There's a reason they call it the TwitFace.

Behold:

Well there, Massuh Superior Being suh, that's quite a statement there.  (Personally, I'd say the worst insult anyone could throw at me is to call me a v*ter in the first place, but then I'm a known heretic.)  It deserves a far more thorough fisking than I have any time to assemble here.  Nonetheless, presumably you, paragon of civic virtue and All That Is Good, Healthful, and Nonfattening, "supported" a different candidate, and very likely "supported" the current administration through both of its terms, as well.  (I suppose it's possible you didn't, but somehow that seems vanishingly unlikely from the evidence here.)

It would be childishly simple to ask you, in light of your strong declarative statement, why you would prefer a candidate (and a sitting president) who believes that dead Mexicans (that's brains-blown-out dead--we're not talking about a bigotry of words here) are an acceptable political cost of manufacturing the public impression that American gun dealers are arming narcotraficantes on the sly.  (Oh, you never heard about Operation Fast And Furious, reported on almost daily for what, a year?  In which the ATF deliberately armed the cartels so that their crime guns could be traced back to US gun dealers, supporting the FedGov's claim that 90% of Mexican crime guns trace back to the US?  Yeah, both Hill and Barry were all over that one.)

It would be similarly easy to ask you, again in light of your morally upstanding and good-for-the-climate statement, why you would support candidates and presidents that not only argue openly for extrajudicial killing and indefinite detention, but practice it regularly.  As but one example, assassinating not only an American citizen without trial, but shortly thereafter his teenage son, offering the functional equivalent of "sucks to be him, he should have had a better dad" by way of explanation.  How many hundreds have been killed with drones, or more traditional methods of extrajudicial war?  

You're okay with all that, right?  Seeing as how "there is no middle ground", and all.

One could go on.  It's not difficult.

But you're smart, and enlightened--so much moreso than half the American public, which you keep telling me has simply lost its mind because it doesn't move in lockstep with your beliefs.  (Oh, you don't put it that way, but that's always what it comes down to.)

Obviously they must have been conned.

I'll bet you think you appreciate irony and wit, too.

Arthur Silber is back at it.

Over at Once Upon A Time, Arthur Silber weighs in on the thunderous worship of American Sniper.  As usual, he lays it out well, and also as usual, he stays very close to his core subject matter.  Here's your teaser, with that latter idea in mind:

In the midst of this blood-drenched celebration of unnecessary, avoidable murder, I heard one especially stupid comment. A local Los Angeles radio host lamented that, during his time in office, Mr. Obama has never uttered Chris Kyle's name. Obama has failed to grant the recognition due this great hero. When I heard that, I had an odd, funny thought. Of course Obama isn't going to mention Kyle, I thought. Kyle is his competition.

Obama is the Murderer-in-Chief. He devoted years and enormous energy to becoming the Murderer-in-Chief. And you expect him to share this great achievement with some two-bit sniper? 160 confirmed kills? That's a morning's work for Obama. Surely we recall that Obama devotedly continues -- and expands -- the infernal work of American Empire in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and in countless countries around the globe. Surely we recognize that Obama considers the lives of tens of thousands of people, most of them entirely innocent by any standard, as completely expendable in the pursuit of American global hegemony.

On top of this, we surely recall that Obama has a Kill List, and that his Murder Program has been widely publicized in the nation's leading newspapers. The U.S. government has been at great pains to make sure that we all know about the Kill List and the Murder Program in excruciating detail -- and that we know that Obama himself is critical in directing all these operations. The U.S. government, led by Obama, claims that it may kill anyone it chooses, anywhere in the world, for any reason it offers, or for no reason at all. Why would Obama even notice a pipsqueak like Kyle?

Do please RTWT.  As usual, it's worth the effort.

