Facebook Bans the Left Before the Election

This confirms my suspicions. Facebook is silencing liberals just ahead of the 2020 election. And that's why even this blog is permanently banned from Facebook, without explanation.

The Ugly Social Media Platform

I was banned from Facebook for a month merely for mentioning the name of this famous novel, which also became a Marlon Brando film. 

Facebook called it “hate speech.”

Conspiracies Aren't All Theoretical

"Accidentally," my royal American eyeball. The Republicans will commit ANY crime to retain power.

 

Silence on Madison Avenue

“(I)n late 1954, Reginald Rose found himself engaged in a bitter behind-the-scenes battle over his teleplay about racial injustice, Thunder on Sycamore Street,” wrote Gordon E. Sander in Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man.

“The play, inspired by an actual incident that had recently taken place in Cicero, IL, was about a group of suburban neighbors who were so perturbed when a black family bought a home on their block that they banded together to stop the move, and eventually resorted to outright vigilantism to accomplish their end. In the final, blue-penciled version that went out over the air, the black intruders had been changed to a white ex-convict and his family.”

After all, the denizens of the Madison Avenue red light district knew that television could not suggest that you shouldn’t terrorize and maim black people. 

That might sell fewer tins of floor wax.

And that would never, ever do.

How You Know When Your Society Turns Fascist

“It was also the Berlin of the rising Nazi party, of anti-Semitic riots and other acts of violence, some committed by the far left but more, and more menacingly, by the Fascist right.”

That line is from an Auden biography by Wendell Stacy Johnson published in 1990, when we all still agreed that fascism was a right-wing political movement. And that’s the way you know you’re now living in a fascist society — when the right wingers start calling fascism “leftist” in order to hide what they really are — even, perhaps, from themselves.

The Moment When Fascism Begins

I never underestimate these people. They are authoritarian sociopaths who want a feudal society with themselves as the unchallenged aristocracy. Even if you're uncomfortable with terms like “evil,” these boys are basically a working definition of it — willing to crush centuries of civilization and human progress under the limo wheels.

Let Your Enemies Help You

“Cease to make yourselves slaves, first of things, and then, upon their account, of the men who have the power either to bestow or take them away. Is there any advantage, then, to be gained from these men? From all; even from a reviler? What advantage does a wrestler gain from him with whom he exercises before the combat? The greatest. And in just the same manner I exercise myself with this man. He exercises me in patience, in meekness … he exercises my good temper, my moderation.”

— The Discourses of Epictetus

Pardon Trump? You Can Kiss my Ass

Some idiot in The Independent is hooting for a pardon for Trump, saying, “As with the resignation and pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974, the country has to heal from the trauma of the past few years.”

No, no, no, NO! We made that MISTAKE with Nixon. That’s why hold-harmless Republican criminality was able to metastasize into Trump.

Actually, we can start “healing” the moment President Plague is in prison cut off from his Twitter account.

Funny how “healing” always involves letting rich, powerful people get away with horrendous crimes, isn't it?

What's Morally Wrong With Trump, Diagrammed

Trump and his supporters are permanently stuck at the infantile level of pre-conventional morality on the Kohlberg scale.

Thinking Is Critical

This critical thinking issue precedes and underlies politics. If we don’t know what the facts are, we can’t know where our interests lie. 

Of course, many would prefer that we don’t. Public relations, advertising, religion, bureaucracy and partisan politicians often work to subvert critical thinking. 

Yes, educational institutions praise critical thinking, but sometimes hollowly and warily. Real critical thinking is often at odds with institutional authority because it accepts only the authority of fact.

They Have Always Manipulated You

 “Father of public relations” Edward Bernays “…crafted the modern idea of America, a country haunted by hidden forces and whose citizens’ lives are inundated with dangerous manipulations,” wrote Jared Yates Sexton in American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People.

“Bernays helped usher into the world a new reality … On the surface was what Walter Lippmann called a ‘pseudo-environment’ wherein citizens bought products based on psychological appeals and voted for candidates who played to their base instincts while blissfully unaware of the constant manipulations brewing right under the surface.”

“This strategy constituted the new world of public opinion, a social science dedicated not to understanding what the electorate and public wanted but to how to convince them to want what the ruling elite wanted to sell them.”

FYI, our welfare-recipient neighbors were just on their porch, discussing their opposition to taxation.

Fascists Fly their Flag

I was an antifascist before fascists like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump had ever heard the term they denigrate and lie about.

