Day: November 22, 2016

Closing Thought–22Nov16

Labels…..

Before anyone gets all butt hurt….I am not accusing anyone of anything…..all I am saying is…….. it is a perception….if you take one person at their word then why not everyone?

For over a decade there has been a label used by uneducated dolts to describe anyone that does not agree with their ignorance….socialist/Marxist/ Commie….on and on….

I will agree that I use terms like d/bag, a/wad, moron etc etc…..but those are not labels for me….they are observations.  Plus I was a socialist and to lump me in with Dems is an insult…but people would know that if they had any idea of what they speak.  There is little socialistic about a Dem…you cannot be a socialist and embrace capitalism…..it is really simple…..again that would be known if there were half a brain working on the Right.

After the Trump victory I have seen a label turning up more and more…..Fascist….to be clear I do not believe that Trump is a Fascist….(please read that again so that you do  not embarrass yourself)….

Those using such label do so because they have seen a list of characteristics for Fascism and find some of them in the Trump camp…..


If one would remove one’s head from one’s ass and use a wee bit of commonsense then one could see where this could be believed….what is that saying…”If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck” then you are probably looking at a duck.

And stuff like this does not help the conversation what so ever…..

A private banquet dinner, a reality-TV star, and a tweet showing a Nazi salute have placed a DC Italian restaurant in the center of controversy. Maggiano’s Little Italy hosted a dinner Friday for a group that had a conference in DC the next day, apparently without knowing the group was the National Policy Institute, known for its white nationalist members, Washington City Paper and the Washington Post report. How the restaurant became clued in: a protest against NPI that formed at the eatery, followed by dinner attendee Tila Tequila sending out a tweet showing herself and two men performing the Nazi salute along with the caption “Seig [sic] heil!”

I still will not use the term…I may change my mind at a later date….but for now I will not use them.

On the other hand the uneducated dolts on the Right keep using a term they do not understand then they should not be offended when the other side does the same.

Do I need to use another awful cliche?

The Demise of Anti-War Liberals?

After my stint in Vietnam I returned home to a society that did not like me much (deep down they still do not like the Viet vet very much)….I also became an antiwar activist because I did and do not think that war is a good thing…it usually creates more problems that it solved…..

I have noticed that the antiwar movement does not have the same impact it use to…..especially within the ranks of so-called liberals…..one reason is because war nowadays only effects 1% of the population…..basically there is NO shared experience and the media used to control ALL info about our numerous wars……

The liberals aka Dems, are now as entrenched with the money of the “defense” industry that they have turned a blind eye to anything resembling right……

This last election proved this point…..and a little historical perspective at the liberals and the antiwar movement…….

Senator Sanders may now have sounded the death knell for the liberal anti-war movement.

During the post-World War II period, opposition to U.S. militarism and involvement in dubious military conflicts has usually been stronger on the political left than the right.  Left-wing, anti-war sentiment reached its peak during the Vietnam War, when groups opposed to that conflict could sometimes mobilize tens of thousands of demonstrators.  Opposition to subsequent U.S. military crusades was less robust, but even as late as the Iraq War, there were sizable anti-war demonstrations in the streets.

There have been warning signs for some time, though, that opposition to unnecessary armed conflicts has lost its appeal to much of the political left.  For one thing, there was always a partisan bias to anti-war movements.  Even during the heyday of resistance to the Vietnam War, the criticism became more intense after Republican Richard Nixon took over the White House than it had been when Democrat Lyndon Johnson occupied the Oval Office.  The bias was even more apparent in later decades.  There was far more criticism of Republican George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War than there was of Democrat Bill Clinton’s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.  Indeed, a distressing number of prominent liberals found reasons to praise Clinton’s military crusades in the Balkans.

Source: The Demise of Anti-War Liberals? | Cato @ Liberty

Americans need to pay more attention to the wars we start and why….if for no other reason than it could be a family member that has to fight the battles…..

 

Facebook Fake News & America’s Cultural Crisis

I recently touched on the “fake news” becoming mainstream in my Closing Thought…..I read a post later that went into more detail and its effect on the culture of the country.

