We Need To Talk About...
Sometimes it feels like there are so many unaddressed elephants in the room that there is scarcely room for oxygen. I want to deal with basic matters that affect everyday political culture, but that we take for granted or feel unable to discuss. I am doing this in the most raw, bare-boned way possible. It is just me speaking from notes.
Episodes
3 days ago
3 days ago
In this episode I forget the name of Henry Wallace and tentatively refer to him as George Wallace (who was a famous segregationist Governor of Alabama). Sorry Henry :-(I discuss the fact that the Democrats clearly did not campaign to win the 2024 presidential election, and what circumstances contribute to that behaviour. I talk about the increasingly fraudulent nature of politics at the highest levels and express how much I hate the commentators who base their "analysis" on their evident ability to read the minds of political figures and talk with absolute assurance about what their subjects think and feel.I discuss the way the unrelenting and sophisticated dishonesty of modern politics creates splits in the consciousness of both the individuals and groups of people, essentially making us all a bit mad and highly vulnerable to intellectual and moral degradation.This is the first part of Part 2 of my election analysis. Part 2 was too large to do in one part so I will post Part 2 of Part 2 later. In it I will discuss the role of professional wrestling in the 2024 US Presidential election - which goes far beyond the involvement of Hulk Hogan.
Sunday Nov 10, 2024
Sunday Nov 10, 2024
In a different approach to a postmortem of the US 2024 Presidential Election I try to avoid focusing on the campaigning choices of each party and look instead at the systemic constraints that have made US presidential elections into a spectacle - a spectacle almost devoid of actual politics. The history of US presidential politics has been dominated by public sentiments about their policies on issues of war and peace, but the electoral politics have evolved to keep such issues well away from the ballot box.I run through the history from Woodrow Wilson deceptively running as the antiwar candidate in 1916 under the slogan "He Kept Us Out of the War", while already intending to put the US into the War, to Lyndon Johnson running as the antiwar candidate while engineering a massive genocidal onslaught in Indochina.In Part 2 I will explore the way in which US elections are constrained to produce only pro-empire, pro-genocide results and the way in which the system is simultaneously a means of controlling public opinion.
Friday Oct 11, 2024
Friday Oct 11, 2024
In Episode 2 I follow thematically from episode one to explore generalisation and "othering". I continue some focus on antisemitism but shift more to the use of wilful bigotry against Palestinians which serves to paint the victims as being the agents of their own destruction. Links: Indi.ca: "How 'Israel' Is Used To Divide And Conquer The Middle East" https://indi.ca/how-israel-is-used-to-divide-and-conquer-the-middle-east/Me: "Israel's Big Lie of 'Self-defence"" http://ongenocide.com/2023/11/02/israels-big-lie-of-self-defence/"Beyond Stalemate: The Second Indochina War as a Genocidal War System" https://ongenocide.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/beyond-stalemate-revised.pdfGeorge Orwell: "Politics and the English Language" https://archive.org/details/PoliticsAndTheEnglishLanguageCBS Mornings: Ta-Nehisi Coates segment, https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/ta-nehisi-coates-on-the-power-of-stories-new-book-the-message/vi-AA1s2CEE
Thursday Sep 12, 2024
Thursday Sep 12, 2024
Antisemitism is on the rise, but so is the misuse of allegations of antisemitism to police political speech. How do we balance these increasingly urgent concerns? How do we distinguish what is and is not antisemitism?
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