Glenn Greenwald to discuss Kevin Spacey with S.E. Cupp!

And will no doubt try to tie Spacey's behavior to liberals, liberalism, the DNC, Hillary, women, Hollywood, the left.

Just an FYI...

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/925132763782701056

Private Prison Giant Parties At Trump Resort After Landing $110M ICE Detention Center Contract

Curb your enthusiasm: Flake votes w Trump 91.7% of the time.

Stop letting mild criticisms of Trump make you fall in love him

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/jeff-flake/

p.s. Flake is awful. So is McCain. So is Corker. They're diametrically opposed to everything you stand for. Get a grip.

Leftists That Arent Leftist

In the last few weeks a video of Michelle Obama speaking at a conference began to make the twitter rounds to general acclaim. In it the former First Lady was responding to a query concerning the phenomenon of Imposter Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome, first conceived of by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, has been a common topic of discussion in liberal academic circles since and it concerns the negative experiences of members of underrepresented groups in straight white male dominated environments — the feeling of being an imposter in such settings.The First Lady, interpreting and guiding the conversation in a somewhat different direction, began to use the imposter syndrome conversation as a base to expand upon other conceptions of the imposter. Though not directly stated (she really has mastered the ability to name names without actually naming any names), her comments were very clearly a grade-A read of the current president: he was the imposter. While Trump may fit the predetermined mold our society has outlined for the role of president in body and skin tone and selection of sexual partners, the implication underlying the First Lady’s statement was that in reality he was actually a fake and maybe, perhaps, us self-conscious marginalized types are not the ones so out of place.

<snip>

Take Julian Assange, for instance: ever since Wikileaks first dropped those Chelsea Manning-acquired dispatches he’s been hailed by large portions of the left as a truth-telling hero of the people. This reputation has largely continued with that group even as the man, self-exiled to an embassy due to rape charges, worked for a year to get Trump elected and has been operating as a clear front for the far right Russian government. He’s even had things to say on twitter about Weinstein! Mostly, that he blames the former Democratic presidential candidate and popular vote winner Hillary Clinton for Weinstein.

There’s Jill Stein to consider too. The former Green Party candidate ran off with Hillary supporters’ money at the end of 2016 and is now a likely focus of Mueller’s investigation. Importantly, her state margins and choice to specifically target battleground states played an integral role in Trump’s election. And she still has no explanation for her infamous dinner with Putin.

And there’s Edward Snowden: a far left hero since 2012 and bunk buddy to Putin ever since, he urged voters nationwide — likely at Putin’s request — to vote third party. It had, obviously, a disastrous outcome. Both Snowden and Stein have largely kept their image intact with the far left even as their actions have contributed directly to the rise of the right: there seems to be no recognition of the damage they each have wrought. As for the man, Glenn Greenwald, who made Snowden famous in 2012? You could have caught him on FOX News this week attacking Democrats and liberals.

These people are fakes. They do not wish the party well and they do not care about the ramifications of a rising far right they’ve regularly assisted. They are in this for themselves. The left needs to recognize that.

https://medium.com/jeremystephenwright/leftists-that-arent-leftist-657f1f3e02e

Breitbart: Women are using #MeToo to share their stories of sexual harassment as a "status symbol"

As usual, the rightwing reaction to sex abuse is totally disgusting....

John Nolte: “It’s like the AIDS ribbon. You know, I feel very bad for these women, but it’s sort of becoming a status symbol.”

Sarah Polley: The Men You Meet Making Movies

One day, when I was 19 years old, I was in the middle of a photo shoot for a Miramax film when I was suddenly told it was time to leave. I was wearing a little black dress, showing a lot of cleavage, lying seductively on my side and looking slyly at the camera. The part I had played in the movie, “Guinevere,” could not have been more removed from this pose. My character was an awkward girl, bumbling, in fact, who wore sweatshirts and jeans, and had little sense of her sexual power. But this was how they were going to sell the movie, and at a certain point, I was tired of being a problem, which is how a female actor is invariably treated whenever she points out that she is being objectified or not respected.

I was pulled out of the photo shoot abruptly. The publicist said that we needed to be in Harvey Weinstein’s office in 20 minutes.

“Are we done here?” I asked. “No” was the answer. “But Harvey wants you there now.”

In the taxi, the publicist looked at me and said: “I’m going in with you. And I’m not leaving your side.” I knew everything I needed to know in that moment, and I was grateful.

<snip>

But I had forgotten a key ingredient of the acting process. Most directors are insensitive men. And while I’ve met quite a few humane, kind, sensitive male directors and producers in my life, sadly they are the exception and not the rule. This industry doesn’t tend to attract the most gentle and principled among us. I had two experiences in the same year in which I went into a film as an actor with an open heart and was humiliated, violated, dismissed and then, in one instance, called overly sensitive when I complained. One producer, when I mentioned I didn’t feel a rape scene was being handled sensitively, barked that Dakota Fanning had done a rape scene when she was 12 — “And she’s fine!” A debatable conjecture, surely.