Although I can hardly find cause to argue that Silber is wrong in any of this, I find myself more interested in pursuing the angle of having a functional understanding of the role of protecting  comrades, but simply being unwilling to elevate it, uncritically, to heroic status as the masses seem to expect us all to do.  And that, of course, is a simple matter of "you knew this about the job when you took it--or you should have".  By definition, a military sniper is a hired killer who takes his orders from a third party.  His morality and ethics are deliberately outsourced, and see, right there you've lost me.  Further, that morality is, knowingly, outsourced to a group of people that are known liars, known propagandists, known murderers, known sociopaths... To take killing orders on their word--and take money for it--uh, no, this fits no definition of "heroism" I have ever heard. 

It's good to see Silber back at it.  May his health hold out longer still!

Calling out Glenn Greenwald.

Wait, what was that?  Calling out Glenn Greenwald?

Yes.  You read that right.  And I'm talking about a legitimate calling-out, too--not the playbook-regurgitated tripe that you'd expect from the various flavors of American Exceptionalism.

I've been following, with some interest, Arthur Silber's recent work on this topic (which seemed to start back in June, here and here), and as much admiration as I have for Greenwald's work (and I do), Silber's core point cannot be denied.  He articulated it in October, this way (emphasis in original):

...Greenwald, together with the other journalists to whom he has granted access to the Snowden documents and who abide by his ground rules, is engaged in precisely the same exercise of power that the State employs. Yet Greenwald continues to vehemently condemn the State's exercise of such power, just as he condemns those who obey the State's edicts, while he and his enthusiastic fans view his identical exercise of power in glowing terms, offering endless praise for the "bravery," "courage" and "independence" demonstrated by those who bring us these carefully selected, sanitized, edited, and redacted tidbits from the documentation of the State's actions and crimes.

Silber makes this case by illustrating the substantive differences between WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden (emphasis in original), of which this is just an excerpt:

...WikiLeaks' methodology stands in stark contrast to that used by the journalists to whom Edward Snowden gave his document trove. These journalists insist that filtering of the "raw" documents is indispensable to understanding by the otherwise untutored (and, presumably, unwashed) public. These journalists will first select which documents we will be permitted to see, and which we won't (which is most of them). But that is far from sufficient in the view of these journalists, who are gifted with powers of understanding and judgment far exceeding the abilities of us ordinary schmucks. We are told that the Snowden documents are "difficult" and "complex." Therefore, when we are allowed an occasional glimpse of carefully selected documents, these journalists will explain to us what we should think of them, and what conclusions we are entitled to reach. These self-appointed authorities are genuinely dedicated to the role they have granted themselves: they will guide us in every step we take. Our "protectors" will guard from all the dangers that might unleash chaos resulting in the immediate implosion of the rigid structures that narrowly circumscribe our lives: an original thought, a unique perspective, an unexpected insight.

You can see where he's going with this.  And while it's not that I want him to be right about it--Greenwald seems to make for a truly excellent hero in many respects--I sure can't see where he's wrong.  (As with so much of Silber's work, you don't so much read it as confront it--which is what makes it some of the most useful writing available today.)

And if I'm understanding events properly, Greenwald just seems to be serving himself up perfectly according to the very script he seems to have spent so long railing against.  For anyone who does bother to look beyond his past laurels and view his current actions critically, it ain't lookin' so good for Glenn Greenwald.  (Emphasis and links in original.)

If there is a single general theme to Glenn Greenwald's career as a journalist, it is that he constantly confronts and challenges power and those who exercise power, primarily in the political sphere. Greenwald himself has often proclaimed this to be his major concern, and he repeated this conviction in a recent interview: "I came to believe if you’re smart, skilled, and have the resources, you should use those things to fuck with the powerful.”

So challenging power and those individuals who exercise power is a positive good, one of critical significance. Indeed, if you are able to do so, you should "fuck with the powerful."

Pierre Omidyar is a multibillionaire. On Fortune magazine's list of "The World's Billionaires," Omidyar appears as number 123. Fortune describes that article as follows: "The names, numbers and stories behind the 1,426 people who control the world economy." At 123, Omidyar is very high on the list of people who control the world economy.

Look, I'm hardly against the idea of wealth honestly earned, but even if Omidyar is just exactly, precisely that, still:  that's painfully ironic and Greenwald has got to know that.  (For anyone who isn't yet up on the Omidyar connection, see here and here.  The short story is that he seems to want to make GG into some sort of large-scale franchise.)

