1.)I’m a bit sad this morning over Bernie Sanders’ self-immolation of his brand. Bernie was on to something. His message resonated with me strongly. He made a strategic misstep when he identified too much with the more paranoid supporters in his constituency. Bernie supporters will always be welcome here. Your opinions *do* matter to us and your vote is still important if you haven’t had a chance to participate in a primary yet. You shouldn’t be ignored just because your champion temporarily lost his f&*(ing mind. (Just don’t expect us to argue every point with you. Our focus is forward, getting Hillary elected)
And anyway, no revolution is going to happen until we put more people like us in Congress, the Senate and statehouses. If Hillary is elected president, the tide of bad voting laws can be rolled back. That right there is a good reason to vote for her because you can’t change anything if you can’t vote. So, I hope we can concentrate on downticket Democrats that both sides of the party can get behind. (Yeah, we don’t like Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and her student body president types either)
2.) We had a sustained attack on this blog on Friday. I have reason to believe it was not just a Bernie Bros production. The Bernie Bros are occasionally more earnest burning swamp monsters flailing and broadcasting high anxiety to the blog. (Calm your tits, guys, Hillary isn’t nearly as Satanic as you think). But I don’t think they are the most destructive trolls. I mean, who has the most to lose this election really? Who is more motivated to try to diminish and marginalize the pro-Hillary contingent?
Let’s just say that I’ve been tracing some of the commenters to their original sources and my curiosity is piqued. Would there be a concerted effort to bombard Hillary positive blogs with comments that looked like they came from unhinged Bernie Bros but are actually right wing disrupters who got their hands on what should be defunct domain addresses? I wouldn’t be surprised. Someone with more time and network skills on their hands should look into this. I can provide the information if you interested.
3.) Jane Caro, my favorite Australian, is writing a trilogy of books about Queen Elizabeth I of England and what sacrifices women in power have to make. She touches briefly on what Hillary is going through at about the 35 minute mark when she talks about how men are ok with women playing second fiddle. But the minute a woman politician decides to go for the top spot, she suddenly morphs into a “heinous bitch” in the media. There’s some speculation that there is an ancient physical taboo involved. Donald Trump has already tapped into this. I’m really intrigued by Jane’s hypothesis here.
Jane used to be in advertising and she’s very perceptive about what motivates people as well as what turns them off. Jane talks about why virgins are more powerful. We should probably try to understand this if we ever expect to make progress. Is she on to something? Discuss.
The whole video is really good. If I were Hillary, I’d add Caro to the campaign advisors.
4.) Ok, who out there hates to clean? Don’t be shy, raise your hands. I have some podcast gold for you that are truly sponge worthy and will take your mind off the chores that never end and don’t seem to stay done. These are about Hollywood’s early years and they are fascinating.
Stuart Waterman has two amazing podcasts. Pick one depending on your mood.
Attaboy Clarence podcasts are about an hour long and feature biographies of the stars, old timey ads and Lux Theater rebroadcasts of movies, along with Stuart’s sardonic commentary delivered in a Jude Law drawl.
The Secret History of Hollywood is more like an ongoing deep dyve narrative. These podcasts must take months to put together but they are so well done you can’t wait for the next one to come out. He has podcasts that cover Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Pictures’ horror genre and the beginnings of Warner Bros. and their gangster film franchise. I’m on part two of Bullets and Blood. Start with Bullets and Blood part 1. You won’t be sorry.
You Must Remember This is Karina Longworth’s podcast on the history of Hollywood. Her podcast also has biographies of the stars starting with the silent screen right up to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. These podcasts are shorter, about 30 minutes long. Karina always finds an angle that you might not have thought about and leaves you thinking long after the podcast is over. Hollywood has had an enormous effect on our culture.
Both podcasters discuss the pre-code Hollywood era. That was a revelation to me and may explain why your grandparents were so much cooler than your parents.
5.) Alright, on to what you really wanted to talk about: Game of Thrones predictions. To recap this season (don’t read if you haven’t seen season 6 episodes yet. Spoilers ahead.):
Jon Snow is not dead. Melisandre brought him back with a sponge bath, haircut and some funky prayers in what sounds like Hebrew. He executed the Watch brothers who executed him, which just goes to show you that characters are not dead until you burn the bodies, assuming they can be burned (I’m getting to that).
Sansa escapes with Theon’s help. She and Theon are rescued in the woods by Brienne who offers her sword to Sansa. This time, Sansa has finally bought a clue and accepts the help. Theon departs for the Iron Islands where he offers to help make his sister queen after their father’s untimely murder at the hands of his brother.
