Is Salazar the left's new up

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 12:26:46 +0000

In reply to The threat to democracy--from the left

Is Salazar the left's new up-and-coming liar?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/opinion/julia-salazar-socialism-democ...

A perhaps subtle difference

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 06:07:00 +0000

In reply to The threat to democracy--from the left

A perhaps subtle difference is that William Shockley was a relative unknown, whereas Bannon's had his own magazine and then Presidential candidate/President to spout his ideas.

After 2003 we had all sorts of people who were wrong on the Iraq War, yet they also kept getting airtime, while people who'd been right found themselves uninvited. Neocon who said Iraq'd be a cakewalk? Come on down. Liberal who noted we hadn't found evidence and besides, it's a lot tougher than it looks? must be un-American, anyway, let's find out how it's going from the guys who said it'd be easy and now know it won't cuz they're *experienced* yay...

Bannon shit the bed. His ideas are crazy, and he has no trouble getting them heard enough/too much already. Zakaria says it himself:

The reality is that the people running the Economist, the Financial Times, “60 Minutes,” the New Yorker and many other organizations that have recently sought to feature Bannon know he is an intelligent and influential ideologist, a man who built the largest media platform for the new right, ran Trump’s successful campaign before serving in the White House, and continues to articulate and energize the populism that’s been on the rise throughout the Western world. He might be getting his 15 minutes of fame that will peter out, but, for now, he remains a compelling figure.

"Compelling figure" is euphemism for "CNN made a cool billion dollars giving these fucks air time during 2015-2016 and we want our piece too" - Bannon's everywhere, but somehow if he's not on your campus you're missing his important message. But here in the real world, there are only so many lecture nights on campus, and what Bannon gets means there's less room for Ocasio or Letitia James or Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Arlan Hamilton or Naomi Wu/RealSexyCyborg or Andrew Yang or Michael Avenatti or Stormy Daniels or Ryan Farrow or other figures who bring something new and positive to the table.

The real fear that many on the left have is not that Bannon is dull and uninteresting, but the opposite — that his ideas, some of which can reasonably be described as evoking white nationalism, will prove seductive and persuasive to too many people. Hence his detractors’ solution: Don’t give him a platform, and hope that this will make his ideas go away. But they won’t. In fact, by trying to suppress Bannon and others on the right, liberals are likely making their ideas seem more potent. Did the efforts of communist countries to muzzle capitalist ideas work?

What a little shit Fareed is - no doubt white nationalism & other crazed hateful philosophies are "seductive" - uh, like read the history of the 20th Century to start - and yes, all of these assholes at different media orgs that gave these crazed philosophies air time at the expense of real policies and unified philosophies still don't feel a need to say "mea culpa", but instead want us to keep digging our hole while they make money. Muzzle? Fuck them. The 1st Amendment or the Constitution isn't a suicide pact. There are 200 channels on TV, and I can watch what the fuck I want.

His other examples are asinine: Condi Rice is dumb as a rock - perfectly nice lady, I don't think she realized all the shit she was endorsing outside of her ivory tower, and she shone in that academic sphere where you just have to memorize & regurgitate and keep publishing, but in terms of practical common sense, no, she's a platitude with a mouth. And she put a black female veneer on a horrible foreign policy play. (ok, I again offer the caveat that post-9/11 we might say screw it, we're going to mop up anyway - but no one said we had to do it incompetently and in a long-term swamp/self-defeating way where we're still sending people to Iraq & Afghanistan. What do we have to learn from Condi Rice after all that? What do we actually get from Steve Bannon except "he's really big in Europe!" where all the other fascists are partying & trying to regroup.

When I was younger, giving David Duke a platform was seen as a bad move simply on taste, though it was assumed whoever needed to understand his evil ideas to combat them would. Of course college kids read once upon a time, not just watched Buckley-Chomsky debates on TV, so would know which parts were lies & exaggerated, and which had some elements of the truth.

What I think is missing is that the current debates are just soundbites, hardly a quest for truth & fire. They *are* trying to seduce, and they have the tools to do it much better than ever before (careful you don't find yourself behind a dumpster with your knickers pulled down - social media roofies are more popular & effective than ever). I'm sure we can plug a few of Steve Bannon's ideas into this TED talk template and you won't have missed a thing.

We are in the age of the

rmrd0000 — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 23:49:45 +0000

In reply to The threat to democracy--from the left

We are in the age of the Internet. We have access to news sources on the Right and the Left where we can view articles and video of controversial figures. Do we really expect to hear something surprising from these one on one interviews or debates? Michael Avenatti appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show. Carlson did his usual thing of interruption and ridicule. There was nothing to learn. Personally, I wouldn’t waste energy blocking a wingnuts from speaking, but I also realize there is little to gain.

dagblog - Comments for "The threat to democracy--from the left"

Is Salazar the left's new up

A perhaps subtle difference

We are in the age of the