Random Rant Thread

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UNPOPULAR OPINION: I Don’t Have Student Loans And I Don’t Feel Bad For People Who Do
www.xojane.com/issues/unpopular-opinion-i-dont-have-student-loans-and-i-dont-feel-bad-for-people-who-do

I can’t pretend I completely understand how these people feel after the fun is over and the repayments begin, but I can say that I really don’t feel bad for them.

Why not? Because I worked hard to avoid taking out loans. My wonderful parents and grandmother helped me pay for my education, but in the end, it was a few decisions I made that saved me the burden of borrowing money I would never have been able to pay back. Unlike the majority of my friends who went to schools less than an hour from their parents’ homes and chose to live on campus rather than commute, my college roommates were named Mom and Dad. I chose state schools that were half, sometimes one-quarter, of the cost of the schools my friends were attending and worked a part-time on-campus scholarship job in addition to full-time hours at my retail job. I spent the four years of my life designed for partying essentially reliving my high school years. And yes, it was awful.

Er, um, "worked hard", eh?  The more appropriate title should be:

Unpopular Opinion: I Don't Have Student Loans In Large Part Thanks To My Families Paying For It, And God Knows What It's Like To Struggle Financially, But Here's How I Feel

I think I know why her opinion could be unpopular.

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A wonderful thing about the internet is that it has provided so many chances for so many people to have their voices heard, their words read.

Now we have the clear proof that most people are garbage at writing, and that their opinions are usually garbage too.

It's really wonderful.

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Dems are so spineless that I don't know how they manage to coordinate the movements of their body parts.  Their deafening silence on the police militarization and racial bigotry is almost impressive.  They should be ashamed of themselves that they let a "libertarian" fucker like Rand Paul say the right thing before any Dem.  He - that crypto-racist man - even mentioned "race".  I would use the words "economic underclass, the vast majority of whom are people of color" instead, but libertarians wouldn't go there.  They pretend that economy has nothing to do with the "race" issue.  People like him have no actual solution to the problem, and their economic policies would only drastically aggravate the situation.

But for now, I'm fine with his "race" argument and opposition to the militarization of the police.  It's not like he's wrong.

Eight years ago, NYPD cops gave me and two (upper-middle class white) friends tickets for "possession of marijuana" in Brooklyn. It sucked, but no criminal charge.  Four months later, exactly at the same place, a black friend of mine, a good, published photo artist, was stopped, frisked, and ordered to open his backpack for no reason.  There was a tiny bit of weed inside one pocket, which he had totally forgotten about.  He was arrested and jailed for the "public display of marijuana", though it's the cop that ordered him to "display" the weed.  Now he's got a criminal record.  FYI, when we were busted, two of us, my friends, were smoking joint - as much "public display" as it could get.

Hell, I don't even have to tell you such a stupid anecdote.  After Trayvon Martin and so many others, only liars and fools would deny that racial prejudice is rampant in the US law enforcement and judiciary.  The level of harassment and humiliation that blacks and Latinos living in poor neighborhoods have to put up with is simply astonishing.  And when they turn on TV, they see Starship Troopers shooting at aliens, and oh wait, they are just the locals.  Then it cuts to a news anchor worrying about the New Black Panthers - all five of them, I guess - involved in the protest, and lording over the protesters the message of Martin Luther King Jr, of all fucking people.

It makes me puke.  I'm amazed that they put up with this shit.  I'm amazed that there are only so few Panthers.

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There is one thing you have to remember about the police forces: the entire law enforcement system is, in large part, set up so as to maintain the chokehold on the underprivileged/minority communities.  And that has everything to do with the modern capitalism.

There are an astronomical number of people behind the bars in prisons, and they are, economically speaking, "surplus human resources".  They are not wanted in the economy except as free labor.  They contribute to the economy by *not* participating in it as actual players.

The police functions as the lubricant to keep the system revolving smoothly.  It's not there to solve a dispute between you and the guy next to you; it's there to keep the "order" - economically, and therefore politically.  That's the whole point.

That's why neither "compassion" nor "dialogue" will ever solve the problem.  Neither will the de-militarization of the police forces, for that matter.