Fascism and Nazism are ideologies of the far right, unutterably opposed to the left. Everybody used to know that until the Reagan era, when the Republicans started moving the goal posts like mad. 

When you intend to reintroduce the despised ideology of fascism, you’ve got to really crank up your propaganda fog machine. So they did.

As LiberalFreedomFighter said, “Hitler re-named the German National Workers Party into the German National Socialist Party to gaslight potential members who might be sympathetic to socialism, which was a growing ideology in Weimar Germany. People who read know that.”

People who claim that socialism and fascism are the same are either astoundingly ignorant or blatant liars. 

Fascism is capitalism gone crazy, with rich people permitted to effectively buy the government, put themselves above the law and wield totalitarian power against the majority of citizens, whom they reduce to serfs. That’s the danger that’s now within sight in America.

And you know you’re living in a fascist society when authoritarian terrorists openly announce their intention to kill people who oppose fascism.

Fox News needs to manufacture fictional terrorists on the left to “fair and balance” the actual armed, murderous, car-crusher terrorists that exist on the right. So it will lie to get them.

Those who replaced the journalists with heartless corporate media shills must also replace the cops with thugs, the judges with bribed whores and the citizens with armed, drunken, easily duped crackpots. 

So far, the plan seems to be going swimmingly.

'Civility' Will Get You Killed

This is a fight for civilization. So fuck civility.

 

When I Was Vandalized by Veronica Lake

I put Paul’s handsome new Biden sign out on the lawn this morning. I placed it well toward the house, so the Trump vandals will have to come a long way up onto the lawn to attack it.

I remember the night of Halloween 2008, I was awakened at 3 a.m. by angry, drunken shouts from the front of the house. I saw four college guys out there, and one of them was yanking our Obama/Biden yard sign out of the middle of the lawn. 

I wasn’t having any. 

I chased them down the block and around the corner in my robe and bare feet (cutting my foot).

I was so mad that it took me a moment to realize that the drunkest and nastiest of the bunch was wearing a long blonde wig and a short silver dress.

I had been vandalized by Veronica Lake.

I decided to reason with them. 

“Fuck you, you little pieces of shit,” I explained.

They wandered off down the road, shouting “Faggot!” and “Old man!” back at me, as I stuck a hand behind me to flip them off and limped home to look for the sign.

A police patrol car came rolling up, cherries and spotlight blazing, then another one. Paul had called 911, and he joined me outside.

With an officer, we found the sign lying in the yard where one of them had ripped it off the holder. The police headed off after the four college guys, after asking me if I could describe any of them.

“He’s wearing a dress,” I said.

News Flash! You're the 'Leftist' They Want Shot

This country’s “extreme left” wants to see the continuation of Social Security and Medicare, and the cessation of the state murder of unarmed citizens. 

That’s the “antifa” that Trump has his Proud Nazi Boys standing by to kill.

Trump's Sickness Mirrors Our Own

The book I’m waiting to read: a detailed, authoritative analysis of how Trump’s litany of lunacies, vices and crimes intersects with the damaged American national psyche, which has been reduced to a kind of cringing battered spouse by kleptocapitalism and cruel Fox News propaganda.

Why are Trump’s particular pathologies the key to unlock political power here?

Why Antifascism is Being Attacked

 “Hysterical anthropocentrist” is the technical term a ruthless totalitarian group like the East German Stasi would use to describe people who are primarily humanists — those actually value the lives of other human beings. 

You know, the kind of people who don’t want to see their unarmed fellow citizens shot dead by police on the street.

In the U.S., in the 1940s and 1950s, they were called “premature antifascists” – Americans who opposed Hitler and Mussolini when the powerful people in this country were still busy kissing the dictators’ asses.

You know, just the way those same kinds of people are kissing Trump's enormous, deranged ass now by attacking antifascism.

The Republicans started to sweat years ago when people began correctly identifying them as fascists, so the Frank Luntz propaganda bunch decided to destroy the term "fascism." 

Make it mean everything so it means nothing. Simple. 

So we got nonsense terms like “Islamofascism” and “liberal fascism” — anything to distract people from the reality of fascism, which is a far-right ideology marked by nationalism, militarism, sexism, racism, repression of labor, worship of corporate power, controlled mass media, contempt for intellectuals and education, religiosity used for political manipulation, rampant cronyism and corruption, fraudulent elections, obsession with national security and the destruction of civil liberties. 

You’ll note this is exactly the poison that Fox News peddles all day, every day. It’s essentially the 21st century GOP platform.

And now we have the ultimate in Republican cognitive dissonance: “Antifascism is fascism."