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I’m wondering now. Will evidence of the “stop the count” protests be enough to cut through the partisan miasma in the United States?
Given that the Presidency of Mr.Trump was filled with episodes of ‘surely this (malfeasance ‘x’) will be enough to get him impeached/sacked/thrown in prison – with a null result each and every time gives me pause.
Just because it is ‘your guy’ in office should not turn off your intellectual and moral faculties, yet that seems the norm in the United States. Political parties should not behave like unaccountable cults.
Yet here we are in 2020 facing the real possibility that a sitting President will not concede his defeat in a democratic election. Boggles the mind.
This excerpt from Megan Mackin writing on the Feminist Current:
“This review grew out of a discussion with a dear friend who, at the time, supported gender identity ideology. I, on the other hand, had become increasingly frustrated with the loss of women’s rights to female-only spaces and laws protecting us from sex discrimination, as well as with the silencing of dissent to transgender dogma, and had urged her to examine the available information for herself. Then, I told her, we could revisit the conversation. She did, we did, and together we found pockets of dissent where we could speak further. These small spaces for critical thought on the topic of transgenderism continue to grow across the political spectrum. While we are not alone, as feminists concerned with gender identity ideology, we are — through the loss of access to social and other media, and due to threats of firings and physical violence — effectively silenced.
My friend — herself an academic and writer — noted the eerie (apparent) disinterest in Abigail Shrier’s new book, Irreversible Damage, by political and literary communities. Last month, she wrote to me via email, saying “I, too, have been surprised by what appears to be a deliberate silence around [Irreversible Damage] by newspapers and magazines ‘of record.’” She named it, aptly, “a reception vacuum,” calling book reviewers “taste makers and opinion diffusers.” By pretending the book doesn’t exist, they are ensuring the book will not exist for potential readers either, depriving the public sphere of the research and arguments Shrier presents.
Shrier contributes frequently to the Wall Street Journal, and among her degrees is a Juris Doctor from Yale University. She is a skilled writer who offers complex ideas with accessible delivery. It is possible the media would have covered her work had she resorted to obfuscating postmodernist jargon. Shrier has received no reviews from the established liberal press — not from the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Kirkus Review, nor any other mainstream online publications. Amazon, which still sells and thus profits from Irreversible Damage — garnering rave reviews there — has refused to allow sponsored ads to promote the book.
My friend wrote to me:
“Book reviews are a way of creating and nurturing readers by guiding them toward understanding the meanings and significance of a work. That no politically or culturally ‘liberal’ publications online or in print have even dared to acknowledge the existence of Shrier’s exposé of ROGD [Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria], the medical issues endemic to medicalizing children for life, infertility-producing surgeries, mental distress masked as dysphoria, and the real presence of de-transitioners, is no surprise for many of us.”
Shrier is terribly careful. She only addresses a narrow subset of “dysphoria”: RODG — the apparent social contagion spreading among circles of adolescent girls who have never previously expressed discomfort with their sex or sex role (“gender”). She explicitly acknowledges and interviews (favourably) adults who identify as transgender, and concedes that young children who insist they are the opposite sex consistently, from the time they are toddlers, may have a legitimate form of dysphoria. From a feminist perspective, because “transgender rights” mean women and girls must sacrifice their rights (for example, female-only shower rooms, shelters, and washrooms must allow males access, under gender identity legislation and policy), and the concept of fighting women’s oppression is undermined (seeking to become a member of the dominant sex is an absurdly individualist solution), Shrier’s acceptance of transgenderism itself is a great deal of ground to cede! Despite this, Shrier is silenced.”
Abigail Shrier, at least on this topic, inhabits the same area of Limbo as Noam Chomsky does when he writes about American foreign affairs or the the state of the American polity. The established press and the audience connects through them is suddenly no where be found. It isn’t some sort of dark magic; it is nothing more than the suppression of ideas that contradict the current orthodoxy.
Compare and contrast with the idea that the Left is a defender of free speech and a supporter of the free marketplace of ideas. Perhaps not so much. Especially when it comes to defending the rights, boundaries, and safety of women.
Learning without Flinching from History
“The United States has been the imperial power of record on this planet since World War II. Lately, the economic and moral aspects of that power have waned, even as our military power remains supreme (though without being able to win anything whatsoever). That should tell you something about America. We’re still a “SmackDown” country, to borrow a term from professional wrestling, in a world that’s increasingly being smacked down anyway.
Harold Pinter, the British playwright, caught this country’s imperial spirit well in his Nobel Prize lecture in 2005. America, he said then, has committed crimes that “have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Anyone with a knowledge of our history knows that there was truth indeed in what Pinter said 15 years ago. He noticed how this country’s leaders wielded language “to keep thought at bay.” Like George Orwell before him, Pinter was at pains to use plain language about war, noting how the Americans and British had “brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call[ed] it bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.”
