JohnHenry.US

Category: Politics

  • Health Care A Right?

    Is health care a right, a privilege, or a commodity? This began as a quite different post back in 2009. In 2023, I’ve reworked it to generalize elements that were personalized. It’s a little startling how little has changed about the steadfast position of the right that human beings somehow have a right to live but not a right to the things that keep them alive.

    The refrain is now almost cliché: “health care is a right, not a privilege.”

    Inevitably this observation draws out right-wing trolls, usually calling themselves “libertarians,” to insist that the idea that health care is a right somehow means that we’re all entitled to the services of medical professionals without those medical professionals being compensated, which is just nonsense and has nothing to do with the argument, but makes for a great little chest-thumping FREEDOM! scream for those whose idea of “freedom” begins and ends with their freedom to obstruct the freedom of everyone they don’t like.

    Typically, those arguments look a bit like this (and to be clear: these are all statements made in the course of the original conversation from which the 2009 version of this article was taken…and repeated constantly before and since.

    Rights are things that one has access to without another person giving up their own rights to Life, Liberty, or Property. Unless you are a doctor or surgeon and can diagnose and/or fix yourself, then you do not have a right to health care.

    Should the federal government provide your food for you? Should we all get free college through the government? Should HUD provide homes fr every person who decides they want to own one? And if you believe any of those things to be true, where does it end?

    I’m not making any argument for or against any sort of health care reform; I’m simply stating a fact: health care is not a right, it’s a commodity.

    Nobody seems to be interested in socializing health care on a local level, just the Federal.

    The idea of a free society in and of itself prohibits the concept of things such as “a right to health care”.

    The argument that a right to health care entails by necessity the violation of the rights of others to make a living is at best specious and at worst servile and self-destructive. This has always been one of the manipulative, dishonest, and underhanded tactics employed by the “libertarians” and right wingers: as soon as you start talking about people not having to pay out of pocket for health care, they start talking about health care providers being expected to work for free, which is simply not the argument being made.

    The entire framing also overlooks the basic fact that the government is of, by, and for us. Yes, it is precisely the government’s job to ensure we all have food, shelter, clothing, health care, and all the other things necessary to protect and empower those rights we love to talk so much about. That is the purpose of a democratic government (including the form of democratic government we call a constitutional republic).

    Then they’ll discuss all these other “rights,” like the “right to obtain and choose my own food,” but entirely ignore the reality that this isn’t a right; if it was, food would be free. I have the right to choose which food I’ll exercise the privilege of my material wealth to acquire, and that’s all.

    Even if I did have a “right to obtain food,” what good does that do if I don’t have any teeth to eat it with because I can’t afford dental care, or I can’t digest it because I can’t get treatment for the ulcers that are slowly metastasizing in my gut because I can’t afford to have them treated?

    In the world described by these folks, people fall into three categories: the plutocracy, the avaricious marks who support the actions of the plutocracy because they think they too will someday be greedy and selfish enough to become a plutocrat if only they wear their brown lipstick thick enough (this group is nearly always the one making these arguments), and the poor, who don’t deserve to be healthy because if they wanted to be healthy they shouldn’t have chosen to be poor.

    Self-governance and deregulation are not the solution to our current problems, in health care and in so many other areas of life in the twenty-first century: they are the cause.

    This particular brand of “libertarianism” is marked mostly by freedom of industry from regulation and a callous, selfish, and frankly heartless disregard for the well-being of other people masquerading as a stoic and perverse sort of social Darwinism, i.e. “only the strong survive, so long as I am allowed to define what constitutes strength in terms that are most advantageous to me in my current situation.” 

    The reality is that universal health care is not “taking from” the medical industry, but rather spreading the burden of cost among all of us collectively, consistently, across time, rather than the current reactive system that relies on treatment at the greatest expense to individuals in response to acute health issues.  Rather than trying to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars at once in response to a disease or injury, universal health care allows us all to pay a little bit at a time perpetually into a system that ensures we all get health care when we need it. This also neutralizes the constant demand of capitalism that everything be constantly more expensive in order to ensure profit margins.

    (Sidebar:  don’t believe the hype regarding long waits, death panels, etc.; while it’s true that various socialized models have various flaws, and that one of those flaws is that sometimes care is delayed, the idea that everyone will suddenly be on years-long waiting lists for acute life-saving treatment is a myth; a scare tactic, a boogeyman waved in the face of the frightened, credulous, and uniformed, in much the same way that “socialism” and “Islam” and “the terrorists win” have been. The only truth to the assertion is that truth which is deliberately created post hoc by those working to dismantle socialized health care systems, putting up roadblocks, preventing access to education to ensure there are sufficient professional to staff such a system, and then blaming the system they’ve broken because it’s not perfect.)

    Our constitution guarantees the “right” to  life and liberty.

    Can you have either of these, if you don’t have your health?

    If the answer to the above question is “no,” then health care must, by derivation of the enumerated rights, also be a right itself. 

    If one has the right to liberty, then one has the right to everything that enables that liberty.  While it is true that these derived rights may sometimes clash irreconcilably with reality – no matter what rights I have, if I’m born without eyeballs or optic nerves the current state of medical technology can’t make me see, even though from a legal standpoint I have the right to see – this does not invalidate the derived rights as rights per se; it only demonstrates that our rights are limited in fact by the caprice of fate.  I have the right to be an auto mechanic; I don’t have the skills, nor the inclination.  My eyeball-less self has the right to see; I just don’t have the tools to see, and in the extreme case I gave, there exists no substitute tool that could be made available to me by society.  Even so, we as a society have agreed to provide our best available substitutes, from alternate languages to guide dogs to audible signals at crosswalks.

    QED:  Health care is a right; we as a society have consistently agreed in many situations to provide health care or a working alternative in any number of situations.  Ergo health care is not only a right, it is a right that is almost universally acknowledged when framed in a friendly context like helping the blind people by putting in audible crossing signals, rather than a less “sexy” context like helping the poor keep their teeth and bodies, and thus their minds, in the best working order that is attainable by the consensual application of medical technology, and in doing so ensuring that they have the ability and inclination – even if gently coerced by a sense of debt to society – to be productive citizens.

    The bottom line is this:  regardless of whether you define it as a right, a privilege, or a ‘commodity,’ universal health care – including birth control and comprehensive sex education free of factual distortion by religious institutions pushing agendas of abstinence and strict heterosexuality, among many other health care needs – is a critical necessity to the survival of our species.

    The reality remains that we are all in this together, and if we don’t get together and work to keep the people we have alive while working to control population growth and the abuse of finite resources through comprehensive reproductive health education and care, this argument will be moot…because sooner rather than later, there won’t be anyone to argue about it anyway.

  • McCain Hands Obama The Presidency

    This is a curated post originally written Sept. 25, 2008. It requires a little context; this was the last two weeks of the US presidential campaign pitting Republican Senator John McCain against Democratic Senator Barack Obama. There was a fairly serious conflict happening in congress regarding a congressional debate over a proposed funding bailout of “Wall Street” investment banks, and McCain made the abrupt and surprising decision to “suspend his campaign” in order to go back to Washington and debate the bill in the Senate. There was also a scheduled debate for the day after, September 26th, which initially McCain had said he would not attend but he ended up doing so.

    For a more in-depth review of those events I direct you to this contemporary article/timeline at National Public Radio.

    It should be noted that the question of whether McCain would’ve fared any better in the election had he not done that is not as open as my writing here would suggest; Obama was enjoying a strong campaign run and the great likelihood was he would win regardless. Still, it’s an interesting look into that election in its last few weeks, and in the major missteps made by McCain that certainly didn’t help his performance, whether it can be rightly said that it cost him the election or not. -jh, 3-Oct-2023

    A final note; this was about a year before I began my college education, and the discerning reader will note some minor errors in the use of labels and language, such as referring to myself as a “liberal” rather than the more accurate “leftist.” It was precisely these sorts of errors that led me to choose the educational path I did.

    So by now the evisceration of John McCain by David Letterman last night is fairly old news (even though it just happened).

    What I hate about this is that Dave made a lot of points I’d been planning to make myself.

    While it would be easy for the liberal in me to take great joy in watching the Palin legend implode, the reality is it just kind of makes me sad. With all due respect to my Republican friends, I just don’t see how you can continue to support the McCain-Palin ticket after this week. Not only did McCain completely blow a chance to take a lead on the current financial crisis, he managed to hand Obama the election while doing so.

