Pushing past Markovik
 

I thought he was being humorous. Did I misunderstand?

Could be, with the way the news is written and edited. ?? :confused:

Hard to really know anymore.

You're right, William. (Deleted it even though you've got it there below. Not joking, just venting as I do on occasion. I wouldn't quite put like that, but I agree it's not productive.)

Peace, tolerance, and understanding, my friend. I hope.

Let's keep our eye on the ball here. Trump's world view is one of a Roman gladiator: kill or be killed. Win or lose. Us or them. It is articulated beautifully here in this oped piece written by David Brooks.

(Btw, if we are to continue tracking and commenting on events as they unfold perhaps a new thread is in order? No wait! --Comey's coming back on Thursday to read from his memos. Delicious covfefe!)

Sorry, Jim, but that is just factually wrong. It's like saying Marxism can actually work, after all this time, after all the megadeath, after it has failed in every country where it's been tried.

Donald Trump is a businessman trying to be a politician. He's not cut out to be President, IMO, but a ruthless killer? You must be joking?

Here's a good video of a brilliant woman using reason, tolerance, and extreme patience, facing up to ignorance, and blatantly racist questions from the new, regressive Left:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsSyaTw67Fk

I imagine Jim was speaking metaphorically to describe the Trump mindset as described with more nuance in the David Brooks piece he links to. Brooks, of course, is a lifelong Republican, though not of the Tea Party variety.

But incidentally, Bill, I find it a bit ironic that you oppose the gladiator view with a link to Omarosa, who famously said before the election, "Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe."

She also said "It’s so great our enemies are making themselves clear so that when we get in to the White House, we know where we stand. Let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list." Doesn't that sound at least somewhat gladiatorial to you? Or just another example of "a brilliant woman using reason, tolerance, and extreme patience"?

Yeah, like it failed in Chile. Salvador Allende, a Marxist and a democrat, was elected President. But good ol' America couldn't have that, could they? So with the help of the CIA, General Pinochet staged a bloody coup. THAT, and not during Allende's Presidency, was when the torture, the 'disappearing', and the megadeaths started in Chile. But hey, that's ok, isn't it? I mean, getting rid of a democratically-elected Marxist is worth a few hundred thousand murders, isn't it?

I'm growing weary of Trump supporters who insist they aren't Trump supporters. It's telling they are ashamed of their support. I work with people addicted to alcohol and drugs who are ashamed of their addiction. My first job is to help them climb from beneath the shame so they can focus on recovery. Perhaps we should start similar programs for Trump supporters hiding behind their repeated denials so they can begin to heal. It would be the compassionate thing to do, which I suppose only a bleeding-heart liberal like me would think of doing.

Surely one of the first signs is when they insist on bringing up the 19th-century idea of Marxism as a foil in any effort to discuss the current dire situation. That is probably the first level of denial that allows them to say liberals are the real racists and other comments that have the same intellectual heft as the things divorcing couples yell at each other in lawyer's offices.

Seriously, Bill, Omorasa? Before it was that sad and twisted little man Horowitz. There are plenty of more substantial conservatives to use in your posts. True, it's getting tougher to find any with intellectual and moral integrity to support the disaster happening today. Fox News and social media has all but decimated what was once the conservative tradition. But there are still a few. (Sometimes American Conservative will have a thoughtful article.) I sincerely suggest you search some out though. I love a good discussion with someone I don't agree with but not when they call out to another reality television cipher and David Horowitz to support their point-of-view.

What John said. And Brian. And Roger. And Jim. Sorry Bill, but that's as much time as I'm going to spend rebutting somebody who thinks Omarosa is a brilliant woman.

These are hard times, for centrist/moderates like me. Everyone wants to be a Californian radical :o


J

I thought my post was unfair, to some, so I wanted to take it down. But Trump is an immediate threat. A real life, cartoonish, buffoon. Remember how Obama was treated by the right? So this is ridiculous. There was no tolerance for a disciplined, constitutional lawyer pushing for what we have to all realize in the end,- national health care, gun control, etc. Bending over backwards to normalize a moron when we just had a fairly historic president, is, um, nuts.

I'm very much a centrist or, at best, moderate liberal. I've been called down by my more liberal friends many times for being a "neo-liberal" whatever that is. But in today's climate there are no moderates from the right-wing perspective. Everyone who doesn't toe the tabloid ideology that has taken over conservatism is a liberal or libtard or a snowflake. (It took me a while to realize being called a snowflake wasn't a compliment. It has to be the stupidest political insult ever.) If I was a little more conservative in my opinions I could be a "cuck." Nothing racist there of course.