Those shiny Starship Trooper weapons are nothing but decorations, and enormous profit makers for the defense industry who has made a killing by selling all the military products to the non-military forces = police.  It's Congress that made it possible, and of course that stinks.  It's a typical case of collusion and corruption, a daylight transfer of your taxes to the defense industry.

But you take those toys away from the cops, and they will remain as oppressive as ever.  They hardly need such ridiculous weapons to do their "job".  The cool gears are basically for ostentatious display, a mere show, to intimidate the people and hopefully put them back into their places.  On the practical terms, they are only effective in actual warfare, preferably conventional one.  If a gigantic nation-wide riot broke out, the entire country would be a Gaza Strip.  The weapons wouldn't - couldn't - "win" the war for the government/state , for the same reason that the IDF's superior technology and weapons alone cannot beat Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.  The country would be practically over at that point anyway.

The militarization is a problem insofar as it's overtly offensive and provocative, creating unnecessary tensions between the police and communities.  I'm all for the de-militarization, but you should never think that it will solve anything on any meaningful level.

I just thought that I should remind you of this.

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This is a James Baldwin interview on Esquire, from 1968 - the times of riots, protests, tensions, assassinations, and so on - the roaring '60s.

James Baldwin Tells Us All How to Cool It This Summer
www.esquire.com/features/james-baldwin-cool-it

Q. You say that existing jobs are just make-work jobs. What kind of job program should be adopted?

BALDWIN: It's very difficult to answer that question since the American Republic has created a surplus population.

BALDWIN: I object to the term "looters" because I wonder who is looting whom, baby.

Q. How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?

BALDWIN: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom?

Q. Why policemen?

BALDWIN: Look, we live in Harlem, let's say, or we live in Watts. The mother who comes down there with his cap and his own gun in his holster, he doesn't know what my day is like. He doesn't know why I get drunk when I do. He doesn't know anything about me at all. He's scared shitless of me. Now, what— the—fuck is he doing there? All he can do is shoot me. He's a hired concentration-camp keeper. I can police my own community far better than you ever will. Because you can't. It's not in you to do it. I know why somebody there is upset when he is upset. The cats were right when they were told by somebody, some cop, some leader, some mayor to go home. They said - you go home, we are home, baby.

Q. What would you say ought to be done to improve the relationship of the police with the black community?

BALDWIN : You would have to educate them. I really have no quarrel particularly with the policemen. I can see the trouble they're in. They're hopelessly ignorant and terribly frightened. They believe everything they see on television, as most people in this country do. They are endlessly respectable, which means to say they are Saturday-night sinners. The country has got the police force it deserves and of course if a policeman sees a black cat in what he considers a strange place he's going to stop him; and you know of course the black cat is going to get angry. And then somebody may die. But it's one of the results of the cultivation in this country of ignorance. Those cats in the Harlem street, those white cops; they are scared to death and they should be scared to death. But that's how black boys die, because the police are scared. And it's not the policemen's fault; it's the country's fault.

Q. How can we get the black people to cool it?

James Baldwin: It is not for us to cool it.

He could be saying the same things right here, right now.

I brought up James Baldwin a month or so ago, out of the sheer frustration over African-American intellectuals silent on issues like Palestine.  Baldwin had a historical point of view, and would move from one topic to another with the clear understanding of events taking place in all corners of the world.  He saw the underclass in the chokehold of the status quo virtually anywhere - and the grim spectacle of mutual destruction - be it physical, or ethical.

Q. Let's talk about the average citizen, the white man who lives on Eighty-ninth Street and Riverside Drive, what should he be doing?

BALDWIN: It depends on what he feels. It he feels he wants to save his country, he should be talking to his neighbors and talking to his children, He shouldn't, by the way, be talking to me.

Q. What should he be telling his neighbors?

BALDWIN: That if I go under in this country, I, the black man, he goes too.

It's ironic that the current President of the USA is an ostensibly "black" man.  I was somewhat delighted when he started talking about economic inequality as the defining issue of our time, while fully knowing that he would have to back off.  And back off he did, as soon as the rich cocksuckers began to accuse him of inciting "class warfare".

