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We progressives WARNED Obama not ot make George Bush's war his war. He didn't listen. Now he must accept the responsility for the loss of civilian life every time one of those drones snuffs out an Afghan village.
So is Obama.
Monday, August 22, 2011
While U.S. troops are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq in the supposed fight against terrorists, those same terrorists are now being handed control of an entire country, along with its lucrative resources, as a massive NATO bombardment of Tripoli aids the Al-Qaeda backed rebels in their overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi.
http://www.infowars.com/nato-hands-terrorists...
And Biden, too, by your logic.
We warned Obama that "ya gotta dance with the folk that brung ya." Instead he bent over backward to appease conservative and fascistic Republicans in the name of "bipartisanship."
Now he's paying the cost. His administration could end up (in American terms) like Kerensky, who wasn't wise enough to distance himself for the stupid wars the Czar had gotten Russia in. Or maybe like the weak centrist/liberal Weimar Republic during the 1920s & 30s. A lost opportunity.
-Savant
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ZAius' notion of "critical thinking" is simply MAKING UP things and then dogmatically peddling his fabrications as facts. He's like a Nazi propagandist who simply repeats lies over and over wikth the idea that sheer repetition will get his lies accepted.
Communists, Socialist, Anarchists, Greens--all in the Democratic Party. LOL! For one, Anarchists will hardly join any political party--not even a leftist one. It conflicts with their anarchist convinctions. Communists in the Democratic Party? Shades of McCarthyism! I supposed Zombie Zaius has a secret list of at 20 Commies in Obama's administration. LOL! Of Course, Zaius made it up.
-Savant
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In short, FoxNews is bad for one's mental health.cording to your link CNN invites more republicans than Fox invites dems
" FAIR, a liberal media watchdog group tabulated five months of two of the most popular TV news discussion shows -- Special Report with Brit Hume on FOX, and Wolf Blitzer Reports on CNN.
Both programs featured Republican guests (generally considered conservative) more often than Democratic guests (generally considered to be more liberal).
But, as shown here, the FOX News channel favored Republicans by a margin of about 8:1.
The same survey showed that FOX News featured white guests 93 percent of the time and male guests 91 percent of the time. According to the Nielsen Company, more than 95 percent of FOX News viewers are white.
According to a recent study by the Center For American Progress more than 90 percent of talk radio programming ranges from conservative to right-wing radical.
But is there a downside?
A University of Maryland study reported in late 2010 that the audience for FOX News was far less accurately informed about world and national events than the audiences of other news sources, especially public broadcasting (NPR, PBS) and MSNBC.
The study found that there was a direct relationship between the amount of time spend watching FOX News and holding false information on key issues of the day. No partisan divide was found in the study. People who watched FOX, and voted Democratic were just as likely to be incorrect on major issues as the FOX viewers who voted Republican."
-Savant
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if we could actually focus in this thread on the topic of the thread, we might actually discover new ways to bring about liberating social transformation....Or at least contribute to such discovery.A man who knows exactly what he wants and explains it so well!
Ok; so whats the plan?
There are people who think some kind of progressive political party independent of Democrats, Republicans and corporate interests is what's needed.
Others speak of forming new communities of fraternity and resistance to the established order. Cooperatives, communes, etc.
Some of the programs of the original Black Panther Party or Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee might have contemporary relevance, and not just for the AA community. Perhaps we can discuss some of this. Some of Dr. King's ideas relating to the Poor Peoples Campaign would definitely be worth revisiting, especially his newer ideas of developing more REVOLUTIONARY forms of nonviolence.(As you know, I'm doing some research on King and am still working this out).
What the people of the Middle East are showing through their democratic insurgency is that PEOPLE POWER is often stronger than political or economic power, that "soul force" (as King like to call it) can overpower physical force, and (as the Panthers used to say) "the spirit of the people is stronger than the oppressor's technology."
We are still exploring ways of bringing that truth to the fore. Unfortunately, the distractions of a score of clowns in this thread is contributing nothing to our efforts.
