No, I don't think Breitbart is. Breitbart, by and large is just a aggregator with color commentary. I think Breitbart and its readership like to imagine they're very important, but even in this age of anti-MSMism, the big news outlets like CNN still dwarf Breitbart.
He's a hero to some elements of the Left. The Left, like the Right, isn't a singular, and there are a helluva lot of people in the more centrist progressive category (like myself) who find the Chavistas to either be complete fucking morons, or in the case of Chavez and Maduro, just out and out criminals. Further, the whole "Bolivaran Revolution" crapola Chavez spent years spouting was little more than reanimating Bolivar's corpse for personal ingratiation and political gain (to the point where they literally dug the poor bastard's body up in what has to be one of the most grotesque displays in recent memory).
You see, this is the problem with talking purely in terms of "Left" and "Right", as if these vast monolithic adjectives were actually ideologies in and of themselves, and they're not. The "Right" often includes everything from right-of-center moderates all the way to frothing-at-the-mouth white supremacists, and somehow Libertarians get chucked in there as well, whereas the "Left" is everyone from left-of-center moderates through to wingnut Communists, often with certain anarchist socialist types thrown in as well (despite these groups being more like Libertarians).
So to say "the Left supported Chavez" is about as accurate as saying "the Right supported Pinochet". Clearly in both cases, large numbers of these supposed groups did not support these people. The people who I associate most often with, who might be called "progressives" and "social democrats" found Chavista populism and the incredibly short-sighted economic policies that Chavez instituted to be somewhere between incompetent and malevolent. My personal view is that Chavez may certainly have started out, like all such men, believing he was helping the Venezuelans, but in a pattern that Latin American political movements have partaken of for a couple of centuries now, ended up helping himself and his buddies in the process, thus simply transferring the kleptocracy from a right wing regime to a left wing regime.
Yes, Madonna is an ignorant loud mouth and what she said was deplorable. I won't buy her music or go to her shows. Mind you, since I'm more a Pink Floyd/King Crimson/Beatles/Rush kind of guy, the odds of me ever supporting Madonna in any way were pretty negligible. But this all looks whataboutery to me. The fact that Madonna is a ludicrous and nasty person doesn't make Milo any less ludicrous and nasty, though I'll state quite openly that I find the insanity at UC Berkeley to have done nothing but give Milo yet another undeserved medal on his chest, and I hold any rioter, regardless of ideology, in contempt.
I suspect that there are more than a few Republicans on Capitol Hill that are spooked that Bannon has been elevated to one of the most powerful people in the United States, and therefore in the world.
How about the "Muslim scare", where anyone with brown skin is automatically assumed to be a dangerous terrorist, and that people who belong to a one-billion member religion that isn't even in and of itself homogeneous are all declared to be part of some "Muslim hoard" that's going to take over America and declare Sharia law (meanwhile, ironically, some Evangelical and Conservative Catholic hold positions that would be more compatible with Sharia).
The argument, and not an unreasonable one, is that African-Americans remain an economically disadvantaged group. Now we can certainly debate how much of that is due to intrinsic versus extrinsic factors, but if you're not willing to at least admit that many people in the inner cities, who primarily have been for decades poorer groups and often from minorities, live in poor economic conditions, then what you're fundamentally asserting is "black people are criminals who deserve to be shot."
Are you saying a Syrian refugee fleeing a brutal civil war are not disadvantaged? Are you saying an illegal Mexican seeking a better life north of the border is not disadvantaged? On average, Americans are the most prosperous human beings that have ever lived anywhere at any time, but somehow some family just trying to get away from a partially failed state where both the government and the rebels are murderous psychopaths somehow enjoy some great privilege.
Why does this always have to be an either-or proposition? And by this I mean to criticize both ends of the political spectrum, who both equally and gleefully partake of identity politics.
Even if he was a terrorist (and if you're going to start calling protesters who start swinging fists terrorists, then I'd suggest the word loses any meaning at all), that does not empower any group to try, convict and mete out his punishment.
