JohnHenry.US

Category: Politics

  • Combating Artificial Narratives in Social Media Related To The Sanders Candidacy

    Spread The Word:

    This post is a companion to the March 11 & 12, 2020 editions of The John Henry Show, a livestream broadcast on YouTube that appears every night M-F at 8pm eastern on my YouTube Channel.  If you’d like to watch the videos you can find them here and here.  If you have material you believe will be beneficial to these techniques, please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to check them out and integrate them, but please don’t forget this is a one-man operation and there are only so many hours in the day.

    I am an individual acting of my own volition and am not associated with or contracted by any candidate, PAC, Super-PAC, or party.

    Step-By-Step Deconstruction: How This Happened So Far.

    1. Set up a very large field of candidates to make it difficult to be heard above the crowd
    2. As the field narrows with public support failing to materialize, allow a small group of third-tier candidates to gain support
    3. Allow the front-runner to get a little comfortable.  Keep building various dishonest narratives (see below)
    4. The front-runner will eventually lose to someone.  When that candidate is identified, they become the “party favorite.”
      1. Immediately shift narratives to support party favorite while downplaying successes of outsider candidate
      2. Support all narratives with both mass media and social media compliance-gaining tactics (see below)
    5. Once the party favorite is identified, pressure leading third-tier candidates to drop out with promises of reward if they throw support to party favorite.
    6. When party favorite wins, build narrative of “surge” and “the people have spoken.”  Continue to ignore prior successes of leading candidate.
    7. Send proxies to speak in favor of party candidate and declaim outsider as Super Tuesday approaches.
    8. Continue working to undermine confidence in leading candidate.  Ramp up negativity post-Super-Tuesday.  “Can’t win,” “people don’t want a revolution,” etc.
    9. Continue to circulate easily-repeatable points with high resonance on social and mainstream media.  The populists must be discourage and feel beaten.
    10. Continue to suppress turnout and enthusiasm for progress through disinformation campaigns combined with “evidence” of primary victories.
    11. Claim pre-emptive victory with less than half of delegates committed, to defuse any potential energy generated by the inevitable one-on-one debate, which must take place after both Super Tuesday and the following 6-state primary a week later.
    12. This ensures that enthusiasm and momentum is sapped for the popular candidate going in to the debates, which will hopefully blunt the predictable and one-sided victory of the populist in the debate afterward.

    Understanding the Techniques Of Disinformation

    In this election cycle we are seeing unprecedented levels of inauthentic behavior in social media.  This is a key tool in manipulating public opinion; the use of social pressure.  By creating the artificial appearance of social approval of the opinions selected by the propagandist, the unethical actor can readily manipulate the public into repeating them and thus doing the heavy lifting of the propagandist for them.

    Example:  Create multiple social media pages, groups, and other resources that appear on the surface to support Sanders or at least a substantial part of his platform.  For instance you might name your group “[Insert Social Group] For Sanders 2020,” where any defined group can be used – Christians, Muslims, Blacks, Whites, Teachers, Utahns, Californians, Progressive, Liberals, Democrats.

    One of the things this technique accomplishes immediately is to create artificial attractions to Sanders’ base that are readily confused with authentic “organic” groups.  This has the added benefit of “teaching a lesson” to grassroots organizers that they’ll be outwitted, flanked, and have their own tactics used against them at every possible turn, which accomplishes some discouragement.

    Rather than try to conduct a collegiate-level examination of the fine points of disinformation, let’s go ahead and dig in to the meat of the matter:  what do these false narratives look like, how do I identify them, and how do I counter them?

    Identifying Inauthentic Behavior

    One of the most subtle and complex techniques that has emerged in the last two-four years in the American political landscape is the “seeding” of inauthentic narratives in such a way that they play on the fears of “soft” Sanders supporters – those who perhaps believe in his message or ideological goals but are afraid they won’t gain public approval, or that he’ll be hamstrung by an uncooperative Congress once he’s in office.

    For this reason, we can only take the default behavioral path of treating anyone posting disinformation or misinformation as authentic, at least initially.  So start out by giving the benefit of the doubt that the argument being put forth is sincerely held, and deal with it on that level first.

    Inauthentic actors will double down on assertions and arguments that are readily disproven by fact or valid reasoning.  The more they cling to their position in the face of contradictory facts and reason, the more likely it is that you’re dealing with an inauthentic actor.