That's like Assad accusing a Syrian rebel of inciting a war fever when he shoots at the army, when everyone is already in the middle of a war.  The class warfare is right here, right now.  Even Warren Buffett, a symbol of the billionaire capitalism that we have today, made it clear when he said, "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."

Who is looting whom, baby?

The word "looters" is very popular among those who advocate the free-market ideologies.  They use it to describe the economic underclass, be it blacks/Latinos in ghettos or "white trash" in the trailer parks, who live on the welfare programs ("They don't work hard, and live on MY FUCKING MONEY!").  And then they show their "empathy" by denouncing Teh Government - almost always the federal government and not State governments - for corrupting their minds with its "socialist" programs.  Some of them are condemning the "overreaching power" of the government as we speak, using the Ferguson case as a great opportunity for another government-bashing.  They think it would all be fine if we took the power away from the federal government and gave it to each State, or what's even better, privatized everything under the sun, including the police forces.  Yeah, what could go wrong?

Have we become so dumb that we find such ridiculous arguments somehow liberating?  Is that what "liberty" has been reduced to?

And never mind that without the federal government "messing with" the States, segregation would've at least continued much longer.  Hell, we would've had mini-(and worse)-South Africas all over the place without the American Civil War, the biggest case of the federal government "messing with" the States.

Q. What about the poverty program, does that offer any remedy?

BALDWIN: Are you joking? There has not been a war on poverty in this country yet. Not in my lifetime. The war on poverty is a dirty joke.

Q. How would you improve it?

BALDWIN: By beginning it.

Q. In what fashion?

BALDWIN: Look there's no way in the world to do it without attacking the power of some people. It cannot be done unless you do that. The power of the steel companies, for example, which can both make and break a town. And they've done it, they're doing it. Everybody knows it. You can't have a war on poverty unless you are willing to attack those people and limit their profits.

Who is looting whom?  That's the question, and unless it's addressed in a serious way, James Baldwin will always sound like he's immortal.

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Here's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's take on Ferguson.

The Coming Race War Won’t Be About Race
time.com/3132635/ferguson-coming-race-war-class-warfare/

With each of these shootings/chokehold deaths/stand-your-ground atrocities, police and the judicial system are seen as enforcers of an unjust status quo. Our anger rises, and riots demanding justice ensue. The news channels interview everyone and pundits assign blame.

Then what?

I’m not saying the protests in Ferguson aren’t justified—they are. In fact, we need more protests across the country. Where’s our Kent State? What will it take to mobilize 4 million students in peaceful protest? Because that’s what it will take to evoke actual change. The middle class has to join the poor and whites have to join African-Americans in mass demonstrations, in ousting corrupt politicians, in boycotting exploitative businesses, in passing legislation that promotes economic equality and opportunity, and in punishing those who gamble with our financial future.

Otherwise, all we’re going to get is what we got out of Ferguson: a bunch of politicians and celebrities expressing sympathy and outrage. If we don’t have a specific agenda—a list of exactly what we want to change and how—we will be gathering over and over again beside the dead bodies of our murdered children, parents, and neighbors.

He quotes from Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues at the end of the article.

The phrase "The way they do my life" has been co-opted by the fanatical free-market preachers.  By "they", they mean Teh Government that taxes and regulates them.  But that's not what "they" really are. NO - They are themselves a huge part of "they".


Bills pile up sky high

Send that boy off to die

Make me wanna holler

The way they do my life

Make me wanna holler

The way they do my life


Who does your life?

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Bwahahahahaha.  OMG, I'm dying.

This British ex-conservative MP bimbo, who is about the only person who managed to make Piers Morgan look like Socrates in comparison, thinks "Zionist" is a racist slur.  Never mind that's exactly what over 80% of Jewish Israelis and the majority of diaspora Jews call themselves, very proudly.




ROTFLMAO. "If he uses Zionist, then YES!"  Poor Theodore Herzl.  But guilty as charged.  He can't complain.  He not only used the word a lot, but practically invented it.  He will have to endure in his grave the days of being blocked by Louise Mensch as the ultimate anti-Semite.  There is this small problem of labeling Herzl, the founding father of Israel, as the biggest anti-Semite in the world, but I guess those small details don't really matter in the big picture of conservatism.  Right?

