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The RPOJ comes for thee “Nicky”.
Counterpunch needs to rein in the crazy, or at least find an editor that will actually edit for truth and veracity as opposed to the shout festival screed titled “The Time for Queer Revolution is Now” by Nicky Reid. How this ‘article’ got published is quite beyond me as it is rife with abject lies and hyperbole.
What the article and “Nicky” are though are prime examples of what passes for activism on the so called woke activist left. Notice there is never a positive solution offered only a ever growing grievance list that can only be satisfied by tearing down the society and norms that have given people like Nicky the opportunity to endlessly indulge in their specious narcissism in public.
This RPOJ (Red Pen of Justice) episode may run long as the bullshit runs deep and wide in almost every sentence.
The text in brown will be the quoted essay from “Nicky Reid”.
My commentary will be in red italics.
Outside (non fatuous) sources and quotes will be in purple.
So. Here… we… go!
““Why don’t you guys do something?” Those were the eternal words of Storme DeLarverie as the pigs hauled her away in shackles, bloodied but unbowed, after she threw the first punch of the Stonewall Uprising. “
Historical revisionism is one of the features of transgender ideology. Surprisingly(!) gender ideologues are fond of placing themselves at the centre of past events in order to gin up the baffle-gab narratives they use to hoodwink the public. Let’s get the actual history on the Stonewall riots –
“My research for this history demonstrates that if we wish to name the group most responsible for the success of the riots, it is the young, homeless homosexuals, and, contrary to the usual characterizations of those on the rebellion’s front lines, most were Caucasian; few were Latino; almost none were transvestites or transsexuals,” concludes David Carter in Stonewall, the definitive account of the uprising, for which he conducted hundreds of interviews. Carter quotes one of the bar’s owners stating that its clientele was “98 percent male.” As for the presence of transgender people, the Stonewall was “not a generally welcoming place for drag queens,” Eric Marcus, editor of an oral history of the gay rights movement, wrote in 1999. “The majority of the hundreds of people who crowded onto Christopher Street and jammed Sheridan Square were young gay men.” In his 1996 book American Gay, the sociologist and anthropologist Stephen O. Murray writes that “men familiar with the milieu then insist that the Stonewall clientele was middle-class white men and that very few drag queens or dykes or nonwhites were ever allowed admittance.”
Be very aware that someone who treats the historically record so maliciously will have no qualms about presenting lies and falsehoods about the present. This is one of the founding lies of transgender ideological narrative with the goals of painting themselves as the most oppressed group in the history of humankind. We’re only one sentence in folks…
“I feel like I’m screaming this to my people all the time lately and I still can’t seem to inspire the riot necessary for our collective survival.”
Ah yes, because the evil society does nothing but oppress you. Ever more the reason to burn it all down and remake the rules strictly based on your abject narcissism; sounds like a win for EVERYONE (this is how woke ‘inclusion‘ works btw).
I’m guessing this particular whinge is because parts of society (women who care about their rights, boundaries, and safety) have woken up to the bullshite that is being peddled by gender ideologues. Saying ‘no’ to the gender-cult is very distressing for them.
“We live in dangerous times. We have lived in them before but genderqueer people like me have never faced a creature quite like this.”
It is very important to establish how dangerous and oppressed you are (by your own metrics of course, we certainly cannot have empirical data muddying the waters. It is important to note that being transgender places you in one of the *safest* demographics in the US) .- especially in countries that, historically speaking, are the most free and most tolerant ones to exist. I’d like to see ‘Nicky’ spout this in China, or Cuba, or Iran. Then a few actual lessons about free speech and minority rights might be learned.
“As we reach an era when we have never stood farther outside of the closet, we face an open and brazen campaign to extinguish us from public existence.”
Umm. Reality is calling to you. Do you hear it? It’s the faint siren song of the truth trying desperately to breach your practiced ideological allergy to reality. A simple picture refutes yet another false transgender ideological construction (as does most of reality, to be honest).
Literally Extinguished…
” While popular right-wing ideologues proudly call for our annihilation, state governments across the nation are dutifully carrying out their dictates.”
I had to look up what ‘Nicky’ was talking about. I’m going to assume it was something to do with this clip.