    There simply is no iron-clad way to identify a fake, troll, or poser on sight.  You have to treat them as though they’re 100% real in every initial exchange.  Most of them will reveal themselves as fake or inauthentic in the course of a short conversation, if you watch carefully.

    Specific Points To Rebut

    Here’s the “meat and potatoes.”

     “Sanders can’t win”

    •  Sanders was winning just fine until people started buying in to this false narrative.  Don’t lose hope.  We all want a better nation, a country we can be proud of that takes care of its people and produces leaders in every discipline.  To do that, we need to get people out from under impossible student loan payments and make college tuition-free so students can afford to attend
    •  Nearly every poll published in the last six months has Sanders beating Trump by a significant margin in head-to-head matchups, even among largely Republican and right-wing audiences like Fox News.

     “Socialism”

    •  Nearly everything we do is “socialism” in one way or another.  Police, the military, roads, libraries, the NIH, the CDC, standardization of electrical current; every fundamental function of our nation is socialized.
    •  Socialized medicine in the norm in the developed world.  While many nations have supplemental private insurance to pay for elective procedures like cosmetic surgery, these are general options that produce no benefit for medical needs but rather cater to a small group who chooses to engage in elective medicine.
      •  Wait times, low quality, and other dogwhistles are just plain not true.  Anyone can cherry-pick anecdotes – which may or may not even be true – to support their existing biases.  The reality is the United States pays twice as much per person as the next-most-expensive country in the world, and has the worst outcomes nearly across the board.  This data is readily available from WHO
      •  If we had a proper universal single-payer system we wouldn’t be waiting for commercial enterprises to negotiate a profit for coronavirus vaccines, and thus those vaccines would be forthcoming much more quickly.  Indeed a vaccine for SARS was developed four years ago that could potentially have been developed and modified for inoculation against nCoV, but there wasn’t enough commercial interest in funding it and our current profit first mindset ensured there was no political support for a federally-funded research path.
    •  The Soviet Union and “Red China” were not and are not socialist countries; they are authoritarian pseudo-communist countries.  Confusing “socialism” with “authoritarianism” creates two major problems; first, it allows the word “socialism” to be used as a boogey-man against those who don’t understand what it is, and it also obfuscates the reality that capitalism can also create authoritarian systems, which is exactly what’s happening in the United States right now.

     “The media said…”

    •  The mainstream media in the United States is owned by six corporations:  Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany and Viacom, which own most cable channels, and the Sinclair Broadcasting Corp which owns a majority of local TV stations.  Every one of these companies has a vested interest in defeating Sanders; thus, every one of them has a vested interest in manipulating the news to disinform voters and discourage the rise of a populist movement.  Sanders has repeatedly spoken in favor of the unions present at these corporations and on the side of striking workers at Comcast, which owns MSNBC and CNN.  Furthermore, Sanders supports “net neutrality,” which ensures internet traffic is not sped up or slowed down depending on the provider’s biases toward the content or content provider.  That bias may exist as cash incentives (“fast lane” traffic for big sites) or as socio-political incentives (making access to information like what you’re reading right now inconvenient or effectively impossible).

     “We don’t need a grumpy old man…”

    •  The entire race is grumpy old men.  You can vote for the one who has consistently demonstrated a commitment to public interest throughout his career, or you can vote for one of the ones that don’t.

     Nobody likes Bernie

    •  I like him.  So do millions of other Americans.  This is a false narrative put forth by his political opponents.

     Congress won’t work with him.

    •  They won’t work with Biden either; any president’s success with Congress depends on the individuals serving in that Congress.  If there must be compromise, then isn’t it smarter to begin negotiations from the position you actually want, rather than staking a watered-down position to begin with and then compromising further?  Sanders has a much better chance of elevating down-ballot candidates who will work with him, if we keep public interest and enthusiasm engaged.  If we allow the media to tell us we can’t win, we get nothing.  Get Bernie into the White House and vote for the most progressive down-ballot candidates you can find, and you’ll end up with a Congress that works just fine with Bernie Sanders

