For many in the States, the American breakfast table with its coffee and morning news, the blessing or curse (both) of close family, the coffee and pancakes, and the “hey, Martha, listen to this” off the headlines has been replaced by the wake-up brew slurped by the nation’s (the world’s) keyboard warriors. So it goes, and what caught my eye on Twitter first thing was a tweet (long lost when I tried to find it again) on Cruz assenting to defend Trump’s mind-bending effort to run around the relationship between the state’s voters and Electoral College representatives.
With relation to all of the above, the Far Out Left’s historical power-seizing mantra “By any means necessary!” appears revived on the dark heights of the nation’s Far Wrong Right in its fraud-fishing efforts to have Biden win reversed.
Verbatim but for identification of the thread host.
The inspiration was one of those grievance-laden rants about the Clintons and Obama, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, the Steele Dossier, George Soros, the CIA, the FBI, and “The Deep State”.
It’s not the truth, K. It’s polemic without basis, empirical, factual or otherwise.
Posted elsewhere on this thread . . . but I wanted to reply to you specifically —
Is there the possibility of your being wrong and having been wrong about President Trump and his claims?
There is in politics related to conflict a concept widely accepted as “Accusation in a Mirror”.
On YouTube, Republicans Voting Against Trump (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC03-Q9vq-JyiStTnqasADVg) voluntarily submitted recordings of their most personal political views and the insults and violations of their sensibilities brought to them by Donald J. Trump. Listen to them. Listen to their hearts. They are your fellow Republicans and fellow Americans.
Is there in your heart even the possibility that your information may be wrong and your conclusions faulty?
Social control in our competitor’s state, Russia, often involves medieval agitation and propaganda; today’s America has been deeply divided not by examined issues but by defamation, disinformation, innuendos, and the floating of wild conspiracy theories that just don’t add up or pan out with clinical examination. The post-Soviet (World Peace Council) Far Out Left knows the methods too, but here in the United States, it really has been a kind of Far White Right that has spun up delusion and paranoia in its ranks.
I am certain that more centered and moderate Americans encounter similar rants composed or copy-and-pasted from the Trump base, and I wouldn’t know what to tell them but to battle back the disinformation.
Turning Point USA’s featured meme, November 20, 2020.
From the Awesome Conversation
You are wrong, Turning Point USA.
Qualities of Living (QOL) anywhere involve complex economic, political, psychological, and social arrangements, the same that have states adjusting infrastructure and tax-related variables to attract business (see Foxconn, Wisconsin for an egregious example of bending over frontward) and put populations and jobs together with the help of appropriate transportation systems, none of which are ever without local, state, and Federal government support in one form or another.
It’s good that California is losing population while the host of America’s “activists” and economic developers wrestle with basic floor-level habitability and standards issues.
Of course, California’s compassion, generosity, and wealth have done their job in attracting both labor and predatory elements, but with regard to the latter and the impoverishment and ravaging of the seemingly marginal, the state that also glamorizes its demimonde (see, for example, the film _Barfly_ or, really, just about any modern product playing up the mix of crime and wealth) has drawn exactly what is has created and invited. — I saw Patrick Moynihan years ago at a subcommittee hearing in D.C. on growth, and he noted that the difference between Columbia, Maryland and Calcutta, India was . . . government and planning. He was right. I would add culture and the vision in total of our own humanity. — Sweep California’s social issues off the rug or under it has seemed to me the persistent conservative stance. Perhaps (as complement to other “Turning Point” businesses picking up the broken pieces), engagement with corruption and crime, distribution of population, site-locating of new financial hubs elsewhere (!), and development of small homes communities for those looking for their next California in the interior, would be the better way to go.
For America’s 328-million souls, the “report card” is not that awful but what comes of a kind of geospatial political affliction in population affects the entire nation. Those you seem to need to label as enemies are your fellow Americans, and many among them appear to be engaging issues you just don’t want to see.
The meme’s featured fellow is actually . . . rather clean cut — great teeth, clean clothes, finely photographed!