I'm going to go out and a limb and say I don't think Trump won because majorities in the Rust Belt, or even in more traditional Red states, are a pack of white supremacists. Obviously there is that element (and up until Nixon's South Strategy, that element was more associated with the Democrats, or at least on the fringes like the Dixiecrats), but it sure looks to me like a lot of people were very pissed off (and not without good reason) at what they viewed as the Washington establishment, at a pack of elites who had grown so comfortable in their ivory towers that even if they wanted to help the average person on the street, were so detached that they wouldn't even know where to begin.
So, to put it in rather blunt terms, the notion that Breitbarts, Milo, Bannon, and ultimately even Trump himself somehow represent the New America is absurd, to the point where Trump has entered the presidency with the lowest approval ratings of any new President since anyone started measuring that. I really do get the impression that he actually has damned little overarching political support outside his base. At best, general support seems to be of the "monkey wrench in the machinery", as in "we sure hope he fucks up the Washington establishment", but there seems little evidence that most Americans believe he's going to be a great president. I simply think the Alt-right, like the out and out White Supremacists, are delusional on this point.
Yes, those BLM types, so damned racist because they protests that African-Americans are statistically more likely to die in police shootings. How racist of them! They should just ignore that statistic because it makes them racist to point it out!
I remember someone even trying to prove Milo wasn't a racist because he likes to sleep with black man. It was pointed out that that would have made meant many of the slave owners in the American South weren't racists.
Oh bullshit. If the white supremacists can't post on major websites, they don't get stronger. They get weaker, because the successes they've had in the last few years largely come from the fact that they've been able to hijack places like Twitter and Facebook. If they're stuck on their IP address accessed web forums or on places like Stormfront, they end up becoming what they were before, a circle jerk of racists.
That's fine. Let them go to Stormfront. You have a right to your views and to discuss them with likeminded people. Major online portals have no obligation to help you.
If the White Supremacists are pushed back to their web forums which the rest of the world doesn't have to view, that's fine by me. I don't want to shut Stormfront down, I just don't want the sites I visit turning into Stormfront colonies.
Explain the difference to me. I'm having a hard time seeing the difference, other than that, in the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, "at least National Socialism is an ethos."
Any pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas were pretty small numbers, whereas there were a helluva lot of descendants of the Clovis peoples in the Americas, and they were witness to a lot more than wars. The treatment of some of these peoples was so awful that even at the time some had misgivings. At any rate, the point is that the Europeans were the late-comers and seized the land by force, just as their descendants seem oddly fearful that a few Syrian refugees are somehow going to manage to do.
As to the Mexicans, well much of what constitutes the southern United States was out and out stolen in an imperialistic war of aggression against Mexico. So if Spanish-speaking peoples are now growing in number, well, sounds like karma to me. It sounds a lot like some Anglo-saxon types are worried that others peoples are just as much a pack of bastards as they have been in the Americas. But really, I see little evidence of any great overthrow of the American system by immigrants, it strikes me that the damage is being done by that narcissistic moron the Electoral College put into the White House.
It's also important to remember that in the United States, the people who pass taxation legislation are elected. The American Colonies who revolted against Britain weren't against taxation, they were against taxation without representation. And the world goes around with taxes. There is no other way, and if you just let people decide when and how they'll pay, the system will collapse. That's why Greece is the mess it is in, because for years tax evasion was practically a national pasttime, with the Greek government's ability and will to catch evaders being very ineffective.
Being forced to pay taxes has the same constitutional basis as being forced not to speed or to defecate on sidewalks.
Slashdot Mirror
So why aren't we holding those disgruntled Rust Belt voters clinging to a dying way of life to the same standard?
Obviously you do, and the only person trying to distract here is you. I wonder why
No, I don't think Breitbart is. Breitbart, by and large is just a aggregator with color commentary. I think Breitbart and its readership like to imagine they're very important, but even in this age of anti-MSMism, the big news outlets like CNN still dwarf Breitbart.
