Listen to a reading of this article:
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The Times has published an article titled “Lady Gaga embodies everything China fears,” subtitled “The singer’s uncompromising individuality makes her a serious threat to the mass imposition of cultural conformity through censorship,” and its contents are exactly as horrifyingly idiotic as you would imagine.
Here are the first three paragraphs of the article by Ben Macintyre, because if I had to read them then so do you:
A woman looking like an extra-terrestrial praying mantis upholstered in red leather strode on to the stage at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, jets of flame shot 100ft into the air, 50,000 outrageously costumed fans screamed, and I understood why China is so terrified of Lady Gaga.
For there is nothing so wildly individualistic, so defiant of convention, so unwilling to be regimented and controlled as Lady Gaga in full voice, an erotic, exotic ubercelebrity who also contrives to be the girl next door, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from New York City.
Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball last week was the first UK performance in seven years by this raw meat-wearing, bisexual feminist who sings of liberty, drugs, addiction, mental health and the absolute right to self-expression because she, and everyone else, is Born This Way. Simultaneously channelling Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, she is both an extreme fashion freak and defiantly ordinary, which is why she is one of the most powerful pop stars in history and, from the point of view of Beijing’s Communist leadership, a serious threat.
Lady Gaga embodies everything China fears.
“Do What U Want, she sings, and Beijing trembles.” https://t.co/Tid1FRa8ri
— Tom Harwood (@tomhfh) August 6, 2022
Macintyre goes on to explain that Lady Gaga was banned from China in 2016 for meeting with the Dalai Lama (who just between us is known to have collected a massive paycheck from the CIA for decades), which makes her a serious threat whose bold defiance and bisexual feminist individualism give Xi Jinping screaming night terrors.
“Lady Gaga poses a threat less for her political views, her visit to the Dalai Lama, and her support for LGBTQ rights than through her determination to be, and encourage others to be, entirely different,” Macintyre concludes. “Do What U Want, she sings, and Beijing trembles.”
I seriously cannot believe this article was published. Like, anywhere. I would have been surprised to see it picked up by even the most obscure clickbait blog in the seediest backwaters of the internet, much less by a prominent 237 year-old British newspaper.
But from where I sit right now, the funniest thing about it is the way the article portrays the western world as this bastion of free thought and individuality. Just that one fact alone eclipses the absurdity of the fact that the article’s author thinks the perfect symbol of this freedom is Lady Gaga strutting around in a meat dress.
I mean, just the fact that we are ingesting anti-China propaganda to facilitate the long-term strategic agendas of the US-centralized empire while reading in the Murdoch press about how free and unique we are compared to the Chinese shows you how bizarre this claim is.
In an authoritarian regime, you do what the powerful want you to do. In a Free Democracy™️, you do what you like, and it’s only by pure coincidence that what you like just so happens to always align perfectly with what the powerful want you to do.
The more you understand about the brainwashing effects of domestic propaganda in the west, the more adorable it is when you see westerners talking about themselves as free-thinking individualists living in a free society in contrast with the citizens of nations like China. A civilization whose inhabitants are continuously indoctrinated with power-serving belief systems from childhood until their dying breath is not individualist, is not free, and is not thinking. Its inhabitants only think this is so, and they think this is so because they’ve been programmed to.
Freedom of thought and freedom of speech only exist on the fringes of western society, in such small numbers that they make no difference. The mainstream population whose numbers could be used to effect revolutionary change are herded into political factions which are designed to prop up status quo power at every turn and corresponding media echo chambers which keep them from providing any meaningful resistance to the machine.
As a whole we are marching in perfect accordance with the will of our masters: voting how they like, thinking how they like, speaking how they like, working how they like, shopping how they like, and living how they like. It is only the power-serving narratives put in our minds by our education systems and our media which tell us we are free. And it is only those power-serving narratives which have trained us to look down our noses at people in nations like China.
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55 responses to “Westerners Think They Are Free-Thinking Individualists And It’s Effing Adorable”
When you realize that most of the comments on your website are just you using different names to make yourself seem liked it’s really very sad. I truly feel sorry for your delusional way of thinking that every single American is out to get the rest of the world when it’s really only the upper 1-5% that want money/power and will do anything to get it.
“Westerners Think They Are Free-Thinking Individualists And It’s Effing Adorable”
Says the bitch that lives in Australia and thinks that everyone in America believes what the media tells them. No honey sorry. 5% of the country are rich enough not to care about anything, 10% buy into the bullshit, and the rest of us 85% are just trying to survive. I know all your Stans on this site will probably disagree with me, even the ones that live in the USA but if you’re actually paying attention you’ll get it.