Nor does it help that the State seems to have found a perfect comfort with Greenwald's "filtered leaks" strategy.  Rather than offer a quote from the article, I'll just use Silber's title, which says it all:  The Establishment Makes Big, Sloppy Love to the Snowden Leaks.  Again, more than worth a RTWT.

As much as I hate to admit it, as a whole this stinks pretty big.   I wanted to believe better, but with Master so content, chaos replaced with subjective "management", and what leaking there actually is backseated for books and branding deals...

...well, it'll take something pretty spectacular to recover from that.  I don't think I have that much more breath left to hold.

And here's Arthur Silber, being all relevant again...

Despite being in failing health, and now freshly persecuted by The Gang That Wishes Demonstrably Sapient People Would Just Go Away...Arthur Silber is at it again.

Being relevant.

In From the Merely Calamitous to the Ungraspably Nauseating, he offers a brief (for Silber) reaction to Dear Leader's recent lecture on how a Zimmerman acquittal means that we should stop being naughty and swallow his gun control pill, for our own good of course.

It's not terribly flattering:

If a significant number of Americans were remotely healthy, they would treat Obama as they would any monster who raises his bloody arms from the open chest of his latest victim, lifts up his hands -- which hold his victim's heart, liver and other organs -- twists himself with enormous effort into his most obviously and fundamentally false serious mien and with phonily solemn voice, as blood soaks the scene, implores us all to love one another and embrace tenderness and gentle care for each other as the greatest of virtues.

What stuck out at me, though, was his quoting of himself, from January of this year, on the same subject in a previous round:

Therefore and thusly, to believe that one of the greatest sources of violence in the world today should be trusted to solve the problem of gun violence in America is to believe in self-contradictory statements which immolate themselves on a gigantic pyre of the most ridiculous, asinine, ludicrous notions ever imagined in the malformed, grotesque, nonfunctioning brains of the dumbest animal that has ever existed. Anyone who believes that gun control -- gun control devised and implemented by a brutal, endlessly violent, systematically murderous State -- will even begin to solve the problem of violent death in and by America is a fucking idiot. Moreover, to believe that the man who has lovingly embraced the principle of mass murder, and who proudly and repeatedly declares to the world that he is a serial murderer dedicated to continuing his murders into the indefinite future, targeting an ever-increasing number of victims, is sincerely devoted to ending even a single aspect of the problem of violence is so colossally, stupendously stupid that it defies accurate description. 

Well said, as usual.  And this is not a guy that you would naturally call a "gunnie" in the sense that I know it.

In Stop Doing the Vicious Work of the Ruling Class, he goes further on what I was on about in the last post.  As usual, Silber says it far better.

The demonstrations against the Zimmerman verdict continue, as the tribes play out their chosen roles. The demonstrations concern a case which should not have been brought, and which cannot support the constructions the right and left have placed on it. Meanwhile, wouldn't all those energies be far better directed if, for example, they were targeted against U.S. foreign policy? Or against the War on Drugs? Or against what is almost certainly the already irreversible rise of the surveillance state? But no: the right and left have learned their parts very well. All the arguments they need have been prefabricated, ready to be hauled out whenever the signal is given.

The Zimmerman case is yet another in an endless series of distractions. It is another bauble to be tossed around by the ever-busy writers and "activists" of this country's political factions. It is a means of fragmenting and splitting the people's political power, which would be far more meaningful -- and far more powerful -- if the warring factions could only be motivated to form strategic alliances. All those energies are safely directed into a non-threatening pathway -- while the ruling class continues to consolidate and expand its power over every one of us. To the extent the right and left play their parts with such enthusiasm, they do the ruling class's bidding. Most of those on the right and the left have enthusiastically placed themselves in service to the State, and the majority of them have no understanding whatsoever of their grievous failing.