    Consider the position that McCain is now in. If he refuses to attend the debate, Obama can blast him for lack of multitasking skills and an indifference to the needs of the voters to be informed about their candidates’ positions. If McCain attends the debate, then he’s reversed himself, as it’s clear that this is simply not an issue that can be meaningfully resolved in two days.

    Perhaps more importantly, however, is that McCain has once again tipped his hand in several different ways. First, he’s impulsive – sometimes recklessly so – in making decisions. Second, he spins and spins; it would take a truly dedicated Believer to not suspect that the real motivation for McCain wanting to delay the debates is rooted in not only his own lack of preparation, but in a fear that his running mate will fare even worse in the veep debates. Third, it says something very unpleasant about the man’s leadership skills that when the merde hits the fan, his reaction is to slam on the breaks, panic, and demand drastic changes in plan that aren’t actually justified by the situation.

    But all of this is secondary to the real revalation hidden behind McCain’s ‘suspension’ of his campaign – the fact that he has zero confidence in his running mate to step in and handle the duties that he would otherwise be performing. There’s no reason that Palin couldn’t have done Letterman last night. There’s no reason that she couldn’t step in for him nearly anywhere other than the debate itself, but it wasn’t even suggested.

    Palin’s performance thus far has been utterly abysmal outside of her stump speech – which aged so fast you’d think it was suffering from Progeria. Her three major interviews thus far have been populated with stock, rehearsed answers, a glaring lack of meaningful responses, and a recurring impersonation of a deer in the headlights of an oncoming Peterbilt. She even managed to make Katie Couric look menacing and tough, and with no disrespect intended to Ms. Couric, that’s not exactly her strong suit. I mean, come on. “I’ll find out and get back to you?” Did a moose eat her homework?

    The shine is off the Palin apple, I’m afraid, and what’s left is just not much to look at. Throughout this campaign, Obama’s decisions and responses have been measured, reasoned, and careful. McCain’s have been impulsive, reckless, fearful, and pandering, from his selection of Palin as running mate to this latest kerfluffle over ‘suspending the campaign.’

    I submit to you that John McCain has indeed handed the Presidency of the United States to Barack Obama, and now it seems the only thing left for the Republican party to do is leave him as big a mess as they can possibly manage, so they can blame him for not cleaning it up. At every possible turn, McCain has said and done exactly the worst possible thing, and frankly at this point my expectations for him are so low that if he just manages to not blow his top and say something ridiculously impulsive, it will count as a victory.

    It’s a pity, really. Eight years ago, I could have seen myself voting for McCain. Unfortunately, the 2008 John McCain is just the same old neo-conservative, trickle-down, right-wing panderer that the previous candidates from his party have been. Any touch of the ‘maverick’ he once was is long gone; while some folks are just coming to that realization, for me the turning point was when he agreed to speak at Liberty University, after criticizing other candidates for speaking at Bob Jones and labelling Liberty founder Jerry Falwell an ‘agent of intolerance.’

    Politicians are human beings. I accept that, probably more so than most voters. I don’t expect them to be perfect. But McCain has been stepping on his johnson for years, and has made a complete mess of this run at the presidency. The Palin selection was a horrendous move, but then to flat-out lie to Letterman about ‘rushing back to Washington’ only to be caught on feed talking to CBS news when he was supposed to be on Letterman is just the icing on the cake. He flat-out lied. Whether it was appropriate for him to appear on a comedy program or not is beside the point – he could have said that honestly. “Dave, I love being on your show and you’ve been a good friend for a lot of years, but I just don’t feel like a late-night comedy/variety show is the place for a presidential candidate to be in the middle of an economic crisis. I’m going to do the news with Katie tonight, can I take a rain check for say two weeks from now?” That was the approach Obama took with his SNL appearance a couple of weeks ago when Hurricane Ivan was heading for Galveston – he backed out honestly.

    With his bumbling ineptitude, his cynical attempts to pander to any voting bloc he can define, and the consistently dishonest tone of his campaign from the lies in his advertising to this most recent gaffe with Letterman, John McCain has shown clearly that the only change he’s going to bring to Washington is the name plates on the doors.

    Hero? Absolutely. Presidential material? Not on your life, and frankly I think he’s realizing it.

    So on January 20th as President Barack Hussein Obama is sworn in as the 44th President of the United States…be sure to spare a moment of thanks for his opponent in this race. Obama couldn’t have won without McCain’s diligent effort to throw the fight.

  • What Real Media Bias Looks Like (2010)

    (Curated post originally published Apr 8 2010)

    The subtle ways in which some media outlets will deliberately attempt to manipulate public opinion rather than just reporting the facts never ceases to amaze me.  This article about the health care bill provides an excellent example of what real media bias looks like – the subtle manipulation of public opinion though the use of loaded words and phrases to play on existing fears or create new ones, which in turn feeds conflict and drives interest in the news, which creates profits for the news companies.  A given organization or writer may also unwittingly wear their bias on their sleeve.

    Such as this article from McClatchy today:  Health care overhaul spawns mass confusion for public

    In this case, a series of reasonably neutral facts are embedded in a story full of negative anecdotes, some of which make deliberate pretense to fact for the sake of adding negative tone.  To wit:

    “They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com

    “Obama care” is a buzzphrase for all of the negative hype associated with the health care reform bill, used exclusively by conservative commentators and agitators.  I’ve yet to see a credible news source, or a credible commenter on either side of the issue refer to the bill as “Obama care” (or “Obamacare”).  Further, this is the third paragraph in the article – so one of the first evoked emotions is resentment by the conservative “base” against those evil greedy welfare leeches who want a free ride from ol’ Karl Adolph Obama. [ed. note 2023: this was long before Obama & the left began embracing the label]

    So if you already lean conservative on the issue, by the end of paragraph three you’re already pissed.

    It continues on with a claim that call centers have been “inundated” with requests from people who think that they have OMGRITENAOFREEDRUGS.  This strikes me as a highly questionably assessment; I participate widely in conversation on this subject with a very diverse group of people and viewpoints, and I’m not sure I’ve heard anyone who thought that the recent health care bill created immediate free health care for everyone…although in an ideal world that’s what it would have effectively done via single-payer.

    (Of course if we’re all healthy, then we can think about things other than needing medical care.  Things like how to properly detect bias in ostensibly objective news articles, for instance.  I can’t imagine anyone who would want to prevent THAT…)

    Watch the REAL media bias:

    • Consumers are cast as “frustrated” and “confused,” the article says, leveraging the power of suggestion to create confusion where there is none (the HCRB is actually pretty strarightforward, considering the scope and source of the thing) and further inflame negative opinion. 
    • A “new wave of inquiries” is coming; laid-off workers on COBRA are going to lose funding (cue a bunch of people on unemployment complaining about LOSING their socially subsidized health insurance for the unemployed while simultaneously railing against socialist health care policies).
    • A breast cancer survivor (cue sympathy!) is “confused” (oh that poor dear, how could that rotten Obama and his socialist minions have done this!) as to whether she should “try to access private coverage again some day” (Of course she should, if that’s the best option available, and that’s so self-evident as a result of both media coverage and the broad availability of both bill and summaries that I’m forced to wonder if “Ann Wooten” even exists.  Prior to te HCRB, of course, private coverage was the ONLY option other than abject poverty, and it wasn’t an available option at all and never would be to “Ann Wooten” due to her pre-existing condition.)
    • The state employee whines about how long the reform will take; a Hollywood Librul AND Furrner shows up to gloat down his nose at the rabble because he has good insurance through his labor union; small business owners are cast as confused and lost and at risk of cost increases or fines, with vague suggestions of IRS entanglements and labor cuts to “contain costs” – and of course “containing costs” implies that there are new costs to be “contained,” costs that will of course be well in excess of current costs.  The problem is there’s no data to support that implication.
      • One of my favorite passages: 
        Dimarob said many small businesses wouldn’t be able to participate. First they must do research to see whether they qualify. “It requires them to understand the intricacies,” she said.

