http://reductress.com/post/5-times-...tations-about-cops-listening-to-rape-victims/
reductress is too real with these call outs
Season 11, Episode 12 (“Shadow”)
"The daughter of a murdered couple (Sarah Paulson) believes she is being stalked by a man who turns out to be a cop. This cop is actually tracking her suspicious behavior, not groping her and then blaming his behavior on his supervisor, like real SVU officer Lukasz Skorzewski did in August 2016.
Protecting and serving the people is just a flashy tagline, not an actual requirement of working in law enforcement. So don’t buy into this fanciful show."
"I'm not really concerned if outside collectives of leftists in other countries support
#berkeleyantifa
I'm more interested if #berkeleyantifa is forming links with the local unhoused, Black, Brown community
Someone told me that their friend drove up to Berkeley from LA to be a part of the antifa action....why?
Are there no fascists in LA?
Oooooh I get it.
YOU wanted to get in a fight.
YOU didn't want to organize your community.
YOU wanted to punch a nazi.
YOU didn't want to put in the WORK to defeat fascism as an ideological force.
Violence is the last step we take as a force for social change and only when we don't have other options, when we are left without a choice.
The alt-right must not be normalized
They must be denied any public space
But our community must be organized
That is how we fight
That is how we win
Not as individuals but as a collective, a community."
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/07...edia-and-bipartisan-praise-for-bombing-syria/
"New wars trigger the worst in people: their jingoism, their tribal loyalties, their instinct to submit to authority and leaders. The incentive scheme here is as obvious as it is frightening: great rewards await political leaders who start new wars.
In Federalist 4, John Jay warned of all the personal benefits a leader obtains from starting a new war – which is the reason it was supposed to be difficult for U.S. Presidents to do it:
'It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.'"
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/art...ism-behind-blue-collar-republican-progressive
'
In the name of this more theoretical and even literary conservatism, by the time I started my graduate studies, I was able to criticize liberalism without necessarily defending the George W. Bush administration.
The disastrous consequences of Bush’s two terms as president—the war in Iraq, the sanctioning of torture, his presiding over economic catastrophe—did not immediately lead me to abandon all of my political and intellectual allegiances. What they did do was force me to reexamine the self-satisfied story conservatives told about themselves. Movement orthodoxy instructed that against the tide of statism, contempt for the Constitution, moral relativism, and embarrassment about defending America’s ideals and interests abroad, a small band of intellectuals stood athwart History yelling “Stop!” What began as ideas—especially those found in the conservative journal
National Review—became a movement, one that, as the religious right and neoconservatives joined it, would finally achieve political power when Ronald Reagan was elected president. And of course, as the story continued, the Reagan years vindicated conservatism by spurring economic growth and leaving the Soviet Union in the dustbin of history. It turned out ideas really did have consequences.
This heroic tale, so easy to be seduced by, fell apart upon examination. Reading beyond the catechism-like “histories” and hagiographies peddled by those in the movement revealed the rise of conservatism to be a far more complicated, and often more nefarious, development. The potted movement literature brushed aside
National Review’s endorsement of white supremacy and segregation, and feigned ignorance of the role of race in conservatism’s ascendency more broadly. Official histories glossed over Buckley’s description of Senator Joseph McCarthy as an heir of the abolitionists; his threatening to punch a “queer” on national television never seemed a problem either. It still barely registers among conservatives that Reagan’s successes often came from resisting people like them: cutting deals with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill; leaving the size and scope of the federal government more or less as it was; and defying the hawks in his own party who denounced him for negotiating with the Soviet Union. The many conservative organizations dedicated to proselytizing for “free markets” obscure how the economic “booms” supposedly generated by unleashing capitalism—deregulation and massive tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans especially—have consistently proven to be less durable and widely shared than promised. These are not exhaustive examples."