Excellent article.
There is freedom of expression in America but everyone says the same things–Tocqueville
I must live “on the fringes of Western society.”
I have to fight every day to get through to the minds of those Caity is describing in this article. Sometimes, I even have to lie, in that I will usually tell the politicians what they want to hear from me, then go and do whatever the hell I want. That even goes for Facebook, where I maintain an account in order to stay in contact with friends and relatives scattered around the globe. And, I get nowhere near the contacts, on my page, that I used to get – and I’ve been long convinced that Facebook has an algorithm that fails to notify friends of the types of posts that it is paid by the government to mask.
The lesser posts, such as those that are harmless humor, get far more reaction that the posts such as those from Caity and others in the alternative media – including articles on which I do intensive, deep research to make sure that there is no fallacy of thought, nor false information, contained in them, because I don’t post lies. Only an unthinking person could fail to understand the difference between mild, harmless conversation and freely expressed truths that are in opposition to the both the government’s agenda and that of the controlling billionaire sociopaths – an agenda most often that originates in the minds of the latter.
Often, however, the open mind is the rarest mind of all.
I cant help but think that all of this global dipshittery could have been avoided if we had all just done a suicide in the 80’s when it was clear that western culture was just consumer brain rot. We really dropped the ball there.
Have a blessed day everyone.
It is all about a social-psychological experiment to shape perception. The “woke” movement, cancel culture and whatever else can be summarized in “Hey guys, I have an idea to test with the cattle. Let’s play this as long as it takes to see if the fools will bite it.” It just exist in some western countries and all strongly connected with the US-UK empire. Unfortunately for CJ because in China and Russia fags cannot get out of the closet. Perhaps the only thing which would make CJ align with CIA psychological ops division. LOL.
Jeez, that’s just to bizarre a take to assimilate!
I’m sure it’s just the same with the Putin and Pussy Riot!
Now I’m wondering if they have met with the Dalai Lama.
All of China’s neighbours look down on China. The “Chinese tourist” is an unflattering meme.
Tourists from any nationality are disliked in every poorer countries where they feel entitled to treat people like shit because they have more money.
And it’s just pure chance if everybody these days is walking around in jeans wearing a base-ball cap (in countries where nobody’s ever played base-ball) engrossed in an ever-flowing interaction with their pet phones. Everybody was laughing at the Chinese in the 70s because they all wore the same blue boiler suits and caps and read Mao’s little red book in public every time they got the chance. What’s the difference?
Social reality is a build-up. Day after day the media, controlled top to bottom by the secret services, themselves in the service of Mammon, patiently build constructs.
Unfavorable opinions of Americans about China went from 47% five years ago to 73% now along with the escalating trade war and its cortege of “CCP virus”, “Xinjiang genocide”, “Hong-Kong revolt” and now “Taiwan’s oppression”.
All created by the media because nothing changed there fundamentally in that timeline except for US agitprop.
Magician James Randi once said that “no amount of belief makes something a fact”. Albeit epistemologically correct, in social reality, it is precisely the amount of belief that makes something a fact. Better still, it makes it so much of a tangible fact that it can constitute a ladder for social promotion.
This Mcintyre character is obviously more or less consciously aware of this. What’s the idea of introducing alleged Chinese policies out of the blue in the critic of a performance by Lady Gaga at Tottenham Hotspurs Stadium in London?
Why China of all countries? Is it possible that Lady Gaga would stick out like a sore thumb more in Saudi Arabia than in China for instance?
But whereas Saudi Arabia is our beloved friend, in spite of its chopping habits, because it’s got the oil that we don’t want because it’s dirty but still need badly to function, China on the contrary, in spite of providing us with most of our goods, has been painted black coat after coat for five solid years culminating in Crazy Nancy’s one woman show, for having become, through the most basic laws of economics, a predictable if unwitting threat to the self-styled legitimate hegemon.
In this reality, facts don’t matter. At the turn of this century, there was a lot of tension between the US and Iran and an American friend used to send me these emails, obviously concocted in some CIA back-rooms along with the fake bin Laden tapes, showing people beheaded in public in that country. What a bunch of savages!
Except that… the attire worn by the executioners and the modus operandi were typically… Saudi. Most people couldn’t tell the difference though because they couldn’t care less and bashing Iran was the thing to do in polite society.