Clearly, Michael Knowles is referring the ideology, and not the people. Accuracy in reporting, as Nicky keeps demonstrating, is clearly not their forte.
“Genocide is an ugly word, but I can’t think of a more appropriate description for the GOP’s war on “transgenderism.”
I am not particularly surprised that you can’t think of a more ‘appropriate description’ – because appropriate also usually entails the notion of comporting with reality. There is no trans genocide happening in the world outside of the unhinged ravings of transactivists hopped up on narcissism and fatuous ideology.
To see this risible claim of ‘transgender genocide’ demolished, please see Talia Nava’s full essay which I have quoted below on “There is No Trans Genocide”.
“For one, there is no clear intent to commit genocide against trans people, but additionally the trans comm unity is not of any particular nationality, ethnicity, race, or official religion (although one could argue that transgender ideology is a religion, it is not a recognized religious group). […] It appears the group that is most harmful to trans identifying individuals are the activists who claim to be protecting them.”
Confabulating again. Shocking.
“At a time when violence and suicide have never been higher in the transgender community, we are drowning in a deluge of openly bigoted legislation.”
I think ‘openly bigoted’ means in the real world legislation that comports with the material reality we all share. This from the Substack Parents With Inconvenient Truths About Trans:
Advocates of ‘gender affirming’ healthcare cite high suicide rates as evidence that medical and surgical intervention is “life-saving and medically necessary.” It goes without saying that every suicide is tragic, but there is no high-quality evidence to suggest that the often quoted overall attempted suicide rate of youth who identify as transgender is 41%. Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper who is the Chair of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has stated, “As far as I know there are no studies that say that if we don’t start these kids immediately on hormones when they say they want them that they are going to commit suicide.. So that is misguided… in terms of needing to intervene medically to prevent suicide and doing it quickly. I know of no studies that have shown that.” There is also no evidence that medical transition decreases suicidality. In fact, one study showed that post transition adults were 4.9 times more likely to have made a suicide attempt and 19.1 times more likely to have died from suicide than the general population. No one is born in the wrong body. Our sex is written into the DNA of every cell of our body. People cannot change sex. It’s a serious thing to insinuate to someone that their healthy body is somehow wrong and might require extreme, irreversible cosmetic interventions to relieve mental distress. There is no right or wrong way to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.
I just want to pause here and draw attention to the two very different styles of writing going on. Nicky relies almost exclusively on personal narrative, raw emotions, and well…outright fabrications/delusions about how the world is. I (and other rational beings) present evidence and arguments based on said evidence for the reader to evaluate. ‘Nicky’ should try this ‘weird new methodology’ at some point in time.
“2023 is already the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans bills in this country, with 498 hate laws in counting proposed in 49 states. 43 have already passed. This includes 12 states pushing laws that violate the rights of minors to seek what has been clinically proven to be lifesaving care, as well as three who have also expanded those bans to reach well into adulthood, banning the use of puberty blockers up to the age of 26.”
Nicky once again mischaracterizes legislation meant to protect children as ‘anti-trans’. We here at DWR like to classify this legislation as “pro-reality”. Children cannot consent to being sterilized, based on a self diagnosis of gender identity. It is a clown-school level of idiocy that certain medical ‘professionals’ have embraced the notion that young children can actively consent to make life affecting decisions. Justdad7 a Canadian Lawyer, characterizes and summarizes what is going on –
“The more controversial question is whether puberty blockers, which can be started as early as age 9, will result in sterility. Critics of medical transition have long argued that puberty suppression, which is almost invariably followed by cross sex hormones, will result in sterility. Gender clinicians generally reassure parents that puberty blockers will not necessarily result in sterility. They refer to research on cases of precocious puberty which have found that puberty will resume once the drugs have stopped. However, in treatment or precocious puberty the drugs are stopped at the beginning of the normal window for puberty. This is when they are started in gender affirming care. There is no reliable research on the effects of puberty blockers during the normal window for puberty on fertility. In private sessions, they do acknowledge that sterility is a serious risk.“
Yeah, so Nicky steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the other side of the story and hopes that his emotive language and hyperbole will win you over. (As opposed to facts and evidence.)