At this point, I almost feel it's beside the point to blame the ruling class for this kind of thing. (Note: I continue to blame and condemn the ruling class without mercy.) What appalls me is how easy it is to distract the American public with incidents like this. Most Americans have been trained very thoroughly. The bell is rung, and they eagerly run to their designated positions. While they are entirely consumed with playing their meaningless roles in the affair of the moment, they pay no heed to the hell that is rising around them.

Indeed.

If this is true...

The Supreme Court handed down a decision on June 17 that has been ignored by most media outlets, despite its devastating effect on one of the most fundamental rights protected by the Constitution.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices ruled that a person no longer has the right to remain silent as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. In relevant part, the Fifth Amendment mandates that no one “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.”

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Salinas v. Texas, that part of the Bill of Rights has been excised — and has joined the list of so many other fundamental liberties that now lie on the scrap heap of history.

 (from The New American)

If this is true...well then, what, really?  To grossly paraphrase Arthur Silber, why get all uppity about the right to remain silent, in a world in which the state can simply murder you, for any reason it wants or for no reason at all, in complete secrecy?

Outrageous?  Sure.  But there is absolutely no surprise here. 

And in a way, it may be better like this--it's been so tiring to have to endure the increasingly rainbow-colored unicorn excreta from the "it can't happen here" crowd, that--since it's not like the larger public seems interested in, like, you know, FIXING THE PROBLEM--at least we might as well drop the pretense entirely.  Just maybe, this might shift the relentless excuse-mongering to something else...maybe how "necessary" this all is, or how "not a big deal", or some other boilerplate entry from Ye Oulde Statist Playbook.

As long as nobody's listening, we might as well get some rotation of the excuses in there...

Silber on Boston.

Arthur Silber returns from a hiatus with another blister-raiser, on the same subject Claire was recently on about.

I am not suggesting for a moment that I would expect or advise anyone to resist when the bullies arrive on your block in their war machines, laden with their war weapons. If I had been in that house, I would have done exactly what I was told to do.

But I wouldn't be grateful for it afterwards. And I certainly would not celebrate, nor would I congratulate myself for my astonishing courage. There are many words to describe the eager prostration before power, and the enthusiastic willingness to ally oneself with the overwhelmingly stronger side. "Courage" is not one of them.

Do please RTWT;  as with all things Silber it is worth the time.

And you have to love a man who can find the pluperfectly appropriate Nock quote:

The mass-man, ignorant of [the State's] history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State's progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share -- he is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself.

I'm not sure I've ever seen it said better than that.

Arthur Silber on the Dorner exercise.

I make pretty regular references to Arthur Silber, and there is good reason for that.  The man is a magnificent commentator, and one doggedly obsessed with things that matter.  (As opposed to Things That Matter(TM), see?)

A few days ago I saw this piece, which is a rather classic Silber device, regarding--um, Christopher Dorner, yeah...

Killer at Large, Panic Ensues

Everyone on talk radio in Los Angeles goes on and on about just a single topic these days. I'm sure the same is true in much of the rest of the country. It's a huge national story.

A man has murdered several people, and he's threatened to murder many more. He says he has his reasons, and he thinks they're good reasons. He thoughtfully published his reasons so all of us can consider them. But when you read what he's said about why he's killing people, you realize it doesn't make any sense. He uses words that are familiar to us, but he uses them to mean whatever he wants them to mean.

...

I'm confident they'll catch him soon. After all, we've seen him on television a lot. Someone is sure to get a glimpse of him any day now. He can't hide forever, can he?

...

It will be fine. I think we should all calm down. Obama will be locked up very soon.

But wait, wasn't this about...?  Oh, yeah, right.

But as to Dorner...  So last night the claims of vic'try! started to roll in, with all the usual trappings:  conflicting details (does anyone doubt that these will officially settle into meme-supported patterns?), ignored eyewitness accounts, and of course the obligatory overlooking of whatever combat tactics our noble protectors decide(d) to use "onsite".

See, the cabin seems to have burned to the ground.  (It certainly appears that the cops wanted it that way.)  And there may, or may not, have been a body in it.   Gosh, we're just going to have to take the investigators' word for it on the final details of what went down.