He's a hero to some elements of the Left. The Left, like the Right, isn't a singular, and there are a helluva lot of people in the more centrist progressive category (like myself) who find the Chavistas to either be complete fucking morons, or in the case of Chavez and Maduro, just out and out criminals. Further, the whole "Bolivaran Revolution" crapola Chavez spent years spouting was little more than reanimating Bolivar's corpse for personal ingratiation and political gain (to the point where they literally dug the poor bastard's body up in what has to be one of the most grotesque displays in recent memory).
You see, this is the problem with talking purely in terms of "Left" and "Right", as if these vast monolithic adjectives were actually ideologies in and of themselves, and they're not. The "Right" often includes everything from right-of-center moderates all the way to frothing-at-the-mouth white supremacists, and somehow Libertarians get chucked in there as well, whereas the "Left" is everyone from left-of-center moderates through to wingnut Communists, often with certain anarchist socialist types thrown in as well (despite these groups being more like Libertarians).
So to say "the Left supported Chavez" is about as accurate as saying "the Right supported Pinochet". Clearly in both cases, large numbers of these supposed groups did not support these people. The people who I associate most often with, who might be called "progressives" and "social democrats" found Chavista populism and the incredibly short-sighted economic policies that Chavez instituted to be somewhere between incompetent and malevolent. My personal view is that Chavez may certainly have started out, like all such men, believing he was helping the Venezuelans, but in a pattern that Latin American political movements have partaken of for a couple of centuries now, ended up helping himself and his buddies in the process, thus simply transferring the kleptocracy from a right wing regime to a left wing regime.
Yes, Madonna is an ignorant loud mouth and what she said was deplorable. I won't buy her music or go to her shows. Mind you, since I'm more a Pink Floyd/King Crimson/Beatles/Rush kind of guy, the odds of me ever supporting Madonna in any way were pretty negligible. But this all looks whataboutery to me. The fact that Madonna is a ludicrous and nasty person doesn't make Milo any less ludicrous and nasty, though I'll state quite openly that I find the insanity at UC Berkeley to have done nothing but give Milo yet another undeserved medal on his chest, and I hold any rioter, regardless of ideology, in contempt.
I suspect that there are more than a few Republicans on Capitol Hill that are spooked that Bannon has been elevated to one of the most powerful people in the United States, and therefore in the world.
I'm not implying anything. I'm outright stating Milo faked tweets from her and then encouraged his followers to harass her on Twitter.
How about the "Muslim scare", where anyone with brown skin is automatically assumed to be a dangerous terrorist, and that people who belong to a one-billion member religion that isn't even in and of itself homogeneous are all declared to be part of some "Muslim hoard" that's going to take over America and declare Sharia law (meanwhile, ironically, some Evangelical and Conservative Catholic hold positions that would be more compatible with Sharia).
The argument, and not an unreasonable one, is that African-Americans remain an economically disadvantaged group. Now we can certainly debate how much of that is due to intrinsic versus extrinsic factors, but if you're not willing to at least admit that many people in the inner cities, who primarily have been for decades poorer groups and often from minorities, live in poor economic conditions, then what you're fundamentally asserting is "black people are criminals who deserve to be shot."
Are you saying a Syrian refugee fleeing a brutal civil war are not disadvantaged? Are you saying an illegal Mexican seeking a better life north of the border is not disadvantaged? On average, Americans are the most prosperous human beings that have ever lived anywhere at any time, but somehow some family just trying to get away from a partially failed state where both the government and the rebels are murderous psychopaths somehow enjoy some great privilege.
Why does this always have to be an either-or proposition? And by this I mean to criticize both ends of the political spectrum, who both equally and gleefully partake of identity politics.
Even if he was a terrorist (and if you're going to start calling protesters who start swinging fists terrorists, then I'd suggest the word loses any meaning at all), that does not empower any group to try, convict and mete out his punishment.
