guillaumeb
guillaumeb's JournalElizabeth Warren Shows She's Ready To Fight With Strong Takedown Of Trump's Grifter Presidency
From the article:
“We have lived through two years of one scammer and grifter after another, running federal agencies, running our federal government,” Warren said. “And we have lived through two more years of giant tax giveaways to the billionaires, to big corporations, and a harder and harder squeeze on working families.”
To read more:
https://www.politicususa.com/2019/01/02/warren-trump-2020-grifter-presidency.html
Levon Helm and his Dirt farmer Quartet:
Trump is a symptom, not the cause.
Trump is a racist. An open racist. The GOP depends on racists as an important and large part of their base.
The only difference between the openly racist Trump, and Ronald "welfare queen" Reagan, is that Trump is open about it.
The only difference between Trump and Mr. 47% Mitt Romney is that Trump is open about it.
The GOP is the party of racists. The GOP cannot win without the support of racists. And that should be the narrative. Well, a part of the narrative.
With all of the talk by Trump of the necessity for a border wall,
and all of his framing that true security for THE AMERICAN PEOPLE can only be provided with a big, beautiful wall, my question is this:
exactly how many times has the US been invaded by any countries south of the US?
I know that the US, literally or by proxy, has invaded nearly every country south of the border.
I know that the Monroe Doctrine is cited as the justification for treating every South and Central American country, and the Caribbean countries, as the property of the US.
I know that the US regularly interferes in the affairs of all of these countries.
But what enemy has actually ever invaded?
Or is it brownophobia, the fear of brown skinned people?
This is what hope looks like:
It looks like 40 seats flipping from the GOP to the Democrats in the House.
It looks like Democrats making large gains on the state level.
It looks like Democrats picking up Governor’s s eats.
It looks like 49% voting versus 37% in 2014. And this higher turnout came in the face of increased GOP obstruction and suppression designed to weaken the Democrats.
It looks like a wave of schoolteachers rising up, many in reliably red states.
It looks like Beto O’Rourke falling short, but showing that Texas is slowly turning from red to purple on the way to, one hopes, blue.
It looks like 19 new women in the House.
It looks like younger voters starting to vote.
And all of these things represent bad news for the GOP.
It looks like Robert Mueller doing his work, and drawing every closer to the Trump crime family with each indictment, each conviction, each plea agreement.
Feel free to add more reasons, and more hope.
Guill
edited to add: 2 years of intense House investigations of the Trump crime cabal.
China Sends 1.1 Million Party Members to Share Uighurs' Homes
From the article:
One was his 39-year-old sister; standing at her side was an elderly woman Idris did not know. Their grins were tight-lipped, mirthless. Her sister had posted the picture on a social media account along with a caption punctuated by a smiley-face.
"Look, I have a Han Chinese mother now!" his sister wrote.
Idris knew instantly: The old woman was a spy, sent by the Chinese government to infiltrate his family.
There are many like her. According to the ruling Communist Party's official newspaper, as of the end of September, 1.1 million local government workers have been deployed to ethnic minorities' living rooms, dining areas and Muslim prayer spaces, not to mention at weddings, funerals and other occasions once considered intimate and private.
To read more:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-30/urgent-uninvited-guests-keep-watch-for-china-inside-uighur-homes
Shades of Big Brother.In this particular case of totalitarian oppression, the leaders of the totalitarian Chinese Government are atheists.
When I read various posts that try to explain that religion is the prime reason for war, or violence, or repression, or oppression, or any of a list of things, my reaction is to notice that all of thse things are done by totalitarians. Most of these totalitarians are theists, but that is because theists represent the majority of humans.
But when totalitarian non-theists are in charge, the exact same negative behaviors are present.
Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought
From the article:
But apparently Harris doesn’t think he is part of that “we.” After he accused Klein of fomenting a “really indissoluble kind of tribalism” in the form of identity politics, and Klein replied that Harris exhibits his own form of tribalism, Harris said coolly, “I know I’m not thinking tribally in this respect.”...
We all need role models, and I’m not opposed in principle to Harris’s being mine. But I think his view of himself as someone who can transcend tribalism—and can know for sure that he’s transcending it—may reflect a crude conception of what tribalism is. The psychology of tribalism doesn’t consist just of rage and contempt and comparably conspicuous things. If it did, then many of humankind’s messes—including the mess American politics is in right now—would be easier to clean up....
Examples of Harris’s tribal psychology date back to the book that put him on the map: The End of Faith. The book exuded his conviction that the reason 9/11 happened—and the reason for terrorism committed by Muslims in general—was simple: the religious beliefs of Muslims. As he has put it: “We are not at war with ‘terrorism.’ We are at war with Islam.”
Believing that the root of terrorism is religion requires ruling out other root causes, so Harris set about doing that. …
Or, to put Harris’s fallacy in a form that he would definitely recognize: Religion can’t be a cause of terrorism, because the world is full of religious people who aren’t terrorists.
To read more of a very interesting article:
https://www.wired.com/story/sam-harris-and-the-myth-of-perfectly-rational-thought/
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