Sansa reaches Jon at Castle Black and there is a touching reunion. Tormund Giantsbane locks eyes with Brienne. It’s love at first sight. (Bow-chicka-bow) Ramsay Bolton has Sansa and Jon’s(?) little brother and sends a taunting letter to Jon and Sansa at Castle Black saying “Come and get him”. Sansa channels her inner badass and tells Jon that if he doesn’t help her take back Winterfell, she’ll do it herself. Jon and the Wildlings are all in.
Arya is still in Braavos training to become a faceless man. But is she really “no one”? By the way, did anyone else notice that during the “beat the confession out of her” scene the Waif got Arya to reduce the number of brothers she has? Has Arya always known in some instinctive way that Jon wasn’t her brother even though both Arya and Jon are the most Stark like of all the Winterfell children?
Bran has greenseer visions with Bloodraven about the Tower of Joy. We still have no confirmation that R+L=J but, c’mon, what else can these visions mean? Unless there’s something we don’t yet know…
Cersei and Jaime hatch a plot to get the Tyrell’s to take on the High Sparrow and the Faith Militant. Sparrow has Margaery, King Tommen’s wife, and her brother Loras. The idea is to bring the Tyrell army to King’s Landing. What could *possibly* go wrong?
Dany escapes from the Dosh Khaleen and burns the right wing trolls and Bernie Bros, the worst collection of obnoxious, threatening, small minded barbarians that ever gave rape culture a bad name and emerges from the flames as an unburnt fiery demi-goddess.
Predictions:
High Sparrow got Loras to crack. Loras told Sparrow that is grandmother had King Joffrey poisoned. Then, Sparrow tells Tommen this, and he tells his mother Cersei. Cersei and Jaime hatch a plan to pit the Tyrell’s against the Faith Militant and hope to take both of them out at the same time by having the Lannisters show up and clean up the aftermath. Not sure how the much anticipated Cleganebowl comes out of this but expect to see Mountainstein take on The Hound in about episode 7.
Sansa is going to lead the army to Winterfell. She’s going to be the one to make herself a widow by slamming one of her embroidery needles into Ramsay’s brain. Being eaten by wolves is too good for him. He’s got to die by Sansa’s hands. Die, Die, Die, Ramsay, DIE! Ahem, got carried away there.
Arya took an antidote before she drank from the cup that Jaquen H’gar offered her. She’s still Arya under there.
Bran is going to go diving too deeply under the sea and almost loses himself. He sees The Others coming and Meera helps him sound the alarm. Will Howland Reed deliver Robb Stark’s will to the other bannermen of the North in time to take back and fortify Winterfell in time for the onslaught?
The wall will come down in episode 10.
Valar Morghulis.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Attaboy Clarence, Bernie Bros, Bernie Sanders, Cleganebowl, Dany, Downticket Dems, Game of Thrones, Jane Caro, Jon Snow, Karina longworth, podcasts, Queen Elizabeth, Robb Stark, Sansa, secret history of hollywood, Voting Rights, you must remember this |
The Confluence 
As far as Bernie goes it’s probably the problem is him. Those who have known him a long time like Barney Frank and Howard Dean have said that this is who Bernie has always been. He’s really an ideologue more than anything else.
As far as the attack I would agree that it is mostly like right wing trolls. There are some very sophisticated right wing trolls posing as Bernie supporters on the bigger blogs but the ones that hit here almost seem like people who English is their second language.
IKR? The quality of trolls they’re sending us this year has been really disappointing. They’re using brute force instead of sophisticated mind-fucking tactics. Does that mean we are more effective at counteracting psychological manipulation or are we just too low on the totem pole to send first string trolls?
I’m inclined to go with the former. There was a lot of effort on Thursday and Friday to derail us.
I am enduring either a cold, or an allergy attack, which started Friday. That is why I’m here at this time on Sunday. It’s a nuisance rather than a menace, but if it be a cold, and therefore contagious, I don’t want to give it to other people. 😛
***************
I noticed three distinct personae among the trolls Friday. They could be three different trolls, or one troll using three personae, or two trolls with one of them using two personae:
(1) The Merry Prankster. This was the troll (or persona) who kept making sophomoric spoofs of the site (and Joe’s site) and pretended to be various regulars of this blog.