Now it’s China and Mcintyre knows that by putting his foot on this step of the social ladder, even out of context, he ticks multiple yum-yum boxes, both with readers and hierarchy.
It’s all in a day’s work for a corporate presstitute…
Good comment. Re: the changing perceptions of Americans about Chinese people, I think there was a lot of racism and cultural arrogance to earlier opinions of the Chinese, who were viewed as quiet, submissive factory workers and peasants, and certainly no threat to Americans. But then something happened. Turns out, China’s leadership was very strategic in building out its industrial base, and had no intention of remaining an American sweatshop. Vast Chinese investments in education and infrastructure, and effective controls over the political power of China’s new billionaires, has led to a general elevation of the Chinese people, with poverty in rapid decline, education higher than ever, and productivity soaring. Now the Chinese can no longer be viewed paternalistically as a submissive, unthreatening people, now Chinese people are viewed as a threat, even though there is noting expansionist or aggressive about China’s development and recent history….
I hate to tell you so, but I did tell you so back in February, that the most important element in this Ukraine war slash SMO will be the nuclear power complex at Zaporizhzhia.
If it survives the conflict great, if it doesn’t, it will lead to “The Death of Europe.”
Those were Zelensky’s words 5 months ago, and for once, he was telling it like it is.
This finally made “the news” today, even though some of us have known about this since Thursday I link to this piece because it is beyond confusing. Are the Russians once again shelling their own positions? Or is it the Ukies that are shelling the plant, and that makes the Russians “terrorists” because they allow them to do so. Also, if you produce home made knitted caps in Ukraine, you are doing your patriotic duty. Whether these caps will help you to survive the nuclear thermal plumes, is left unclear. (5 minutes – of total nonsense).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6YQBKv_ZMg
I could’ve linked to an Amy Goodmen piece at Democracy Now, but hard hitting journalist Amy was too frightened to discuss the issue, and kept shifting the concerns to Chernobyl, which is nearly irrelevant.
Chernobyl, if things went haywire there, would only lead to the “Death of Kiev” and not much more.
I like Ms. Goodman, always have, and didn’t want to embarrass her.
And so I did not link.
Kindergarten. That’s the evolutionary status of humans at this moment in time, in my opinion. And the stage before that wasn’t nursery school. Far from it. There was a time, during the later stages of the hunter-gatherer period, where I believe we humans were more like post graduate students.
We plateaued and are now de-evolving. And though I hate to use the word, it is clear to me, that we are doing so at an “exponential” clip.
Note: I get it. Everyone loves nuclear, because it does seem like it’s our only way out of “the energy trap.” On top of this, it might allow us to not only beat the Great Filter, but to do so with style, with all lights blazing and air-conditioners on full blast.
And we all want that.
But nuclear is a pact with the Devil. It is also, as a gambling man, what people like me call a MORTAL LOCK, meaning, there is a 100% certainty that a spent fuel pool will fail at some point.
In other words, the Fukushima Scenario will be realized, it is inevitable, and as WE ALL KNOW, if the nation of Japan didn’t have several consecutive miracles go their way over a span of 7 to 10 days, their nation would no longer exist.
At minimum.
In other words, nothing’s happening according to the video but it might and if it did, which it shows no sign of doing because everybody knows on both sides it would unleash hell, it would deprive half of Ukraine of electricity. Conclusion of the blatant propaganda stunt complete with the entitled Garden Gnome of Kiev in full gear and the same T-shirt he doesn’t seem to have washed for five months unless he’s got a spare (but I read somewhere that it cost 1,000 bucks because it’s haute couture, so you don’t fuck with that!): Russkies go home! :o)
It would deprive Ukraine of a lot more than half of it’s electricity, should an artillery shell, or a rocket, or tank round, or a precision guided missile, detonate in a spent fuel pool.
Your are in Spain, I believe? Put it this way, if you hear the words “cascading failure” in relation to this plant, get the fuck out of Spain.
Immediately.
I start swimming already!
I have noticed the devolution. Read a Victorian newspaper of magazine–the vocabulary alone is amazing. Definitely not the 6th grade level we’ve been fed since the inception of TV. Rates of literacy were actually higher back then. Without TV and radio, people read constantly, which improves thinking skills. And talk to an indigenous shaman such as a fully trained and experienced Navajo medicine man or woman–the expanse of his or her memory and knowledge beats that of any college professor I know. But most concerning is that rates of narcissistic personality disorders have risen, and we know now that NPD is caused by both genes and conditioning. I worked in psych and have seen estimates now running as high as 20% NPD in America, up from about 10% 30 years ago. This is a genetic devolutionary trend, because NPD is so destructive.