“This hideous campaign also includes a growing rash of so-called anti-drag bills the likes of which have already passed in Tennessee and Florida and are effectively written to police public gender non-conformity in a blatant violation of free speech and expression. In Nashville, a second attempt at “male or female impersonation” is a felony that could lead to over half a decade in prison. That is six years upstate for the crime of having a dick beneath your dress.”
The transgender piggy back is in play here and you will see many instances of this phenomena in Nicky’s essay. Trans ideology and transactivists will latch onto any other groups problems and use it to amplify their own concerns. Another favourite piggy-back target are individuals with chromosomal disorders or DSD’s or intersex people. They will regularly point to intersex people as some sort third sex which makes their specious argument that sex is spectrum “truthier”. While in reality, people with DSD’s do not constitute a third sex and almost all are unambiguously male or female. Anything to promote the transgender cause though, it really doesn’t matter how big the lie or who they have to toss under the bus. See the transgender denial of sex in action, and of course dismantled by fact in the video below.
“And these lawmakers aren’t shy about their intentions either. They have made it painfully clear that they consider the entire transgender tribe to be little more than an ideology that they fully intend to censor out of existence by any means necessary and they are targeting our children first, using the public school system for its original intended purpose to kill the Queer and save the child so as to protect the sanctity of their idealized concept of purified cisgender youth.”
The blurring boundaries and destabilizing children is being fought against. The original purpose was of the public school system was/is to educate them. This is not the goal of DQSH and similar operations as pointed out by James Lindsay on the New Discourses.
“It bears pointing out that so far we have heard that Drag Queen Story Hour exists to be generative for the following purposes: (1) to lead children to “livequeerly,” (2) to question sex and gender and their stability, (3) to break rules and want to break rules, (4) to see their usual teachers and school authority figures and potentially by extension their parents as boring by comparison to drag queens and “living queerly,” (5) to turn toward pleasure and desire, and (6) to let go of control, all in the presence of an adult man who thinks it is a good idea to dress and perform as a highly sexualized woman in the presence of children he hopes to influence. As we will see, we can add to this list (7) tempting them into “alternative modes of kinship” in the sense of the “queer ‘family’” one leaves their real family for and chooses “on the street.” (Calling this program “grooming,” it must be warned, will get you unceremoniously kicked off the largest social media platforms, by the way.)
At this point, it is legitimately a question as to why any adult would possibly consider Drag Queen Story Hour a good idea. DQSH surmounts this obvious challenge by selling itself deliberately as what it is not, both a necessary tool for increasing “LGBT empathy” and “family friendly.” Both of these designations are deliberate misdirections by the purveyors of Drag Queen Story Hour, who want to use it as a generative tool to lead (but not groom) young children into “queer culture” and “alternate modes of kinship” and desire.”
I’d highly recommend you spend some time at the New Discourses, there are many insightful and provocative essays to peruse.
“My people aren’t clueless to these facts. The word genocide is popping up like daisies in every support group and Queer bar across my little slice of rustbelt Americana, but I still can’t seem to inspire a single goddamn faggot to throw a fucking punch.”
I wonder why? Certainly not because your unhinged ranting is disconnected from reality.
“The stormtroopers are returning to Stonewall and every time I say revolution, my own fucking people stare at me like some kind of crazed heretic, telling me to simmer down and that this isn’t the appropriate time for such radicalism. Really? Then when? There is an open plot to erase us here. If this isn’t an appropriate time to arm ourselves to the teeth and batten down the hatches, then when is? I seriously want to know so I don’t miss the signal. Do we wait for the train cars to arrive at the gayborhoods? Or maybe we should just sing “We Shall Overcome” as they march us all into the fucking showers?”
I bet it is because they are tired. Tired of the cognitive dissonance. Tired of the constant ordering and reordering of who is “most oppressed” and what they can an not say based on some risible oppression matrix. Tired of meeting every objection with hyperbole (see Holocaust references above) and coercive tactics. It takes significant energy to be mad at everything all the time.
““Vote, march, be peaceful, repeat, vote, march, be peaceful, repeat…” this what they tell me over and over again. Hell, even the so-called radical Queers are simply peacefully marching to their local state capitols to demand that other powerful cis-gender people in Washington come to our rescue with the miracle of more useless legislation that no country sheriff or small-town principal is ever actually going to follow through on.