    Specific Points, Part 2

     Too Radical

    •  There is nothing radical about catching up with the rest of the world.  I can attend university tuition free in dozens of countries without even being a citizen, and if I were a citizen there would be further benefits (e.g. stipend for living expenses in Finland).  This is another boogeyman to make people afraid of positive progress for their benefit, and doesn’t hold up to reasoned scrutiny.Besides, can you imagine if our founding fathers had taken that position?  Can’t break away from England, that’s “too radical.”  We should try to negotiate better terms.
    •  The “overton window.”  The Overton Window is a political phenomenon where a radical fringe continually redefines the limits of what is “left” and “right,” and then pulls the center toward them until what was once firmly centrist is seen as “radical.”  The process is very subtle and executes over an extended period, and it’s been happening here for several decades now.  We need it to stop; at this point the “left” is where the middle used to be, the right is off the edge of the scale, and anything that is genuinely in the people’s interests is treated as though it’s fringe lunacy.  Wanting a nation of healthy, educated people is not fringe lunacy; it’s the only way to have a strong country

     “The American People Don’t Want Revolution”

    •  Perhaps the american people who own corporations and pay tens of thousands of dollars to have dinner with candidates other than Sanders don’t.  The rest of us are in a somewhat different boat.  There are half a million people sleeping on the streets right now who don’t just want a revolution, they need one.  Two and a half million schoolkids report being homeless at some point during the school year.  Eighty-seven million people have no meaningful access to health care.  Meanwhile you’ve got a candidate telling you that just getting back to the compromise position we already had in place four years ago represents a victory, and that’s just not true.

     “People don’t want to change too quickly”

    •  Perhaps that shrinking group of people who enjoy the privilege of material security don’t.  For everyone else, time is running out.  Millions of us no longer have the luxury of being able to wait for a pleasant negotiation with profit interest who can, do, and will continue to take any sign of compromise as an indication that they can go for the throat.

     “Bernie has no plan to get us there.”

    •  Of course he does.   It’s on his website, go read it.  It’s right there.

     “He’s hiding information about his medical condition”

    •  How much information do you have about Joe Biden’s health?  Donald Trump’s?  Bet it’s less than you know about Bernies.

     “He’s too old”

    •  Ruth Bader Ginsberg is the same age now that Sanders would be when finishing a second term, she seems to function well.

     “He’s a hypocrite because he rails against the wealthy but he’s a millionaire”

    •  The Sanders’ have an estimated net worth of about 2.5 million, most of which has been acquired in the last few years through sales of a best-selling book and the inheritance of his wife’s parents’ home.  The man never said he hated money; it’s the abuse of power that comes from great inequality of wealth that’s the problem.

     “He’s a divider, not a uniter”

    •  This is an old tactic.  The only thing that makes Sanders a “divider” is that he opposes the power being abused by the oligarchy that currently holds sway in this country.  This is similar to accusations that Obama was a “divider.”  Obama wasn’t a divider; the people who hated him were the dividers, and they gaslighted a bunch of people into thinking it was his fault.  They’re doing the same to Sanders.  Don’t fall for it.

     “He can’t expand the base.”

    •  He has expanded the base, and continues to do so by reaching out to the 90 million eligible voters in this country who don’t bother voting because they don’t feel like they have a voice.
    •  Is your loyalty to the nation and its people, or to a political party?  Why?  What has the Democratic Party in and of itself done for you or anyone you know?

     “He has no experience in international politics”

    •  Neither did Obama.  Neither did Reagan.  Neither did Carter, or Ford, or Nixon, or Kennedy, or Roosevelt before they were elected.  Besides which, Sanders has traveled outside the country extensively – to at least forty-one other nations – and met with world leaders on multiple occasions.  When he does so and is quite rightly critical of some of our less-savory engagements (like the Iran-Contra affair), then people turn around and complain about that.  This, again, is just an empty complaint with no substance.

     “Bernie Bros”

    •  Sanders supporters represent every corner of American society.
    •  Some of them are pretty angry, and frankly with good reason.  They’re starving, they’re dying of preventable illnesses, and they’re hearing their friends and neighbors say, through their support of Trump and Biden, that those friends and neighbors don’t really care about them.  Meanwhile, poor people, people of color, and others continue to waste away and die while we’re trying to negotiate a “civil discourse.”  I’m pretty mad, too – why aren’t you?