Jeez.  Basically, the "conservatives" like her defending Israel tooth and nail are roughly on the same level as engaging in a discussion about the history of the USA without having a clue who George Washington is.  "Who?"  Never heard of him. I guess if you tell her that he's someone who talked endlessly about "revolution" in America, and was very anti-British, she will think he's a despicable commie, probably a Kremlin agent, against the "free world" and try to block him on Twitter as well.  Poor George, yet another insult coming from the British.

This idiot is apparently some kind of a star in the British conservative world.  Their idiocy never ceases to amaze me.

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When you talk about the over-criminalization, and militarization of the police, you can't avoid talking about neocons.

Yes, neocons, my eternal punching bags.  You thought they only cared about wars and stuff?  Wrong.  The early neocons were first and foremost commentators on social issues.  In fact, what compelled them to convert from left-wing Trotskyism to right-wing conservatism was not the threat of the Soviet Union, but exactly the civil unrest back in the 1960s-1970s.  In short, those riots and protests, the escalating crime rates in urban areas, hippies having sex and doing LSD all the time and so on made them lose faith in people, at least in their warped minds.  They thought America was collapsing from within.

To put it simply, they blamed all the trouble in the society on "too much individualism".  They concluded that the black people protesting the police violence and racism suffered from TMI - "Too Much Individualism".  If your bullshit alarm is beeping like crazy now, be glad that you are not as warped as a neocon.  The neocons justified their view by employing various jibberish-y arguments, using many highbrow words that they had learned in their socialist days.  But it all boiled down to the simple, reactionary sentiment against "too much individualism", which supposedly the Civil Rights movement, feminism, gay rights activism, and the whole other lot had unleashed in the society.

Then, a few of them came up with the so-called Broken Windows theory.  They felt the need to assert Authority in the society to control the rampant individualism, and thought that if dads in families and local communities weren't doing the job, the government had to do it.  That's why they have always been supportive of religious Christian communities, where the notion of Authority is by default very strong, even though almost every single one of them is a proud atheist.  On the economic side, they borrowed heavily from right-wing economists like Milton Friedman.  You may think that's weird since those economists always trumpeted the value of "individualism", but what the neocons wanted to prove is that the government programs to improve the lives of the underclass would be a waste of money and resources, because of "Too Much Individualism".  They thought all they would do was spoil the people even further, encouraging them to indulge in TMI, and the right-wing economists provided neat theories for that view.

The Broken Windows theory, on the actual policy level, led to the drastic reinforcement of the police forces and the massive criminalization of social problems.  War on homelessness (which only meant getting rid of the homeless camps and kicking them out of public space), war on drug, war on terror, all the destructive, stupid "wars" on something.  They didn't care much about whether the "crime" was actually harmful to the society or not, since it was first and foremost about recovering Authority.  That's the trademark pragmatism of neocons - stabilizing lies over disorienting truths.  They have huge contempt for difficult truths that threaten the myth of a peaceful, stable society.  What they want is a society of Good Cop vs. Evil Criminal, that wonderful black-and-white make-believe world.  Leo Strauss, the father of neoconservatism, was a big fan of American TV shows Gunsmoke and Perry Mason.  People must maintain their faith in a stable Authority the same way the American TV viewers did in Marshal Matt Dillon and Perry Mason, and only within that solid framework could all the "good" values like freedom and democracy flourish, they thought. 

Back in the '70s, there were lots and lots of proposals/plans for all kinds of social programs to improve the lives of poor Americans.  But they were never seriously tried.  And gradually yet steadily, the Broken Windows theory won out, and Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in the presidential election secured its dominance.

I'm sure you now understand that what neocons have been doing on the international stage is simply the extension of what they did inside America.  It's always the same theory, the same reactionary ethos that drives them.  That's the legacy of neoconservatism, and you are witnessing one episode of it in Ferguson, as you have in the Middle East, Ukraine/Russia, Israel, etc. 

As they say, everything starts at home; and comes back home eventually.

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So, Amnesty International observers are led away with their hands up on national television in the United States of America in 2014.  I think that's what I'm watching.

