ok for pretty much everyone. There may be some nasty people around here or there but all the important battles have been won already, so what's a group like "Black Lives Matter" for?
Basically the privilege and denial that things are NOT in fact ok for everyone. This is basically the gaping hole that destroys the whole ideological foundation of the GOP, because their platform (when taken on its SUPPOSED merits and not the white entitlement) and by extension the entire right's discourse is only just if things have progressed to a post-racial society where non-whites are on relatively equal standing with whites.
edited 12th Dec '16 9:54:26 PM by Draghinazzo
Bannon is a white supremacist, anti-Semite, and domestic abuser. To call him by any other name is to downplay his vileness.
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I'm not sure whether we're underestimating Bannon or overestimating him.
Honestly, I think he's still dangerous just because Trump seems to take the asshole seriously.
I'd be able to sleep a little bit easier if Trump would just punt Bannon out of the WH. But that's not going to happen.
edited 12th Dec '16 9:52:43 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedIt's just the natural order of things. When minorities get a HUGE, Earth Shattering victory, white people always within ten years strike back.
When Slavery ended, what did we get? Jim Crow and the Klan.
When we got Civil Rights? We got Nixon, the Southern Strategy, and trickle down economics
When we elected our first black president? Fucking Donald Trump.
New Survey coming this weekend!![]()
He's the man who ensured Breitbart got to its current white-supremacist state and has the ear of the most malleable new despot on the block. I have no doubt that Sessions was partly his doing. All he has to do is congratulate Lil Donnie while asking and he can get open Nazis all he likes.
Agreed. He was always an evil bastard, but he was mostly contained. Now he's managed to hijack the GOP's brainwashing and undermining democracy to ride ignorance and bigotry into the chance to remake the nation in his own image.
edited 12th Dec '16 9:56:25 PM by Geostomp
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all" Futurama, GodfellasI don't see why calling him a hacky crony capitalist is denying he is those things. Trump is also a white supremacist, racist and abuser and a crony capitalist.
The point is calling him an ideologue is to pretend he has any ideology or that we must take his gibberish speeches as indications of any plan.
The man is just a racist, with Delusions of Eloquence. He's also rich. The combination of racism and wealth dedicated to generating and enabling racism is a deadly combination, but let's not pretend Bannon is an exceptional ideologue. He's just a media baron thug and nothing more.
People just hate letting power and privilege go, don't they?
Disgusted, but not surprised@Julian: What you are saying (edit: what you were saying a few pages ago) is essentially that only the most downtrodden "classes" of society have any right to complain, and that their problems must be addressed before anyone else's problems can be addressed. In an ideal world, that's how things would work, but anyone who lives by ideals and principles rather than by the cold reality we are faced with is a Doomed Moral Victor in the making.
There is an extremely large sector of the population, irrespective of background that cannot normally be motivated to vote because of somebody else's plight; to them, the great injustices inflicted upon black Americans (or upon Hispanic Americans if they themselves are black) are ever bit as distant to their lives as starving children in the third world. The number of people who vote via this rather selfish calculus increases as a person's confidence in their family's future drops. Perhaps one day, we will be sufficiently enlightened as a society to move past the crass desires of the individual and work towards the common good of the human species, but that day is not in sight.
Thus we are faced with two means of achieving our progressive political agenda; convince people that the struggles faced by minorities in America are their own struggle as well so they feel they have a personal stake in the issue, or ensure that times are good when such agendas are pushed so that people are more likely to behave in an altruistic manner and accept policy making that does not benefit them.
edited 12th Dec '16 10:11:32 PM by CaptainCapsase
This is the fourth or fifth time that this has been claimed. And so I will once again point out that the governments Castro backed in Angola and Mozambique were no better than the RSA, and were responsible for the murder and imprisonment of tens of thousands of their own civilians. If the crimes of Augusto Pinochet, Hissene Habre, Efrain Rios Montt, etc, are shared by the American governments that supported them, than Castro gets to take some of the blame for the crimes of the Communist parties that he helped to install via the export of mercenaries (and that's ultimately what the Cuban contingents were, revolutionary fervour be damned).
The RSA was vile. The tacit support that Britain and the USA gave them is deeply shameful. But Castro and the Communist regimes he backed don't get a pass on their own crimes simply because they fought against the RSA. Nobody on any side of that war emerges from it looking good.