And they keep quoting Martin Luther King at me like braying birds, promising me with almost embarrassing sincerity that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice.” How do I politely break it to them that this is total fucking bullshit? First of all, King was quoting a 19th-century clergyman named Theodore Parker who was actually trying to console his fellow white abolitionists with the hollow promise that at least there would be justice in the sweet hereafter. Second, there exists no single clearer case that peaceful liberal democracy achieves exactly nothing than the endless struggle for anything that even remotely resembles civil rights in this country.”
Living in the country with the most freedom and rights the world has ever seen and makes the claim that system that has brought all these rights to fruition JUST DOESN’T WORK(?). We’ve gone full circle here and have returned to the constant negative complaining shtick.
[…] Skipping redundant ahistorical whinging.
“So, what happened to our precious liberal democracy? Motherfucker, this is your precious liberal democracy. I’ll let you in on one more dirty little secret. This liberalism gig is nothing but a bourgeoise drag show. The Age of Enlightenment occurred among the intellectual elites in the dark heart of Babylon during the height of colonialism, slavery and imperial genocide. From this same swamp of powdered wigs and pompous twats came the twin inventions of race and liberalism and both were devised for the exact same reason, to rationalize psychotic behavior.”
Trenchant class analysis with the solid argumentative support of “because I said so”.
“Like any other serial killer, the state desperately needs to believe in the benevolence of its own cruel existence in order not to crash like an idle shark. So, it replaced monarchies with congresses that hand out “rights” like gangsters hand out turkeys at Christmastime and it replaced puritanical crusades with the new secular religion of racial science, all in the name of the endless march of civilized progress.”
I wonder which editor at Counterpunch reviewed this copy and said, “Oh hey, this isn’t completely off the rails bat-shit crazy town speak. Let’s print it. I’d like to meet them and their purveyor of psychedelics.
“The gender binary was an invention of these same enlightened creeps too. More puritanical social conditioning masquerading as science. But the savages didn’t need to be fucking enlightened. Our pagan tribes were doing just fine before civilization came to brain us with the bludgeon of their historical arch. Pre-liberal societies from Africa to Atzlan existed for centuries without rigid gender boundaries, hierarchical racial caste systems and enlightened academic sociopaths. They also existed without prisons or monsters with badges to pack them full of broken children.
Searching for the Utopian vision that *obviously* existed in the past, and now *obviously* we have to burn down the current society to pave the way to return to the Utopian promised land… It’s obvious “Nicky” has no plan on how to organize society after the glorious revolution, only that – somehow – it will be better. Riiiiiiiiiiight.
“The few major achievements in social progress that have ever been made in this country weren’t made by Washington or Harvard. They were made by wild unassimilated savages in the streets when they finally stopped singing and started swinging. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was only signed into law under the duress of massive nationwide riots that came after Doctor King was assassinated, and a year later proud faggots like Storme DeLarverie and Marsha P. Johnson followed their lead by beating the police state stupid like a rented mule at Stonewall. The only reason that we didn’t achieve more is because we stopped short of the revolution that we needed to be free and the only reason that we stopped is because the state paid us to behave with temporary privileges that they call rights.
As long as the state stands, marginalized people will remain at the mercy of its enlightened aristocracy who will only ever give us just enough rights to behave and then replace them with more violence once we let our guards down. I don’t believe in coincidences because I don’t have the agency to afford them. Queer people became targets for genocide again the moment we began to assimilate into the same breeder state that Storme begged us to smash.”
*Yawn* – I hope that screaming into the Void is therapeutic for you. For the rest of adult society it looks like a ill conceived temper tantrum, but go ahead an vehemently soil your diapers. Keep doing you, you magnificent queer agitator.
“So, I’m going to ask you, people, one more time, as nicely as a bloodied but unbowed genderfuck bitch like me knows how to ask.”
All I’m getting from this is unbalanced and unwell man in dress vibes. But as with all activist leftist bullshit one must always consult the oppression matrix to ‘prove’ the worth of your insights and commentary. Never-you-mind those small details like comporting with the reality and history we all share…
“Why don’t you guys’ fucking do something? Justice doesn’t come from civilization, it comes from pissed-off freaks like you and me in the streets, and the arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend unless we grab it with both hands and wrap around the throats of the powerful.