I'm going to go out and a limb and say I don't think Trump won because majorities in the Rust Belt, or even in more traditional Red states, are a pack of white supremacists. Obviously there is that element (and up until Nixon's South Strategy, that element was more associated with the Democrats, or at least on the fringes like the Dixiecrats), but it sure looks to me like a lot of people were very pissed off (and not without good reason) at what they viewed as the Washington establishment, at a pack of elites who had grown so comfortable in their ivory towers that even if they wanted to help the average person on the street, were so detached that they wouldn't even know where to begin.
So, to put it in rather blunt terms, the notion that Breitbarts, Milo, Bannon, and ultimately even Trump himself somehow represent the New America is absurd, to the point where Trump has entered the presidency with the lowest approval ratings of any new President since anyone started measuring that. I really do get the impression that he actually has damned little overarching political support outside his base. At best, general support seems to be of the "monkey wrench in the machinery", as in "we sure hope he fucks up the Washington establishment", but there seems little evidence that most Americans believe he's going to be a great president. I simply think the Alt-right, like the out and out White Supremacists, are delusional on this point.
Wow, I'm impressed you could decipher the post. It read like gibberish to me.
It certainly did wonders for the Weimar Republic...
Yes, those BLM types, so damned racist because they protests that African-Americans are statistically more likely to die in police shootings. How racist of them! They should just ignore that statistic because it makes them racist to point it out!
I remember someone even trying to prove Milo wasn't a racist because he likes to sleep with black man. It was pointed out that that would have made meant many of the slave owners in the American South weren't racists.
Oh bullshit. If the white supremacists can't post on major websites, they don't get stronger. They get weaker, because the successes they've had in the last few years largely come from the fact that they've been able to hijack places like Twitter and Facebook. If they're stuck on their IP address accessed web forums or on places like Stormfront, they end up becoming what they were before, a circle jerk of racists.
You mean the guy who fabricated tweets about Leslie Jones to try to make her look like a racist. Yes, he doesn't care about skin color at all.
That's fine. Let them go to Stormfront. You have a right to your views and to discuss them with likeminded people. Major online portals have no obligation to help you.
If the White Supremacists are pushed back to their web forums which the rest of the world doesn't have to view, that's fine by me. I don't want to shut Stormfront down, I just don't want the sites I visit turning into Stormfront colonies.
Explain the difference to me. I'm having a hard time seeing the difference, other than that, in the immortal words of Walter Sobchak, "at least National Socialism is an ethos."
Any pre-Clovis peoples in the Americas were pretty small numbers, whereas there were a helluva lot of descendants of the Clovis peoples in the Americas, and they were witness to a lot more than wars. The treatment of some of these peoples was so awful that even at the time some had misgivings. At any rate, the point is that the Europeans were the late-comers and seized the land by force, just as their descendants seem oddly fearful that a few Syrian refugees are somehow going to manage to do.
As to the Mexicans, well much of what constitutes the southern United States was out and out stolen in an imperialistic war of aggression against Mexico. So if Spanish-speaking peoples are now growing in number, well, sounds like karma to me. It sounds a lot like some Anglo-saxon types are worried that others peoples are just as much a pack of bastards as they have been in the Americas. But really, I see little evidence of any great overthrow of the American system by immigrants, it strikes me that the damage is being done by that narcissistic moron the Electoral College put into the White House.
BEcause no climatologist before you came along considered these factors.
Be sure to pick up your Nobel Prize at the door, you super genius.
Don't be an evil asshole! If you start talking about long term trends, that pseudo-skeptics can't cherry pick their data!
My apologies! That's what I get for drawing hasty conclusions.
It's also important to remember that in the United States, the people who pass taxation legislation are elected. The American Colonies who revolted against Britain weren't against taxation, they were against taxation without representation. And the world goes around with taxes. There is no other way, and if you just let people decide when and how they'll pay, the system will collapse. That's why Greece is the mess it is in, because for years tax evasion was practically a national pasttime, with the Greek government's ability and will to catch evaders being very ineffective.
Being forced to pay taxes has the same constitutional basis as being forced not to speed or to defecate on sidewalks.