Month: December 2016

 
From Frances Langum:

So what happened that Carl Paladino had to “backtrack” on his earlier written comments? As we reported last week,

Artvoice asked 42 Buffalo locals: WHAT DO WE WANT FOR 2017?

Some responded by saying they hoped the Bills would make the playoffs, wishing for high speed rails, increased shopping, even the impeachment of Donald Trump, but nobody made the type of vile comments that Paladino offered.

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From Dave Dubya:

This past election the voice of the clear majority of Americans was politically silenced.

We were silenced by the results of the fatal flaw in our democratic representative republic. The Electoral College proved to be the poison pill in our Constitution that abetted a tyranny of the minority, the Extremist Minority.

Yes there were factors apart from the Electoral College that had some effect. Turnout is always an element. The partisan interference by a crooked FBI director was an unprecedented corruption of his office. An open invitation for Russian hacking from Trump revealed the warped and unpatriotic character of our next president. Corporate media’s false equivalences and Clinton’s flaws provide many answers to how it happened.

The reasons don’t matter so much anymore. The damage has been done. Something else matters now

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From NOJO at Stinque:

Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, chronicling how Europe had stumbled into the Great War, had been published that year, and JFK didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of history, especially with history-ending weapons.

Besides, the concept of “mutual assured destruction” — there’s no point nuking Russia if Russia can nuke you back — was already well-established. Dr. Strangelove was more than a year away, but Kubrick was already busy with the script.

And yet, the idea that bombing and invasion might lead to catastrophic unintended consequences was not in the minds of Kennedy’s generals.

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From Aaron Astor at The Moderate Voice:

Slaveholders’ sons who feared the loss of their livelihood took to the bush to destroy all vestiges of the new post-emancipation order. Frustrated ambitions were central to the rise of Al Qaeda, especially among those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia who found their own careers as professionals (often engineers) blocked by pro-US autocratic governments for one reason or another. Their manhood undercut and financial well-being undermined, they took to a radical and destructive movement that vowed total war on the system that humiliated them. Like many of Quantrill’s raiders, they often witnessed their own fathers (and other family members) being emasculated by either the forces of secular autocracy or klepto-global-capitalism.

With ISIS, however, we see a second kind of guerrilla that showed up quite commonly in Civil War Missouri and Tennessee- the petty criminal who desperately sought a sense of purpose in the destruction of all that corrupted him and his society.

These were the mostly nameless followers and toadies who rode with Bloody Bill Anderson and Quantrill.

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From driftglass:

She also lays a lot of the blame for this fiasco at the feet of the self-contained media-bubble in which…

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…Both Sides live!

Because Driftglass Rule #17: If you corner a Conservative hard enough, Matthew Dowd/David Brooks/Ron Fournier will invariably come popping right out of their mouth. After all, what else is she gonna say? “Liberals were right all along”?

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

The people who grew up with 9/11 as their significant milestone of consciousness, or indeed, had that event occur before they were even really aware, might be more inclined to see war and violence as being a product of state and non-state actors performing acts of mass destruction at more or less close range. The threat of global thermonuclear war just wasn’t as ever-present in their minds.

The idea of an “arms race” might seem like a curious 1980s artifact–as it should.

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From The Big Empty:

This is another ruse of course. From the beginning of the Obama administration when Homeland Security was targeted by Republicans for identifying the severity of white extremist groups, the agency has since very quietly amassed a dossier of hate groups within the U.S. whose only goal has been to intimidate and terrorize leftists, minorities, women’s health organizations, and LGBT.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

I am not going to tell you to get over it (which I have been told several times by presumably well-intended people), but I do want you to remember that you have agency over yourselves.

The Russian Usurper cannot change who you are; you have the ability to shape your own opinions and make choices that reflect your own values. When he is cruel, you can be caring. Look around at your community, find the frightened, the hurt, the marginalized and make them your cause. Be brave and be kind. Help to defend the defenseless.

And defending the defenseless includes defending the institutions you hold dear.

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From John Scalzi at Whatever:

My kid is an adult now. I am literally not the boss of her anymore. And I and Krissy have gotten her there, without want or fear, and with her knowing, with certainty, that she was and is loved.

In one sense it’s obvious why this is important to me. What parent does not want these things for their child? These things are also, to be blunt, not particularly laudable; if you have the means and circumstances (I’ll get back to this in just a bit), you should be doing these things as a matter of course, and even in difficult circumstances you should be striving for them. There are no medals for being a decent parent. It’s a baseline.

But the thing is, I didn’t have a childhood free of want or fear, and while I never doubted I was loved, at certain times and in certain circumstances, everything else was up in the air.

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From Max’s Dad:

Glenn went on to go back to space at the age of 77 again renewing his hero license. John Glenn died at age 95. The world is worse off because a real hero like John Glenn is gone.

Larry Colburn died last week at age 67. Larry Colburn was also an American hero. Colburn was a chopper gunner during the Vietnam War when his Captain, Hugh Thompson Jr, saw the My Lai Massacre going on beneath them. Thompson landed his chopper between the American soldiers slaughtering innocent Vietnamese civilians…

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