Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Pray

Particularly poignant in Andrew Sullivan' s "Democracies End when they are too democratic are: "And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny" is the paragraph: In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, The True Believer, he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread that the anger begins to rise. After the suffering of recession or unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or dwindling pay, the future stretches ahead with relief just out of reach. When those who helped create the last recession face no consequences but renewed fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo."
Continuing: "The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically."

And: “It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues. "Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded."

More: "This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate."

And finally: For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is as mercurial and as unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter stream. And we are contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes.

Read the whole thing which I sent out link below:

My Thought: America, see what you have wrought and then if you are a praying person pray our nation survives this horrific man, Trump and if you are not a praying person then sit in hope that those who pray our nation survives have their prayers answered!


http://nymag.com/.../04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

I SUPPOSE IT IS UNNECESSARY TO SAY THAT WE ALL OF US WHO CONSIDER OURSELVES HUMANE AND PROGRESSIVE ALONG WITH OTHERS WHO LOATHE TRUMP GET OUT, ORGANIZE DISTRICTS FOR DEMOCRATIC VOTES AND ULTIMATELY IN NOVEMBER WE MUST WIN.  THERE IS NO OTHER CHOICE.  THE ELECTED PRESIDENT MUST HAVE A "D" AFTER HIS/HER NAME!

I lied to myself for years about who my allies were. No more. By: Ben Howe (Diary)

GREAT OPINION!!!!|

Donald Trump is my fault as much as anyone else’s.

It started way back in 2009-2010 when the Tea Party erupted on the scene. At the core of the tea party was a principle that I agreed with so much that I became a conservative activist during that time period. That core was principled, fiscal conservatism and a desire to return to the things that had made America great.


We said it lots of different ways back then. “Take our country back.” “Return to the Constitution.” It really is embodied quite nicely in Donald Trump’s motto: Make America great again.



That’s what we wanted. A budget that the country’s federal government had to live within. A shrinking bureaucracy. An end to exploding entitlements.

Social issues weren’t discussed that much in the very early stages of the Tea Party. We all knew that there was some disagreement on these issues and we wanted to stay singularly focused. We could sort out our differences after we’d stopped the runaway train of government largesse.

By 2011 there were some cracks in the movement. There were groups that seemed to just be profiting off of it without actually helping. There were politicians who’d won on tea party rhetoric in 2010 but seemed less inclined to stop the growth of government once they got to Washington.

It was frustrating. This was compounded by the fact that Mitt Romney became the nominee and then lost in 2012. It was at that point that I believe a lot of people simply put down the signs and went home.

Through it all, my own career was burgeoning in politics. Not only did I begin writing for RedState, I started doing some television appearances and owned a video production company with a laundry list of clients from the movement.

When your life becomes politics and you are surrounded by people in the industry, you learn a key term: allies.

Allies aren’t friends. They may not even be colleagues. They are simply people that you find enough agreement with on enough issues to not go after each other. You don’t have to overtly support one another but you certainly don’t try to hurt each other.

As more and more people knew who I was and I fostered relationships and allies, I found myself more and more having to look the other way. Moments where I would cringe at something someone said, or quietly roll my eyes at a post they wrote, thinking “Gosh, I can’t believe they think that way” or “I swear that person is one tweet away from saying Obama is from Kenya.”

I justified it quietly to myself the way we had at the beginning of the tea party when such things would happen. People would say outlandish things and I would find myself nodding my head and awkwardly walking away, not calling them out for their silliness.

After all, there were more pressing matters.

And so, as I said, I kept quiet about these allies in new media and in Washington. People who I thought I agreed with only 70% of the time. Which normally is a great reason to consider someone an ally, but not when the other 30% is cringe-inducing paranoia and vapid stupidity.

I chose peace over principle. I chose to go along with those I disagreed with on core matters because I believed we were jointly fighting for other things that were more important. I ignored my gut and my moral compass.

The result is that, almost to a man, every single person I cringed at or thought twice about, is now a supporter and cheerleader of Donald Trump.

I looked the other way, and I’m sure many others did too, as these people rose to prominence and their microphones got louder. I ignored it at times because I hate self-righteous liberals who tell anyone they disagree with that they don’t want to be around them and I didn’t want to be like that. At other times because, well, it was easier than standing against foolishness.

I’m done with that now. Albeit a bit too late.

I’ll never be like the indignant pricks I’ve dealt with on the right who judge harshly anyone who doesn’t automatically parrot the Republican leadership. I’ll also never be like the virtue-signallers who feel the need to put rainbow flags over their avatars to prove how socially progressive they are.

But my days of watching crazy people gain readers & listeners right in front of me are over.

Ann Coulter, Gateway Pundit, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, Breitbart News, Matt Drudge, and scores of others, too many to list here. They are all people that at one time or another caused me to bury my face in my hands. Caused me more than once to say “wait…we ARE the stupid party?” I’m done with it and I’m done with all of them. They are in this for money and power and influence and they think Donald Trump is their ticket. Hell, they may be right. And I’ll go down in flames with my principles befor

NOT ANYMORE

  I wrote this last week and for the most part sat on it because I did not want my writing to imply anything against Israel. As stated agai...