When the state gets violent, reform becomes an act of mass suicide and I’m done with drinking that cult’s punch. It’s time to get fierce and it’s time to get organized. It’s time to finish the Stonewall Uprising and overthrow the government once and for all, side by side with every other tribe that refuses to conform to the institutional violence of liberal reform.”
You know that process… the incremental progress toward a more just and human society? Fuck that shit. Instead lets go full Tribalism and destroy that system that has made the US the most prosperous and most free nation on Earth. I’m sure that a polity based on group identity and oppression will be just as good. Somehow….
This is the problem with the marxist/maoist bullshit. They never lay out the plan for what success looks like. It’s always in a process of becoming so no metrics can apply because really, when is the revolution ever finished.
“The revolution” certainly never leads to dictatorial authoritarian states that devalue human life and liberty. That almost never happens…
“Queer revolution now!”
Not on my watch, or anyone else’s who happens to values rationality, liberty, and democracy. Come back to us when your utopian vision doesn’t end with an authoritarian nightmare.
Counterpunch is a alternative news site that I’ve followed for many years. I have often picked up on an essay that I found there and added my critique or opinion on the matter. Recently I critiqued a piece that was – ideologically speaking – over the top and I had to give it the Red Pen of Justice treatment. The lambasting was due as the claims made could only hold up in a proper collectivist utopia. When I saw that one of their hardcore left ideologues, Paul Street had mentioned the ‘woke politic’ I was expecting more fodder for the mill of insane leftist politics to criticize.
They’ve set the bar for what passes as journalism pretty low as of late so I was prepared for the worst. And… was pleasantly surprised. Apparently there are limits for some people as to how much cringe-woke insanity they can stomach. The title of the subsection jarred my consciousness :
“Erasing Women and Girls with “Woke” Idiocy”
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Strap in folks, this is going to be a ride.
“And then there’s the hyper- and fake-“woke” identitarian idiocy that pervades and cripples US social movements on the ground. I will never forget the time (in the summer of 2014) I politely corrected a Black Lives speaker who said that the killing of a Black person by “could even happen here in Iowa City” by pointing out that Iowa City had been the site of an incident in which a white police officer had murdered a Black man – the killing of John Deng by a Johnson County Sheriff in July of 2009. A white female graduate student lectured me on how “white men have nothing to say at racial justice rallies.” Six years later on the South Side of Chicago, Black Lives activists would not listen to information I had on the potential to powerfully link up two separate racial justice marches (both protesting Kentucky’s decision not to prosecute the cops who murdered Breonna Taylor) because of my race and gender.”
Paul Street at least aware of what can happen when the what your group looks like is more important the the content of your character. It’s a really quite a shit way to view the world and it bites even most rabid proponents when they do not follow the rules.
“(Idiotic standpoint identititarianism is deeply embedded in the American psyche. Recently I participated with some other white folks in the stoppage of traffic on a major thoroughfare and on behalf of women’s abortions rights in Chicago. Two Black men got out of their cars and attacked us claiming that we would not be stopping traffic for Black people. I informed these gentlemen that we had all been in the streets for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Justin Blake and, before that, for Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Chicago’s own Laquan McDonald. After hearing this, one of the two assailants asked me, “so are you saying that you have experienced all the same micro-aggressions and prejudice that I have and go through every day of my life”? I said, “no I don’t think that. I’m not an idiot and I’d have to be an idiot to think that.” He went back to his car before I could tell him that the repeal of abortion rights will inflict special and disproportionate harm on the Black community and Black women.)”
If Paul Street can see the bullshit that is is standpoint epistemology/identitiarianism you know it has to be a problem. For the uninitiated: “standpoint epistemology (and related identity-based epistemologies) are a complicated and widely discredited way to create and justify a kind of gnosticism around critical conceptions of identity and the relevant power dynamics in society. In practice, this typically means it is yet another justification within Theory for only people who agree with Theory to be considered knowledgeable authorities […].”
It’s being used in the leftist activist all the time and it contributes to the inefficiency and infighting that mars all identitarian movements.