(2) The Leftist Intellectual. This was “Vincenzo” (among other pseudonyms), who advanced the spurious argument that an unwillingness to accept right-wing conspiracy tropes about the Clintons was a sign of right-wing authoritarianism. He also pretended to believe that the noble, but weak, UN is far more powerful than it truly is.
(3) The Regular Guy. “Sanjay” tried to cast our friend Joe Cannon as a bush-league Alex Jones, and, somewhat contradictively, that we were the cranks for refusing to take the Clinton-bashing cranks seriously.
As Joe noted, it’s an oblique compliment that some campaign (Sanders’s and/or Tribble Hair’s) considers you important enough to send one or more flying monkeys against you.
Good analysis. Do you think there were any earnest but unhinged and confused genuine Bernie people in that mix and which trolls are the most dangerous? I saved their comments so we can go back and data mine
They all smell like troll personae to me. I think genuine Sanders supporters would have been less obnoxious.
While the other two trolls (or personae) were merely obnoxious, I think “Vincenzo” was the most proficient bull$#!+ter. He could sway people with less secure egos. Fortunately, my abundance of arrogance grants me immunity to him. 😈
And now, a concern troll has been added to the mix.
The convenient thing about the mounting frenzy of your petty internecine squabbles is that none of you will notice your government’s struggle to avert action in September on state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts. You don’t even know what I’m talking about, of course, your state propaganda keeps you in the dark. If you could see the frantic evasions of your upper-echelon apparatchiki you would understand why the Sixth Committee’s work will affect your unitary executive vastly more than which chump becomes Figurehead-in-Chief.
From our Argus-eyed viewpoint in the underground EMP-hardened command center of your political adversaries, it’s endearing to see you daydreaming that political operatives might actually give a shit about four social isolates in the dimmest reaches of the cyber-boondocks.
As if on cue, “Vincenzo” returns. *slow, sarcastic applause* 😛
You’re too open-minded for this place. You are able to address questions of inductive logic, even though you tend to do it in a lazy and manipulative way. That makes you something of a freak here. You should go someplace where the claims are substantiated and the discourse is rational, like moonofalabama or nakedcapitalism. On the intellect axis this place is severely impaired.
Vincenzo, you might be more effective if you’d shed the smarter-than-thou persona and adopt a concern-troll persona in its place.
It’s got nothing to do with smart. It’s the Big Five personality axis called open-mindedness (or intellect.) The obsessive stereotyped conflict here very effectively squeezes out any possibility of holding your government to accepted standards.
Ah. You must mean Openness to Experience. It correlates with creativity, not with intellect. It’s also the least robust of the 5 factors… But wait! I forgot! Uh… can you please explain to me what you mean by inductive? Take pity on a poor, stoopid gurl.
This one sounds like a Paulhead. The next thing is expect to hear this one talking about is the trilateral commission or the Illuminati.
Ah, forget the Illuminated Trilateralists. The little gray space aliens are the real masters. 😉
Actually, I belong to the Trilateral Commission. I’m in charge of world chromium prices. The Grays say if I do a really good job, they’ll put me in charge of molybdenum and tungsten as well. All of group 6B will be mine! BWAH-HA-HA!
*strokes fluffy white cat*
If you’ll be kind enough to excuse me for a while, that pesky British “secret” agent whose name and face everyone knows got out of yet another deathtrap. Perhaps I should quit buying deathtraps from that ACME Corporation.
Since GA6D brought up Paulheads, Sanders booster H. A. Goodman (or as I call him, Lord Haw-Haw Goodman) was a Paulhead before he became a Bernout. I will not be surprised if, once Bernie is officially eliminated from the Democratic nomination race, Lord Haw-Haw becomes a Trump Chump.
Open-mindedness is an overrated virtue.
We had some Webfriends on this blog who, in their justifiable anger over Obama’s handlers rigging the 2008 nomination for him, allowed themselves to start reading, listening to, and watching right-wing propaganda without their mental deflector shields turned up to 11, in the name of “open-mindedness”.
They’re all Trump Chumps now. They once supported Hillary, but now they think she’s Madame Beelzebub. That’s what “open-mindedness” will do for you, if you keep your mind so open as to leave enough room for professional propagandists to dump their trash in it.
Watching them change felt like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 😮
Of course they found somebody else to push their limbic buttons, they’re not open. Notice the story you tell has them coming back to the same canned conflict, just with a different faction. You are aware, aren’t you, that your interest in this rigged electoral shit makes you a dwindling minority? A different but increasing minority of the population is more interesting in imposing comprehensive standards on the state and its officials, whoever they may be. Can you think of any standards of that sort? Bet you can’t.