    Final Thoughts

    This should be enough to get you started and rolling on some effective rebuttals.  Here are some final thoughts to help you succeed:

    • Avoid confrontational tones. – We’ve all heard the “Bernie Bros” narrative and I understand as well as anyone how frustrating it can be to talk to someone who clearly isn’t listening.  Give them three cycles of conversation:  if they haven’t stopped stonewalling you by that point, they’re not trying to have a conversation, they’re trying to win an internet argument.  You can state clearly your reasons for doing so, and then walk away.  “I’m sorry, but I just don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about the other people in our country, people like me and even people like you.  Since you don’t appear to be interested in understanding it, I’m going to spend my energy on people who really do want solutions rather than arguments.”
    • Avoid heavy criticism of other candidates.  Nevermind what’s wrong with them – what’s RIGHT with Bernie?  What positive does he bring to the table, what progress is he trying to achieve, what benefit to each of us does his ideological position provide us as a nation and as individuals.  If you must compare and contrast, stick to facts and be prepared to back them up with evidence (e.g. video of Joe Biden saying he’d veto a universal single-payer health care plan if it passed Congress)
    • Find Common Ground – Ask questions – what issues are important to you?  What matters most to you in this election?  The answers can guide your discussion further, for instance if they say “I just want to get rid of Trump,” you can point to the polls mentioned above under the “Bernie Can’t Win” bullet point.  The simple reality is most Americans strongly support Sanders’ platform but have been manipulated to dislike his personality, or his followers, or something else that really isn’t relevant.  Make them bring the conversation to a point, and once you have that point in focus any of the techniques described above should help you get there.

  • On The Futile Delusion Of Anarchy

    Spread The Word:

    Mixing Messages

    I completely agree with the first sentence. I resent it being used to manipulate me into spreading the second.

    A page I follow on Facebook recently posted the image you (should) see at the beginning of this article among some other images generally promoting the ideology of anarchy and insisting that “government” – no qualifiers – is “dangerously evil.”.  Included was the hashtag #GovernmentIsTheEnemy.

    (Note:  Under ordinary circumstances the image would be intact and properly credited, including the creating page’s name that was on the original. In this case however I want to avoid both provoking a direct confrontation (because there’s no point in it and it’ll just seem like petty personal crap rather than a principled criticism) and, frankly, advertising for someone this careless about their messaging, so I’ve cropped it out.)

    Those of you who have been following me for a minute can probably already guess where this is going.

    I commented to the effect that if this was what was going to pass for substantive dialogue, I would go ahead and see myself out…and of course, the poster immediately challenged me to provide some substantive dialogue.

    And so here we are.

    There are a couple of things I want to point out before we get too deep into this:  first, I don’t disagree with a single letter of the first sentence.  I am wholeheartedly behind the sentiment and in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if I wrote it ten or fifteen years ago and have since forgotten, that’s how much it resonates with me.

    The second sentence, however, and the hashtag, render the whole thing about as basic and banal and entirely un-revolutionary as a thing can be.

    The second thing I want to put up front is that my comments are predicated on the core assumption that we’re discussing life in a democratic system of some kind, and that system is at least somewhat functional – enough so that it’s not a dog and pony show to validate a dictator, such as we see under Putin in Russia.  Obviously the subjects of a totalitarian government cannot take responsibility for that government short of open rebellion.

    So with that said, let’s nail a few things down about this recurring fantasy – which seems to inhabit mostly young, white, fairly affluent men between 15 and 25 – that all you have to do is get rid of that darned ol’ government and everything will be a beautiful anarchist utopia.

    Government: Is-es and Isn’ts

    First, government is not an external entity, nor a mysterious overlord, nor an unyielding and ineffable omnipotency. If you live in a functioning democratic system – a system in which, one way or the other, the people’s voice controls who represents them and how – the government is you. If your government is acting in a way contrary to what you think best, it is up to you to get up and fix it.  You vote.  You lobby your representatives.  You organize public demonstrations.  You run for office yourself.  That’s how this is supposed to work.(*)

    This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. – Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

    – Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

    This insipid abuse of stupidity by picking words to artificially demonize is obnoxious to critical independent thought. “Government” is not some outside actor imposing its will on people. If you live in a democratic system and your government is not governing to your satisfaction, you change the government.  That’s literally what democracy is for, the reason our form of government exists, to ensure that “the government” – that is, the citizens elected to represent their fellow citizens in the processes of determining the details of being a successful country – is always responsible to its citizens.