“I have recently been confronted by destructive uber-“woke” folly in the form of the loony yet cocksure charge that it is “trans-exclusive” and transphobic to specify females as the target of the war on abortion rights. As a friend writes me, some transgender activists “really believe it’s exclusionary and reactionary to dare to talk about ‘forced motherhood’ and ‘women’s oppression.’ Such madness actually happens.”
This is sheer village idiocy. The Christian fascist war on abortion rights is quintessentially about the patriarchal control and oppression of women and girls. The Republifascist enemy is not remotely thinking about transgender folks when it goes after abortion. Calling activists “trans-phobic” and anti-trans for defending “women’s abortion rights” is reactionary madness. The demand that activist language be changed to “people’s abortion rights” is to erase women in the name of “inclusion.” This is like calling for Black Lives Matter to be changed to “All Lives Matter.”
Wow, you know you’ve gone to far when Street calls you out (rightly) on your bullshit. Of course transgender queer activism has no limits and no sanity. Everything – absolutely everything – is about their oppression and their plight. Those damn females talking about their rights in society are oppressors using their privilege to further marginalize queer trans voices who are *obviously* way more oppressed than those women fighting for their rights to basis reproductive healthcare in society.
“Such hyper-identitarian irrationality has worked its way all the way up to Planned Parenthood (PP). Eager to mess with radical abortions rights activism in accord with its shameful advance surrender to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, PP is down with the preposterous claim that the call for women’s right to an abortion is repressively “gendered” language that oppresses trans people. See this shamelessly stupid PP post on how activists should replace “women” with “people” abortion rights discourse.
In a shameless and transparent hit-job on the radical anti-fascist feminist group Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights’ (RU4AR) recent successful actions at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, Dodgers’ Stadium in Los Angeles, and Joel Osteen’s right-wing megachurch in Houston, the liberal zine Jezebel displays extreme identitarian wokeness to rationalize its advance capitulation to the Supreme Court assault on Roe. Jezebel’s Emily Leibert childishly claims that RU4AR’s use of the phrase “female enslavement” is “inappropriate given that the leaders of this group are not Black” (has Emily Leibert ever heard of the great abolitionist leader John Brown?). Leibert says that RU4AR’s “repeated usage of gendered terms …excludes trans and nonbinary pregnant people who need abortion access and care.”
And what are those “gendered” terms, specifically? Answer: “women” and “girls,” half of humanity (!), and “patriarchy,” a supremely significant (to say the least) and longstanding oppression system defense and advance of which is at the very heart of the war on abortion rights.”
Street is quite done with the fuckery on display, but is it too late for him to preserve the brand of activism he supports? Because this sort of identity politics nonsense is what rules the roost in leftist circles. It cares not for the reality of any situation, but rather the power dynamic and the relationship to power to which best interpolate the amount of oppression a group experiences and thus how much ‘authenticity’ said group has when speaking on the issue.
Apparently women (adult human females) do not have enough ‘authenticity’ to speak on the issue of abortion and reproductive healthcare.
“Some anarchists fall for this women-erasing tripe. See this depressing It’s Going Down post, which glories in the replacement of the RU4AR slogan “Not the Church, Not the State, Women Must Decide Our Fate” with “Fuck the Church, Fuck the State, Only We Decide Our Fate.” Reflecting on this article, whose anarchist author digs how his/her/their allies chided a “Maoist” for using the bourgeois word “women,” Chris C of the Communist Workers Group (CWG) writes the following: “I don’t know how any ‘Leftist’ can write an article on abortion and reproductive rights and only mention ‘women’ once. Kind of difficult to organize and mobilize for women’s liberation if one cannot even use the term.”
Well Mr.Street, by saying these words you’ve joined the “far-right” TERF crew who believe that women are adult human females and inhabit a category of human beings that are distinct from men and have their own unique set of issues and concerns when it comes to society.
Welcome. Let’s hope now that you will apply some of your revolutionary zeal to combat the rise of woke identity politics and the cancer that it represents for society.
This article is written by Nicky Reid who in her first sentence declares their identity as a “Queer pro-lie anarchist”. I think that if you happen to be writing an piece to be published, wouldn’t it be better to let your thoughts and ideas carry your message rather than stating which camp you happen to belong to?
