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Some historical context By Tom Englehardt showing the lead up to the bright and cheery future we now inhabit.
“In the end, those seeds, first planted in Afghan and Pakistani soil in 1979, led to the attacks of September 11, 2001. That day was the very definition of chaos brought to the imperial heartland, and spurred the emergence of a new, post-Constitutional governing structure, through the expansion of the national security state to monumental proportions and a staggering version of imperial overreach. On the basis of the supposed need to keep Americans safe from terrorism (and essentially nothing else), the national security state would balloon into a dominant — and dominantly funded — set of institutions at the heart of American political life (without which, rest assured, FBI Director James Comey’s public interventions in an American election would have been inconceivable). In these years, that state-within-a-state became the unofficial fourth branch of government, at a moment when two of the others — Congress and the courts, or at least the Supreme Court — were faltering.
The 9/11 attacks also unleashed the Bush administration’s stunningly ambitious, ultimately disastrous Global War on Terror, and over-the-top fantasies about establishing a military-enforced Pax Americana, first in the Middle East and then perhaps globally. They also unleashed its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. drone assassination program across significant parts of the planet, the building of an unprecedented global surveillance state, the spread of a kind of secrecy so all-encompassing that much of government activity became unknowable to “the People,” and a kind of imperial overreach that sent literally trillions of dollars (often via warrior corporations) tumbling into the abyss. All of these were chaos-creating factors.
At the same time, the basic needs of many Americans went increasingly unattended, of those at least who weren’t part of a Gilded Age 1% sucking up American wealth in an extraordinary fashion. The one-percenters then repurposed some of those trickle-up funds for the buying and selling of politicians, again in an atmosphere of remarkable secrecy. (It was often impossible to know who had given money to whom for what.) In turn, that stream of Supreme Court-approved funds changed the nature of, and perhaps the very idea of, what an election was.
Meanwhile, parts of the heartland were being hollowed out, while — even as the military continued to produce trillion-dollar boondoggle weapons systems — the country’s inadequately funded infrastructure began to crumble in a way that once would have been inconceivable. Similarly, the non-security-state part of the government — Congress in particular — began to falter and wither. Meanwhile, one of the country’s two great political parties launched a scorched-earth campaign against governing representatives of the other and against the very idea of governing in a reasonably democratic fashion or getting much of anything done at all. At the same time, that party shattered into disorderly, competing factions that grew ever more extreme and produced what is likely to become a unique celebrity presidency of chaos.
The United States with all its wealth and power is, of course, hardly an Afghanistan or a Libya or a Yemen or a Somalia. It still remains a genuinely great power, and one with remarkable resources to wield and fall back on. Nonetheless, the recent election offered striking evidence that the empire of chaos had indeed made the trip homeward. It’s now with us big time, all the time. Get used to it.”
Something something reaping…and sowing et cetera. :/
I do like me some science. :)
Reblogging in Solidarity – This quote from the post: “Feminists like Lise Meitner responded to continued insistence that gender is a matter of subjective identity (an idea that justifies medical experimentation on children and the bullying of lesbians), by insisting on evidence-based debate. Meitner wrote: “Words mean things and if someone uses a word improperly then I will correct them. If men could become women there would be no need to force women to accept them as such. Telling people to ignore their own senses & value patriarchal dogma over material reality is zealotry.”
Put another way, “Gotta love the men telling us women we don’t exist as a class: so we cannot protest the patriarchy” tweeted Kristina Vasaätten, in response to Young Greens convenor Max Tweedie’s insistence that there is no solid definition of what a woman is. “TRANSACTIVISM = FEMALE ERASURE”, she said.”
Note: GNC is an abbreviation for gender non-conforming.
On the evening of Saturday, February 17, Charlie Montague and I jumped the fence at Auckland Pride to lead the parade and conduct the first televised interview of the event. We – proudly – held a two metre banner reading STOP GIVING KIDS SEX HORMONES – PROTECT LESBIAN YOUTH: a statement that, however boldly made, should surely not be controversial. Other than the accidentally live streamed interview, the action was largely ignored by media: only Scoop published the press release. The main response has been on social media.
The social media response has included plenty of trashing, much of it amusing. I’ve been compared to Milo Yiannopoulos (though I collaborated, on this action, with a lesbian “ecofascist”). Anne Russell, who has previously published fabrications about me being an ‘abuser’, went so far as to coin the term “Genital Witch”. Threats…
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Wow. You go to Banff for a choral workshop for one weekend and it seems like ‘all the news’ happens while you are away. Meghan Murphy has been busy on the Feminist Current detailing the latest assault on Feminism led by – completely shocked here – Transactivists (read Male Rights Activists). Munroe Bergdorf, the latest dude who thinks its his god-given role to tell females how to act and speak – demonstrates how to incorrectly use feminist terminology on a veritable bevy of levels.
I cannot stress this enough – intersectionality – is the idea that oppression can (and most often does) occur along multiple axis. What dudes in skirts and their handmaidens always conveniently forget is that one of the major axis of oppression is biological sex (you know, that thing you can’t change even if you try super real hard). Females are oppressed because they are born with the female reproductive anatomy the marks them as the sex class, and thus second class human beings. Not acknowledging this basic and grim feature of our society tends to make one’s analysis shit (see most of ‘queer’ theory) .
Anyhow, here is the juicy bits from the FC article and a nice comment from the comment section as the actual feminists were schooling a dude on what feminism is and how basic biology works.
“Trans model and recently appointed member of the LGBT+ advisory board for the Labour Party, Munroe Bergdorf, recently demonstrated his allegiance to New Feminism by demanding those formerly known as women stop talking about our bodies at our feminist marches, lest we alienate mankind by acknowledging the fact that all of mankind comes out of our vaginas (also by advocating empowerment through cutting up your face in order to appear more feminine and buying makeup).