I remember how Chinese queues were actually more like mobs and how this contrasted with the way Americans think of Chinese as orderly and regimented, yet Americans form a proper queue even though we’re supposed to be rugged individualists. It made me think maybe the Chinese weren’t so orderly and regimented after all, though I still think queues are better than everybody all jostled together. And group individuality is funny. I sometimes think of joining the Hells Angels but I like riding where I want. I don’t actually know anything about Lady Gaga and I doubt the Chinese leadership does either.
Is this what the liberal `democrats´ do? https://bioclandestine.substack.com
Even if this is suppressed in the western media, the whole world will know.
To me, the most stunning statement in The Times article was “China fears Lady Gaga.”
It’s…science fiction. It’s otherworldly.
He confused her with Atomic Blonde where Charlize Theron is an atomic power in her own right :o)
Good stuff. Keep up the great work Caitlin!
The Brits love their kink, especially the royals. It would have sent them over the top if Elton John crawled out of Gaga’s butt to sing a duet. Bread and circus for the plebes. Wait until the Christian fascists finally take power in the US, then the media will quickly lose interest in meat clothing and will become annoyingly devout, those godless Chinese. And the beards have all grown longer overnight.
Thank you! Woke fauxgressives have weaponized the Real Left, who have always only been concerned with improving the quality of life and planet, and given it a bad name. Awaken with JP makes fun of them daily in his YT show, but labels it all “looney left”. A certain segment of the left has fallen for this hijacking makeover, i.e. the pussy hat wearers, but most of us can see through the manipulation. There are no mainstream politically-charged bands today. After the 60’s social revolution, they made sure THAT wouldn’t happen again. To get signed as an artist today, you are free to express to your heart’s content, as long as that content doesn’t contain an incendiary political motivation. In upside down world, the bizarre are really the boring conformists.
Chris Hedges says the same thing about “the woke fauxgressives,” that they have given the Real Left and its principles a bad name.
(What a cool phrase! I’m borrowing it.)
Lady Gaga has a great big talent … for men.
As to any kind of thought, free or forced if you ever tried to follow her lyrics, she does not complete sentences there, it is not even English. If you googled the lyrics, you will regret reading them.
She is more of a threat to any kind of thinking and society, than to China.
She writes dance songs, repetitive and dumbing down, a lot like Western propaganda, and puts up a great show if herself in the US style. In her free time she feels sick a lot, like a lot people in the US who grow up in a sick society hearing lies in school and media.
She’s a good player though.
The Times of London is, along with the Guardian (it’s supposed ‘opposition’), the premier vector for the UK Security Services to push their propaganda. If you want to know what ‘they’ want you to think, it’s your go-to.
You just have to enter “chinese pop star” into the Google image search to see how wrong this guy’s claim is. A lot of colorful outfits and androgynous guys. But doing research is something for journalists, not propagandists.
If people are so unhappy with the lack of freedom in the US, they should get them some billions of dollars. They’ll have more freedom and friends in Washington and their state houses than they can shake a baby at.
My child told me, if I want to stop paying taxes, I can just become a billionaire.
Or, as William K. Black put it, “the best way to rob a bank is to own one”.
It’s also the best way to rob a nation.
Im reminded of the Monty Python skit where the whole class roboticaly intoning after the teacher “we are all individuals” and one person objecting “I’m not” thusly proving that they are.
… just another brick in the wall.
My favorite Python line, too.
The implication is that the “one person” is the same as “everyone else”.
If A is the same as B…Z, then logically B…Z are all the same.
That line tickles me.
I thought freedom of thought and expression existed at the fringes of western culture to allow the in-group a focal point for the derision (and denigration?) they have been conditioned to internalize [insecurity is the easiest thing to sell] and now need to redirect.
I may have to look into this further.
“Freedom” in the US no longer means thinking independently and questioning authority. It means finding a new hole every weekend to park your thing.
Regarding the propagandisation of the West, Jacques Ellul, writing many years ago:
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/266492-propagandes
“Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver, even though basically a high intelligence, a broad culture, a constant exercise of the critical faculties, and full and objective information are still the best weapons against propaganda.”
― Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
*
To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness — of himself, of his condition, of his society — for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man’s inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and — to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person — against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today’s events his life by obliterating yesterday’s news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented.
This situation makes the “current-events man” a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more striking, more distressing, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants. Propaganda addresses itself to that man; like him, it can relate only to the most superficial aspect of a spectacular event, which alone can interest man and lead him to make a certain decision or adopt a certain attitude.