I’m surprised/not-surprised that Counterpunch would publish this person’s work, but there was a time when CP was about giving a voice to intelligent authors who had serious arguments that added breadth and depth to many an important topic. Instead what we are presented with is scattered unhinged whinging about how terrible everything is and that the only solution is burning it all down. A small sample:
“Me too. I say that Queer people and our allies on the left start putting our priorities into challenging these scumbags to put up or shut up by thinking big, acting small, and weaponizing our own communities against their institutions.
The best revenge against judicial tyranny is secession and we’ve seen this theory wielded with fantastic results in the form of sanctuary states and sanctuary cities. Local governments who simply refuse to comply with the feds on issues as far-ranging as gun rights and marijuana have exposed their powers for the hopped-up illusions that they really are and rendered them totally impotent in the face of communities who quite simply resist being governed by any authority figure they didn’t vote for.
Let’s take this ethic to the next level by organizing intentional communities across the map around shared ideals like communes and gayborhoods and turning them into sanctuaries from any power that exists outside them. Let’s create a quilt work of Queer autonomous zones and feminist autonomous zones and Black Power autonomous zones and Boogaloo autonomous zones and polygamist autonomous zones and tweaker autonomous zones.”
Really? Because the public good is well served by the destruction of the institutions that maintain the public good? Because creating ‘autonomous zones’ isn’t a recipe for chaos and lawlessness that will hurt everyone not ready to go all in on the “bloody tooth and nail” routine?
Tearing all of society down because *you* inside your bullshit queerness are having an ‘unhappy’ is insanity. Calm the fuck down.
The same goes for you Counterpunch, calm down and stop printing such aggressively stupid articles.
US commentators still seem to be mulling the prospects of how close, or how far they came to living in an authoritarian fascist state under Donald Trump. It is interesting how little air time the States dances with fascism get in the media today.
The liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put things well on the morning of January 7, 2021, in a column titled “Appeasement Got Us Where We Are”:
‘So, is it finally OK to use the F-word? One shouldn’t use the term “fascist” lightly…Donald Trump, however, is indeed a fascist — an authoritarian willing to use violence to achieve his racial nationalist goals. So are many of his supporters. If you had any doubts about that, Wednesday’s attack on Congress should have ended them.’
Observing the events one day before, when Donald Trump instigated an attempted putsch meant to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral democracy and constitutional rule of law, the esteemed veteran historian Robert Paxton, author of the classic volume The Anatomy of Fascism, finally relented. He had to admit that he’d been wrong on Trump and that the 45th US president was in fact what Krugman said – and what many of us on the margins had been saying from the start.
Paxton was one of a bevy of “fascism experts” who had been proclaiming that Trump didn’t qualify for “the F-word.” This august list of Trump fascism-deniers included an impressive roster of 20th Century European historians who were hopelessly out of their depth when it came to analyzing 21st century US society and politics: Paxton, Stanley Payne (emeritus at the University of Wisconsin), Roger Griffin (Oxford), Richard Evans (Cambridge), and Samuel Moyn (Yale) (also meriting mention here is Japanese historian Gary Leupp [Tuft’]s). But field specialization and professional immersion in the previous century was no excuse for other deniers: NYU law professor Bruce Neuborne and the political scientists and government professors Sheri Berman, Cory Robin, Eric de Bruin, and Jason Brownlee. The heights of denialist comedy were scaled by Neuborne, who couldn’t put “the F-word” in his text or index in a book that discovered no less than twenty common themes, tactics, and policies that Trump as president was “copying from the early Hitler government” while “following Hitler’s playbook” and “letting Hitler’s genies out of the bottle”: holding power without winning majority support; finding and using direct lines of communication with their base; blaming others and dividing along racial lines; relentlessly demonizing opponents; constantly attacking objective truth; relentlessly attacking mainstream media; assaulting science; cultivating a fawning alternative media to spread lies; regular orchestrated mass hate-rallies; extreme nationalism; closing borders; embracing mass detention and deportation; using borders to protect selected industries; embedding authoritarian rule by rewarding capitalist elites; rejecting international norms; attacking domestic democratic processes; attacking courts and the rule of law; glorifying the military and demanding loyalty oaths; proclaiming unchecked power; relegating women to subordinate roles[1].
