"Too bad all the people who know how to run this country are busy running taxicabs or cutting hair."
-- George Burns,
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To date, this is how the very few interactions I've had with Never Trumpers have gone, because I want to talk about the Befor...
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It's been over for a long time now. The zombie Right now exists in a continuous state of aggressively rejecting basic observable ...
5 comments:
Seems you only get to have America First when she's in full retreat.
Cults usually eventually require total isolation to survive.
Do all the best ideas sell themselves? Sadly, no.
Good ideas thrive on a hearty diet of the proverbial blood,sweat & tears.
The Left's electoral mechanics game needs triage more than its media game.
The checkers-chess trope applies all too well here.
Good podcast, people. Don't apologize, BlueGal. It was fun hearing you and Driftglass virtually reverse roles, especially with regard to the patriarchy's thinking Hilliary Clinton needs its imprimatur. And thank you, Driftglass, on your comments on Stephanie Miller. The recurring guests she has on are regularly funnier and more insightful than Miller herself is (and it was through her show that I discovered Charlie Pierce, Hal Sparks, and Bob Cesca), but she's kind of an irritant.
If you're not in favor of boycotts because the Right might use the same tactic on you, that's your privilege, but that renders all your talk of "resistance" as empty. She doesn't want anyone to lose their forum? I often wonder if Stephanie Miller doesn't know what she's talking about or if she's some sort of Fifth Column for the Right intentionally lulling the Left into complacency. The fool may traditionally be the character who speaks truth in Shakespearian plays, but I challenge anyone to name a play where the fool was actually put in charge of anything. Perhaps Miller and her fawning listeners' feelings shouldn't be taken into consideration in strategizing against the Right. As you said, Bill O'Reilly wasn't taken off the air because of what he said or did; he was taken off because he was costing Fox News money, and the sane among us have few enough weapons without removing some from our arsenal.
The end of the podcast put me in mind of both Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Sermon from the Mount and the Outer Limits episode "The Music of the Spheres." If there's any hope for the United States after the harm Trump and the Republicans have done, I doubt I'll be alive to see it, and maybe your children will be able to make a better world.
OK, I'm gonna re-post something I wrote a couple of days ago here, as I'm not sure I can improve on it in my current state of mind:
Here in California we are still standing with the Paris accord, and we employ more people in the clean energy sector than fossil fuel extraction does in the rest of the country.
This is a moment that will decide who leads in the next phase of energy production and use.
These changes happen from time to time as technology allows: from wood we switched to coal to power the new steam engines that transformed industry and transportation. From coal we switched to oil and gas to power internal combustion engines and generate electricity cheaper and cleaner than the coal technology from the 1880s.
We have been trying to clean up energy production since the late 1800s when soot coated everything in larger cities to the point of impeding normal life and killing people.
The air in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in the seventies was brown and barely breathable, and now it is much better, even with the increased population.
Whoever gets the market in clean energy technology will be the economic superpower for the next century. Even Exxon/Mobil knows this. So running away from the future we already know is coming is supremely stupid, and to a certain extent, mostly symbolic: none of the major corporations supported withdrawal from the Paris accord, and they aren't going to change their business strategies because of it, so progress will continue apace, only without the leadership from the US government that could help accelerate it.
President four-year-old says he doesn't want to be laughed at by foreign leaders, but he just stepped on his own dick so hard that they are all doing just that.
And after his trip he said that the world wasn't a community but a competition, then sets to ratfucking our chances at competing in what will be the most important economic sector of the next century. Do you think China or Germany is pulling back on clean energy production research and development?
As for anger, some do better with it than others. I have a friend who was a door gunner in Vietnam and came home with extensive napalm burns across his shoulders, which was all kinds of fucked up because we were the only ones using napalm there. Anyway, he got sent to anger management class by a judge after being in some fistfights, and he was so affronted by the idea that this guy could presume to tell him how to manage his anger that he verbally baited the instructor into swinging on him and then proceede3d to beat the piss out of him. I guess some things are mostly a matter of style...
Thank you once again for the breath of fresh air that your podcast is, and speaking as an Irishman, may your righteous anger become highly contagious.
-Doug in Oakland
As Johnny Lydon once sang "Anger is an Energy". I loved the righteous anger in this weeks podcast.
I particularly applaud Blue Gal's righteous and loud rant in support of Hillary Clinton's agency. I shouted "FUCK YEAH", scaring the poor orange dog.
I looked it up, and it turns out "Music of the Spheres" is actually an Outer Limits (1995 series) episode, but it's an honest mistake and, from the sound of things, a good story (not surprised it's by Steven Barnes).
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