        What I love about this is that it’s completely meaningless, but it SOUNDS scary.  “Many?”  What is “many?”  Is that a majority percentage?  Or is it “five,” which is indeed many but sure isn’t much among the millions of small businesses in this country?  The great thing is, I can’t find a provision anywhere that would prevent ANY small business from participating – indeed, one of the biggest complaints about this bill is that PARTICIPATION IS MANDATORY.  So how the hell are small businesses going to “not be able to participate?”  Uh-oh…look out, Joe, here come the INTRICACIES for you to have to sort through!  OMG WHY DOES GOVERNMENT MAKE RUNNING A BUSINESS SO HARRRRRRD?

    All of the above aspects of the article add to an overall negative tone – this health care bill is clearly confusing, expensive, and puts at risk the ability of small business (HI JOE THE PLUMBER!) to hire employees and pay their bills.  It makes cancer patients exhaust themselves trying to run the maze of regulation; it leaves parents unable to cover their adult children all the way until SEPTEMBER!!!  It forces small business owners to deal with more paperwork and “intricacies!”  It’s so EVULLLL!

    But it’s not just about accentuating the negative – you also have to negate the positive.  Our intrepid reporter accomplishes this with aplomb, leaving no positive aspect of this legislation untouched by her blighted point of view:

    • Rather than parents grateful for the ability to cover their kids an extra eight years, they’re parents who “have heard” that they can do this, “however” they have to wait until September.
    • Every single positive statement about the new law or the administration is delivered with a qualifier.  Every.  Single.  One. 
      “The administration is launching a public education campaign, BUT…”
      ”Parents can cover currently ineligible children, HOWEVER…”
      “Those with good coverage aren’t worried, BUT…” 
      “He explained many highlights…[h]owever..”
    • The software engineer who defends the bill’s clarity – the only person quoted who had anything positive to say about it – still has his caveats about detail. 
    • Obama has been “touting” a tax credit for small business…note how nasty that sounds, as opposed to the actual objective fact:  Obama has discussed small business tax credits along with the rest of the bill, because it’s now the law and people need to understand it and as President part of his job is to try to help people understand it because he’s the number one talking head in the country.  But rather than that, let’s choose words and phrases that a) make this sound like it’s still one mans quixotic crusade rather than a matter of accomplished federal law and b) then make the president sound like a snake-oil salesman “touting” the latest nostrum.
    • And of course, the president has been traveling to “talk to ordinary Americans.”  Because of course he couldn’t be “explaining” or “meeting” with people – he’s got to be “talking to” them, like a professor or a judge…and let’s not forget that the President is anything but an “ordinary American,” shall we?

    And then the same people who read this article as though it’s an example of objective, fact-based reporting sit and sneer at how dumb the people quoted in the article are for not realizing that their communist dreams of a free ride at the expense of us good, christian, white people who pay taxes are in vain.

    This is what our political discourse has come to, and this is why.  If we don’t start using our heads for something other than a place to put our iPod ear buds, we will continue getting the government, and the country, that we’ve earned.

  • Thanks, America (2008)

    It’s still sinking in.

    I’m 38 years old.  I was born in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War.

    In my lifetime, my country has been led by:

    • A crook
    • An oaf
    • A man whose good intentions and peaceful nature rendered him too soft on foreign aggression and inept in the management of the economy
    • A bad actor who shut millions of people out of the process of government, refused to confront the most pressing domestic issues of his time, and created a culture of greed that we have yet to grow out of
    • A spy
    • A philanderer
    • Another oaf, this one with an unfortunate mandate provided by circumstance that has allowed him to abuse our military and destroy our standing in the world

    Yesterday, on November 4th, 2008, for the first time in my life…we elected a leader.  A man of courage, of vision, of honor, and of hope.  A man who has spoken his mind, stood his ground, and encouraged us all to reject the politics of hate and fear.

    A black man.

    Last night at 11 pm EST, The United States of America turned the page on nearly two hundred and fifty years of unrealized ideals and unfulfilled potential.  We the people have rejected hate, fear, and division.  We have rejected hypocrisy and greed and envy, and for the first time in our history, we have taken a major step toward living up to that precious founding assertion that all men are created equal.

    Even as recently as a year ago, it was inconceivable to me that a black man could be elected President.  I liked Obama, and I wanted him to win…but I didn’t think he could.  I didn’t think we were ready, as a country. to elect a black person to the Presidency.

    I am proud and honored to say today that I was wrong.

    I am sure that Barack Obama will make mistakes.  I am sure that he will do things I don’t agree with.  I am sure there will be controversy and conflict.

    But I am equally sure that never again can the world look at us and say ‘before you take the mote from our eye, remove the beam from your own.’

    The next four years will be tough.  You don’t need me to tell you what’s going on in the world, you’re well aware.  We have a lot of problems to solve, at home and abroad.  We have errors to correct, and we have some major repairs to make in our systems and processes.  We have a baddly tattered national psyche to heal – one that has never really been healthy in the first place – and we have some soul-searching to do.

    A week ago today I wrote, “…it’s not just time for them to change…it’s time for us to change.”

    Last night, in the most significant positive historical event of my lifetime, we began that change, and for the first time in my life I can say without hesitation or qualification:

    I am proud to be an American.

    I don’t want to get too wrapped up in navel-gazing.  There is work to be done, and it’s up to us to do it, working with our leaders instead of working in spite of them.  This is not the end of struggle, merely the end of the beginning of a long journey.

    But at long last, that journey has well and truly begun.

    Savor this moment, if Obama was your candidate.  If he wasn’t, consider that maybe you have bought in to ideals that are less than ideal, and maybe it’s time for all of us to look inside ourselves and see what could use some adjustment.  Rest assured that although I have great faith and confidence in President-Elect Obama, I will hold him to the same standard, if not a higher one, that I have held our previous leaders.  Don’t think that if you are a card-carrying Democrat or liberal, that your agenda just got a blank check, because it didn’t – I suspect that those lawmakers on the left who still cling to their outmoded methods and ideologies (lookin at you here, Pelosi) are in for a bit of a rude awakening, because we’re still trillions of dollars in debt and we still have major steps and sacrifices to make, and there is much to be corrected and abandoned as useless on all facets of the political spectrum.  For too long, the starry-eyed idealism of our social conscience has been either untempered by pragmatism, or defeated by cynicism.  

    Today, we begin to find the balance.

    The whole world is indeed watching, and in this one night America has taken a major step to not just reclaim the honor and respect we have sometimes enjoyed in the world…but perhaps, for the first time in our history, to make a strong case for deserving it.

    And now…now we have to get to work on maintaining it.  Each of us has our part to play in rebuilding and building up this nation.  Some of us may not know what that role is yet…but we each have one, and it is vital.  If you don’t know yet where you’re going or what you’re doing, then my best advice to you is to work now to get yourself in fighting shape so that when the call comes, you’re prepared to answer.

    Yes, America, we can.

    My congratulations and my thanks to everyone who has played a part in making this happen.  

    Now let’s get to work.

  • The Price Of Fear (2008)

    Curated post, originally published 10-Oct-2008

    The lies and bile of the McCain campaign are officially Not Funny Anymore.

    I’ve been quietly concerned as I read and participate in various message groups and discussion fora at the level of seething hatred some McCain supporters – I won’t even call them conservatives at this point – have for Barack Obama.  We have seen a few scattered reports over the last week or so, mostly from Palin rallies but at McCain’s as well, of crowd members screaming such unjustified and ugly things as ‘traitor,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘liar,’ and worse.  In one instance, at a Palin rally, even the chilling refrain, “kill him!”

    This evening, I read this story, detailing how John McCain got booed at his own rally for saying that Obama is “a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”  The story includes quotes from McCain’s followers at a “town hall” style meeting, complete with ‘socialists taking over this country’ and ‘I don’t trust Obama…he’s an Arab.’  These are clearly the same people that many of us who support the Obama candidacy have been laughing off.  Let’s face it – they’re pretty damned stupid, making political decisions based on rumor, innuendo, and negative ads.  In the exercise of what is, regrettably, a fairly common liberal trait of condescension toward the credulous and naive, we have basically ignored these knuckle-dragging noisemakers because frankly, we find it difficult to believe that anyone is dumb enough to buy in to theridiculous, irrelevant nonsense being churned out by the McCain campaign.

    But it’s gone past funny over the last week.  There’s nothing at all funny about an American citizen shouting ‘kill him’ at a political rally.  There is nothing funny about accusing a presidential candidate of terrorism or treason.  