Bottom line is if one tries to make evidence based political decisions today he or she can't be a conservative. The vice-president of the United States says science is a liberal opinion for goodness sake. This is the type of s**t Galileo had to deal with. I don't think it's what Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk or even Barry Goldwater had in mind.

I found this talk by Critchley strangely pertinent to this thread. At first it might not seem like it but a careful listening will do the trick. And it would give us an actual leftist stance to talk about instead of the strange cut outs from Horrowitz et al. His approach should interest poets not least because in other works Critchley exams the poetics of Wallace Stevens while searching for a new foundation for future institutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X9ruueLJqg

Cantor,

I don't care what you think of me, and never have. Your opinions about me and my posts, as far as I'm concerned, are irrelevant. I wrote a PM to you apologizing for saying your behavior on the Sphere was deplorable, but that was because I felt guilty. And besides, I only said your behavior was deplorable because you said that about Duncan's behavior, and managed to insult Duncan AND Jayne once again. And the beauty part is, you got away with it, when your entire post should have been deleted. I noticed that you had replied to my PM, but that was deleted unread, so I have no idea what you wrote back, nor do I really care.

John Riley,

I don't support Trump, and in fact, did not vote for him. These are facts. I will offer you a challenge: to go through my posts - which you can find easily - and please quote any instance where I said Trump was a great guy and a good president. You can find my posts by going to my profile and selecting "statistics", and clicking on "find all posts" or something like that. Then, if you can find a single post where I actually say I "support" Donald Trump, please quote it, and post it here, so I can own up to it. In your search, you will find MANY instances of me insulting the POTUS and saying rather mean things about him. Good luck.

What I am trying to do is suggest that my fellow Spherians are exaggerating the inefficiency Trump's presidency, and trying to paint him as a new Hitler, which is absurd. Hitler wrote about his hatred of the Jewish people LONG before he rose to power. His agenda was clear LONG before he took over the brainwashed minds of the German people. Comparisons to Hitler are absurd. That's my over all point here: not a defense of DT.

I will admit I didn't know much about Omarosa before I saw the interview, but that doesn't change the fact that she was asked blatantly racist and sexist questions by that panel. And Joy what's her name has got to be one of the most ignorant people I've ever listened to. I've seen so many videos of that show, and I don't think she's kept a clear head during any of them.

Jennifer -

Indeed! Eratosphere has been taken over by the regressive Left. There are virtually no active members who don't spout the party line at every opportunity. But I don't mind being in the minority. The individual is the smallest minority, after all. Notice no-one will have a negative thing to say about Marxism, communism, and how that ideology has destroyed so many nations, and killed so many people. I think perhaps many of these people are closet Stalinists. One death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths, a statistic, or something like that? I believe that's the mind set for a lot of Spherians at the moment.

I could write a thousand times that I am a centrist, a classical liberal, and that I think the whacko Right is even more dangerous than the whacko Left, but none of these people will remember, as they have highly selective amnesia.

Bill, you cannot simultaneously say something as ludicrous as this and self-righteously posture as a defender of reasoned discourse and free thought.

I suppose I have the advantage of being young, but I know a lot of people who actually answer to the term "regressive left" (here using it as a mere name, without the usual connotations of "regressive", which incidentally, show that anyone who uses this phrase seriously is a committed enemy of reasoned discourse). The Sphere, with a handful of exceptions, isn't even close.

I swore to myself to leave this alone but when I read that I'm not aware of the evils of 20th century communism or have somehow forgot them I have to respond.

I'm not a scholar and never learned Russian as has some around here have, much to my regret, but I will gladly challenge you to a duel on who has collected the most information about the atrocities of Lenin and Stalin and the later dictators for that matter. Or Mao or Pol Pot or any other dictator we can remember. I did have a flirtation with Marxism when I was a teenager growing up poor in the plutocratic South. Had my own Little Red Book and a coverless copy of a book by a man named Cornfeld, Maurice was the first name, I think the head of the British CP or something, about dialectical materialism that I read. (It made me interested in Hegel more than convince me of scientific materialism.) It took a couple of semesters of college history for me to grow up and see through it. That's the extent of my Marxist affiliation but my change of heart didn't stop me from pursuing my degrees and doing outside reading in 20th century history. I learned of the forced starvations and millions murdered and the justifications and rationalizations people made to explain away evil before I was twenty. (As it happens I've recently been reading translations of Mandlestam's "Voreonezh Notebooks." Stalin starved him to death if you aren't aware. So the learning is fresh.)

That is what is so infuriating, Bill. You throw around a twisted man like Horowitz and want to be taken seriously. Then you insist we are all racist adherents to "regressive leftism" who know nothing about the Marxism we never criticize. It is the typical junk that comes from what I have repeatedly pointed out is tabloid conservatism.