This sounds similar to the Bernout delusion that the majority of the U. S. population actually wants socialism of one flavor or another, and is just awaiting for a Dear Leader.
As for standards, in this dreary real world, the only standard which actually matters is The Other Golden Rule: “Those who have the gold, make the rules.”
Without real power to back them up, your standards are so much unicorn flatulence. Before you say that the maneuverings of Global Capital (and its chief minion, Uncle Sam) to block your standards constitute evidence of such real power, I would say that the very fact that they can be blocked indicates their lack of real power.
What do you know, here’s another statist propaganda line drilled into your head: realism, so-called, the tarted-up mass-mind slogan ‘might makes right.’ Morgenthau died in despair when he took it to its logical dead end. But your betters have been using it on you ever since to make you renounce any claims on your rights. You swallowed it hook line and sinker.
Meanwhile the other 96% of the world is not paralyzed by your government-issue habit of futile handwringing. They don’t suffer under the provincial ethnocentrism of US state propaganda, which keeps you oblivious to what people have done in Eugene, Rosario, Graz, Santa Cruz, Bihac, Porto Alegre, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Temuco, Valparaiso, Bongo, Newton, Wa, Nimamobi, Walewale, Nagpur, Korogocho, Kita, Kati, Kayes, Sikasso, Timbuktu, Bucuy, Musha, Thies, Mogale, or Kaohsiung. Doesn’t it make you feel kind of foolish when skinny brown foreign people have more rights than you do?
The people you refer to have rights on paper. Do they have them in real life?
Proof, please, that the list of events you described are both true events and achieved irreversible gains?
Not that I expect any, mind you. No, I expect you’ll just peddle your usual smarter-than-thou shtick. If you really are a leftist of some sort, why do you not understand the importance of avoiding a sneering, smarter-than-thou attitude, in order to avoid irritating the very people whom you are trying to convince?
But then, you’re not a leftist of any sort, are you? You’re a Trump Troll, pretending to be a leftist intellectual. I hope you’re not doing it for money, because Roger Stone will cheat you if you give him half a chance. It’s what he is.
RD, I grow weary of this third-rate imitation of a Counterpunch columnist. Please feel free to flush him whenever you see fit.
Hmmm, as someone who has worked with skinny brown people and other foreigners on H1B visas and restrictive green cards, I feel sorry for them. They make their lives here, have children here, buy houses here, but they can be sent back to their homelands with nothing on a moments notice if their livelihoods cut into a shareholder’s value.
They have no rights. And they are lovely people. They deserve better than to be treated as disposable widgets in someone’s short term model.
Please find another blogger who cares what you think.
How nice that you feel sorry for them. May your white tears allay their misery.
Of course they have no rights, they’re in the US, Duh! Maybe they would have some, if you warrior princesses weren’t too bashful for ask the candidates for yours. Or too fecklessly furious even to find out what they are. By the way, when’s the last time Hillary asked you what you want? Oh right, never. You just pick what’s on the menu. The shit sandwich.
Look, we know don’t you give a shit about your rights. We’re not talking to you.
What is it about our support of Hillary that is turning you into crazy ass trolls?
We don’t have to defend our choices to you. You have no right to criticize our choices. You guys just sit here like some critical male voice over in a laundry detergent commercial getting increasingly impatient because we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge your superior wisdom and authority.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re right wing or left wing, I honestly don’t give a fuck what you think and I don’t have to give you reasons.
You have accomplished nothing here. That doesn’t seem particularly smart to me.
If you gave a shit about anything but rationalizing your passivity, you’d go see for yourself. But instead we get the aforementioned manipulative streak, Nyah, Nyah, you got Trump cooties! Because you really cannot fathom that your factional allegiance is a matter of indifference to some people. You think, she MUST swear fealty to some queen bee. Then of course, Mommy, Mommy punish him, it always comes back to the appeal to authority with you RWA followers.
Expelling a troll from a blog is not censorship.
Here’s the difference.
Your whole shtick is a monument to the motto: “If you can’t dazzle’em with brilliance, baffle’em with bull$#!+.”
Which, come to think of it, is the whole life story of the tribble-haired grifter whom you wittingly or unwittingly serve.