    This idea that anyone does, or even CAN exist without some form of government outside a single-person vacuum is as frankly ridiculous as it gets. I’ve gone into the question of anarchy itself in a previous article that I’ll resurrect when I find it, but the key point is the simple reality that “anarchy,” this notion of free people freely choosing to live in peace without government, is a delusion.  It literally can not exist.  See now:

    There are two people. Those two people meet. Those two people carefully approach each other, find they can communicate effectively, and arrive at some basic agreements to avoid displeasure.

    You now have two governments and an international treaty. If you decide that guy is better at chopping logs but he sucks at hunting meat so you’ll trade him some of your excess meat for his excess logs, you now have an international trade agreement. You agree not to kill each other, you now have laws.

    That is “government.”  I’m quite sure someone reading this, and probably many of them, are thinking well you just don’t get what they mean by “no government.”  That’s not my problem, frankly; what they said was “no government,” and if that’s not what they mean then they should speak more accurately.

    (* After publication, a reader pointed out that any number of exigent circumstances might prevent someone from taking any of the actions I described, running for office, voting, etc.  I do understand this and probably should have clarified that in the absence of an ability to do these things, at the very least you can support organizations and individuals working in your interest by sharing their content on social media, talking with your friends about these issues, and other activities that are free, easy, and take little time.  Really, the effort to be a genuinely good citizen isn’t much.  It just gets built up that way by the ownership class to discourage participation.

    The point is, in a democratic system the government is by definition responsible to the people, and the people are responsible for their government.  For instance in the 2016 election it’s pretty fair to say that at least an effort was made to subvert the process, but it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well as it did if people hadn’t cooperated by backing a status-quo candidate in a rebellion election, by tolerating the obvious dirty pool on behalf of the DNC with regard to Sanders, by not pushing back against those stunts.

    The degree to which any one person in your democracy may be disenfranchised, excluded, or subverted in their political choices is precisely the degree to which you do not live in a true democracy.  Even in a republic, the job of the elected representatives is to work on behalf of the best interests of the people.  If they’re not doing that, get rid of them before they break the system to the point you can’t.)

    Words Matter

    As my late friend Sam was so fond of pointing out, words matter. I should HOPE their opposition is not to “government” but to “abuse of power.” So say that. Because the two are not equal, and attempting to equate them just makes you look like an ignorant hand-waving agitator with little if any understanding of what government even is at its most basic level.

    As long as there are people, there will be government. Inescapably as there will be wetness as long as there is water and it’s above 32*F somewhere the water is. Trying to ignore or “work around” or protest that is the absolute definition of Quixotic.

    It’s not that I’m telling you “you can’t because I say so,” I’m telling you “you can’t because it’s functionally impossible,” like trying to create a one-sided three dimensional object.  This isn’t about “I don’t like what you’re saying,” or about “I think you” anything.  It’s about the basic impossibility of the premise of having “no government.”  The very second there are two sentient beings interacting, there is some kind of government, no matter how rudimentary, and that government is going to do exactly the same things in terms of function as any other: work to ensure its own survival through the easiest means available.  That means you have to work out SOME kind of rule for your relationship with that other person you inhabit your planet with, even if that rule is “there will be no other rules.”

    Yes, even that is a form of government.  Even a two-person world in which the only rule is there will be no rules, has government.  It also has authority; you just exercised your authority to negotiate “no rules” with your co-planeteer.  They exercised theirs to negotiate with you.  Their authority extends only over themselves inherently; to extend it over you requires either your cooperation or force.  But it’s still authority; it’s still the privilege to make a decision and commit to it, and it’s still the responsibility for bearing the consequences of failing to live up to that agreement – or for that matter the consequences of succeeding – even if that consequence is nothing more formal and organized than a punch in the eye.

    So we now see that simply poo-pooing government and making aggressive anti-government generalities just doesn’t float.  To put it more formally it’s an ineffective, dead-end tactic for genuine reform or even revolution.  All it does is mark those who fall for it as easily manipulated and not real careful thinkers.

    Of course, it’s very easy to agitate people into the streets to make anger and break things. Doing the hard work of actually crafting a better idea and implementing it is a much more daunting process, and it often doesn’t fit easily into a meme or bumper sticker.

    Ours is a world in which words matter, and the chest-thumping pronouncement of inflamed passion untempered by wisdom or depth of thought creates nothing but the same old stupid escalations and abuses they always did.  If you’re going to take on the system, you need to know that before you even leave the house.