Silber today says "Welcome to Afghanistan.  This is just the beginning.":

I'm like really stupid, so these really stupid questions occur to me. There was absolutely no way to take this suspect alive eventually? They couldn't wait him out? I guess maybe they had other important stuff to do -- the kid's high school play, a book club meeting, maybe a department barbecue (har dee har har). And since they're not absolutely sure it's Dorner who was burned alive ... well, um, does that mean maybe they burned someone else alive? Did they determine that no one else was in the cabin? Does anyone care?

Just the heretics, from the look of it.  The cops' problem is nearly already "fixed";  with a body, a unified story and a cordoned-off pile of ashes for evidence, who are the little people to say differently?)

Silber goes through the nearly comical over-reaction of the Dorner manhunt (which Joel brilliantly summarized as "Mildly concerned police officers basically shooting everybody they see, on theory that it might turn out to be Dorner"), and returns to his larger point:

Like I said, I'm totally stupid, but I think the lesson goes something like this: If you threaten the State itself or interfere with its plans, and especially if you threaten one of the State's armed, militarized branches, the State will go to war, including here at home. I don't mean "go to war" metaphorically. I mean the State will go to war. So I think we know what the response will be if/when there is widespread domestic unrest, when the economy further falls apart, for example. Entire neighborhoods cordoned off, whole blocks incinerated, checkpoints everywhere, people shot for any reason, or for no reason. Oh, yeah: no more fourth amendment for you, either. Well, it's not like you were doing anything with it. If you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide, etc., etc., etc. And just to be safe, you don't want to be there. Yeah, where you are right now. Don't be there. And don't move. Haha. Gotcha!

Just as the fish rots from the head, the horrors start with the president. Why should Obama be the only one to have a Murder Program? It's only right that every police department should have its own Murder Program. Especially in war time.

The "don't be ridiculous" crowd may need to be reminded at that point, that it wasn't so long ago that we used to make fun of those stupid Russkies because they couldn't travel freely about their own country without showing their papers.  Or those stupid 1930s Germans, because they couldn't see the Nazis metastasizing from "legitimate government" into murderous evil, until it was too late.

Some days it's easy to remember that a determined minority can usually outsmart and fend off an institutionalized majority--lots of people have observed that the Dorner case illustrates well that one man can tie up the resources of an entire state for nearly a week.  (And if that pile of ashes is Dorner, he doesn't seem to have been all that competent a baddie in the first place.)

Other days, though, when you get a glimpse of what's coming, of what "we" have made all but inevitable...well, it's a reminder of what the cost of such a "victory" might look like.

And speaking of crocodile tears...

...if you haven't already, go check out Grigg and Silber on the topic. 

Grigg gets right down to it in that beautiful matter-of-fact language that is so refreshing in this plasticene time.  He opens:

“They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own,” intoned the murderer of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as he began the liturgy of official mourning for the victims of the Newtown massacre.

Every time children die in an outbreak of violence, “I react not as a president, but as anybody else would as a parent,” continued the head of a regime that will not explain to Nasser al-Awlaki why his son Anwar and grandson Abdulrahman – both of the U.S. citizens – were murdered by presidential decree.

“We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” insisted the official who has presided over dozens of lethal drone attacks in Pakistan and other countries with whom the U.S. is not formally at war.

Tears welled up in Obama’s eyes as he pronounced the familiar, facile phrases of selective sympathy. After ordering that U.S. flags be flown at half-mast for a week, Obama said that he and his wife would hug their children a little closer tonight as he empathizes with the parents whose children were murdered in Newtown.

It’s doubtful that he was moved to similar thoughts of vicarious bereavement as he contemplated the parents in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan who have been left childless because of his actions. 

Silber goes much further into the psychology.  Even the hardcore may have trouble agreeing fully with everything he says, but all of it is worth consideration.