"
This deductive quality of the conservative mind is its most distinctive feature. Certain axioms are true—about the Constitution, about morality, about economics, about our aspirations as human beings—therefore particular policies and courses of action should be pursued. Despite their vaunted claims to grappling with the world as it is, of being mugged by reality, conservatives in America practice a determined anti-empiricism. This is what holds together all the myriad failures of conservative politics: a devotion to first principles that simply
must be true, whatever the consequences, and whatever the human suffering left in their aftermath.
The Bush years, then, were not an aberration but a culmination. What mattered to me were not finally the particular instances of bad behavior or misguided political ideas on the right in the early 2000s, but their cumulative force. I came to reject conservatism—fitfully, and without a coherent alternative at hand—because I understood it to be an ideology willfully resistant to reality. The misery caused by George W. Bush and the movement that enabled him mattered both in and of itself and because it revealed the fundamental limitations and failings of conservatism."
"
The failure of conservatives to attend to the world as it actually exists, the world in its suffering and hardship, drove me from their ranks. And awareness of how suffering and hardship are so often unchosen and undeserved by those who endure it—and prolonged and deepened by a political system that assumes they are due to failures of “personal responsibility”—moved me to the left. But even more, all this convinced me that turning to class remains the most powerful way to understand and respond to these realities.
It is difficult to imagine another way to explain how, in the same year marriage equality came to all fifty states—a mark of at least one kind of progress—you could read studies showing that
death rates for working-class whites were rising, driven by suicide and addiction to painkillers and alcoholism. Or how, almost a decade after the financial crash of 2008, those responsible for the economic devastation are thriving, bailed out with taxpayer money, all while working-class Americans, saddled with debt, try to make do with stagnating wages. Or why, casting a glance at those who depend on government assistance, our politicians blame the morals of the poor for their plight, even as those with power ask our forgiveness for their indiscretions and corruption. Our trade policies, our political priorities, our passion for sending soldiers into the deserts of the Middle East, are best grasped by turning to class: they all serve the interests of those not dependent on wages, or hemmed in by want."
"
The bromides of “personal responsibility,” the claims of capitalist efficiency and the dictates of “the market,” do little but allow the adversities of working people to be blamed on themselves. What could it mean to working-class people to be told, as one prominent conservative recently argued, that if jobs aren’t readily available where they live, to load up an U-Haul and just move to where work can be found? Such advice could only be premised on a freedom many do not have: the freedom given by already having the resources to afford the moving truck, to be able to pay the security deposit for a new home to live in, to have the time to look for work while raising children. And this is to say nothing of what it means to leave behind the community you are a part of, to strike out on your own without the help of neighbors and friends and nearby family.
Leaving conservatism behind, then, was like leaving behind my youthful fundamentalism. Both conservatism and fundamentalism assume freedom to be the foundation of our lives, not something limited by environment or resources. Both assume that virtue can conquer the brute force of circumstances. And both condemn us to a world where grace must be earned rather than freely given—a view of life that comforts and flatters the successful but can only prove cruel to everyone else.
A class-based politics acknowledges that we are bound in ways we do not choose; that we are constrained in ways that the exertion of our wills may never overcome. This is not to concede too much to defeatism or despair, but to resist making heroism a requirement for a decent life. Class politics is, finally, a form of solidarity, a way of joining together in our shared fallibility and weakness, and shaping our life together accordingly.
The tired platitude that the young, if they have a heart, should be liberal, and the old, if they have a sound mind, should be conservative, turns out to be wrong. Experience has taught me just how much contingency and chance are responsible for what good has come to me in my life. Growing up has meant an awareness that the struggles of so many are not because they lack virtue or ambition, but because we live in a country stacked against their material well-being and interests. And I know, when I think about what the people I love and so many others have endured, that
it does not have to be this way."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hoot-it-at-protesters/?utm_term=.324d631f868e
"2017: US conducts an air strike in an area where 95,000 human beings live with a bomb that shares the same effects as a chemical weapon and our media bylines froth over how it's 'the biggest bomb ever!!!!'"
lastly:
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Liberals: "But you can create the most change by working within the system..."
Me:
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