    This is precisely why so many revolutions end up becoming tyrannical themselves.

    Either you want to be rid of Orwell’s Boot, or you want to wear it. If you want to be rid of it, engaging in doublespeak and agitprop is pretty much the opposite of doing that.

    That makes you no different from the power you’re supposedly fighting.

    No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

    George Orwell, “Animal Farm”
    Any revolution predicated on the idea of “eliminating government” is automatically self-terminating.

  • Cutting Education Funding Is Wrong (2011)

    Spread The Word:

    Another of those subjects that just refuses to go away because the fascists we’ve allowed to take part in our government know that keeping us stupid is their best weapon.

    The sound quality on this really stinks, I’m afraid, and I don’t know why. Unfortunately all the source video has been lost to the inevitable costs of poverty, but if it’s that tough to hear feel free to DM me via FB or Twitter and I’ll go ahead and transcribe it here.

    What’s interesting about this video to me is that it inadvertently documents one of those “things I never do,” in this case working with Eric Byler and a group of fellow students who eventually called ourselves “Michigan’s Future” (clearly reflective of my traditionally-aged colleagues!) at Western Michigan University to get a resolution passed by the local city council that they would refuse to enforce any attempt at creating an Arizona-style “show your papers” law. I’m pretty bad about documenting the things I do; in this case it turns out that I did, and totally forgot. You also see legendary Kalamazoo city council member Don Cooney speaking at a pro-education rally, among other things; Don turns up again in a documentary I did about the Occupy movement.

  • Willful Ignorance: The Big Lie of Omission In Iraq

    Spread The Word:
    Oh, you didn’t know? Your ass better call somebody….

    “What, you mean you didn’t know WE SOLD Saddam Hussein all that stuff he used to “OMG GAS HIS OWN PEOPLE”? Surprise.”

    This is definitely one of those things I’ve hit on many times over the years and for some reason people just don’t…catch on? Grasp the implications?

    A crime of omission is one in which one’s failure to act in some way itself constitutes a criminal act. In Laird v. Texas (1983), infanticide co-defendant Deborah Michelle Becker was convicted of “murder by omission” and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison for failing to call emergency services immediately when her boyfriend assaulted and ultimately killed her four year old daughter.

    Remember all those WMD’s we were so sure Saddam had? I don’t know why nobody wanted to admit this, it’s not a secret, but the reasons we were so sure he had that stuff is that we sold it to him.

    See, we left that part out of the official narrative of the second Gulf War, after 9-11.

    The very same Donald Rumsfeld who was so aghast at the gassing of 800,000 Kurds consistently left the part out of the narrative where we sold Iraq not just the stuff to make the gas but also missile fabrication equipment and targeting intelligence. Our hands, and in particular the hands of people like Rumsfeld and others who were highly placed in Washington for decades, are no cleaner in that matter than those of Saddam himself. He simply couldn’t have done it without our help.

    None of this is a secret, or even up for debate. As Bill Hicks said, “we still have the receipts.” You can download a copy of “The Riegle Report,” aka “U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the Gulf War,” at this link. Please note well: this is a PDF copy of the transcript of a series of congressional hearings held in 1993 investigating “Gulf War Syndrome.” The Bush Administration absolutely knew all of this long before 9/11 ever happened, and not one time during the prosecution of the war against Iraq did they answer the question “how do you know Iraq has WMDs” with the honest response from Don Rumsfeld: “I’m the one who authorized us to sell the stuff to him.”

    We knew it, we knew we knew it, and we ignored it because it was an unflattering truth. Imagine how differently the post-9/11 world would’ve played out, if we had just been honest.

    Originally posted June 18, 2010. Recorded in Royal Oak, MI in NTSC-HD/VHS-C. Possibly the last time my hair was so gloriously frizzy.

  • Why Bristol Palin’s Pregnancy IS ‘Fair Game’

    Why Bristol Palin’s Pregnancy IS ‘Fair Game’

    Spread The Word:

    Why Bristol Palin’s Pregnancy IS ‘Fair Game’

    Date: 2008-09-18
    Source: Master_Extraction (lowgenius.net)

    Original Text

    As someone who has long been vocally opposed to right-wing religious fundamentalism, I had to laugh when the Bristol Palin pregnancy story caused thousands of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians to suddenly come out in favor of pre-marital teenage pregnancy, with the most-often sounded refrains being: “It’s really not that big of a deal” and “We should leave Sarah Palin’s family out of the political debate!”