Now I want to draw your attention to several other issues that will never be mentioned during the current exercise in national mourning. I again emphasize that I exclude from this analysis those persons and families directly affected by these events. My concern here is the national immersion in this story. This enthusiasm, and there is no other word to describe it, for demonstrating how deeply one is affected, how vast is one's grief, how completely shattered everyone is by these deaths -- everyone, that is, who is supposedly "decent" and "caring," and who is grief-stricken and shattered by these deaths but not by many thousands of other deaths -- is a symptom of a culture that is profoundly disturbed.

In wrapping up, he brings back the brimstone:

And while there are references now and then in news stories to Newtown being a "wealthy" or "affluent" town, I haven't seen much highlighting of some easily available facts about Newtown: 95% of those who live in Newtown are white, and the estimated median household family income is around $120,000. This is one very small, enormously privileged fraction of America; it certainly is not representative of America in any general sense in the smallest degree.

And that makes it the perfect tragedy for the Age of Obama, and the perfect opportunity for Weeping Obama to make his appearance. Never mind those whom Obama orders to be murdered; don't give a thought to the children abused, humiliated and tormented in ways that will scar them for the rest of their lives; ignore the families destroyed by Obama's zealous pursuit of the monstrous War on Drugs. None of those victims are people like us, they're not human beings who actually matter. Who gives a damn what happens to them? These are among the hideous effects of the unrelentingly cruel and brutal reality America entered when it elected its first black president, a man who perfectly embodies the white authoritarian-corporatist-militarist State, and who ran as a white man. You elected -- and reelected -- a white man who is also a vicious killer. What did you expect?

I'm with these guys.  Crocodile tears don't much impress me.

Irony meter: pegged.

So, an observation about yesterday's exercise in public masturbation.

"We" elected a war criminal, by any definition that matters.  It's on record*.  He sent lawyers to argue, openly, that it is his full and unquestionable right to (to paraphrase Arthur Silber) murder anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason (or for no reason at all)--and to do so entirely in secret.  And he has done so, repeatedly.  (He also sent lawyers to claim the right to indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere, at any time, etc...but with the right to just whack someone, does detention really matter?)  From all that I can tell, almost nobody seems to care about this, or even acknowledge or know about it.  Even most of the (for lack of a better word) "liberty sphere" seems more agog about the possibility of the detaining than about the actuality of the killing.

Now, consider that the electoral block that got this man elected--either directly via their v*tes, or indirectly because of their pimping and salesmanship.  By their own account, these are people who are "awake", "aware", and otherwise fully in command of their world and how to make it a better place with "correct" politics.  (They'll tell you this.)  They are also the self-appointed standard-bearers for peace in our time, and the irreplaceable bulwark against the total destruction of society by imperious warmongers and tramplers of civil liberties.

Ahem.  (Ping!)

When this block got Obama elected the first time,  the key to his success was entirely his claim to be nothing like his predecessor.  Cries of "war criminal!" were used constantly to attack the truly awful incumbent, and by association his own opponent, chosen by the incumbent's rival intramural gang to continue the horrors.  And, of course, it worked.

Now...you may have noticed that, since Election Day 2008, the term "war crime" has been completely missing in action.  This is well past "curious", since (again to quote Silber, emphasis in original):

Every blogger and writer who is conscious and even fractionally honest now acknowledges that Obama has doubled down on every single policy of Bush's that the progressives had condemned so loudly and for so long. Moreover, Obama has gone beyond Bush's profoundly awful record in certain critical respects. And never, ever forget that Obama and his administration claim the "right" to murder anyone in the world, wherever he or she may be, for whatever reason they choose -- or for no reason at all.

Again, this is all on record.  (Say what you want about the demonically vile Dubya, but at least he had enough of an understanding of basic humanity to try and hide his worst crimes.  This administration argues and defends the same and worse, openly.)

And yesterday, the Defenders Of All That Is Good, the "awake and aware" crowd who Care About You, the ones who most loudly declare "only through your action can you make a difference", protected us from a potential war criminal...by re-electing a proven one.  (For any of those Enlightened Beings who don't understand:  it's just like the re-election of Bush in '04, with the intrasquad teams reversed.)