My confession: life’s a lot cozier and secure viewing the world from my desktop as opposed (for this moment at 65+ at which I need to work on my own “fitness level” before further adventure’s forth) to playing a male Dorothea Lange — and what she saw was the economic migration out to California. However, two examples among the more brave with friends and partners: Mark Horvath documenting the homeless via his work published on Invisible People TV; veteran war photographer James Nachtwey via a Time “Special Report: The Opioid Diaries” (2018). In the world far from the armed and gated bastions of wealthy Californian conservatives — at least a few, I’m sure — “Turning Point” has a different meaning. However, there’s much more than the narcotics trade at work within California producing conditions for social ills and outbound migration. Issues: affordability, crime, desperation, greed, and — out of practical necessity as well as individual personality factors — plain old cold-shouldered inhumanity.
What is to be done?
🙂
For improved Qualities of Living (QOLs) for any Area-Squared, it might help if governments try to balance population with variables associated with basic physical and psychological security. For the troubled floors of myriad urban and rural economies, the only process answer for that is to know who has come from where with what purposes at heart — know thy community — and start to encourage the development of distributed alternative resources for living reasonably, lawfully, and with hope.
I would add here the necessity of serious criminal “filtration” associated with the end-to-end channels of the Transnational Crime Industries. Suffice it to say there are currents and pools of “dark money” all over the world, and all of them scrape from off the streets of the world. With regard to that theme, BackChannels would rather write fiction.
Posted to YouTube March 10, 2019.
“This Tiny Home Community Gives Homeless Veterans A Chance – Working To End Veteran Homelessness” – Posted to YouTube November 27, 2019.
Posted to YouTube June 26, 2020.
Administrative Reality
The data provided by LAHSA showed that 31% of those leaving the shelters went back to the streets and 35% to unknown destinations. An additional 13% found other temporary housing, either with friends or family or in a program; 4% checked into a mental hospital, detox program or nursing facility; 2% went to jail; and seven — less than half a percent — died.
Fewer than half the placements in permanent housing included supportive services, such as case management and housing assistance. Most were in subsidized rentals or with family or friends.
Well, they’re not “invisible” anymore, and they’re providing impetus for innovations in basic minimum housing design, shelter placements and programs, and perhaps thinking about “client” autonomy, character, and drift.
Is America sure it did the right thing? And why has he any support left? Are his followers dumb? Are the trolls on Facebook that good? Have Americans really wanted a “mafia state” of their own?
Trump and his organization “lies up” his projects, screwing his subcontractors out of untold millions. The Taj was just one project “inspiring” countless lawsuits.
The truth about Russian-borne disinformation: it’s designed to break us apart, Far Left and Far Right. Americans who lean Left have become (with disinfo) suddenly Communist and those leaning right get salted as something like white Christian nationalist extremists . . . .
The country has had four long years with this guy, and it voted him out.
— and you know how it’s done: someone pastes up the art, slips it into the Internet Wild absent of context and any thematic evaluation, and out it goes to intellectually poison the gulls.
Agitation/Propaganda (agitprop) is never clear, accurate, or complete. It is always twisted, lacking in context, in detail, and integrity.
Excerpted from the above URL.
“Nearly 40 African American religious leaders released a statement supporting the bill, saying: “While we do not agree with every provision in the crime bill, we do believe and emphatically support the bill’s goal to save our communities, and most importantly, our children.”
Now I have to ask my fellow Americans: what kind of person, what mentality, what measure in irresponsible character grabs an attention-getting image with potent political content or suggestion and goes with it without at least a look into the claim?
That person — the person who would do that — that’s not an American.
We’re a real country full of real GOOD people working difficult issues as we go along, and if we’re not that today, let’s get back to that real fast!
Published in 2015 to tell how Putin’s power manipulates media and through it information in Russia, the same may be applicable today on the Far Wrong Right in what is still, for a while, Donald J. Trump’s now perverted pseudo-democratic America.