    People everywhere, across the political, religious, and ‘class’ spectra, are hurting, angry, and frightened.   As the Obama campaign has worked to stay positive – not always with great success – McCain-Palin and their Atwater-Rove-inspired hate machine have continued throwing the negativity in ever-increasing intensity toward Barack Obama.  The Republican’s haven’t just failed to control the negativity, they have actively encouraged it at every turn.  They intentionally stoked those fires in the mistaken belief that the solution to the ineffectiveness of their negative message is to ramp up the negativity; portraying Obama as a terrorist, someone to be afraid of, someone who cannot be trusted, someone who is ‘different than us.’

    And now, it’s spinning out of their control. 

    It seems to have finally dawned on Senator McCain that the politics of hate aren’t winning this election for him, and when he tried to rein them in…his own crowd turned on him. 

    Frankly, I don’t have enough respect for John McCain any more to believe that his attempt to be less negative toward Obama is motivated by any sense of shame, or of concern at the intensity of the hate he has engendered.  I think he just noticed – after weeks of failure – that his negativity isn’t bringing in the voters.  The problem is that in ‘energizing the base,’ McCain and Palin have given those who would themselves aspire to radical terrorism a sense of validation and righteousness.  

    John McCain has deliberately turned the slim possibility of Obama’s assassination into something that is frighteningly plausible.  We are faced with two possible scenarios:  either McCain is just too ignorant to have understood the power he was unleashing, or he understood it and unleashed it anyway because he cares more about getting elected than about the consequences of his filthy, digusting, fear- and hate-mongering tactics.

    Now – too late – he tries to put the brakes on, and like the fabled sorcerer’s apprentice, he is faced with the frightening fact that no matter what he does, the brooms continue to fetch water even as the house is flooding.

    I’m forced to wonder if McCain or his ‘brilliant’ team of strategists who have engineered this pretty hate machine have considered the fear that’s going through my mind right now…the fear of how big the explosion will be if one of these ignorant, hate-filled, seditious domestic terrorists actually manage to make a meaningful attempt on Barack Obama’s life.

    Senator McCain can’t un-ring this bell.  The brooms keep fetching and the water keeps pouring in, even as the apprentice who thought he was commanding the brooms is overwhelmed and drowned.

    And that’s a cute, funny little analogy, you know.  John McMickeymouse waving his wand ineffectually at all those disobedient brooms that he’s brought to life.  The problem is, it’s not funny anymore.  It’s getting ugly.  Bobby Kennedy ugly.  Abraham Lincoln ugly.

    John McCain has failed, miserably, in his first real test of leadership.  A leader would never have opened this Pandora’s box in the first place.  A leader knows that you do not set loose forces that you can’t control. A leader knows that in a place and time when people are already frightened, angry, and suspicious, to further encourage that and direct it against a political opponent can have dire consequences.

    John McCain brought those brooms to life.  The man is 72 years old and has been a national leader for nearly 30 of those years…and yet he lacked the foresight and judgment to consider what sorts of consequences would be in the list of potentialities if he chose to pour gasoline on that fire for the sake of his own ambition.

    If for no other reason, this stunning lack of judgment and blind ambition make it clear:  John McCain is not fit to be the President of the United States, and that hate-filled, bigoted, wretched joke of a woman he selected for his vice-president doesn’t deserve the slightest bit of attention or respect from the people of this country.  Time and time again, through poor judgment, through the abuse of power, through the malicious disregard for the sancitity of the offices they hold and seek, they have proven themselves profoundly unfit for service.

    Let’s just hope the gun they’ve loaded with such irresponsible avarice is never fired…unlike Barack Obama’s “relationship” with Bill Ayers, the results of such a tragedy are something that is really frightening.

  • Obama a Muslim? So What? (2008)

    Curated post, originally written Oct 10, 2008

    From Time Magazine, via http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20080918/us_time/maxedoutmoms

    That sentiment is echoed by Beth S, a factory worker in Cleveland who works the third shift so she can take her son to school and then to practices for the four sports he plays. Pausing recently at a Wal-Mart, she said: “Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I really don’t want to vote for McCain. You can tell he only cares about rich people. Sarah Palin wears glasses that cost $300. McCain’s wife wears Gucci clothes. Which means they don’t know anything about people like me.” Into that stew of assumptions, she adds: “I hear that Obama’s a Muslim. If he is a Muslim, that would be a problem, because the terrorists already attacked us.” (He’s not.)


    Dear Beth S and the rest of the “Obama’s A Muslim” crowd:

    I have a question to ask of you all.

    Let’s assume for a moment that Barack Obama really *is* a Muslim.  He prays toward Mecca five times a day and believes that Mohammed was the pen with which the Word of God was written.  It’s not true, never has been, there’s not the slightest shred of evidence that Obama ever so much as considered *being* a Muslim…but let’s assume for a moment that he is.

    This leaves us with a very important question.

    So what?  Why is this important?  Why is it relevant to the man’s leadership skills or vision for this country?

    And furthermore, why is it such a problem for one person to be a member of a religion with fundamentalist elements that are far removed from sanity, but perfectly okay for another? 

    I’ve been to Pentacostal churches.  Some of my people are Pentacostal.  Have you ever seen human beings “speaking in tongues?”  This is a sect that believes in taking the Bible literally – that every single word is the manifest Word of God, that contradictions are explained only by the reader’s inability to understand what is written – and in the gift of prophecy, that He (and of course God is ALWAYS a “He” with these folks) will choose YOU as the Most Speshul Snowflake to use as his conduit for communicating with the world, if only you believe hard enough and have enough gibberish pouring forth from your tongue.  These are the people who believe that medical problems not just can, but *should* be resolved by the laying on of hands and the channeling of the Holy Spirit rather than a medical professional, apparently neglecting to consider that perhaps medical science is *also* a ‘gift from God.’

    This is the religion of Pat Robertson, who blamed 9-11 on America’s tolerance for homosexuality and abortion.

    While I recognize that as with any large sect, there is a spectrum, rather than a point, that defines beliefs and doctrine, at the same time it must be considered that even the least radical of the Pentacostal movement is quite some distance from the mainstream of modern thought.  I further recognize that in this great land of ours, each of us has the freedom to choose what we want to believe, and how, and it’s not my intent or desire to suggest that anyone should be prevented from seeking elective office solely on the basis of their beliefs.  (Whether they intend to use their position to force others to adhere to those beliefs through the manipulation of public policy is another matter entirely.)

    While it seems extreme to the point of absurdity that Pentacostal fundamentalism and radical Islamic fundamentalism share the same core beliefs…it’s actually quite true, apart from the nature of the dieties they worship.  Both sects believe that they are the ordained and obedient servants of God; that nonbelievers should be punished and excised; that they alone are enlightened to the One True Path; that God bestows gifts upon them for their faith and devotion; that those who believe differently are hellbound sinners; and that they have a sort of charter from God to go into the world and convert as many people as possible to their way of thought. 

    It may seem outrageous to suggest that Pentecostalists are as willing to kill or die for their religion as radical Islamists have proven to be…but then again, perhaps not so crazy, if one considers the war in Iraq a ‘mission from God.’  Perhaps not so crazy, when the leading voice of the Pentecostal movement is so willing to ascribe the attacks of 9-11 as a judgement upon us from God in retribution for “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.”  Perhaps not so outrageous when another leading light of the Pentecostal movement, Jimmy Swaggart, once said in an interview that if a gay man “looked at me like that, I’d kill him and tell God he died.”

    And I’m sure some of you are reading this and preparing to fire off vitriolic responses filled with righteous indignance…but when you throw away your local prejudice, there’s not a whole lot of space in the gap between the kind of hate espoused by Robertson and the Pentecostal movement, and that espoused by the Mullahs of radical Islam.  Robertson is no more representative of Christianity than Osama bin Laden is of Islam, yet some of us have no problem tarring all Muslims with that brush, even as we object to any suggestion that the knife cuts with both edges.

    So we come back to the question, so WHAT if Barack Obama were a Muslim?  He’s not, and I’d like to say that nobody with half a brain believes he is, but apparently it’s still a pretty common belief.  So What?  Why are we still being so stubborn, blind, and ignorant as to associate an entire religion with 1.5 BILLION adherents with the actions of a small, radical, hate-filled handful of them?  This is no more ridiculous than to assert that every Christian believes the same way Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church does, or that every Christian acts the same way a few Catholic priests have. 