Oh, I've no doubt that Romney would have made a most enthusiastic war criminal and trampler of individual liberty.  (Those are the only campaign promises that you really can count on.)  But here's "lesser of evils" in the starkest possible relief:  over sixty million people v*ted to elect a known war criminal.  (And almost sixty million more people v*ted for his functional twin with a different team mascot.  That's at least 120 million v*tes endorsing the embrace of war crimes.  Wow!  Do you have any doubt that the Establishment got this message loud and clear?)

Because, you know, if we don't act now! to prevent it, we could get someone really awful to wield Absolute Power on our behalf.

If anyone needs more than this to conclude that politics causes otherwise normal people to completely lose their fucking minds, brother, ain't nothing I can do to help you.


And so now, whether or not "we" deserve what we're going to get, we most certainly will get what we asked for.

___________________
* If any of this is new to you, you really should look it up.  I'd lay it out here, again, but I suspect that the reality is that if you need me to lay it out for you, you'd write off anything I had to say anyway.  Look it up for yourself.

On this sacrosanct National Masturbation Day...

...I offer only the reprises of what has been said before, since not one single thing of consequence is going to be any different about this year's result.

As before, millions will--voluntarily--legitimize the very system that enslaves them by participating in its perpetuation...and then preen sanctimoniously about, in what must be the afterglow of what George Carlin likened to public masturbation.  (Either click that link to start at the right spot over at YT, or start the below embedded segment and scroll to 2:48):

Miss ya, George.

For myself, I'll simply say, before the polls open:  Congratulations, America, you just elected the Establishment.  Again.

You can now go back to acting surprised at how bad things have become.  How uncivil.  How warlike.  How anti-humanitarian.  "Gosh, wherever did all this ugliness come from?"  And before long you will have fresh, new cause to be shocked, shocked that the people you just put into Current Occupancy aren't really what they told you they would be after all, and you can act surprised about that too.

That article points to the one I wrote specifically to be a reference, How to Vote on Election Day.  Which (s'prise!) needs not a single word changed for this year's episode of The House Wins!  The House Wins!  Snippets therefrom:

...Then, you do the Absolution Shuffle: free your mind from further worry. You have Done What You Can Do. It's in The System's hands now. If things go south from here, you can always absolve yourself further by proving you voted for The Other Guy. You have now validated your License To Bitch.

...For days on end after voting, affix various physical and virtual "pieces of flair" to yourself, sanctimoniously offering to the world that "I voted". Well, good on you. You have discharged the duty you learned about in Civics class, and proven that you know how to take orders and follow the rules. You have played your part in deciding who gets to play with the guns of the state for the next term, without raising any serious challenge to the legitimacy of the very Establishment you are voting to "fix". (Oh, it's fixed, all right: did you not choose from among the Establishment-approved candidates in the Establishment-approved election constructed, monitored and interpreted by Establishment appointees?) Yes, you're a Cool Kid now. Come get your cookie.

...Always interpret any insinuation that you, the voter, may have been deceived within or by the political enterprise itself, as prima facie evidence of simple provocateuring by The Other Team. No other explanation is acceptable. This just reinforces the evidence that your continued participation in the game is more important than ever before. After all, you've got skin in the game now, and have a reputation to protect.

Most of all, hold your head up high. You're better than they are. You've done your part. Now go tell everyone about it.

I suppose I did write a bit more recently in the same vein, and may as well point to that as well:

I'll be staying home, thanks.  And no matter what "official sources" may tell you, it ain't due to some dismissive fifty-cent term like "apathy".  After more than twenty years of defending all the sophistries just like I was trained to do, I simply ran out of excuses, and realized that politics is not the solution to the problem.  Politics IS the problem.

What I really hope people go to and absorb, though, is Arthur Silber's latest brimstone on the subject.  He's recently been a writing madman, and has contributed some real stunners, which for that man is saying something.

If you vote for Obama or Romney, that is certainly your right -- although you will forever forfeit the right to speak of "rights" at all. If a human being can be murdered for any reason, or for no reason at all, merely on the arbitrary order of someone who claims the power to issue such orders, she has no rights at all. You thus sanction the destruction of all rights, of all human beings -- including yours. The victim may be Mrs. Hamilton, or Joanna -- or you.