The point here was not simply to bash America. It was to get us to think about our actions in genuine historical terms. A decade and a half ago, Pinter threw down a challenge, and even if you disagreed with him, or maybe especially if you did so, you need the intellectual tools and command of the facts to grapple with that critique. It should never be enough simply to shout “USA! USA!” in an ever-louder fashion and hope it will drown out not only critics and dissenters but reality itself — and perhaps even your own secret doubts.
And we should have such doubts. We should be ready to dissent. We should recognize, as America’s current attorney general most distinctly does not, that dissenters are often the truest patriots of all, even if they are also often the loneliest ones. We should especially have doubts about a leader who threatens to bring violence against another country 1,000 times greater than anything that country could visit upon us.
I don’t need the Catholic Church, or even Christ in the New Testament, to tell me that such thinking is wrong in a Washington that now seems to be offering a carnivorous taste of what a future American autocracy could be like. I just need to recall the wise words of my Polish mother-in-law: “Have a heart, if you’ve got a heart.”
Have a heart, America. Reject American carnage in all its forms.”
The massive disparity between the social classes in the US make it difficult to find the equality as set down by their law, in their society.
“1. The United States, by the way, is fundamentally unjust. Even before the Trump Virus sparked a depression and corporate bailout that deepened inequality in the U.S., the three wealthiest Americans’ combined wealth already exceeded that of the nation’s bottom 50 percent. The top tenth of the upper U.S. One Percent already had a shared net worth greater than that of the nation’s bottom 90 percent and median Black household wealth amounted to 6 cents on the white median household dollar. The nation has long been riddled by massive, interrelated disparities of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and power that make an abject mockery of its claim to represent democracy and equality before the law. Exhaustive empirical research shows that progressive majority public opinion is close to irrelevant in the making of “public” policy, which consistently reflects the preferences of the wealthy Few and their giant corporations and financial institutions. You can learn all about this from mainstream researchers and journalists who never identify with “ideologies such as Marxism” or acknowledge that significant socioeconomic disparity and top-down class rule are inherent to the profits system.”
The US would do well to start to manage the current distribution of wealth. A country that is run for the benefit of a small elite is a society that is doomed to fail.
This is where ‘patriots’ and others accuse me of hating the West and America.
Good.
Our inflated sense of being the ‘good guys’ and on the right side of history shields us from the monstrous atrocities that have been and are being committed in our name. The very truth of the matter is that there is no right side of history, only self interested actors on the state and individual level acting inhumanely toward those deemed to be the enemy. The truth is that being tortured for in the name of democracy or dictatorship is quite irrelevant to those being put to the irons – the only take away is that torture can not be justified, not ever.
The history of US intervention in Central and South America is a history of coups, brutal repression, and torture. One of the specialists sent to ‘teach the torture trade’ was Dan Mitrone, his legacy is written in the blood and lives of Left activists and innocents across Central and South America.
“The late US journalist and author A.J. Langguth credited US advisers led by Mitrione with introducing “scientific methods of torture” to Uruguay. These included psychological tortures like playing recordings of screaming women and children and telling prisoners it was their relatives being tortured, to more traditional torture techniques like electric shocks applied under the fingernails and to the genitals. According to Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban double agent who infiltrated the CIA and spent years in the agency’s Montevideo station, Mitrione said that the key to successful interrogation was to apply “the precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount to achieve the desired effect.”
“A premature death means failure by the technician,” Mitrione told Hevia. “You have to act with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.” Mitrione walked a very fine line between surgical and sadistic when he added: “When you get what you want, and I always, do, it may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening up, not to extract information now, but only as a political measure, to create a healthy fear.”
In order to build the perfect underground classroom in which to teach his Uruguayan students the tools and techniques of their torturous trade, Mitrione soundproofed the basement of his Montevideo home. He tested its integrity by blasting Hawaiian music or having an assistant fire a pistol from the room while he listened from different points outside the home. Hevia claimed it was there that Mitrione trained Uruguayan police to torture using “beggars from the outskirts of Montevideo,” a practice he honed to perfection while stationed in Brazil. “There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the different voltages on the different parts of the human body,” said Hevia.
The Cuban claimed that Mitrione personally tortured four beggars to death in his bespoke dungeon. This fits a historical pattern: At the notorious US Army School of the Americas (SOA), then located in Panama, US doctors supervised torture classes in which homeless people were kidnapped from the streets of Panama City and used as human guinea pigs. According to one former SOA instructor interviewed in the award-winning documentary film Inside the School of the Assassins, “they would bring people in from the streets to the base, and the experts would train us on how to obtain information through torture… They had a US physician… who would teach the students… [about] the nerve endings of the body. He would show them where to torture, where and where not, where you wouldn’t kill the individual.”