“I also want to stress that if you do attend, it is CRUICIAL that you do with an INTERSECTIONAL mindset. Centering reproductive systems at the heart of these demonstrations is reductive and exclusionary.
— Munroe Bergdorf 🌹🌹 (@MunroeBergdorf) January 20, 2018}
Today, he has further demonstrated his generosity towards ex-women, gifting us his feminist leadership via an article for Grazia about how the vagina’d are getting vagina all over his feminism.
“Feminism: the advocacy of women’s rights based on the equality of the sexes. A simple enough concept, right? Wrong!”, Bergdorf writes. “This is 2018 and if the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that feminism isn’t for women, it’s for everyone except women, and it’s particularly not for women who have human female bodies, which came out of the box defective, full of holes and with missing parts.” Perhaps not a direct quote, but my ovaries are really a pair of extra eyes that allow me to read between the lines. Neat!
Bergdorf goes on to explain that “woman” no longer means anything, and that no one really knows what one is anymore; maybe it is your mom, but also maybe it is that old banana you bought thinking maybe you would start eating fruit in the New Year but that now has become a part of the basket on top of your microwave.
It is specifically because “woman” is now everything from an old banana to the collection of hair behind your bathroom door, and also possibly your mom, though we will never know for certain, that feminism must serve as an inclusive tool of liberation for all old bananas and other feminine-type experiences (that means you, no-elastic leopard print thong from 2005!), not just some (#notallwomensavealltheir2005leopardprintthongs). “This is where so many women are still getting it wrong,” Bergdorf explains.
Lest you get stuck here, wondering, “If an old banana can be a woman, why can’t I, with my woolen pink vagina that also has cat ears?”, Bergdorf would like you to know that that the hot pink vagina that allows babies to emerge from your skull drives woman-types things apart. Our attempt at uniting females failed, he argues, explicitly because we acknowledged females share something in common, causing them to be an oppressed class of people under patriarchy. It’s impossible to know what the thing we share in common that leads us to be oppressed is, of course, but it’s probably the fact that men hate old bananas, don’t have hair collections behind their bathroom doors, and hardly ever give birth via pink cat ear hats.”
Thank you, the ever facetious Meghan Murphy… :) Now to the nice comment I found. Mind the argument from authority though…
The pull quote I like is this: “Trans ideology is castles in the sand, abusive nonsense that is ushering in totalitarianism and doublethink into our world. It is based on [a] conflation of sex and gender in the English language, and deep-seated misogyny and homophobia.”
The tortures that the Grecian people are being subjected to by the neo-liberal institutions of Europe (European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF) are unnecessarily brutal and threaten to unravel the fabric of their society. We can learn what is in store for other nations that dare to act against the ‘good prudence’ of the current economic elite. Robert Hunziker writes about the toxic economic prescription being forced onto Greece and some of the reasoning behind it.
“Mysteriously, but maybe not so mysterious, this particular Greek Tragedy does not pass the sniff test. Something is rotten, somewhere. In order to get to the bottom of it, according to Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, member Secretariat of Syriza: “The Greek Reform Program was no mistake but was and remains the premeditated assassination, by economic and political means, of a European nation and its state, for reasons of much wider significance than the significance of the country itself,” Ibid.
Which prompts: Why so brutally horribly dehumanizing?
According to one analysis, Greece is the scapegoat for all European ills, thus it represents a looming threat to all other abusers of neoliberal dicta. The rationale: Other delinquent southern European countries were spared the hatchet only because, if Troika brutalized them as well, it risks alliances of like-minded protagonists and revolt all across half of Europe. Which would exceed the wherewithal of the grand neoliberal crusade and possibly blow its covert operations wide open for all to see. As it happens, Greece was/is low hanging fruit and a perfect whipping boy that hopefully knocks some sense into spendthrift Mediterranean lefties, or so the Troika likely assumes. Otherwise, why destroy Greece?
As it happened, Troika misrepresented good intentions, and in fact lied by publicly claiming Greece was receiving enormous amounts of financial support from its European partners, whereas 95% of those funds zip-zip right back to Deutsche Bank, PNB Paribas, and other U.S. and European banks, bypassing Greece’s banks and citizens as quickly as a finger click. But wait; of course, Greece keeps five percent.
In order to receive Troika’s financial bailout, Greece has undergone a massive transfer of public assets, all the best stuff, to privatization interests, part of the hardcore hypothesis behind neoliberalism, e.g., (1) 14 major regional airports sold to Germany’s Fraport, (2) the Port of Piraeus, one of the largest ports in Europe sold to China’s Cosco, (3) the Port of Thessaloniki, which is Greece’s second largest city, sold to a German consortium, and (4) privatization funds created, under Germany’s direction, for water utility transfers to private hands, prompting the president of the Greece water company trade union to forewarn that the for-profit model often times raises prices for consumers and sometimes service degrades. But then it’s too late to do much about it.
And, come to think of it, why should water be a for-profit enterprise in the first instance? And, why should ports, as old as the city of Athens, be for-profit private enterprises? By longevity alone, it is an iconic attachment to Greece, dating back centuries upon centuries. Maybe some precious things in life should escape the dictates of profit for the few in favor of the common interests of the many.
Regardless, financial colonization is ripping Greece to shreds same as 19th-century European colonization of Africa, in harmony with the Industrial Revolution, shredded natural resources. But, nowadays Industrial Revolution is passé as the Internet revolutionizes everything, other than the onslaught of neoliberalism’s transnational elite special forces.”
I think we, as Canadians, should be aware of what is in the toolbox of the world’s financial instituions when it comes to deal with countries that are ‘in need of financial discipline’.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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