What I learned most critically is that ideology is the real threat. The idea doesn't matter in the end. It's the blind adherence to it that creates horror. There was once a time when conservatives had this as a basic tenet of their philosophy. Beware of holding to a central, unimpeachable idea that forces you to commit evil in the effort to implement that idea, whether it be communism or Nazism or any mixture of the two. That was the argument they used against the communist left in the U.S. when there was one, three-quarters of a century ago, and they were right.

How anyone can look at the world today, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, and think the dangerous ideology that exists in our time is some sort of Marxism is stunning. I truly don't understand how one can think this. It is so clear that the threat to what is left of democracy is coming from a combination of racist and ethnic revolt against globalization combined at the bottom and middle, in tandem with the with the apparatus devised to redistribute wealth upward at all cost, which in turn, of course, aggravates the unrest among the majority. In addition, since the 90s, the methods of media control devised by the upward redistributionists is nearly overwhelming. (It apparently has you in its grip.) In the U.S. we now have a president who has no regard whatsoever, none, for the founding ideas of the country. His impatience with the separation of powers will eventually, I say soon, probably around the efforts to pass yet another tax cut for the financial elite, lead to a Rubicon moment, and there won't be a Lenin or Stalin at the table. To think the threat comes from some Marxist professors or newspaper columnists, wherever it is you see all these communists, is incomprehensible to me. I'm not being an ass. I honestly cannot understand it. It's one of those things that makes me marvel at the human mind.

So please, if you have any concern for accuracy, please put my name in parenthesis as one of the regressive leftists who isn't a commie. I'm not a racist either but of course that's tougher to prove. Then we're discussing the quality of my heart and I understand you don't know me well enough to be definitive about that. So, if you have the urge to say "racist leftists" I can't ask you to leave me out of that grouping. That's between me and my fellow humans.

John

I disagree, of course. The new left is regressive, and has been for a long time. And what I said is not ludicrous at all. Just look at the political threads around here. Groupthink all over. And I don't posture. I'm about as candid and honest about myself as anyone on the Sphere.

Edit: glad I noticed. Excuse me? To use the word "regressive" left is a "committed enemy of reasoned discourse". ?? How dare you? You, all of 25 or so. Have you been brainwashed in the university as well, Aaron? You are calling me a "committed enemy of reasoned discourse"? How dare you?

Walk in my shoes for another 25 years and we can talk as equals. As for now, you're a child. You may acquire wisdom with years, or you may not, depending on what you choose to challenge your mind with. You keep on this track, you'll be guilty of visiting lunacy on the world again, and millions more people will die. But it will be okay, because you'll be alright.

- emphasis mine.

You go right on and continue to be infuriated, John. It's good for your mind. And mine.

I was going to address other remarks in your last post, but have decided that it would be a waste of time and energy. All I would like to highlight is that last bit. I have not called anyone in this thread, or any Spherian, a racist. I HAVE called them leftists, which is obviously a fact, and, well, shouldn't really be an insult if you're a leftist, right?

I DID say that the panel on The View asked blatantly racist, and sexist, questions of Omarosa. In case you missed this doozy, by a fellow black woman no less: to paraphrase: "Isn't Trump just using you for optics?"

Translation from loony lefty-speak into reality: "Isn't it true that you're working for DT because you're a token black woman, and also because you're beautiful? Don't you know that you can't be a black woman, and be beautiful, and actually EARN your position in this world? Don't you understand that you NEED white people in power to advance you in this world?"

I don't support Trump, and didn't vote for him. I will tell you three people I most definitely support:

• David Horowitz
• Dave Rubin
• Sam Harris

Have at it.

And let's not forget the obvious and shameful absence of just about everyone from the recent thread (black history month) started by Ralph to celebrate great black poets. Talk about hypocrisy?

Now, before that gets spun up to mean I am calling Spherians racists because they didn't get involved in that thread: What I mean to suggest is that most of you guys were having a blast in the other threads going on elsewhere, posting political doggerel (the poetasters were out in force) and patting one another on the back, and either DID NOT notice Ralph's thread (entirely possible), or just didn't bother to take some time out to honor the great black poets in our past, and present.

Yeesh. This is getting tiresome.

Edit: Actually, this will be my last post in this thread. I promise! I think if I continue I will be silenced again, or risk being banned. I've been a member since 2001, and without the Sphere, I'd certainly slip back into a gulf of depression I might not be able to get out of.

So - I am stopping here. I will read responses, out of a sense of respect and fairness, but I promise I will NOT respond to those responses, in this thread, though I probably will in private.

If anyone wants to discuss anything with me, PM me.

nvm, deleted

Yeaahhh....maybe not......post deleted.