Tag: politics

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Privileged Narrative: The Legitimation Crisis of the Implacable Radical Center

Change doesn’t happen with this much encouragement from the neoliberal centers of power.  Real change won’t be marketed like the latest iPhone.  It won’t be packed neatly and endorsed by the “experts.”  In fact, it’ll be called bad names.  It’ll be made fun of, insulted, talked down to, ridiculed.  The innuendo and probing and narrative construction will go on 24/7.  Television news, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR – doesn’t matter which consumer infotainment product you subscribe to – will be suspicious, hesitant to cover it, and have pundits who cynically mock anyone with a plan or vision of anything substantially different that might disrupt the status quo.  But this is what change would look like.  And if it actually does happen, television personalities will be completely astonished and chalk it up to a strange twist from out of the blue.  They’ll have no idea.

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The Kremlingate Delusion

It’s a dangerous tactic played by the conspiracy-minded, at worst it rattles the saber for war against another nuclear power, fueled by hawks on both sides of the isle. And at least it perpetuates a cynical politics of blame and externalization, a politics of blindness as harmful as McCarthyism, and uses Kremlingate as a cudgel against the alienated populist progressive left.

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Harvey: The Loud Knock of the New Climate Reality

It reveals to us a strange mix of cultures. One is the ordinary functional modern Houston, the air conditioned oil boom town, celebrating its entrepreneurs, robust business and hustler culture. The other is the extraordinary just under the surface, the rich texture of human community which is sadly amnesiaed in more mundane times. In Harvey, we see these dueling ethics clash in amazing ways, and reveals how Houston’s disaster could hopefully open our minds to learn how to survive the future peril of a new climate reality.

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Steve Bannon’s Therapy II: The Bookend of the Reagan Era?

In Steve Bannon’s world, we are at the end of an age, the end of a forth turning of American history, completing a cycle that began during the Great Depression and World War Two. He saw this “Greatest Generation” of heroes lead to a Golden Age of Capitalism of the 1950s, only to be spoiled by liberal baby boomers of the 1960s leading to Civil Rights Movement, war protesters, feminism, and the moral decay of the narcissistic Woodstock generation. While Reagan saved America from Communism, these Woodstock degenerates would help destroy America with their hedonism, selfishness, multiculturalism and godlessness. They are basically the New Democrats. Bannon, politically awakened after the 2008 crash, which he saw as the fault of Wall Street’s managerial class of libertines, got a hold of a book called “The Forth Turning,” and bought into a prophetic vision that the millennial generation was given the short end of the stick economically and culturally. Left with a gutted economy in the heartland, unattainable and expensive education, and the moral decay of Hollywood libertinism, drugs, secularism and multiculturalism, had no opportunity. Bannon’s prescription is to save the Millennial Generation from the pernicious effects of globalization which opened the doors to these sins. Bannon’s therapy prescription is to close the borders, return the nation to economic isolationist integrity, boom the economy, and rally the nation to a Judeo-Christian crusade against Islam, and possibly against North Korea and the conflict zone in the South China Sea.

The trouble with this theory is basically it’s a political ideology that bears little resemblance to the real world and is replete with laughable factual errors.