When asked about parallels with Trump and the Trump presidency, the “fascism experts” engaged in straw-dog reasoning by ticking off numerous and obvious ways in which the 45th United States president and the United States during the Trump years fell short of the committed doctrinal fascism of Mussolini and Hitler and the fully consolidated fascist regimes of interwar and WWII Europe. Nothing less than Classic Coke passed muster for these sweet-rooted connoisseurs of pure historical fascism, who chattered about the absence of “real fascism” in Trump and Trumpism as they missed and/or unduly downplayed remarkable political, rhetorical, ideological, and movement continuities between fascism old and new while failing to grasp contemporary US and global fascism as a movement and politics – a movement and politics with a very real (if clumsy and more “instinctive” than doctrinal) fascist cult leader in the most powerful job of the most powerful nation in world history from January 20, 2017 through January 20, 2021.
The next presidential election in the US should be very telling as the populace will once again have to choose between the ribald Republican strongman and some hapless Democrat empty suit.
The very last thing we need in the world is a military conflict with China, David Vine writes in Counterpunch about the folly of taking the Cold War path again.
“The Biden administration and the United States must do better than resuscitate the strategies of the nineteenth century and the Cold War era. Rather than further fueling a regional arms race with yet more bases and weapons development in Australia, U.S. officials could help lower tensions between Taiwan and mainland China, while working to resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea. In the wake of the Afghan War, President Biden could commit the United States to a foreign policy of diplomacy, peace-building, and opposition to war rather than one of endless conflict and preparations for more of the same. AUKUS’s initial 18-month consultation period offers a chance to reverse course.
Recent polling suggests such moves would be popular. More than three times as many in the U.S. would like to see an increase, rather than a decrease, in diplomatic engagement in the world, according to the nonprofit Eurasia Group Foundation. Most surveyed would also like to see fewer troop deployments overseas. Twice as many want to decrease the military budget as want to increase it.
The world barely survived the original Cold War, which was anything but cold for the millions of people who lived through or died in the era’s proxy wars in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Can we really risk another version of the same, this time possibly with Russia as well as China? Do we want an arms race and competing military buildups that would divert trillions of dollars more from pressing human needs while filling the coffers of arms manufacturers? Do we really want to risk triggering a military clash between the United States and China, accidental or otherwise, that could easily spin out of control and become a hot, possibly nuclear, war in which the death and destruction of the last 20 years of “forever wars” would look small by comparison.
That thought alone should be chilling. That thought alone should be enough to stop another Cold War before it’s too late.”
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.
It seems like William Greider was frighteningly correct with the thesis of his book from 1997. This snippet from Counterpunch has raised my curiousity enough to make it point to borrow or buy the book.
“Back in 1997, Greider wrote a book, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, which warned that competition from the developing world would put downward pressure on the wages of manufacturing workers and that large trade deficits could lead to serious shortfalls in aggregate demand, meaning weak growth and high unemployment. The book was widely trashed by economists, including the leading liberals of the day. In particular, they ridiculed the idea that trade deficits could lead to unemployment, after all, the Fed could just lower interest rates to make up any shortfall in demand.
Two decades later, most of the mainstream of the profession accepts the idea of “secular stagnation,” meaning a sustained shortfall in demand that leaves the economy operating well below its potential level of output. With interest rates having bottomed out at zero following the Great Recession, most economists would concede that the Fed does not have the ability to boost the economy back to full employment, or at least not with its traditional tool of lowering the federal funds rate.
While economists generally do not like to talk about the trade deficit as a cause of secular stagnation, fans of logic and arithmetic point out that if we had balanced trade rather than a deficit of 3.0 percent of GDP, it would provide the same boost to the economy as an increase in government spending of 3.0 percent of GDP or roughly $650 billion a year in today’s economy. There is little doubt that would be a huge boost to demand and would have gone far towards ending the problem of secular stagnation. (There is no magic to balanced trade. I only use it as a point of reference.)
There were certainly things that Greider got wrong in One World, Ready or Not, as he did in his other economic writings. He was a journalist not an economist. Still, as one great economist commented, it is better to be approximately right than exactly wrong, a position that described many of his economist critics.”
The book, read now, will probably read like a fairly large “I told you so”, but I think it would be interesting to see what evidence he used to make the assertion.
bleatmop
Mystro
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