The troll is sneering as usual, which tells me that he doesn’t really give a flying duck about trying to convince anyone of anything; he’s just here to be a nuisance. If he really were as smart as he claims to be, he’d realize that sneering at people as intellectually inferior to him is not the best way to convince them to adopt his way of thinking.
Oh, and if we were RWAs, we’d have followed our misguided friends and become Trump Chumps.
I suspect you know nothing about queen bees.
We don’t need to respond to you. We recommend you start your own blog. That way you can have all the freedom of speech you can eat to project and blather incoherent word salads.
Really, there’s an audience for your stuff. It just isn’t here.
RD, I suspect now that he’s completely phony, whereas I previously thought he might be an honest hard-leftist, an anarchist perhaps.
He just comes here to use pseudo-intellectual jargon to try to make us feel insecure. The only thing I still don’t feel sure about is whether someone is paying him, or if he’s simply acting out an idiosyncratic psychopathology. I suppose it could even be both.
He’s not making me insecure. Im sure that’s what he wants but he’s wasting his time.
I did say he was trying, not that he was succeeding.
If his precious international standards really had established social democracy for the other 96% of the planet, why would anyone still be trying to come to our (admittedly highly imperfect) country?
I was sad when Hillary addressed someone whose family’s health insurance premiums had gone up $400/mo over what it was two years before. She said that wasn’t possible unless they’d had major medical claims.
Two points: (1) It is possible; (2) Obamacare made it illegal to increase premiums for medical claims.
I wish I had the link to the You Tube video.
Ms. Clinton doesn’t even know the generalities about a policy that she was supposed to be a huge advocate for, let alone the state of insurance under that policy. Knowing that gives me a feeling of hopelessness for my own future.
I always thought Hillary was the smartest person in any room. Now I’m not so sure.
I wish Bernie Sanders could win the primary. He seems more savvy than Hillary. Since he can’t win, Trump is leading with people of an age that regularly vote. A win for him might help put some more Democrats into Congress who can help change this gawd awful law. Hillary will do nothing but make sure the Congress is run by Republicans for the rest of my life.
Concern troll is concerned. Film at 11 (to use an obsolete term).
If I know Hillary, she had her aides contact that woman with info on how to lower her family’s premiums.
Hillary gets stuff done.
Elections have consequences. Obama and the republicans locked us into a crappy health care policy.
I think she looked into the Palantir last year and saw nothing but obstruction for changing it. That’s the danger of accepting negative conventional wisdom and ignoring opportunities.
I don’t know if we’ll ever get single payer in this country. But we could do much better than we have if we had cost controls like every other developed nation with a national health care policy.
That’s the battle that Obama refused to fight.
If you vote for Hillary, you are signing on to an unknown. We’ve never had a woman president before and she has to to single handed combat with seemingly immovable cultural and institutional obstacles.
The more support you give her in the face of incredible odds, the more likely we are to see these obstacles budge.
Don’t support her and learn to live with the shitty dregs the Republicand and weak Democratic enablers give you.
This isn’t an Obama campaign. That was easy compared to what is coming. This is a fight for something bigger.
If you decide to sit this one out, you will be hearing Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech in your head for a long time and may regret it even longer.
This one is obviously a Republican. They love to concern troll and pretend to be Bernie supporters.
Actually, abcd has been here before. I’m not sure this is a concern troll.
If so, then I apologize.
Forgot to add two things I noticed about Bernie supporters when I was canvassing: they weren’t friends to Obama, tho they erroneously thought I was. I didn’t correct them. That’s not what I was knocking on their doors for. And two, they wanted to vote their conscience but every one of them said they would vote for Hillary in the general. I was surprised. And no, not trying to psych anyone out. And they could have been lying to me to be polite. But I think they were telling the truth. I didn’t meet even one hostile Bernie person while canvassing. And they were all about middle age. Believe it or not, he’s not attracting a zillion Millenials to the exclusion of everyone else. The Bernie people I met were middle aged, middle class people hanging on to their socio economic status by their fingernails.
The media has their narrative but I’ve actually spoken to Bernie voters. They’re smart, well educated and under stress. And they’re not all 20 years old with smokin’ hot bodies.
One must always make the doomed villains as nasty, cruel, and overall evil as possible, so that the audience won’t feel guilty about rejoicing in their horrific deaths.
About the Hays Code, in one of his books–Under God: Religion In American Politics, I think–Garry Wills briefly marveled at the improbability of the Catholic Church’s managing to impose “the values of the cloister” on the film industry of a predominantly non-Catholic nation.
You have a canny ability to make trolls have meltdowns. LOL.