But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.”
― Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
Basically we Americans want to view the Chinese as extras in American western’s, or if we prefer to think of them in more modern terms, as a people who’s main mode of transportation is the Mao bicycle.
We … are in for a rude awakening.
I started commenting on-line in the late autum of 2008. I thought, well, this is it, my country’s last chance. Democrats have all three branches, they have put in place an executive who outwardly at least, has all the qualities of greatness, and this means, there is a sliver of a chance we can begin the long, slow, grinding process of turning this doomed ship around.
I by no means thought this was mathematically possible, but I’m notoriously bad at math, and I also thought to myself, what the fuck. It can’t hurt to give it shot.
I chose Matt Yglesias’ blog at Think Progress to make my thoughts on some matters known to the world, and one of my first comments, might’ve even been the very first, was; “MattY, you and your ‘friends’ are aware that if this was a football game, the US would be trailing China 46 to nothing at the half, and China has yet to put in their first string?”
Lmao … Almost 14 years ago now. What a ride. One mathematical concept I have, for some reason, always been able to intuitively grasp, perhaps because I’ve seen it play out so often in real life, is that of the exponential function. Going from bad to worse usually takes quite a bit of time, but going from worse to total collapse is but a step.
Every time.
And the inverse of the function can operate in much the same way. Going from from weak to strong can be a seemingly interminable process, but going from strong to unrivaled greatness …. can and does happen overnight.
I was wrong looking back. It wasn’t 46 to nothing at the half. Probably more like 10 to 7 at that point. But it hardly matters. What mattered was the game was clearly over. It was all there in the numbers, and the exponential function was very much in play in those numbers, and it meant that China was going to start to blow us out in the third, and put us away for good, early in the fourth.
And that’s the way it played out … the only way it could.
As for me, by spring of 2009 I knew it was over for my country. Matt never answered anyone in his comment section, but he would, in classic Gatekeeper fashion, reply to people’s specific ” leftist concerns,” usually the next day, in one or more of his 5 or 6 daily posts.
His standard reply to “radical leftists”* like me in those daily postings was, we must all embrace neo-liberalism, because it is only in this way that all nation-states can become equal, even if that means that most of them, including ours, must be leveled in the process.
Note: It was also on Matty Y’s blog that I was introduced for the first time to the concept; “we must never let the perfect by the enemy of the good!” It quickly became all the rage in a commentariate, one that had been, for the most part, beaten entirely into submission by their party’s leading inspirational lights.
Over and over again, it became the one true standard response to those of us who quesioned the “wisdom” of a party, and a nation, that would pass a right wing, Heritage Foundation inspired, Mitt Romney version of health care, despite knowing the Republican Party was about to unanimously vote against it after having written 57% of the bill’s provisions, when “we” were not just theoretically, but were actually very much in, the ascendancy.
* “radical leftists,” i.e., old New Deal Democrats.
MAX424: I was in a different position from your move to comment online in 08/09. I’d been blogging intensively (when blogs hadn’t yet been killed by social media), but gave up when Obama the Blessed was elected in 2008. Stopped in 2009. Declining readership (didn’t know why, thought it was me, only years later realised it was Twitter and FB), but also very depressed at the certainly that Obama would put ‘progressives’ to sleep for 8 long years. I was rooting for McCain, as only 8 more years of over BS could have nudged enough people to the actual left, and not the ‘liberal’ center. And my decision to walk away was proven right. Back in 03-08, I was constantly attacking the US empire (Bush/Cheney) and got death threats from the right types. Were I to do the same today, I’d be called a Russian troll, and my former ‘liberal friends’ would be trying to destroy my career.
2016 proved that there is no ‘good’ side in US politics, it’s turds all the way down.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good” is a fantastic and accurate statement. However, in the hands of a US Dem, there’s an “invisible premise” that they’re tyring to sneak past you: “We are Good”.
No, Dems, you are not. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and the dems are the enemy of both.
I was pretty sure exactly who Obama was going in. He was after all, a Robert Rubin acolyte, Larry Summers was his pal, he also was an openly hardcore Big Coal Senator who liked to play rounds of golf with JP Morgan whiz Jamie Dimon, and so on, but after reading his books, something in them made me open to the possibily that he could be the type of dude who plays it coy, and then when his chance comes, he risks assassination and tries to do something that will reverberate forever in the Halls of Vahalla.