    There’s no law preventing a Muslim – or an Atheist, or a Jainist, or a Taoist, or a Buddhist – from running for and being elected president.  Furthermore, there is no ethical or moral reason why anyone, of any religion, should be prevented from doing so, as long as they meet the constitutional requirements for the Presidency.

    I find it disturbing and frightening that even now, more than seven years after 9-11, when we’ve all had plenty of opportunity to do our own research and gain our own understanding of Islam, to realize that not all Muslims are hate-mongers and terrorists any more than all Christians are bigots and murderers and pedophiles.  I would ask anyone who reads this to confront the next person who throws out the “Obama is a Muslim” tripe to resist the urge to simply deny it – these people obviously don’t care about the facts anyway – but make them explain why it’s a bad thing.  Make them confront their inner bigot and drag it out into the light of day, make them justify it.  See how long they can hold on to their irrational prejudices when they’re forced to verbalize them.

    I’ll bet the majority don’t last long.

  • It’s Time To End Confederate Flag Worship

    Over the years much has been written in defense of waving and displaying the “Confederate Flag.” We’ll forego the silly pedantic arguments about what the “Stars and Bars” really flew over, and all that nonsense – it’s diversionary argumentation without relevant meaning to the core questions we’ll address here.

    Back in 2019, the city of Wake Forest, NC, had to cancel their annual Christmas parade because they intended to allow a float from a group called the Sons and Daughters Of The Confederacy. In response, several people indicated plans to protest and potentially even incite violence, so the city decided to cancel the parade.

    This generated all the hand-wringing outrage you might expect, and of course brought to the forefront this old, tired argument about southern pride and so forth.

    In the intervening period, we’ve had the violent coup attempt in Washington where multiple violent traitors paraded through the halls of Congress…carrying the Confederate flag. States have passed resolutions to stop flying it on government grounds, along with significant effort to remove statues of Confederate “heroes,” rename public facilities named in honor of traitors, and so forth.

    Naturally all of this has the “Southern Pride” and “Heritage Not Hate” contingent – who, let’s be clear, have never been anything but bad-faith goobers making arguments the know have no merit – to raising all manner of hew and cry declaiming these actions

    These arguments tend to break down into three key points: My family was involved and I have a right to be proud of my family; the soldiers of the Confederacy fought valiantly for their cause and deserve to be honored and respected for that; you’re trying to “erase history” by interfering with my celebration of the Confederacy.

    So let’s go ahead and address these one by one, shall we?

    Family Pride

    I understand the idea of family pride and heritage. Often these things are very positive; I’m quite proud of my family history on my dad’s side working against the Nazi’s in the Netherlands during WWII, for example

    In this case, the agrument simply doesn’t hold up, and I reject it.

    The Confederacy was a collective act of treason against the United States, an attempt at creating a breakaway republic predicated on the idea that owning other people was a negotiable and acceptable proposition, and they prosecuted a war to defend that position with all the costs that entails.

    Fortunately for conscience and decency in the world, they lost and the “state’s right” to decide that some human beings weren’t human was denied in this ostensibly free country once and for all, as it should have been from the outset.

    However, as we’re seeing play out once again perhaps as a direct result of our reluctance to address this issue head-on in the first place, the simple fact of the matter is you don’t celebrate traitors. There are no flags of the third reich flying in German. The people of Romania don’t celebrate the heritage of Ceaușescu. Lithuania does not celebrate the “heritage” of the Polish government who tried to overthrow them. Germans do not honor the “heritage” of the Beer Hall Putsch. The city of Milwaukee doesn’t have a “Jeffrey Dahmer Culinary Appreciation Day.” The state of Illinois has not named its high school mentoring program for boys after John Wayne Gacy.

    In my family there is a tragic incident in which a woman and her boyfriend murdered their four year old daughter in the early 1980s. If I were to apply the “family pride” argument, rather than taking punitive measures against her because she did a horrible, unforgivable thing that cause an innocent life to be lost…I would say let’s have a Christmas parade float for all the infanticide perpetrators! I mean, I know it’s not really cool and all, of course it used to happen more often but we’re a better people now, but she’s family so I have an emotional attachment and my ego’s involved. Not only that, although it’s less common than it used to be people say things like “If those kids don’t stop raising cain I’ll kill ’em” all the time, so it’s pretty clear some people – quite a few of them – are perfectly okay with the idea of murdering children. I bet if you’ve got kids you’ve said it yourself! “If they don’t stop that racket I’ll kill ’em!”

    So you’ll just be okay with that, right? Even though some of you may have lost children to violence yourselves and even the suggestion is so outrageous as to deserve nothing more than a punch in the mouth…I mean, let’s be civil. Don’t be rude. Don’t be impolite. Can’t we have some unity here? It’s the Christmas season, where’s your holiday spirit? Where’s that forgiveness and all-encompassing Christian love we like to talk about so much this time of year? Let the baby murderers in. Heck, Susan Smith gets out right before Thanksgiving in a couple years, maybe we can get her to be Marshall!

    Right. That’s how every single person who defends confederate flag worship sounds to anyone who was not born and raised in the south. The only people I’ve ever met outside the “Old South” who parrot the point of view on the confederacy I hear as the mainstream there (at least outside the major cities) are open white supremacists.

    Nobody else, outside of that region of the country where it’s taught as gospel, buys in to the romanticism and whitewashing that’s been brought to the history of the Confederacy since its fall. And yes, I’ve seen a fair part of it and talked to a whole lot of people in my time, including time spent in community non-profit work right there in Wake Forest, North Carolina not that many moons ago.

    So that addresses this whole “my daddy fought hard for the south and that was honorable” thing. The cause wasn’t honorable, nor was fighting for it. AT BEST many uneducated people motivated by a firm conviction that some human beings should rightly be considered property *believed* they were fighting for an honorable cause, and so one must allow a sort of grudging subjective “honor” to attach in the sense of following and fighting for your beliefs, but c’mon. The most honorable position in the Confederate military was serving as a patsy to oligarchs; at least in that role you could disingenuously plead ignorance, and that’s the best argument to be made. There’s no honor or glory in stupidity.

    That brings us to…

    The Valiant And Honorable Sacrifice

    Pol Pot’s soldiers fought valiantly for a cause. So did Stalin’s, and Hitler’s, and Tojo’s, and Minh’s, and Mao’s, and Mussolini’s, and bin Laden’s. Back in 2001 19 men from the middle east made a “valiantly and honorably” sacriviced their lives for the cause they believed was just and righteous.

    Sure, YOU might not think so, because they’re the Bad Guys, but THEY sure thought so. They died to prove it, didn’t they? Just like your great-grandpappy at Second Bull Run.

    Pictured: The ultimate participation trophy, symbol of losers since 1865 (far left of the image), shows up at another lost cause: the January 6, 2021 attempt to overthrow the US Government by violent coup in Washington DC at the behest of President Donald Trump

    Fighting valiantly for a cause means less than nothing until you know what the cause is. If I die fighting valiantly for the cause of my asserted right to have sexual congress with ducks, I sure hope you don’t use that as a reason to give me a parade float and I would reasonably expect the ducks to be pretty angry if you did.

    I want to stress again that none of this is personal. There’s not some individual or group whose feelings I’m trying to hurt here. We’ve evolved now, that’s all. We don’t sacrifice virgins anymore either, and we don’t really have parade floats honoring The Great Virgin Sacrificers (sic) of History either.

    And history brings us to that last Great Pillar Of Confederate Apologia

    Erasing History

    This is frankly nothing but cheap gaslighting. Maniplative bad-faith argumentation constructed of the highest-quality bovine excreta.

    Erasing history is talking about “states’ rights” and leaving out what specific right was at issue – the right to own human beings based on the color of their skin.

    “Erasing history” is bandying about phrases like the “War of Northern Aggression,” which I was still hearing unironically when my daughter was attending a rural North Carolina high school, just about fifteen miles up the road from Wake Forest, in the oughts…and I was hearing it from her teachers.