I suspect his meltdowns are as phony as everything else about him.
There, there, no one is trying to convince you of anything. Given the obvious point that you don’t have to respond, it is very enlightening to see the contortions you go through to avoid thoughts that might induce disquiet. We see imprecise use of the pejorative ‘word salad’ for facile dismissal. Lots of puzzling irrelevant notions. Pervasive fundamental attribution error based on stereotyped ideological pigeonholes. And evident discomfort with any hint of your strictly circumscribed role in politics, which is limited to RWA mobbing.
All to escape reflecting on your rights. Your tiny corner of the world is very exotic.
Again, what do abstract rights, promulgated by noble but impotent agencies, mean without actual power to back them up?
If those promulgated rights had resulted in actual social democracies being established in formerly oppressed nations, why would anyone still be coming to our hemi-democracy, rather than a massive exodus from it?
And, of course, always the sneering, which the troll would not be doing if he were actually interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s just here to fling feces and show off the size of his, ahem, intellect–that is, if he’s really doing this on his own time, rather than on Roger Stone’s dime.
Why don’t you have the power to back them up? That’s not clear to me at all.
Everyone has the right to leave and return to their country. People in the outside world exercise that right and you do not. So what? If you go to Arkansas to take a job, does that prove Arkansas is a human-rights utopia? Of course not. Don’t be silly.
What you call sneering is simply consistency in pointing out evasive irrational tricks. Do you really think your rights are bullshit? If you’re just a slave, why do you bother to vote?
I don’t know how to answer your first question, but what power do you have to back up the rights which you claim to have?
If the UN had succeeded in establishing quasi-Utopian conditions in other countries, why would anyone want to leave those countries to come to this far-from-Utopian country? Before you say “jobs”, in a social democracy, you don’t need a job to live comfortably, so why leave if you live in a genuine social democracy already?
“Evasive intellectual tricks” = disagreeing with the troll. 😉
I have all the rights I exercise, Don’t you?
If you don’t feel you have the power to institutionalize and enjoy your rights, maybe you should ask the citizens of Eugene, Rosario, Graz, Santa Cruz, Bihac, Porto Alegre, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Temuco, Valparaiso, Bongo, Newton, Wa, Nimamobi, Walewale, Nagpur, Korogocho, Kita, Kati, Kayes, Sikasso, Timbuktu, Bucuy, Musha, Thies, Mogale, or Kaohsiung how they did it. They didn’t wait for the UN to establish anything. They also didn’t swear fealty to a party functionary and expect her to do it for them. They went and did it.
Here we go, more migrant red herrings. So if anyplace is ever more developed than the USA, that means nobody would ever come here? Now you’re just going off half-cocked. People migrate all over the place. Migration to the USA proves nothing, except in US state religion. And social democracy is neither here nor there. That’s another of your statist categories. Human rights are agnostic with respect to the economic system, capitalist, communist, socialist, no one gives a crap as long as the state fulfills its duties.
That almost sounds like it makes sense. His horse$#!+ is getting better with practice.
So all it takes to have rights is the will to exercise them?
Tell that to any hapless North Koreans who tried to exercise the rights they have on paper.
The citizens of the USSR had all sorts of wonderful rights on paper. How many did they have in reality?
But then, why should I pick on the Commies?
For many years in the USA, citizens had pitifully few rights which counted for anything if they were female and/or non-white, and those who were white and male, but poor, had it little better.
Eugene? Santa Cruz? Seriously?
If you’ll notice, Joffrey never actually says what (allegedly) happened in any of those places.
With some due respect, is your post written by a human being?
That’s an interesting question, Sue. I will never be mistaken for a software expert, so I can’t answer it. I don’t know if computer programs have become sufficiently sophisticated to pass for a human being online.
” Would there be a concerted effort to bombard Hillary positive blogs with comments that looked like they came from unhinged Bernie Bros but are actually right wing disrupters who got their hands on what should be defunct domain addresses?”
I think you’re absolutely correct about this. But then, I think most of the “Bernie Bro” tweets are probably from right-wing operatives, too. I live in a county that went 80-20 for Bernie at the caucuses, and I have yet to meet a “Bernie Bro” in the flesh.
Interesting that neither the Merry Prankster or the Regular Guy have shown up again. Maybe they are three separate trolls after all.
Or since I said, way up toward the top, that I thought the Leftist Intellectual persona was the most likely to be effective, the single troll took my advice.