A once in a millenium man. Rises from nothing to become the 21st century’s version of Ghengis Khan. Only nicer.
Two weeks in to his gig in the Oval Office, the leader of the most “transparent administration ever” is behind closed door with Big Pharma hammering out “the deal.” and I’m writing to Matt, “Matty Kid, this treasonous MOTHERFUCKER is going to be the first billionaire ex-President, mark my FUCKING words!!!”
I used a lot of caps and exclams back then. Too funny.
You know, if you had fifty checkmark boxes of say, left right issues, the Dems would at this point get a checkmark in more than 25 of the boxes on the right, which means, the Dems are now unquestionably, to the right of the Republicans.
This is not only an extraordinary development, it is also an impossible one, because the GOP is as far to the right as you can get with falling over the rightward edge.
I think this means therefore … lmao … that our “political system” has gone completely mad, and the future of it, is to achieve whatever state of mind lies beyond the darker side of total madness.
Note: That perfect/enemy shit drove me crazy. Nobody “on the left” was asking for perfect. Some of us, myself included, were only asking folks like Matt to write the words “Public Option” in a sentence.
“We can’t have a Public Option because we don’t want one.” That’s all he had to say, I would’ve stopped mocking him the next day.
Vote Blue Harder has replaced this complex nonsense, I think, which is good thing. Keep the stupid simple, I always say.
Rather than the enemy of the good, the perfect is the precondition of the good, that which claims and lures us, draws us onward and upward toward it, providing the necessary tension between reality and the impossible dream. Why not pull up the old song with that title and give it a listen? These days, it’s a radical act, the mortal enemy of neoliberalism being not socialism (count me in) but idealism. Only when the left recovers its idealism, its various visions of perfect societies, will it find the strength and courage to rise again and take its slingshot in hand to meet the seemingly invincible adversary.
Beautifully put, couldn’t agree more.
Because you think the left is not idealistic enough? Wokism is the epitome of idealism, i.e. bordering on insanity. As a matter of fact, the more insane your proposition (“a trans man can compete in perfect fairness with a biological woman because he is now a woman”), the more welcome it is in the woke echo chamber. And it will be sponsored by power because it brings about insecurity. Nothing that anybody thinks they know can be trusted. Everybody needs help and guidance on this slippery slope but thank God, the security state has solutions…
Voltaire once said that “if there were other beings in the universe, the Earth must be their loony bin”. And wokism, one might add, with emotions channelled by social media in support of Mammon’s options, its Mecca.
“Wokism is the epitome of idealism, i.e. bordering on insanity.”
So when I was a kid, and I asked my Dad, “Dad, when Tommy and his brothers say black people are inferior because they are niggers, are they right?”
“I believe black people are no different from us son, but it ultimately it can only be up to you to make your own determination, as you go through life.”
So are you saying my Dad was border-line insane Pascal? Because goddamn was that man woke as hell. Thing I admired about him most, actually.
Note: Besides, how did woke get into this conversation. I though we were talking class warfare.
Too funny. The traps snap shut on just about everyone, even those that are looking right at em.
Just can’t help themselves. The want to be snared is simply too strong.
Actually, idealism is the cause of all these problems. It’s a distraction from the material conditions necessary for people to construct their own experiences, in service of some LARPy abstraction. How about the middle class corks their precious religious humbug, stops thinking of themselves as superior, and produces a system that delivers reliable living standards such that I don’t NEED to hear their sentimental claptrap anymore?
https://eand.co/how-the-left-died-c7bda59e6812
I couldn’t agree more! The left died when it became bourgeois autistic narcissism and the watchdog of capitalism through replacing socialism by societalism in the consumer society, voting to send weapons to far-right oppressors and banning the free speech that denounces this.
folks in the USA are confused … Living In Fear =not= Freedom.
Like the old adage ‘people don’t know what they don’t know’, also true here, this is about ‘people thinking they think’ when in reality they only echo other people’s thoughts. No thinking necessary!
We think therefore we are, or so we think .
Wow the old Russian joke would have worked well in this article too.
Lady Gaga ( her Vanguard name) could have gone with her real name Stefi Germ.
Maybe one day her “ little monsters” will look back & see “Everybody’s so different we’re all the same” to quote Joe Walsh.
I just read Caitoz hit two home runs in one day, well done
I really enjoy living in China and I read a book that Harry Browne wrote “How I found Freedom in an unfree World”.
..and this is why Putin will win! No Vogue covers, no intersectionality, no believing freedom comes from an aging celebrity.
When we seriously start on China the result will be the same.