    Erasing history what happens when you STILL get dirty looks in Granville County, NC if you ask an old-timer (or most of their descendants) about why Bob Teel and his boys never did time for killing Dickie Marrow.

    (Sidebar for those who don’t understand this reference: Dickie Marrow was a black veteran who was beaten and shot in Oxford, North Carolina (where my parents lived for the last twenty years or so of their lives) by two white bigots who claimed he said something untoward to a white woman. The white attackers were exonerated by an all-white jury at trial.

    In 1970.

    This event catalyzed the activist career of Benjamin Chavis, who eventually led a fifty-mile march from Oxford to Raleigh in protest. Chavis eventually became head of the NAACP, I believe.

    To this day, you’ll get the kind of look that will encourage you to be out of town by sunset if you ask the wrong people the wrong questions about this event. The book about the event, “Blood Done Sign My Name,” (disclosure: affiliate link) is routinely stolen or vandalized at the Oxford, NC Public Library to this day.)

    THAT is “erasing history,” Orwell style.

    In the end, I’ve had and seen this basic conversation a million times. I’m not particularly passionate about it because honestly I think it’s a settled issue and anyone who continues to act as though there’s really anything to debate about it is likely kind of dull-witted, usually motivated by emotion and ego, and often motivated by uglier things – no accusation against you personally intended, of course, dear reader.

    I’ve no deep interest in hating on people or whatever, this isn’t some “you dumb hicks” rant. I lived in NC for 15 years, met and continue to maintain deep friendship with and great respect for many fine people there. Some of them even maintain this confederate pride attitude, and I don’t fault them for it. I get it, my dad was a marine, I understand that pride.

    But it’s time to accept reality.

    Continuing to celebrate the Confederacy as though it were a noble cause, as though the “sacrifices” made in the name of keeping human beings enslaved were “valiant,” or as though there’s any reasonable basis for exalting and celebrating those who served the failed and unethical cause of slavery with their lives as though they’re heroes for doing it, just doesn’t hold up to reasoned scrutiny anymore.

    Those people weren’t heroes for fighting on the side of the losing team.

    I’m sorry, they’re not.

    The cause of the confederacy was not noble, the fight was not valiant, and the fighters were not heroes. They were at best useful idiots, and at worst seething, treasonous, bigots willing to die for the “right” to treat other human beings as property.

    I was born in 1970 and grew up in a world where the Confederate flag was still honored and adored as a symbol of rebellion, of raging against the machine, of refusing to back down in the face of authoritarianism. Over time we’ve come to understand these arguments simply have no merit. The idea that “fighting for my country is noble and good even if what my country is doing is horrific and unconscionable” was much more prevalent then and you can see how this perspective took hold in the south after their defeat, but now?

    No.

    That’s the 19th century, man. This is the 21st.

    Blind fealty to a geography because your g’g’granpappy originally cleared the land, I can even understand.

    But loyalty to or pride in the cause and prosecution of the Confederate States and their open act of treason against the United States, just because you had family fighting on that side, and many of those fighting for “the lost cause” lost their lives?

    No.

    We think more clearly than that now, at least those of us who can separate our ethics from our egos. If I suggested you should allow a Nazi parade float because there may be post-WWII German immigrants whose ancestors “fought valiantly for their cause,” you’d likely never stop smacking me in the mouth, and rightly so.

    And that’s how pretty much everyone outside the south who isn’t part of some alt right movement feels about confederate parade floats.

    It’s time to burn those stars and bars and throw ’em in the trash like we should’ve in 1865, and have done with this ridiculous argument.

  • Omar Rivero Conversation

    Among the large-scale scammers, grifters, harassers, trolls, and losers who have been trying to drag me down, play me against my allies, and sabotage my work over the years is Omar Rivero, founder of Occupy Democrats. (Incidentally he had exactly nothing to do with the Occupy movement, he just co-opted the name as a marketing strategy.)

    A few days ago another of these big pages ripped off some content from me, so I wrote about it – loudly. One of the things I wrote was this article on Medium. While doing my normal maintenance I noticed a new comment on that article, and of course it’s a newly-created sockpuppet account repeating the same old stupid lies trying to con people into believing that the guy whose annual income has been less than 10K for years is the grifter and it’s really the guy paying himself hundreds of thousands a year to clickbait the left who’s on the up-and-up.

    I have been holding this conversation in an archive since 2015. I’ve mentioned it before and even posted a couple of screenshots with information redacted. And of course it gets ignored because by and large people (including you, and for that matter me) are egomaniacs and hate finding out they’ve been conned, so when faced with the evidence of the con they ignore it and get mad at whoever showed it to them. We probably ought to break that habit, since it’s literally killing us, but that’s a different article.

    Anyway with all that backstory in mind and remembering that the latest sockpuppet’s claim was that “Omar Rivero doesn’t know who [I am],” here’s the ENTIRE conversation in which Rivero attempts to stir up contention, bait me into throwing popular leftist Manny Schewitz under the proverbial bus, and make all kinds of logically broken and entirely baseless accusations.

    If Omar’s got a problem with that, he can sue me for defamation and we can go to court and he can tell the judge these screenies are fake, at which point I’ll just pull up the archived conversation on my FB account and win the countersuit. But he won’t do that. What he will do, on the off chance this gets any visibility, is make a bunch of excuses how it was 2015, he didn’t know any better, he’s not the same person he was then…but if that was true, he’d have ended the blackballing of my content, and he hasn’t. He’d have stopped the grift, and he hasn’t. What he has done is continue sucking up to the center-right power core of the DNC in the hopes of furthering his political “career.”

    These people are lying, grifting scum – Occupy Dems, Other 98, Being Liberal, Addicting Info, and EVERYONE in their sphere. The only reason anyone would work with any of them is because either that person/entity is unaware of all this garbage, or they’re part of the problem. Either way, enough is enough. If we’re ever going to have a real left wing in this country, we must flush our commode and get these floaters down the drain so they stop stinking up the place.

    Let me be clear: no genuine progressive, nobody who respects independent activism or progressive values or leftist values or anything else they’re pimping for bucks would ever have engaged in any of the behavior I’ve been subject to by them over the years. If you are following these people, if you are sharing their content, if you think they are in any way liberal (in the colloquial sense used as a synonym for “left wing,” the real definition is an entirely different matter), leftist, or progressive, you are the victim of a long, deep, con game that has extracted millions of dollars from the real left and deliberately neutered left-wing social media for the explicit purpose of co-opting grassroots leftist energy to direct it at fakes, frauds, sockpuppets, astroturfers, liars, and thieves. I know that’s hard to hear. I know plenty of folks will just hate me for saying it out loud, and frankly those people are no more “progressive” than the people they’re following – they’re pretending to be progressive for social approval and/or profit, and they will absolutely abandon any genuine leftist principle in a heartbeat if it becomes too inconvenient, expensive or socially challenging to uphold.

    I thank you for your time. And yes, I’ve verified this is legitimate THAT Omar – not a sockpuppet, not a fake account, not a troll that’s pretending.