Yep, agreed. They’re mostly an online presence, probably for a good reason.
Ivory Bill, I hope your are having a good time; I wouldn’t have the patience! Grampa’s Boy Get a Dictionary for His 12th Birthday seems to me to just about sum up your sparring partner.
He does show remarkable skill in pretending to be an intellectual of some sort.
Thanks for the video! Awesome interview! Where are the american women like Jane Caro??
“By the way, did anyone else notice that during the “beat the confession out of her” scene the Waif got Arya to reduce the number of brothers she has? Has Arya always known in some instinctive way that Jon wasn’t her brother even though both Arya and Jon are the most Stark like of all the Winterfell children?”
I didn’t want to wade through the troll comments to see if anyone else said this already, but I think that was just Arya acknowledging Jon is only a half-brother (to her knowledge).
I don’t watch Game of Thrones, but I could talk about Penny Dreadful and Outlander all day long.
Just in case RD hasn’t seen this yet…
Hey, I got an idea! Let’s start referring to the troll as “Joffrey”! 😆
I should have said “trolls”. Let’s call all of the trolls (or troll personae) “Joffrey”. 😛
Brilliant tweet by Joy Reid:
Joe Cannon reminds us why Sanders could not win the general election.
Thanks for this. It’s excellent.
RD:
Excellent Post.
I greatly appreciate the introduction -at least to me, of Jane Caro.
About the opinionators hanging lately in your site, I find them non-welcome.
They’ll be gone soon. It’s not as bad as it was a few days ago.
Wonkette also apparently had an attack–the same day.
Maybe he got tired of being called “Joffrey”? 😈
Probably fake to the bone: fake leftist, fake foreigner, fake intellectual.
“Fake foreigner” because any genuine foreigner who shows up here would probably prefer President Clinton to President Tribble-Haired Raging Narcissist. He scares people outside of this country.
Lots of middle-school nyah-nyah-nyah but with the sole exception of IBW, the plucky freedom fighters here can’t bring themselves to think about their rights. I know, too painful… there, there. Everything you gave up under Bush now gone for good, eh?
So you’ll spend months furiously humping an electoral process that fails to meet the binding legal test of free expression of the will of the electors (Never heard of it, right? Big secret. Nobody knows about it but everybody else in the world.) Because the only thing you can possibly do is vote your little heart out. For whatever it is your queen bee’s going to do.
Hi, Joffrey!
So all you have to do to have rights is claim them and exercise them?
Well, you’re right! I remember when a bunch of Chinese citizens did that back in 1989, and they won and now China is a global beacon of human rights–oh wait, that’s NOT what happened.
But ya know, Joffrey, maybe you are right to think of me as dull-witted. After all, I have been forgetting–one shouldn’t engage trolls; one should mock them.
This pony flies at Mach 5. Your argument is invalid. 😛
Actually, “middle-school nyah-nyah-nyah” is the best way to deal with sophists. 😉
Tiananmen scared the CPC shitless. Have you been there since? Tiananmen is part of the reason why they’ve done more than the US to reform their judiciary and make it independent. It probably also partly explains why Chinese police are much less murderous than yours and why China locks fewer people up, proportionally. The CPC is also working much harder to curb torture. If you happened to have any interest in the specifics of what China has and hasn’t done in terms of all the state’s duties, you could always look at the record,
https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G13/188/55/PDF/G1318855.pdf?OpenElement
Then, if you actually wanted to know whether your example makes sense, you could compare it to the US UPR and see which one sucks worse, and how well Tiananmen together with international pressure really worked. It isn’t obvious to me.
Hi again, Joffrey–or should I start calling you “Andre Vltchek”?
“Tiananmen scared the CPC shitless.”
Which is why they shot the protestors.
I wonder what the Chinese is for “link failure”?
Maybe it’s not a real UN page, hmm?
Spammy’s being an @$$ again.
I take that back; the other comment appeared after all.
China is now better on human rights than the USA?
Joffrey, like one of his hero Tribble Hair’s role models, apparently believes in the use of the Big Lie.
The main reason the USA locks up too many people is the stupid War On (some) Drugs.
Charming cartoon. But hahaha doesn’t cut the mustard in grown-up discourse, you know. Ignorance of objective standards is precisely what has reduced you Americans to your abject state.
It appears you wish to tar me by association with this Vltchek. What is it that you don’t like about him – not enough vowels in his name?
