Hekate
Hekate's JournalI've been earnestly giving that advice since 1998. I am so DONE. They don't want school boards...
They don't want city councils. The believers all think they can jump straight to POTUS. The candidates seem to have another agenda altogether.
Here's your major clue: Ralph Nader has run several times. He takes money from the GOP. Jill Stein is a hundred times worse: She takes dinner with Vladimir Putin.
They are ratfucking us Democrats and our big tent.
I am done making excuses for their supposed naiveté and supposed good intentions. Old saying: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. And after participating in Election 2016, they can go there.
You and H2O Man are giving me a lot to think about. I don't know when I pegged him as an abusive SOB
...but it was fairly early on. There were some articles I read, testimonials from women I found entirely believable as I watched his bullying behavior in public, so by the time he literally stalked Hillary around the stage at the debate, watching him do that made me sick to my stomach. Something is terribly, dangerously, wrong with that man.
For a lot of my life I have questioned my intuition and felt it was damaged in childhood: a combination of abuse (this isn't really happening in my family) and feminine socialization (don't judge a book by its cover; be nice to everyone, and if they aren't nice back ask what you did to deserve it).
Yet the Pole star that saved me from things that snared other people I met over time was my mother's sense of ethics and ethical behavior that she instilled in me. Religious people would have called it morality; New Agey people would have called it my inner guide; but my mother had kind of an 18th century Enlightenment sensibility, and she called it ethics.
Trump is a walking talking violation of -- everything normal and good, and he is dangerous. Likely my intuition isn't as damaged as I thought, because it was not pure reason that got me to my fundamental realizations about Trump.
I'm with Stephanie on this. The problem is with Zuckerberg, who has turned out ...
...to be not so much of a boy genius as an idiot savant. He observes and uses social interactions, but seems to have the personal social consciousness of a clam.
Whether he wants to admit it or not, his company aided and abetted Treason. He scarcely seems able to grasp the harm caused to the nation by his own lack of interest in what entities like Cambridge Analytica hath wrought.
So -- the issue is: How do you get his attention? With a 2X4 upside the head? Or do you grab him where it will really hurt?
I understand a lot of people are addicted to FB, dependent on it, all kinds of stuff. Well, it is a monopoly and very attractive. But it is also a corporation that has harmed and is harming the nation, as much as if it were pouring lead into our drinking water.
Believe me, what Stephanie Ruhle is proposing would assuredly get Zuckerberg's undivided attention.
Putin has a long-term goal of destabilizing all the Western democracies. I forget the name of his
...favorite geopolitical theorist, but the guy is a professor in Russia who writes big fat books that don't get translated into English very much, and are expensive when they do get translated (I looked him up on Amazon back when I first heard about him).
It's scary shit, like everything else about Vlad. It's not a "theory," it is an understood reality. We know now that Putin helped finance and promote Brexit -- and that begins to tear the EU alliance apart. People in the UK never expected it to actually pass -- sound familiar?
There's a wave of far-right anti-immigrant "populism" all around Europe -- Putin's fingerprints all over the place.
The frosting on the cake for me personally was learning that Calexit, the cockamamie idea that California should secede from the Union, was led by an American with an office in Siberia. I'm a Californian, by the way.
So tell me again: who is that Wall separating us from? and is it keeping "them" out? or us in?
Godsdammit, I hate Trumpists and all their works.
I also hate their enablers, whatever they choose to call themselves.
So at DU, all during the Obama years, we had to put up with shit from people with ODS who claimed to speak for the LGBTQ community. He was "spelunking," "throwing people under the bus" every day, lying from start to finish.
Now everything Barack Obama managed to get done for the LGBTQ community is being undone as fast as Trumpists can manage. Just wait till they come for marriage. That, I dare say, is going to be the LGBTQ community's Roe v. Wade -- something they think is settled law until bigots and fanatics go to war chipping away at it.
Where is the endless outrage from those DUers? Where is the recognition that they were wrong? Trump is the Enemy. Worse, Trump is the Trojan Horse.
He is not a Democrat, except once for a hot minute, and has no right to tell us how to run our party
That hot minute when he said he was a Democrat left a lot of us feeling used the next morning. Oh sure he whispered sweet nothings in our ears (or rather, he bellowed them at rallies) -- and he promised to respect us in the morning. But really, what did it all mean? Love 'em and leave 'em. Wham bam thank you ma'am.
Senator Sanders can toddle off and reform his own damned party.