    “A lot of people” = “nobody, I went googling a new site that was set up to be the antidote to my bullshit, now I’m gonna try to troll you with this random auto-scraped entry that means exactly nothing” First off, people working above board don’t play this backchannel crap.
    The explanation is you don’t know how Zoominfo words and you’re a creepy little stalker.
    OMG THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!
    Hahaha isn’t anti-Semitism funny? Your “leftist” hero. Your “liberal” standard-bearer. Your “progressive” warrior. Your buddy of Elizabeth Warren.
    For the record, he never sent me jack shit. But ask yourselves what kind of progressive or leftist or liberal engages in poverty shaming and ridiculing people who have to eat ramen.
    “If you have to cheat to win…” “We make mistakes.” See the gaslight there? Also the obviously backhanded, snotty remarks about “nobody watches” and “nobody reads.” “They hate me because I’m successful (defined as ‘making money by bullshitting people’)” – another common refrain of the plutocracy. The only thing left about this clown is he should’ve left the political activism to people who live their values and believe in progressive ideals.
    Incidentally that article remained on the site, uncorrected until sometime between Sept 2020 and April 2022. At the time of writing this article AI appears to have gone 404. Ironically it was stolen from Raw Story, which is probably what Matt Desmond didn’t want people to notice and that’s what set him off like a coke freak on a four-day bender.
    This me explaining to a guy I know is part of the problem why he’s part of the problem, while pretending I believe he’s acting in good faith. That’s my way of making sure “I didn’t know” isn’t a plausible excuse anymore. He knows. I told him. He doesn’t care because grifting makes him money.
    “Just news blogs.” More gaslighting. This is also how they rationalize themselves. It’s “just a mistake.” Then they find someone like me making an honest mistake and scream SEE YOU DO IT TOO! Nobody is so stupid as to not understand the difference, but the pretense gives them plausible deniability. Now who else can I think of that’s staked the whole game on pretending they really believe their own bullshit? Clue, it rhymes with Trump.
    How many progressives do you know who think maintaining ethics in their sphere is “beneath them?”
    Another gaslight – diversion tactic. The fact we were exploiting a sensationalized story about a murder wasn’t really exploitation because there was a minor factual error in the website we copied and pasted the story from before applying a fourth-grade rewrite to avoid obvious copyright infringement. God these people are scum.
    “Yeah dude I’m a nobody,” but a few panels up he’s bragging about five million visitors a month to his website. False modesty that he clearly doesn’t believe; it’s a show of ersatz humility leveraging the human tendency to feel bad about distrusting people who act humble. I’m not saying he’s not VERY GOOD at being a lying manipulator. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have made so much money doing it.
    “So are you saying that…[insert attempt to go back to the narrative you’re trying to control]” Pure manipulation.
    Just in case anyone thinks I’m afraid to “say that to his face,” this is me telling him to his face he’s a sleazy self-aggrandizing money-grubbing dick pretending to be a political activist, to his face. Small woncer the conversation ends immediately after.

    That’s the entire conversation. The discerning reader will clearly see the attempts at manipulation, the plays to plausible deniability, the fake “oh I’m not important” modesty performance, etc. ad nauseam.

    THIS is the attitude that has been “informing” left-wing politics for the last decade or so, I’ve told you and told you and told you what was happening, and nobody wants to hear it. I’ve resisted putting this out for nearly a decade because I just don’t need the BS, but you know what? I’ve got the BS anyway. I’ve spent the majority of the time since this conversation happened destitute, desperate, begging to survive, and STILL doing more in any give series of random grunts than these scamming pigs have done for the left in their entire lives, collectively.

    I’m done playing.

    https://www.facebook.com/JohnHenryUS/videos/805871634614882/ Livestream where I establish beyond question that these messages came from the real Omar. (Don’t forget to like my page – unlike Omar, I need an audience that appreciates being respected. You can also use the widget on this page if you don’t have it blocked somehow.) If it disappears I’ll upload the archive to YouTube…and if THAT disappears I’ll just host it myself.

    I’ve been trying to tell people for over a decade that these bad actors were bad actors, and they’re damaging our hope for a progressive and successful future. I’ve been largely ignored. It’s time to stop hiding your heads in the sand and face reality: if you’re on board with these pages, you’ve been had, and it’s cost the left and by extension all of us far, far too much.

  • The Myth Of The “Rigged Two-Party System”

    The narrative that there’s a “rigged two-party system” is one of the most destructive and misguided mythologies of political science and discourse in the United States, and it has kept us tripping over our own feet for most of the last century.

    The number of parties isn’t relevant.

    Who we’re electing – the individual human beings we select to make our social decisions – is important.

    Duverger’s Law tells us that a democratic or pseudo-democratic political system based on first-past-the-post voting in single-member districts will tend to coalesce into a two-party system. It’s not a function of intent or conspiracy or manipulation; it’s math and sociology.

    When you study political science and pay attention to how partisan systems in general function, it quickly becomes clear that functionally two-party and multi-party systems simply aren’t “different” enough to substantively impact the issues people tend to lean on regarding the “two-party system.” Makes for great sloganeering and gives people a boogeyman to point at, but it’s meaningless.

    Human beings, politically, tend to group around two basic ideological poles in matters of social management.

    One pole can be called “labor” or “the people” or “the proletariat” or “the masses.”

    What that pole represents should be fairly clear from the description; the interests of individuals, particularly their individual liberties, dignity, and standard of living. Its fundamental principle is achieving, as much as possible, universal equity of those attributes. Public decision-making is left generally to the public. In healthy and well-designed systems the power of the public – which can be just as fallible as any individual or small group of them – is tempered by some degree of power assigned to experts, thinkers, decision-makers, and analysts whose function is to ensure the public will is not applied abusively, cf. Jefferson’s “tyranny of the majority.” We have seen that sort of tyranny in the very recent past; just look at all the state constitutional amendments that tried to outlaw gay marriage. Typically this pole is referred to as the “left.”

    The other pole can be called “business” or “industry” or “the plutocracy” or “the bourgeoisie.”

    What that pole represents is stratification, ingrouping and outgrouping, control of systems and processes generally in favor of a small group of “elites,” nearly always the materially hyperwealthy, either without regard or with overt contempt for the idea that a society works best when everyone has every possible chance to become their favorite selves. This is the pole where you can find concepts like the divine right of kings, the superiority of “good breeding,” the multi-generational and logarithmic self-perpetuation of generational wealth, and the basic idea that the material circumstances of one’s birth are – illogically – reflective of the quality of one’s character. Here you also find the roots of racism, sexism, and “moral bigotry.” This pole is generally referred to as “the right.”

    These fundamental poles are inescapable.

    No matter how many parties there are or how they’re configured, in a democratic system the voting trends will coalesce around the classic “left” and “right” poles – “the people” or “the proletariat” or “the workers” as the “left,” and “industry” or “business” or “plutocrats” or “the bourgeoisie” as the “right.” (The left and right designations themselves are artifacts of reference dating back to the physical setup of the pre-Revolutionary French parliament.)

    There simply isn’t another pole to construct. There is no third polarity, there is no “option C,” and any attempt to create or envision or imagine or fabricate one inevitably ends up with “option C” being a point somewhere in between those two poles, usually with a great deal of makeup and glitter to distract from the reality that rather than being a true “third option” it’s simply a compromise between the two you already had, to one degree or another.

    In democratic systems the fundamental problem is not a “two-party system” or a “multi-party system” or how the vote is conducted (horserace, proportional rep, etc) but rather that the electorate will as a general rule be too disengaged, distracted, and apathetic to evaluate their candidates on individual merit and will instead tend to rely on partisan political labels to inform their vote.

    As long as we continue doing that, any given bad actor anywhere on the ideological spectrum will be able to easily manipulate themselves into power by appealing to the emotional valence of those labels.

    When it’s all said and done, it ends up right back at what I’ve been saying for decades: the revolutions we’re looking for begin in the mirror. Until we fix how we think about this stuff to align with the objective realities, we’ll just keep swinging back and forth largely at the direction of extraordinarily powerful and wealthy entities whose interests are best served by keeping us all impotently barking at each other while nothing changes save perhaps for the increasing success with which the plutocracy continues to erode and disempower anyone who isn’t part of their little club.

    This isn’t to say there’s no possibility of a “third” party or of one of the existing dominant parties to fade and fall. It’s critical to note however that at no time in human history has a third party arisen from outside of the existing system. Rather the typical process is one party begins stretching the Overton Window right-ward to the extreme, pulling the left-leaning party with it, until the far right becomes too extreme and abusive for popular support. The left pulls further to the right until it bypasses the center and becomes the right-wing party, and a new left-wing party rises from within the dissenting and dissatisfied ranks of the former left. You can see this mechanism in the collapse of the US Whig party in the mid-19th century, which gave rise to the splitting of the Democrat-Republican party into two separate groups, and the Whigs eventually disappeared.

    None of this means that there’s no hope, or that there aren’t advantages to one type of system over another, or even that it’s not in our interests to try to avoid the consequences of Duverger by implementing electoral systems that tend to encourage multipartisanship, such as proportional representation.

    However it does mean that, properly armed with a more complete understanding of the mechanics, the informed activist advocating for genuine progress can avoid becoming mired in a fight against a mythical enemy whose defeat is simply not possible because that enemy – the “rigged two-party system” – doesn’t exist.

    The enemies we’re fighting against for the survival and progress of the species are not systems and parties and social structures but individuals making malicious choices based in avarice and mendacity and greed and ego. They have names. When we begin rejecting these individuals and these behaviors rather than railing against a “system,” we gain a significant advantage in our fight, a clarity of vision and purpose that has heretofore been eluding us, and then real progress begins.