    First, I’d like to deal with the second assertion – that Palin’s family is ‘off-limits.’

    I can understand not wanting to drag a candidate’s family, especially their children, into the nasty, tumultuous world of presidential politics. But there are several bits of hypocrisy here that I really feel need to be addressed.

    • Bristol Palin was not being attacked; her mother’s politics were. Sarah Palin has come out vehemently against abortion and comprehensive sex education, maintaining that abstinence education is the only thing we should be teaching our young people about sexuality. As Vice-President, she’s made it quite clear that she will continue to oppose comprehensive sex education as a matter of public policy. Thus, it becomes a matter of examining the issue of sex education and what real results the Palin position has. The uncomfortable truth is, the Palin position – applied by her, as a mother, within her own family – failed to prevent teen pregnancy. Ignorance has never been a solution, and the Palin Sex Education Doctrine is one that insists on enforced ignorance.
    • The families of politicians have NEVER been ‘off limits.’ Remember Amy Carter? Or Chelsea Clinton? John McCain himself once attacked Chelsea, saying publicly that he thought Chelsea’s father was Janet Reno. The notion that there’s some long-standing barrier between the children of politicians and the media is utterly fantastical.
    • A politician’s family is perfectly all right to use…for political gain. When was the last time a presidential candidate with children didn’t have them on the podium at the end of a convention speech? Sarah Palin has listed motherhood as one of her qualifications to be Vice-President. If you’re going to use ‘motherhood’ as a job reference, then it naturally follows that We The People have the right to check your references. To irrationally insist that we not be allowed to consider how her children are doing when she touts motherhood as a job qualification is like trying a man for murder and refusing to allow evidence that he was hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime.

    Teenage pregnancy is a big deal…and I know whereof I speak. I love my daughter – now 19, I’m 38 at this writing – but having a child at 18 years old was not only a stupid move on my part that worked against my own interests, it also didn’t do her mother any favors, and most importantly it didn’t do my daughter any favors. In the real world, I’m forever tied to someone I have a lot of resentment toward; I spent a lot of years pursuing bad relationships in a desperate attempt to ‘find a step-mom’; my daughter has gone through feelings of insecurity, fear, and separation anxiety. Mistakes that I made earlier in my life and could have corrected became insurmountable obstacles. Teenagers are more prone to anger-management issues, impetuous and irresponsible behavior, and a host of other things that just makes them Not Good Parents.

    I find it to be an outrageous and dangerous hypocrisy that we worry about what our kids are taking away from knowing that it’s possible to have sex without getting pregnant…but we cheerfully endorse teen pregnancy as ‘no big deal’ without wondering in the least what lessons they’re taking away from that. Most pregnant teenagers don’t have a rich family that can afford to support a grandchild while mom finishes growing up.

    Leave Bristol Palin alone, sure…but while you’re respecting the kid’s right to privacy, let’s not forego our obligation to carefully examine the positions of the candidate, and to take a hard look at what results those positions have given birth to in the candidate’s own life.

    DORA (2026): Eighteen Years Later

    The logic here is simple and it holds: if someone offers their family as a job qualification, the family’s experience is evidence. You weren’t interested in gossip. You were interested in whether the system (abstinence-only education) produced the result it claimed within its own high-control environment. It didn’t.

    The personal honesty about your own daughter is what makes this work. You’re not judging from a distance — you’re speaking from the ground. You paid the cost of that mistake and you know what it actually costs.

    “Check the references” is still good advice. It was good in 2008. It’s good now.

  • Obama a Muslim? So what?

    Obama a Muslim? So what?

    Spread The Word:

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

    That sentiment is echoed by Beth Seidel, 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 Sidel 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.

    An interesting final note: re-read this sentence.

    “I hear that Obama’s a Muslim. If he is a Muslim, that would be a problem, because the terrorists already attacked us.”

    I find this sentence fascinating because it’s an actual real-time demonstration of someone making the (unsupportable) Islam = terror connection, which is poor enough logic of its own right, but then when you read the sentence entire, none of it makes the slightest bit of sense.

    Timestamp: 2008-09-18
    Signature: Dora Brandon, Cognitive Extension of JH