HE lies.
HE has lied to his business associates, his followers, and his wives.
HE has lied about Americans and about The Press.
HE has lied about America’s Democracy and Freedom by making up enemies out of whole cloth and by demanding from defense and security officials (and possibly military officers — remember Colonel Vindman — as well) loyalty not to the Constitution of our nation, but to himself.
Yeah, well, a couple of days ago, HE had his minions hot on dead voters with mail-in ballots.
Since yesterday: rigged voting machines!
Whatever.
The main thing for Trump is that HE bend reality (for HIS fervently hopeful faithful) to make itlook like HE — and THEY — were cheated and HIS seizing office through THEIR violence (with help from HIS government’s forces) would be just.
Enough with “HE”, “HIS”, “THEY”, and “THEIRS” — you get the diabolical picture.
While Trump may develop his own private media empire, he would have other options as a Putinesque dictator. He could, for example, simply have an assign mention to a publisher — or a publisher’s confidante — a preference for the hiring of one editor or journalist over another. Word gets through (from The Boss), and that’s that.
In the fashion of television drama, Trump’s kind of slick underhanded power (remember–and give it your best smoked gravel voice: “it’s only business”) might help an ambitious journo miss a career (and potentially history-altering) meeting (“you know what I mean?”).
Peter Pomerantzev’s book tells of a world in which Power designs and orders “reality” — or its perception — sufficiently to keep Putin & Co. in loot while the public has its thoughts, which then matter not so much.
If you’re in with power, life’s good!
Or at least it will look good.
If you’re out of the “systema” — as Russia’s hoodlums refer to it — not so great . . . and the reality on the outs ain’t about looks.
The most essential difference between Moscow and Washington and between Trump’s Republicans and both Republicans and Democrats that voted for Biden is the difference between the political methods known to feudal/medieval realms accustomed to political absolutism and the liberal modern and open democracies that really do try to expand inclusion in the distribution of power.
President Trump has long signaled his character through his choice of Paul Manafort as his first campaign manager and not much has changed to this divisive point at which he has been refusing to concede America’s 2020 Presidential Election. Trump and his now delusional Far Wrong Right component well mirror Putin’s church & defense nationalism. I find it difficult as an American to see our domestic politics so degraded by division and reduced to vacuous dogma and slogans promoted by zealots.
With Trump’s election lost — a premise now accepted by all but those who lie about it and those dumbed-down, deluded, and duped by lies — the most egregious of political attitudes and beliefs to have come from this nearly Orwellian farce has been the reinvention of the threat of the Communist Party in the United States and, of course, the great bogies that have been made of so-called “Antifa” and “Globalists“. Anarchists, communists, and globalists (even “Antifa”) may be out there, but it would seem the Trumpian rallying cries and crowds appear more real — frighteningly so — than their nearly phantom targets.
My conversational partner, a Canadian, fervently believes in the latest medieval rumor “Hammer and Scorecard” — a “Deep State” plot to pervert the election via the computing machinery — launched by the now surreal President Donald J. Trump.
From the Awesome Conversation
You should hate the kind of people who lie to you in order to keep you seduced for THEIR — not YOUR OWN — political purposes.
Trump and his cronies know that YOU cannot check out his claims yourself, and by attempting to derail the most dedicated and professional workers in his own government and in the press, he can get you to believe anything HE wants while delivering not very much at all to America’s working men and women.
Remember, our small business community and voters in all of the communities of labor across the land voted for Biden too.
I would love to have you reason critically about beliefs that have become familiar to you but have no basis in reality.
Fear mongering; rumor mills; accusations in a mirror — what HE would do himself, he accuses his opposition of doing to him . . . such have become the medieval tactics now being launched through Donald J. Trump’s political machinery. The victims of President Trump’s false claims and myriad lies are not his critics or America’s journalists or his business rivals — those most exploited are his own and most devoted fans who must turn their backs on the truth and swim into the chaos and darkness he prefers to have swirling around him.
BackChannels 