-Savant
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The mention of robotics is a point of no small importance. Capitalism has long expanded profit by revolutionizing technology, or what Marxists might call the "instruments of production." But hitherto capitalist revolutions have expanded wealth by creating labor saving technologies which increased production while requiring less lebor to do so. But with the electronic revolution--especially robotics and computerization--capitalist technological innovations move frmo merely labor saving devices to LABOR REPLACING devices. This may well underlie much of the current economic crisis. Capitalists enriched themselves off the labor of others--expropriating the labor of working people in the West, and superexploting peoples in the poorer countries. But now the system seems to produce more wealth without labor than with it, making work and workers increasingly irrelevant. The old industries disappear, actual production of things is displaced by financial wheeling and dealing. Wall Street pirates enrich themselves while pillaging the nation and the globe.Easily and especially with robot mechanization, etc., the world could be structured to provide for all, and many WOULD in fact have plenty of time to pursue what they want to do. This is portrayed in utopian fashion on the TV show Star Trek. People are ensured food and shelter, they only have to figure out how they want to contribute. And of course there is a lot higher ambient consciousness, so you don't have the sort of fat sluggards laying about that we do in the USA.
This could be done. Those in power don't want it. They don't even want a USA worker to have a decent Union job with a good wage. They don't want us to have quality goods. They want us fat and stupid. And that's what they're getting until y'all FIGHT BACK.
But the average person can only earn a living by means of "jobs", work that's being eliminated or exported abroad (allowing cheaper labor, lower wages). But if people can't earn they also can't buy, and so capitalism may be cutting its own throat.
Now as human lives are destroyed by this system, there will be a reaction. But what kind? Will popular energies be captured in a right wing fascist movement? A violent revolution? AA NONVIOLENT REVOLUTION? For me, the most desirable alternative would be a NONVIOLENT REVOLUTION, if possible. The LEAST DESIRABLE would be a FASCIST America, which is also quite possible.
But it is clear that things cannot go on as before.
-Savant
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YET AND STILL.....
Yet the electronic technology, which has basically rendered labor superfluous, also holds open possilities of new dimensions of FREEDOM in a post-capitalist cooperative society. In a democratic, cooperative society in which the wealth and technology serve human needs rather than corporate profits and elite political interests, a measure of abundance and and leisure could be available to the entire population.
Not only freedom from want, from economic and political oppression, but freedom FOR human social and peraonal actualization can become the universal birhright of every man, woman and child on earth.
A richer cultural life would be possible. A REAL democracy may be possible for the first time in human history.
I do not say that this is inevitable. I merely say that it is POSSIBLE.
And that it may be achievable by a nonviolent revolutionary movement.
-Savant
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What has REVOLUTION to do with appeasing the oppressor? The latter day MLK was thinking in terms of fighting IMPERIALISM and CAPITALISM. He was drawing connections between racism and exploitation, and between the struggle against colonialism at home, the the struggle abroad.
At one level the issue of violence vs nonviolence is overly simplstic, but is also a question (at least in part) of METHODS.
At any rate, King wasn't slain because he appeased the oppressor. People who appease the oppressor (like Clarence Thomas) are rewarded.
-Savant
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When you ponder only the obstacles and not the possibilities, you defeat yourself from the beginning. Human beings are capable of more than they know. And if everything is not possible, it is only in the STRUGGLE itself that we discover what is possible and what isn't. We must INVENT the revolution, not give ourselves all sorts of reasons why it can't happen. Every tyranny in history which people have sought to end seemed invincible at one time.
The power of American slaveholders seemed immovable. But it was moved. Many people thought that the seemingly impregnable "Militant South" was immovable. But in the 1950s & 60s it was moved.
Even if we considered armed revolutions, the king in France and other lands seemed invincible once. Yet the monarchy fell. Defiance of British rule in America seemed madness to many, as Britain was then the mightiest nation on earth. Imagine Bolivia taking on the USA...or better imagine Vietnam defying America? Impossible? No more so said leaders of the Vietnamese Revolution than your Washington or Jefferson defying England.