Bannon self-describes this way. He sees Lenin as someone who came along and burned the system down, same as he purports to want to do. You can say it's a shallow comparison, and you're not wrong (Lenin whatever his many, many flaws did try to overhaul the system whereas Bannon is participating in a corrupt oligarchy), but it's a comparison that Bannon himself made.
I said specifically that the only people who have a right to claim that the American system is "rigged" in America are women, African Americans, Native Americans, POC and LGBT. Everyone has a right to complain about things big and small. But saying the system is rigged against them is not mere complaining, it's making a huge claim that in the context of American history can only be considered laughable.
And doubly so, when the candidate they voted for won by luck and Electoral College and not the Popular Vote, which said candidate lost by more than 2.7 million votes and counting (expected to hit 3 million). There's no better symbol of America's rigged system than the Electoral College and it is very clear historically, and in the present day, who that system is rigged against and it damn sure isn't the white Trump voters.
The system is not rigged against them. The system is rigged in their favour.
Generally speaking, fighting for the most oppressed, most marginalized and most downtrodden is fighting for everyone. That's true of America's real progressive movements, from Civil War-Reconstruction to the 30s to the 60s. I say generally because there are exceptions and there are counter-examples and odd things, but empirically what I say has generally been the case.
As Pier Paolo Pasolini said, "Today you sell your ring, tomorrow your watch, next week your chain and in 77 days you won't have eyes to cry with.''
If we decide to take a step backward or acknowledge any division between social and economic issues than progress gets undone. Make one small little concession, and little be little you lose it all.
I favor the former...the former can be achieved, and succeeded for a time in American history. Social issues have always accompanied economic issues in terms of progressive agenda in American history, and social issues are the only ones that truly create proper popular coalitions for progressive campaigns. That has what has worked in American history.
It won't work. you cannot overcome selfishness with some kind words; they've long since learned that words mean nothing coming from politicians. That trust isn't coming back unless these people see their futures looking up. I'm referring here more to non-voters than to Trump voters by the way.
edited 12th Dec '16 10:41:16 PM by CaptainCapsase
Actions mean nothing either. Obama's stimulus and bailouts of the auto industry helped rebuild manufacturing jobs. He did that. His AFA is directly helping many people who voted for Trump. He could have done more yes, but humanly speaking you cannot call about a man who is on track to finish and complete more than 50% of his political promises, that his words mean nothing.
Well can't they "pull up their bootstraps" and bring up the can-do attitude and so on. African-Americans and other communities suffered far more than they ever did, suffer far more than they do today, they have had families broken repeatedly by the state and put up with other crap, and yet they are way more optimistic and positive on the whole than these losers.
The White Supremacists gang also calls itself "alt-right" which is a euphemism for racist. Why take their labels seriously or entertain their pretensions is my point? This guy calls himself a "Leninist" despite not doing, saying, or acting in any way like Lenin did...so why entertain him or take his writings seriously. It doesn't matter a jot.
What matters is what he does. Bannon's profile is a Social Climber, a capitalist, a Reaganite, a Lost-Causer and an internet racist, wno managed to earn money by royalties from Seinfeld...in other words he made money out of other people's endeavours, which is probably what he and Trump have in common...that's pretty much bargain basement "white guy" conservatism. Not any ideologue...in this interview
he boasts about Trump's infrastructure plan that Bernie Sanders, Krugman and others have pointed out is nothing more than robber baron divestment of private infrastructure into public hands. He also cites as his inspiration Jackson and Jennings Bryan, the first is an ethnic cleanser, the second is the father of creationism...
About the only interesting thing
there is that he's clearly binge-watching Wolf Hall: "I am the Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors". That's not fair to Cromwell either, nor would the Tudors have anything to do with Trump (Prince Harry and that Nazi guy in the 30s and Oswald Moseley is closer).
Trotsky is Jewish so no they would not have shared tea together since Bannon dislikes Jews, and actual intellectuals, and actual revolutonaries. Trotsky for his part would have had Bannon shot at the first opportunity available.
edited 12th Dec '16 10:56:34 PM by JulianLapostat
Seems like a lot of white Americans are Ungrateful Bastards.
...#Not All White People
edited 12th Dec '16 11:20:23 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised

Honestly, the only situation as bad or worse than this, is the goddamn Civil War, and even then that's a stretch considering Lincoln didn't have to deal with nuclear annihilation.
New Survey coming this weekend!