Hey, I know vowels are expensive ($250 apiece). It’s not the Slavs’ fault they couldn’t afford many of them. 😉
They should have intermarried with the Japanese and the Hawai’ians. Those languages boast surpluses of vowels.
Besides, what you offer is not “grown-up discourse”, but rather, mere sophistry.
Actually, while I usually disagree with Mr. Vltchek, I find him interesting, for since he is a living Communist, I feel the same fascination toward him that I would feel over encountering a living example of my namesake bird.
You know, unless you actually go and debunk the sophistry, the label alone is kind of unconvincing. Even when you back it up with mere. Though adverbs & adjectives seem to work pretty good on you people, absent facts. Still seems to me like Chinese got more out of Tiananmen than you ever got out of voting. Not that I’m suggesting you should try standing in front of the MRAPs, of course, they would squash you flat.
Cowboys are fighting Nazis on Mars. Your argument is invalid.
Embrace the comma.
Indeed, commas are important.
Interesting post this morning (particularly the link, ‘memo’): http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/conventional-wisdom-sanders-refuses-to-play-nice/
Sanders’ supporters? campaign? today pursuing legal action in California because supporters apparently can’t figure out how to register to vote in the primary, and they want people to be able to register up until election day. California has been flooded with voter instructions and information for months, everywhere. But I suspect, because the campaign has stepped up its outreach there, it wants to use the next 2 weeks to register the mostly first-time voters who come to its rallies.
Silver just updated his prediction for the CA primary: it was 75% likely Clinton wins, and is now 98% likely. Californians appear to be fleeing the bern…
They are probably suing because a poll came out that had Bernie down 19 points.
Hmmm…I wonder if it means anything that “Joffrey” has two different identification monsters in his last 2 posts?
Oh, he changed his monicker slightly in the last post, perhaps accidentally.
Sanders needs to be looking for a new career–keeping his rocking chair seat warm, for example. By the time he’s done scorching the earth, even his closest chums in the Senate are going to want nothing to do with him.
Never liked him, and now he’s proving to be exactly what I always thought he was–a cranky old man.
Trolls need not bother with the ageist comments. I’m up there myself.
I’m a cranky middle-aged man. I want to be a cranky old man when I grow up.
I’m a cranky middle aged woman. np with it
I want a threesome.
When asked to name someone in the Senate who was his friend, Sanders could come up with right-winger (R) Senator Inholfe of Oklahoma.
I hope Inholfe is up for re-election.
Off topic: This song was released in the year I was born, but I only learned of its existence a few days ago. It’s a parody of the “teen tragedy” songs of the period. It was released as part of an album called, “MAD Twists Rock and Roll”, released under the aegis of MAD magazine. 😆
The video features fine pix of vintage jukeboxes.
Good night, all. I’m starting to feel like Renge-chan.
Marcos at the Orange Satan is dousing The Bern:
http://m.dailykos.com/story/2016/5/23/1529938/-11-reasons-why-Bernie-Sanders-lost-this-thing-fair-and-square
Here is an article from Raw Story which advances the claim that Trump supporters have been co-ordinatedly posing as Sanders supporters to troll Clinton sites while posing as Clinton supporters to troll Sanders sites. Here is the link.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/05/busted-trump-loving-comment-trolls-pose-as-sanders-and-clinton-supporters-to-divide-democrats/
I must admit I’m surprised that some Trump Chumps actually have enough intellect and education to use the jargon which Joffrey used, however dishonestly he used it.
I need to remember that intellect and virtue do not always go together, and so it is possible for smart, well-educated people to be authoritarian nationalists.
According to the late William Pfaff’s book The Wrath of Nations, page 55 (paperback edition):
Also, while many important scientists fled the Nazi sphere of influence, and IIRC, the Communist sphere as well, many others proved able to adjust to those tyrannies (or simply could not find a way to get out).
Riverdaughter, I want to thank you for the links to the movie history podcasts. I just finished listening to the “Witch Hunting with Walt Disney” episode of The Secret History of Hollywood. Wow! I had read about this period years ago, but this was really fascinating, going into the start of the “Red Scare,” which I was not aware of, and presenting the entire stories of people who have previously been either forgotten or painted as one-dimensional heroes or villains. It was also frightening, because it CAN happen again, and looks like something similar WILL happen again. I will be listening to other episodes, which I assume will be lighter (I do love my old movies, as my huge library of books on the subject and movies from 1925 – 1950 will attest), but I really recommend “Witch Hunting with Walt Disney” for anyone who reads this or any political blog. Thanks again.