11-03-2022, 01:26 PM
(10-20-2022, 05:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-20-2022, 11:47 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-20-2022, 02:07 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I am so disappointed. I thought I would never see a House of Representatives as crazy and dedicated to destruction as the Tea Party congress after 2010. We are now likely to see a congress of cultist conspiracy freaks even more destructive, more crazy and more dedicated to taking away all real freedom and justice. The misnamed Freedom Caucus was bad enough. I wonder what the Boebert/Greene wing call themselves. Just the MAGA wing I guess has become the established name for them. It is just one reason I am feeling sad and lazy today.
The fault lies with us Americans on a whole. If not, then our neighbors, whether the cultists themselves or those who see QAnon, the John Birch Society, the Dark Money plutocrats, authoritarian religiosity, and the militia movements as useful people in achieving their agenda. Those cultists offer conservatives their agenda in pure expression in economics and culture, but those cultists will take away freedom, and not only from liberals.
We liberals see no reason to take freedom from the conservatives. The conservatives will be necessary in the event that someone ever gets the power to "defund the police" or impose Critical Race Theory, and conservatives may be exactly the ones to know how to stop inflation (quit printing money or stop creating easy credit). Conservatives have at times been necessary in the defense of liberty, and if there has ever been a time in which conservatives must defend liberty from domestic threats, then now is the time.
Aside from some lonely Stalinists, Maoists, Hoxha groupies, and Trotskyites, America has no meaningful Far Left. Even the Communist party of the USA is trying to go mainstream. I wish that I could say of the Far Right that it consisted only of fascist pigs who prance around in Klan robes or brown shirts, or spew mirror-image Marxism in their John Birch cells, while clueless about the ridicule that they get from the rest of America. I regret that such is not so. The Hard Right is divisive, cruel, and mad. It is now hard to distinguish the Republican Party from the John Birch Society in agenda and ideology. It is not that the Birchers have gone mainstream; it is instead that the GOP has gone in the Bircher direction.
We know what Marxism is. Mirror-image Marxism is the endorsement of the ugliest critique of capitalism as a defense of class privilege as an ideal. The difference between mirror-image Marxists from real Marxists is that the mirror-image Marxists kill to preserve the sort of social order that is most vulnerable to a proletarian revolution. All social orders have some combination of repression, inequality, and hierarchy, but those high on all three are the ones most likely to implode under stress... like Imperial Russia. In the meantime repression kills in the prisons and concentration camps' inequality starves and humiliates most people; hierarchy bungles commerce and wars.
Tyranny of any kind demonstrates that some conditions are worse than Death itself.
Right, although we very much need "critical race theory", which really means full education about all that we have done in the USA to repress various ethnic groups, as well as all our other mistakes, so we can learn to do better, instead of using the excuse that "critical race theory" will make poor young students unhappy with their country.
We must choose the times and places of ideological battles carefully. We all know about the racist heritage of America, but in the meantime we have people who would delight in shutting down all dissent against monopolistic, corrupt, crony capitalism that scraps all pretenses to equality in favor of the physical or metaphoric lash.
Of course we are right to oppose police brutality that does little to instil respect for the necessary work of suppressing crime and making streets safe (and that includes from drunks and speeders! Some bad driving is literally criminal, and that deserves suppression because it kills!)
Quote: "Defund the police" is a slogan used by some protesters, but is not said by any Democratic Party politicians, yet nevertheless is being used against them to great effect in billionaire-funded ads. What the protesters and some politicians really mean by this idea is that social and health services have been reduced in the last 40 years by neoliberal Reaganomics, leaving the police to do the job of these health and social-work professionals instead of the big job of policing that the police need to do. So funds may need to be shifted to the health and social services so that the police can focus on policing. And if there's a need for more police to do actual policing beyond this, due to rising crime, it can be and is being funded. But these police must be well trained not to kill on the basis of race or unjustified fear, and all racist and trigger-happy cops must be purged. Police unions must be defanged. Police must have connection to the community they police, and preventive social and educational programs must be funded too, which Reaganomics/free-market ideology also cuts. It was the cops who caused the riots with their murders, and Black Lives Matter did not organize any riots. A few frustrated and angry young kids and thugs and some provocateurs did the riots. And police often kill because of fear that the person being stopped or questioned might have a gun, which emphasizes the need for the meaningful gun control which Republicans resist. These points must all be made. The simple slogan "defund the police" and the billionaire-funded cynical ads attaching it to Democrats barely scratch the surface of all these issues. But it is easier to say the slogan than to explain all these facts and needs.
The Hard Right makes it a point to attack arcane, ill-thought-out positions on the other side so that it can impose its own agenda of mass hardship for workers on behalf of irresponsible elites. That Hard Right agenda is itself arcane and ill-thought-out, as it gives most people little stake in the system.
We need more, and better police. Heck, I reported a Michigan state highway that got little attention by the state troopers but has had lots of speeders because it is straight and flat. It has narrow shoulders and it has some residential areas, along which I live. Some people were surprised to be picked up for speeding on Michigan state highway (for the prevention of some shame of some people surprised at getting tickets I am not giving the number. Such people might hate me for what I did. I had a dog at the time, and some people have children).
It is best that there be far fewer firearms than we now have, and compulsory buy-backs would make life safer for us all. One should have a compelling reason to have a firearm. It's not even good for preventing spouse abuse, as the abuser who gets the gun can seize it at some point. (I'd like to see judgments against spouse abuse to include "no firearms in the house"). As I have suggested, dogs are even stronger deterrents to crime than a random gun.
Black Lives Matters behaved itself well. It did not thwart law enforcement. Yes, there were people who tried to exploit the demonstrations, but people who brought video cameras to document any police brutality often ended up taking video of criminal acts from assaults to arson that those amateur photographers turned over to police and prosecutors. Black Lives Matters does not mean "go ahead and torch a police car" or "loot K-Mart".
Most of us can tolerate rigid law enforcement so long as such is fair. I am a liberal on many things, but not crime. Better law enforcement makes us safer and compels us to find solutions other than violence to personal difficulties. Yes, neighborhood-based policing is more effective. Most people are good even in the nastiest slums, and those who live there deserve to have their communities divested of the bad guys who prey on those who have little.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.