  • “The Other 98%” Are Thieves, Scabs, and Grifters

    Hi, everybody! Today, we’re going to have a conversation about clickbait and thieving and scabs and grifters.

    I have gone on for a long time here on my page and done the best that I could over the years to try to raise awareness that there are a lot of bad actors out there, a lot of people who are out there pretending to be leftist and progressive and all this other stuff, but all they do is throw other people’s work around and gather up tons and tons of money. They suck all the oxygen out of the room so real activists and real creators can’t be heard and can be seen and can’t get over.

    So September 3rd, I posted a status message, just an off the top of my head thought about the the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike out in California.

    You can see September 3rd at about 11:00 Eastern PM, I posted this status message

    Studios are canceling things to make you mad at striking screenwriters and actors. Don’t fall for it.

    – me, at https://www.facebook.com/JohnHenryUS/posts/pfbid0dNcTmDSsgjxt5EEqZUBB4VGYrmnf4JaUPjdhVy5q4Wy8215Z1h9AskUbiLEbEWHTl

    I posted that on the third and it just kind of sat there for a few days and didn’t really go anywhere. Then all of a sudden, I guess maybe yesterday or late the day before, I noticed I was getting a lot of hits on my Facebook page for some reason, like extraordinary traffic for me, the kind of numbers that I haven’t seen since Facebook shut down the “I love to wake up in the morning when Barack Obama was president” page, which had 200,000 people following it. My little page has 5000 people on it, right? I’m thinking man, this is awesome because I’m part of Facebook’s bonus program now, I actually get paid for my content. And the more people engage and the more people share and spread it around and like and comment, the more I get paid.

    So I’m thinking, yeah, this is awesome. And I watch the numbers and it was like 25,000 people had seen it. And I’m like, wow, that’s, that’s, you know, my normal reach is about nine, 10,000 people a month and all of a sudden it’s doubled and then some. I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool,” and then I just watched it keep climbing – somebody with some reach or a few somebodies with some reach picked up on this message and spread it around and it went sub-viral.

    The last time I looked at the numbers, it had been seen by 150,000 people and blah, blah, blah. Right. Cool, awesome, maybe I’ll pick up a few new followers out of it.

    So a little while ago one of my readers, Jenna – and thank you, Jenna! – pointed out to me this Facebook page called “The Other 98%” had straight up ripped my post off, posted it as their own, and were making huge traffic with it.

    Now like I said earlier, The Other 98% is one of these grifting garbage, thieving, stealing, underhanded, unoriginal piece of crap pages that have built up a huge following, they have 7 million people following them, and all they do is steal other people’s work. They add nothing to the conversation. They don’t do anything but take energy away from real activists and real creators, and they steal all of that energy and direct it towards their own pages.

    I cannot tell you how heartbroken I have been over the years to continually tell people over and over and over again, “you’re being played. These are not left wingers. These are not progressives. These people don’t care anything about solidarity or unions, strength or labor rights or anything else. They’re just trying to line their pockets by appealing to your biases.”

    And I’ve told and told and told and people who I still think very well of and think of as friends, just ignore it. Just ignore it. It’s like I’m not even talking. Right. So, Jenna, one of my readers, showed me this a little while ago on my page, this is the other 98 post from 9 hours ago. It has had one word added to it, one word: Hollywood. That and changing “stuff” to “shows” are the only changes made.

    They’ve got 7 million people following them. I have 5000. You look at the bottom of the screen, 14,000 likes, 1700 comments, 3.6 thousand shares. Based on what I’m seeing from my bonus program, on the numbers from the same post that I originally made, that is at least at least $50 to $100 that’s coming out of my pocket because they stole my work.

    They stole my work.

    These are supposedly progressives and leftists. These are your left-wing heroes. These are your flag wavers of the progressive movement, these are the folks the DNC pays big money to pretend to be grassroots independent activism.

    These are the people who are supposed to be standing against all the plutocrats and all the corporations that are exploiting our labor. 7 million people, stolen from by these underhanded pigs.

    I got 5000 followers on Facebook. I’m not housing secure. I don’t eat on a regular basis. I don’t have shoes that can go outside without my socks getting soaked. I don’t own a car. The computer I’m doing this through is ten years old, and these grifting scumbags have to steal my work, take money directly out of my pocket, take food directly out of my mouth.

    You think I’m not angry? You have no idea how much self-control I am exercising right now.

    The only reason I regret not believing those people are worth the cost of a gallon of gas is that means I don’t get to pour it on, set them on fire, and then refuse to dishonor my perfectly good urine by using it to put them out. Scum. They are scum. They are taking 7 million people for a ride lying through their teeth to them, putting themselves over.

    They’re no different than that white guy in Australia a couple of years ago who collected $100,000 in donations by pretending to represent Black Lives Matter. These people are no different. They are scabs. What they did is no different than crossing a picket line, walking into my office as a screenwriter (if I was one), taking my work, picking it up, writing one word on it, claiming it as their own, and taking my paycheck.

    That’s the other 98%. That’s your big liberal left wing hero that’s fighting your battles for you. And you wonder why the left in this country can’t get anywhere, can’t get anything done. How much more blatant and obvious does it have to be? These people are scum. They don’t deserve your support. They don’t deserve to breathe, as far as I’m concerned…but I got to be real careful how I say that or I’ll get in trouble because it’s okay for them to steal my work, but it’s not okay for me to be angry about it.

    How dare you? How dare you steal somebody’s words standing in solidarity with striking union labor and scab it. Who the hell do you think you are, you disgusting pigs?

    7 million people following these clowns. Half of them are following me, too. This is who you’re paying attention to. This is who you’re rewarding. This is who you’re paying. Every time. And nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to listen because nobody likes to be wrong and nobody likes to think they got took for a ride.

    Well, folks, I am showing you right now the absolute clear, incontrovertible evidence you are being taken for a ride by the other 98% and every page like them on the Internet who does the same thing. Every one of them is the same, the other 98% and being liberal and addicting info and all of them, they all do the same thing. They steal other people’s work,and that’s how they build their audiences. That’s how they build their audiences. That’s why they have 7 million people following them. And it’s why I have 5000 following me. Because when I do good work, nobody realizes it’s my work because these chumps steal it, call it their own. And who am I? Oh, I’m just some ranting and raving angry longhair on the internet.

    Learn, Stop rewarding these people. Pay attention to who you’re sharing from. Pay attention to who you’re following and rewarding with your traffic and your eyeballs and your endorsement that you are making every time you share their content. They are thieves. They are stealing. Every single person that has ever given me so much as a dollar just got stolen from by the other 98%.

    I’m talking about senior citizens on fixed incomes who barely have food of their own. But they believe enough in what I do to toss me 25 bucks once in a while. I’m talking about people that are on the streets themselves that see my work and hear what I had to say, and they go, “this is power, this is right, this guy needs support” and they’ll send me five bucks when they don’t even have food of their own. And that’s who the other 98 is ripping off. Every single striking worker that’s on a picket line right now just got stolen from. And half of y’all are helping them do it. Wake up. You are being played. And it ain’t by me.

    You have to stop falling for this stuff. You have to start doing that diligence, paying attention, finding out who you’re supporting, who people are, what they’re doing with your money.

    I starve. I go a day at a time without eating. Sometimes two because I can’t get income for all the work I do. 500 plus posts a month. Nobody sees them because anything I post that gets over, somebody else steals it and puts it over as their own and then they get paid. It is no different than if they walked across those picket lines and took the money out of the hands of the people who are on strike. It’s absolutely no different and you have to stop supporting it.

    This is why we can’t have a solid left wing in this country because we keep getting misled and misdirected by these people, pandering to our biases and we fall for it. They get paid, they get rewarded, and it just goes right back into the machine. And in the meantime, the people who are out here busting their asses, dying, starving, begging, going without food, going without shelter, going without clothing, going without computer equipment are losing out to these giant, thieving, grifting scab scumbags.

    The only reason that works is because we, the people, keep letting at work and it has to stop. I am begging you, please stop putting these people over. They are thieves. They are stealing from you. They are stealing from me. And they are stealing the oxygen out of the entire left wing in this country.

    Thank you very much. Have a nice evening.