It appears that “fake news” made the rounds of the MSM as real news…..did it influence the election….not a question I can answer and others will not admit the deception……I know of at least two blogs that I visit that ran with at least one of the fake news items…..and yet they will not admit that they were fooled into believing crap.

Technology has changed culture. It has empowered new voices, but also permitted our political fights to invade many other worlds once exempt from partisan combat: celebrities, beauty pageants, and arguably even our churches, from the Right’s point of view and the Left’s.All the places where we once gathered to celebrate the idea of a world outside of politics are increasingly split by the same hyper-partisanship that characterizes our political culture, which this week is traveling under the cover of what the Left calls a “fake news” crisis.Even corporate culture, which needs to be reality-based to succeed, is increasingly pushing itself in a one-sided way into political combat with half its customers. The Chamber of Commerce declared war on conscience protections for gay-marriage dissenters in deep-red states. Atlanta-based Coca-Cola decided it had to deprive former U.S. solicitor general Paul Clement of his law partnership for the crime of defending the House of Representatives in DOMA litigation. The corporations that run sports entertainment decided to punish the state of North Carolina for its so-called bathroom bill, relocating events they had planned to hold in the state. ESPN is enthusiastically covering and debating those who refuse to stand for the national anthem.Technology, by facilitating the spread of outrage, created the backlashes that led to all of these punitive actions. It has also enabled people’s worst impulses to bully and shame, and unleashed formerly contained voices of open racism and anti-Semitism, as well as open “progressive” racism in universities and elsewhere.RELATED: Report on Scourge of Fake News Turns Out to Be FakedIn the week since Donald Trump was elected, the Left has been quick to hype the crisis of “fake news” on Facebook, complaining that the social-media giant swung the election by allowing the spread of false pro-Trump stories. There is no doubt a kernel of truth to the charge — fake stories were shared on Facebook during the election, and that is worrisome — but insofar as it allows the mainstream media to avoid even a moment’s introspection in the wake of Trump’s victory, it is a convenient distraction. The much bigger problem is we no longer have a consensus, centrist view of what is true and not true: There is no mainstream media anymore.What do I mean by that? Just take a look at the past week’s worth of false media narratives:1. The Trump administration is in disarray. The purge of Chris Christie, apparently for filling the transition team with business-as-usual lobbyists — or possibly as Jared Kushner’s revenge on Christie for prosecuting his father — was, of course, news. But the idea that the Trump administration is behindhand in orderly transition is just fantasy, as David Axelrod acknowledged.2. Trump is already showing signs of unsavory nepotism. Yes, there are laws against employing family members. But they do not apply to the president, and even if they did, they would not prohibit Trump from talking to Kushner, his children, or anyone else in his family about policy, strategy, or legislation.3. Steve Bannon is a white nationalist like David Duke. Yes, Breitbart has championed the alt-right. But the evidence is not nearly as clear as the media have made it seem.Surely, we can and must do better. But trusting the mainstream media to decide what is real and fake news, or asking Facebook and Twitter to sort it out for us, is not the answer.Jonathan Rauch has written, I think rather persuasively, that the absence of authoritative institutions, including political institutions, is a new problem. The fake news “crisis” is emblematic of the cultural problem we have: There appears to be no mainstream any more. The center is not holding. We have few agreed-upon truths that unite us in this Internet age. We don’t have agreement, above all, on who has the power to decide what is true and false and right and wrong.That’s what a culture war is, as James Davison Hunter taught us: a struggle over who has the power to name reality. And, all reports to the contrary, America’s has not gone away; it’s just metastasized.— Maggie Gallagher is the author of four books on marriage and a longtime contributor to National Review.

Source: Facebook Fake News & America’s Cultural Crisis | National Review

Where do we draw the line?  I agree with freedom of the press….but is outright lies covered in that freedom?

For instance these people……

With the controversy over fake or deliberately misleading viral stories making headlines, the Washington Post and the New York Times each have interesting features on the topic:

  • The Post profiles two twentysomethings who were unemployed restaurant workers six months ago but have since struck it rich by creating the fast-growing LibertyWritersNews website. Paris Wade and Ben Goldman churn out quick stories from their couch with headlines like “THE TRUTH IS OUT! The Media Doesn’t Want You To See What Hillary Did After Losing,” promote them via their Facebook page (now with 805,000 followers), then watch them go viral. They collect money from a slew of ads on everything from Viagra alternatives to acne solutions. “We’re the new yellow journalists,” says Wade, at another point explaining their headline-writing process thusly: “You have to trick people into reading the news.” Read the full story.