This is not the practice of any nation that claims to value human rights. Yet in death, a clinical, merciless torture teacher was celebrated:
“Back in the US, Dan Mitrione was hailed as a hero. White House spokesman Ron Ziegler lauded his “devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress” as “an example for free men everywhere,” calling him a man who “exemplified the highest principles of the police profession.” To his wife, he was the “perfect man.” His daughter called him “a great humanitarian.” Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis even staged a benefit concert for his grieving family — Mitrione had nine children — in his home town of Richmond, Indiana on August 29.”
Imagine if we could hear the incriminating shameful stories at the same volume as the triumphant patriotic tropes we are taught, we might able to begin the process of reclaiming our shared humanity.
Source: Counterpunch – Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy of Dan Mitrione
The upcoming election in the US, at least from a Canadian perspective, a bit lost in the deluge of media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. The American Left business party has a chance to regain the White House, but Webb asks the question in his essay on Unherd, “What if the new American Left is — as the philosopher Richard Rorty put it, exhausted?”
“And, he argued, national pride in America is just what the American left had lost — and if that was true in 1998 it is true with knobs on in 2020: to quote the great philosopher, “a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left” understands the nation in a way that “leads them to step back from their country and, as they say, ‘theorize’ it. It leads them to … give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”
Suggested readingRorty, who died in 2007, was not an complete enemy of the new Left’s keenness on race and gender — he thought they had a point — but he knew that it would end in tears. He knew that identity politics would ditch the uncomfortable, sweaty-smelling folks in the unions, the welders and electricians and carpenters and that those (mainly white) men would in turn ditch the Democrats. And so it came to pass, and now we might be post-Rorty with no road back.
Does the American Left have what it takes to knit together the nation when its modern iteration so clearly dislikes so much about it? After the statues ,what else must fall? What other horrors must be uncovered? The jury is out, to put it mildly, on whether American atonement might be over soon or just beginning. If the question is between social solidarity or continued struggle, plenty of modern Democrats have had it with the former and are willing to embrace the latter.
They may or may not be right, or justified, but if America finds no comfort and no direction we will all suffer the consequences. There’s a lot riding on the Biden presidency, if it comes. For them, and, as ever, for us.”
The other problem I see is that Biden may want to return to the status quo which if one recalls – the permanent war economy, gilded age level of economic inequality, and predatory capitalism – isn’t exactly a noble cause.
Is anyone else getting the feeling that a possible attempt to assassinate Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister, is being portrayed as sort of “meh” in the media? The front pages from the Globe and Mail, Global News, and the National Post. Only Global has a story on it on the front page, and of course CBC is still with the story as I’m quoting their article for this post.
“Hurren allegedly drove his truck through the pedestrian gate at 1 Sussex Drive at around 6:30 a.m. ET Thursday morning, which stopped working on impact.
He then headed toward the ground’s greenhouse on foot with what appeared to be a firearm, stopping to hide in a rose garden for three minutes around 6:35 a.m., said Duheme.
Duheme said officers spotted Hurren at 6:43 a.m. and began talking with him two minutes later.
“It was only at 6:53 where the suspect responded and a dialogue ensued,” Duheme said.”
Good heavens, only in Canada do we talk down a possible assassin and ask him to please release himself into police custody. I think if this incident happened a coupe of parallels of latitude to the south, a different more fatal outcome would have ensued.
“The RCMP did not answer questions about the note at this morning’s briefing, citing the ongoing investigation.When asked if police know Hurren’s motivation, Duheme said “yes” but would not go into details. The RCMP did say Hurren wasn’t known previously to police and was not on any watch lists.Hurren ran a business called GrindHouse Fine Foods, which makes meat products. In a Facebook post he reported that the novel coronavirus pandemic had taken a toll on his business.”I’m not sure what will be left of our economy, industries and businesses when this all ends,” he wrote May 26.CBC News Manitoba also reported that roughly an hour before Hurren entered the Rideau Hall grounds, a Facebook page associated with his business posted a meme of a big outdoor party that supposedly would occur after the lockdown.
The post also directs people to look up “Event 201″ — a worldwide pandemic preparedness exercise run last year that conspiracy theorists now use to suggest Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is behind COVID-19.”
Yep, armed and seemingly enthrall to conspiracy theories aaaaaand traipsing around Sussex Drive. I hope our police are not handling the situation like the brother’s Andy from Hott Fuzz, but the media seems to be.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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