Good God.

I don't know how many Americans are aware that they just bid farewell to something rather significant.  It's gone, just like that.  It's over, finito.

It makes perfect sense to many now that the US and Israel are so tight with each other.  Shared values.

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This Don Lemon fella, an African-American reporter for CNN, is really quite a piece of work.  He totally reminds me of that guy.  I mean, that guy, or one of those many guys, in good-guys-defeating-bad-guys-against-all-odds Hollywood B-movies.  You know, that pathetic guy who decides to rat on his friends around 30 minutes into the movie, and ends up being told to get the fuck out of their sight by his former friends in the second-to-last scene.  He thanks them for sparing his life, and runs away, only to die in some sort of a poetic-justice accident (e.g. run over by a fleeing bad guy's car).  Usually one of the highlights of the movie.

This dude has been trying to "see it from the police's side" so hard, so pathetically.  He keeps up that snitch job even after being shoved around by obnoxious cops and basically treated like shit on national television.  He's just said to disgruntled Ron Johnson, a typical "Good Cop" (as in the "Bad Cop, Good Cop" routine): "We hope you're not mad at us."

Super-glue your nose and mouth to his ass already, you grovelling piece of shit.

I really hope this is not the prototype of a "post-racial" African American.  Pathetic beyond hope, but as far as I can see, most of the "new breed of African American leaders" trumpeted by the media are more or less like him, while the real leaders working on grassroots level for civil rights have been consistently ignored.  Or even demonized ("He has a connection to former Panthers!"  "He's a red!  Socialist!") in some horrible cases.

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And can anyone shut up that unfunny idiot Bill Maher?  That guy with the mentality of a typical contrarian college dweeb who seems to somehow think declaring himself an atheist and talking about weed all the time is an intellectually courageous thing in the 21st-century America? 

"And I come home, WITH A BONG!"  ** stupid laughter **

Yeah, you do, rich white man.

I lived in fucking Texas, and saw lots of affluent conservative Republican dads around his age.  And I'd say the clear majority of them smoked weed too.  That's just what many rich white men do.  Who gives a shit about your "bong".

Grow the fuck up, pothead.  Your problem is probably that you smoke too much.  That's why most of your contrarian-reactionary opinions stink, and are as thought-provoking as a dead snail on the road.  And stop speaking in the name of atheism.  I, an atheist, have nothing to do with the likes of you and your pals.  You are worse than the Christians/Muslims you constantly make fun of.  I almost want to baptize you and Richard Dawkins, you pathetic bigot.

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So, the US and Assad are now "allies" apparently, fighting together the New Bad Enemy that is ISIS. They are even sharing some intel, it seems.

The US was THIS close to bombing his palace into pieces and effectively arming none other than ISIS only yesterday, in case you forgot.

I hope you really understand now what I was talking about back then.

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John J. Mearsheimer, one of the so-called US foreign policy "realists", is very blunt:

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis.

Basically my position, and I'm actually not pleased that I have to agree with Mearsheimer.  The "realists" are better than neocons, but that's not saying much, is it?  They are often as realistic as my five-year-old nephew. Some of the worst mass murderers in history were "realists" as well. 

But if I'm not mistaken, he was saying a while ago that Ukraine should keep the nuclear weapons to deter Russia, or some crazy shit like that, so I welcome this shift to sanity.

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Jared Lato is a fucking moron. This needs to be said periodically.

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The IDF is once again pummeling Rafah, Gaza right now. The death toll on the Palestinian side is now well over 2000 and counting.

This is a haunting report on what happened in Shajaya by Max Blumenthal:

www.alternet.org/world/gruesome-tales-surface-israeli-massacres-against-families-gaza-neighborhood?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Truly horrific, and supports my allegation that the attack in Shajaya was nothing but a pure brutal retaliation, where terrorizing and massacring civilians was actually the whole point (if there is a "point" in such madness).

BTW, donate some to Gaza/Palestine if you can, even if you support Israel.  If you are one of those who go, "Oh NO!  The money will INEVITABLY end up in the hands of Hamas!", eat a sack of hell and drop dead.

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