The Times, meanwhile, deconstructs how one false story in particular went viral. The difference is that this one wasn’t intentionally fake. It began when 35-year-old Eric Tucker in Austin, Texas, posted an image of parked buses near an anti-Donald Trump rally on Nov. 9, after leaping to the conclusion that the protesters had been bused in. (Turns out, the buses were completely unrelated.) He had just 40 followers on Twitter, but his tweet suggesting the protests were manipulated got picked up on Reddit, then on conservative forums including the Gateway Pundit, and, soon resulted in headlines like “They’ve Found the Buses!” ricocheting around the web. (Trump himself seemed to buy into the sentiment.) Looking back, “I might still have tweeted it but very differently,” says Tucker of his original image. “I think it goes without saying I would have tried to make a more objective statement.” Read the full story.

It has become all too easy to get Fake News into the national conversation…..but I am positive that this “fake news” is here to stay…..what can be done?

Major Internet companies, such as Google and Facebook, are being urged to censor such articles and to punish alleged violators. Also, teams of supposedly “responsible” news providers and technology giants are being assembled to police this alleged problem and decide what is true and what is not.

But therein lies the more serious problem: who gets to decide what is real and what is not real? And – in an age when all sides propagate propaganda – when does conformity in support of a mainstream “truth” become censorship of reasonable skepticism?

Source: What to Do About ‘Fake News’ – Consortiumnews

I am sure there is another post lurking in there some place……

Trump Needs Good Advice

We now have a new president-elect and he is in the process of putting together a government for the nation……and its people……

So far I am not sure about some of his choices, although it is by NO means complete, but since he has no direct experience in governing then he needs good advisers with good advice….not yes men….he needs advice that will be the best for the nation and its people…..

The American Conservative has a good article on this situation….I may not agree with them on everything but they do have some excellent writers and analysts………this article makes some very good points…..

I would very much like to see the White House revert to a George Marshall type of foreign policy, in which the United States would use its vast power wisely rather than punitively. As Donald Trump knows little of what makes the world go round, senior officials and cabinet secretaries will play a key role in framing and executing policy. One would like to see people like Jim Webb, Chas Freeman, Andrew Bacevich, or even TAC’s own Daniel Larison in key government positions, as one might thereby rely on their cool judgment and natural restraint to guide the ship of state. But that is unfortunately unlikely to happen.

Source: Trump Needs Good Advice | The American Conservative

Everyone needs to remember that Trump is the president for all Americans not just the ones that will kiss his ring.

The Islamic State Threat in Somalia

Time for me to get back to real issues…..there is enough hearsay these days to make one dizzy……

News about ISIS has been slow in coming with the exception of the chest thumping about how it will be defeated…..but while Americans were celebrating and whining over the results of the election….ISIS has been quietly expanding.

First it was expanding into Libya…the conflict there was the perfect set of conditions and then they sneaked into Afghanistan and have been quietly making head way in capturing territory.

And now they have found a foothold in Somalia….al-Shabaab, an AQ affiliate, has been making noise in the country for decades….but now the conditions were ripe and ISIS has come calling…..

On 26 October, about more than 50 heavily-armed Somali Islamic State (IS) fighters seized Qandala, a sparsely populated town in Somalia’s Puntland federal state on a rugged mountainous coastal strip overlooking the Gulf of Aden. It was a small, but highly symbolic, step forward for the group and demonstrates again how armed extremists exploit state disorder and local tensions to develop safe havens and rebuild after otherwise debilitating defeats. Unless Puntland treats this threat seriously and resolves internal tensions like that in the Qandala area and conflicts with neighbouring federal states, IS in Somalia could grow in strength and destabilise much larger parts of Somalia.

Source: The Islamic State Threat in Somalia | World Affairs Journal

The US already has troops operating in Somalia…..will this be an escalation in the making?

It feels good to get back to work after all these months….