The Mid East politics of it are horrible. Jerusalem is sacred to 3 major religions, & the fragile...
...peace there has been maintained by the secular State of Israel for almost 70 years. In these modern times Christian sects cannot agree among themselves on who gets access to holy sites and when, and never have been able to. When Jerusalem was overrun by Crusaders in the Middle Ages, they slaughtered every man, woman, and child in the city.
But wait! It gets better! While the Ultra-Orthodox Jews refuse to accept the modern State of Israel because God told them in no uncertain terms that he would send a Messiah to found a theocracy, they are glad to accept help from the Evangelical Christian end-timers because reasons, despite the fact the Evangelicals believe all unconverted Jews are going to burn in Hell for eternity. The End-timers believe the return of their Messiah will be heralded by cataclysmic war in the Middle East. When they talk about "restoring Israel to its Biblical boundaries" that would pretty much do it -- just compare a modern map and the map included in many Bibles.
Trump, a man who believes only in himself, is catering to people who have no business in American politics.
"Revere the Emperor; repel the foreigner" was a popular slogan for a couple of centuries...
Japan was really quite xenophobic.
The Dutch had access for awhile -- long enough to introduce such novelties as pistols, bread, and Christianity. The drawings of the seagoing Dutch by Japanese are amusing from this distance: blue pantaloons, big noses, strange blond hair.
When the government decided that the trade they were allowing was not worth the risk to their culture, they closed the port. They tried to wipe out Japanese Christians as a threat to traditional culture as well.
As an island nation they had always felt their vulnerability to attacks from China and Korea, but had managed to prevail -- at least once by dint of a powerful storm that sank the enemy ships: the divine wind, or kami kaze. That was rather like the time the Spanish Armada sank in a storm off Britain.
A lifetime ago I studied Japanese history, and I ended up pondering the differences between the two island nations of Britain and Japan. Japan, tho powerfully influenced by China far back in history, was very resistant to not just invasion but immigration and settlement. Homogeneity is built into the national psyche of Japan in ways not understandable to Americans or to our parent culture, Britain.
Britain is a culture of invasions and invaders who assimilated: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Norsemen, Normans -- reinforced over centuries by the intermarriage of their royal families. And all of this before Indian, African, and Caribbean people from the now-former Empire started arriving. They have their troubles with race, just as we do, but they work at it, just as we do.
The Japanese reverence for racial and cultural homogeneity has persisted throughout time. Back in the 1970s one of my work colleagues had a side job as a Japanese/English interpreter at the airport. This blue eyed blond was born and raised in Japan, and I asked her why she left. She said that it was because there was no assimilation possible, that she would always be a gaijin (foreigner), so she decided to leave. It's one thing to arrive as a fully formed adult, but it's another to absorb a language and culture from infancy and to be always told it is not your own.
With the aging of Japan's population, foreigners have been invited in to fill vital roles in caring for the aged and so on, and now that it's been going on for some decades, I wonder if the Japanese government has finally managed to grapple with the problem of citizenship for foreigners and the children of foreigners born in Japan.
Admiral Perry broke their isolation, and they embarked on a very successful program of modernization. WW II was a disaster from start to finish, but by the late 1960s one of my professors remarked: They achieved everything they ever wanted by peaceful means that they failed to do by war.
What he didn't remark on was how powerfully they feel that they are Japanese, and that nobody else is.
I refuse to accept that. I refuse to accept the notion that a military coup is a "solution" ...
...to our present troubles.
I find the fact that a clacque of posters here keep putting it forth -- it's repugnant as hell.
Some people new to DU may be mistaken about the meaning of "Underground" in this context, and when they are told they then have a choice whether to stay or go. Others are trolling hard and, if I may say so, putting the site in danger.
No. Just no.
Well, yes. It's what I've been saying all year. It can be made to appear that we lost key races...
...by a razor thin margin, but not thin enough to require a recount. It can be made to appear that a 3rd party candidate shaved off enough disgruntled voters to kill off Democratic votes. It can be made to appear that certain states or districts were bafflingly more "red" that polls showed.
It can be made to appear that for the first time in the history of elections, exit polls were wildly wrong, so lets not do those any more rather than figuring out what actually went wrong. As happened when Bush "won" over Gore.
Or it can be made to appear that someone was having a little fun, as when Max Cleland's results came in 181818 all over the place.
Talk of a blue wave makes my teeth itch. Lawrence O'Donnell gloating awhile back made me want to throw things at the tv.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
Home country: USA
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 90,835