If you vote for Obama or Romney, do so proudly. I want you to say: "I vote for Obama/Romney proudly. I am proud to be a knowing accomplice to their murders, including the murders of innocent human beings." Say that, and those of us who refuse to surrender our souls will know where you stand.

This is not a complicated issue. It is stunningly straightforward. Those who seek to complicate and confuse it do so because they will not identify the meaning of their support, either to themselves or to anyone else. When they wish still to be regarded as "civilized," murderers and their accomplices will engage in endless irrelevant arguments and invent complexities where none exist. Don't let them get away with it. They are knowing accomplices to murder. Make them say it.

Yesterday he published this excellent treatise on contributing to the legitimacy of a broken system by participation, and on the fallacy of the lesser of evils.  It's blistering:

To return to what may now seem comparatively mundane, the question of voting for national office, even if only for a third-party candidate: It is not simply that one grants legitimacy to the overall system by doing so, although that is true and horrifyingly bad in itself. Perhaps more important is this: all advocates of third-party voting acknowledge its futility. Their candidate is not going to win. They know that.

But let's identify the further meaning of such a vote. They also know that either Obama or Romney will win. That is: a man who enthusiastically embraces the State's murder program -- a program that systematically, regularly, routinely murders innocent human beings, anywhere in the world, for any reason the State chooses -- and who similarly embraces the surveillance and police State, together with endless death campaigns abroad as well as a growing system of oppression and brutalization at home -- will win the presidency. By participating in the election at all, you grant legitimacy to the process that will make one of these two men president. You thereby grant legitimacy to the system itself, to the State, and to all those actions you know with absolute certainty the State will take in the future.

That is what your vote means, even if you vote for a third-party candidate. Perhaps you can do that, and still continue to live together with yourself.

I cannot -- and I will not.

Silber is a national treasure, delightfully enigmatic and directly caustic in a way that we desperately need more of.

Well, that's enough for the record this time.  We'll see, I guess, which of the two proffered monsters we'll have to deal with for the next four years;  there's obviously not a nickel's worth of difference in any way that matters between them, but I must say that Mitthead makes for a much more elegant nom d'ridicule than anything I've seen for BHO, so maybe that would be fun.  (Hey now, it's a difference, and you have to take what you can get!)

Gawd, here we go again.

Arthur Silber: man on fire.

After another health-driven hiatus, Arthur Silber is on another of his "write-like-a-madman" binges, and there are some humdingers in there.  I'd like to say a few more specific things about them, but may not get the time to do so.

Still...this just went into the Facebook stream:

"If you vote for Obama or Romney, that is certainly your right -- although you will forever forfeit the right to speak of "rights" at all. If a human being can be murdered for any reason, or for no reason at all, merely on the arbitrary order of someone who claims the power to issue such orders, she has no rights at all. You thus sanction the destruction of all rights, of all human beings -- including yours. The victim may be Mrs. Hamilton, or Joanna -- or you.

If you vote for Obama or Romney, do so proudly. I want you to say: "I vote for Obama/Romney proudly. I am proud to be a knowing accomplice to their murders, including the murders of innocent human beings." Say that, and those of us who refuse to surrender our souls will know where you stand.

This is not a complicated issue. It is stunningly straightforward. Those who seek to complicate and confuse it do so because they will not identify the meaning of their support, either to themselves or to anyone else. When they wish still to be regarded as "civilized," murderers and their accomplices will engage in endless irrelevant arguments and invent complexities where none exist. Don't let them get away with it. They are knowing accomplices to murder. Make them say it."

__________

Arthur Silber is once again a man on fire. This is just one of a recent flurry of posts that should not just be read, but really grappled with, before befouling oneself with the stank of a voting booth.

I've wrestled with how to arrive at the "Don't let them get away with it...Make them say it" observation, and have never been happy with where I've wound up.  Silber, unsurprisingly, nails it here.