I want to suggest that conditions may be ripe, or ripening, for a global revolution against racial, class, and patriarchal oppression; against social and political tyranny. And maybe for the first time in history a NONVIOLENT global revolution is possible.
I don't say that I KNOW this to be the case any more than the insurgents of 1776, or the defiant community in Montgomery in 1955, could be certain of victory. But if we don't make the effort we defeat ourselves before we start.
And if everyone is not "down" for the revolution, than let's begin uniting with all who are.
-Savant
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Good morning. I got about an hour befor I head back to the compus. I see you guys are still at it.
But I think it's kind of odd to WITNESS nonviolent revolutionary movements now sweeping the Middle East, and then read that there's no struggle. I don't thinkk those insurgents are appeasing the oppressors, oppressors whose goons attack the insurgents with bullets and molotov cocktails.
Of course, we can't know how this will turn out. And it turn out differently in different countries--differently in Egypt than in Yemen or Jordan.
But isn't that the same with VIOLENT revolutions. When rebels in a then underdeveloped land of thirteen English colonies presumed they could take of might of England---the no. 1 supperpower of the era---many observers thought the American revolutionaries to be mad.
And there was no way of knowing THEN, that the whole thing might failed and the leaders executed.
It could have ended en defeat like the 1848 revolutions. The same with the French Revolution of 1789, or the Russian Revolution of 1917.
If there is a desire to EVOLVE, then that may mean re-inventing the Revolution itself. Is it not possible that a NONVIOLENT revolutionary process is itself an EVOLVING MOVEMENT FORWARD?
If the old methods of violence can be replaced by newer and evolving methods of nonviolent social transformation, this may indicate a higher level of human devdlopment, freedom and civilization itself.
Do I KNOW that this is will happen? Of course not. Not any more than previous pioneers knew.
But with all the depression stagnations and bloody setbacks of history, history also is a story of humankinds great forward advances and the overcoming of barriers?
A world without hunger, tyranny, violence and war? Laughable some say....
Cynics once that the a world not ruled by absolute monarchs was laughable daydreaming...a world without slaves? Impossible, thought the eminent Aristotle. Impossible thought the slaveholders and many non-slaveholders in America.
End Jim Crow and disfranchisement? That must have seemed like a pipedream. Ah, but history reveals surprises---not all of them tragic.
-Savant
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"At some point young men may have to refuse to register for the military, and do this in an ORGANIZE manner. Civil Rights organizatons (what's left of them) must EXPAND their vision of what civil rights means. Not only a fight against racism, but also against poverty, class oppression and sexism. Against imperialism.
There's an old saying that we should THINK globally while acting locally. We can support progressive initiatives like Bob Moses' Algebra Project. We can support progressive organizations of women in our community. If they don't exist,create them. One has work where one is, but not be limited to where one is.
Some of my colleagues and I are doing some work to help understand and clarify the meaning of the Middle East revolt for our own struggles here. Progressive community associations, unions, churches can be sites where one can act and promote the ideal of a radically democratic, nonviolent cooperative society.
At some point young men may have to refuse to register for the military, and do this in an ORGANIZE manner. Civil Rights organizatons (what's left of them) must EXPAND their vision of what civil rights means. Not only a fight against racism, but also against poverty, class oppression and sexism. Against imperialism.
Black nationalists (what's left of them) need to rediscover the revolutionary internationalist perspective and vision of Malcolm X. and other things. Well, I'm being called to a meeting as I type.
And I will be discussion with colleagues about the prospects of forming a progressive association of faculty, students and "cultural workers" to aid in the struggle for social justice in this area, and elsewhere. First let COMMIT, then in the struggle we will learn how the revolution is made in the very praxis of making it.
Black nationalists (what's left of them) need to rediscover the revolutionary internationalist perspective and vision of Malcolm X. and other things."
I agree with this 110%.
-Yamato_Kev
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http://www.topix.com/forum/afam/T007AI7IFB3PC2B8P/p87
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