Stretch
The weather remains hot, hot enough for some hiking and swimming, but I didn't return to Jamison Lake yesterday. I tried Feldendkrais. I don't know how else to say it, and I won't provide a link because it is a commercial enterprise and no links other than commercially oriented ones seem to exist. It involves learning to move parts of the body in odd ways, at least odd compared to what is considered typical in our world. It was interesting, anyway, but I think that's the most I will do with it.
Liberals are not fascists, they're not socialists, they're not social democrats or indeed much of anything at all. The goading from the dim, fetid recesses of the right wing mind offers some insight into what they really are. They're timid right wing meliorists whose moments of courage produce tedious, self-indulgently prolix essays in defense of their social status. In the ideological scrum, they occupy whatever middle ground they're assigned by the opposing brand. In their actual political practice, they're adamantly opposed to corporate millenarian policy, if and only if it's branded Republican, and peevishly supportive of it, if and only if it's branded Democratic. The lese majeste offered by yahoos and wackos in the pre-fab town halls has ruffled their feathers. The market has spoken and the invisible hand has moved their perception managers, who cry "fascism" right back at the yahoos. They do it for love, of themselves and their brand identity, but they'd do it for money if it was offered and donate a sensible amount of the proceeds to the ACLU.
--Al Schumann
Both liberals and leftists in the U.S. have had difficulty in believing that a much-discredited American film genre, the Western, could suddenly be structuring and mandating U.S. political rhetoric … from Bush’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” Bin Laden poster, to Colin Powell’s insistence that “time is running out” as we cut to the chase, to the numerous U.S. television and print media that report daily on the “Showdown” or “Standoff” with Iraq. The evocation of the Western and all its prejudices now infuses U.S. culture and underwrites U.S. militarism. It seems that Bush, initially distinctive for his inarticulateness and stupidity, has succeeded in forcing (and enforcing) that same inarticulateness and stupidity on the U.S. public.
--Ann Kibbey, February 2003 (quoted by Stan Goff)
In Obama, we get all the corporate toadying of the last Democratic president, along with an even greater unwillingness than Clinton--and who would’ve thought that was possible--to name names, call out enemies, and throw a freakin’ punch every other year or so. (We’re also getting a continuation of the civil rights and civil liberties policies of Dick Cheney, as an extra added bonus, but that’s another story). What makes it even more astonishing this time around, however, is that we’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. There is apparently absolutely no bottom--as the events of recent weeks have reconfirmed--to the pit of vicious lies, brutal tactics, and democracy-demolishing antics of which regressives will avail themselves in their practice of contemporary American politics. Not only not being prepared for that, Barack Obama is still seemingly unable to raise his voice a decibel or two against the very people who are helping him to destroy his own presidency. Indeed, he is negotiating ‘bipartisan’ (read: total capitulation) deals with them, even as they relentlessly trash him before a national audience.
--David Michael Green
Liberals are not fascists, they're not socialists, they're not social democrats or indeed much of anything at all. The goading from the dim, fetid recesses of the right wing mind offers some insight into what they really are. They're timid right wing meliorists whose moments of courage produce tedious, self-indulgently prolix essays in defense of their social status. In the ideological scrum, they occupy whatever middle ground they're assigned by the opposing brand. In their actual political practice, they're adamantly opposed to corporate millenarian policy, if and only if it's branded Republican, and peevishly supportive of it, if and only if it's branded Democratic. The lese majeste offered by yahoos and wackos in the pre-fab town halls has ruffled their feathers. The market has spoken and the invisible hand has moved their perception managers, who cry "fascism" right back at the yahoos. They do it for love, of themselves and their brand identity, but they'd do it for money if it was offered and donate a sensible amount of the proceeds to the ACLU.
--Al Schumann
Both liberals and leftists in the U.S. have had difficulty in believing that a much-discredited American film genre, the Western, could suddenly be structuring and mandating U.S. political rhetoric … from Bush’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” Bin Laden poster, to Colin Powell’s insistence that “time is running out” as we cut to the chase, to the numerous U.S. television and print media that report daily on the “Showdown” or “Standoff” with Iraq. The evocation of the Western and all its prejudices now infuses U.S. culture and underwrites U.S. militarism. It seems that Bush, initially distinctive for his inarticulateness and stupidity, has succeeded in forcing (and enforcing) that same inarticulateness and stupidity on the U.S. public.
--Ann Kibbey, February 2003 (quoted by Stan Goff)
In Obama, we get all the corporate toadying of the last Democratic president, along with an even greater unwillingness than Clinton--and who would’ve thought that was possible--to name names, call out enemies, and throw a freakin’ punch every other year or so. (We’re also getting a continuation of the civil rights and civil liberties policies of Dick Cheney, as an extra added bonus, but that’s another story). What makes it even more astonishing this time around, however, is that we’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. There is apparently absolutely no bottom--as the events of recent weeks have reconfirmed--to the pit of vicious lies, brutal tactics, and democracy-demolishing antics of which regressives will avail themselves in their practice of contemporary American politics. Not only not being prepared for that, Barack Obama is still seemingly unable to raise his voice a decibel or two against the very people who are helping him to destroy his own presidency. Indeed, he is negotiating ‘bipartisan’ (read: total capitulation) deals with them, even as they relentlessly trash him before a national audience.
--David Michael Green