I’m not naming names in all of these instances. And that invites criticism for some reason. Which is funny, because when women do name names, they are criticized for that, too. There’s no one right way to do any of this. In your own time, on your own terms, is a notion I cling to, when it comes to talking about experiences of powerlessness.

<snip>

Several years ago, I approached a couple of successful female actors in Hollywood about an idea I had for a comedy project: We would write, direct and star in a short film about the craziest, worst experience we’d ever had on a set. We told our stories to one another, thinking they would be hysterically funny. We were full of zeal for this project. But the stories, when we told them, left us in tears and bewildered at how casually we had taken these horror stories and tried to make them into comedy. They were stories of assault. When they were spoken out loud, it was impossible to reframe them any other way. This is how we’d normalized the trauma, tried to integrate it, by making comedy out of it. We abandoned the film, but not the project of unearthing the weight of these stories, which we’d previously hidden from ourselves.

more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/14/opinion/sunday/harvey-weinstein-sarah-polley.html

WA State GOP chair sent an email to state Republicans requesting their presence to support DeVos

“State GOP chair Susan Hutchison sent an email to state Republicans requesting their presence to support Betsy DeVos in Bellevue,” Patch reports.

Some showed up with signs.



source: https://www.facebook.com/strangerseattle/

The Moldbug Variations: Feudalism is the new conservatism

Three years ago, Peter Thiel called me a conspiracy theorist at a Baffler-hosted debate in New York between him and David Graeber. What prompted the characteristically winking and dismissive Thielian deflection was a question from a New York Times reporter, concerning a story on this very blog by yours truly. The story detailed connections between the democracy-loathing venture capitalist and a prolific, flowery neo-feudalist blogger who called himself Mencius Moldbug.

Moldbug was comfortably anonymous, with a modest but influential following in Silicon Valley circles, until TechCrunch revealed his identity as Curtis Yarvin, a San Francisco software engineer whose strange and quixotic startup, Tlön, had garnered some investment capital from Thiel. Moldbug’s moribund blog remains one of the ur-texts of the “neoreactionary” movement, a subset of what is now euphemistically termed the alt-right, but which I characterized at the time—more accurately, I think—as the mouthbreathing Machiavellis of the silicon reich.

<snip>

Yarvin believes there is no such thing as democracy—and Thiel has said as much, as well. Yarvin’s stunted political imagination prizes strict hierarchies—despotisms, monarchies, and experimental new feudalism via a “patchwork” of corporate fiefdoms managed by absolute dictators who might be appointed by a vote of property-owning “shareholders.” Unlike some advocates of Silicon Valley secessionism, Yarvin has never been shy in acknowledging that this amounts to a revolution and would require the forcible overthrow of the established order. He advised, for instance, that the new dictator of California should throw the old elected governor in Alcatraz, and then briskly proceed to pack the government with Google guys.

Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment dogma also is steeped in pseudoscientific racism. Yarvin preaches that intelligence is determined in large part by the laws of “human biodiversity”—which hold, in his telling, that white people are congenitally smarter than black and brown people, and that Chinese people may be the smartest of all. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to see how a blood-and-soil white nationalist like Bannon and a racist bomb thrower like Donald “Good Genes” Trump would find a great deal of reassurance in this toxic philosophy.

<snip>

Yarvin’s idea of enlightenment also means believing that history as we’ve come to know it is a lie. It means believing that the Soviet Union was the greater evil in the Second World War and that Nazi Germany acted in preemptive self-defense against the nefarious scheming of Stalin and FDR. It also means believing that ever since that war, upstanding American fascists have been unjustly persecuted by the state, and that the United States has been ruled by a conspiracy of wealthy establishment Communists and a “ruling underclass” of violent black mobs who are their eager pawns.

To be enlightened, in Yarvin’s world, means forming an uncomfortable alliance with street Nazis—the Stormfront set—and other déclassé white nationalists. The same goes for right-wing terrorists such as Anders Behring Breivik, whom Yarvin denounced, but only in the most limited and depraved terms possible. Yarvin wrote that Breivik should be condemned because his 2011 massacre in Oslo was ineffective as terrorism, which Yarvin considers a legitimate military tactic. Nazi terror was legitimate because it worked, Yarvin wrote. Breivik’s killing spree, which targeted young Norwegian leftists, was illegitimate because it was insufficient to “free Norway from Eurocommunism.” After all, he only killed ninety-two people! “We can note the only thing he didn’t screw up. At least he shot communists, not Muslims. He gored the matador and not the cape,” Yarvin wrote on July 23, 2011, one day after the terror in Oslo, and five years before going to Thiel’s house to hang out and watch their guy, Trump, get closer to power.

As Yarvin evidently sees Thiel as his project, Thiel presumably sees Trump as a useful vehicle to achieve his “enlightened” vision.

more: https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein

Kate Beckinsale shares her experience with Harvey Weinstein in horrifying Instagram post

The media making Weinstein a Clinton scandal is pretty definitive proof that if it wasnt the emails

...it would have been something else.

HRC has endured more vitriolic misogyny on a slow Tuesday than most of us in our lives.