Greetings good citizen,
As most of you are aware, I don’t personally scour the web looking for topics to write about…mostly because I don’t see the need.
There are some very good ‘aggregators’ out there who provide some amazing insight on the big picture every day with pretty much ‘one stop shopping’.
Today’s offering is one I haven’t addressed before, it is something that has been conspicuous only by its absence
While most of you don’t have an hour and fifteen minutes to watch the accompanying video, part of the topic of Mr. Hedge’s talk is ‘where are the ‘intellectuals’?
I’ll synopsize as best I can for those of you who don’t have the hour plus to watch this most enlightening video. (Me, I’ve got nothing but time…sad, isn’t it?)
What I enjoyed most about this particular talk is hearing ideas I’ve been saying for years finally repeated by someone who matters!
What he does is walk the listener through the, er, ‘tearing down’ of the liberal establishment.
Most gratifyingly, he then agrees (with me) that there aren’t any liberals (of consequence) anymore.
He then goes on to point out another major problem I have yet to hear anyone with an audience announce, he goes on to say we DON’T HAVE THE TOOLS TO FIX OUR CURRENT MESS!
Those tools exist on the inside only! If our politicians refuse to clean their own house we can only look on in horror…or take matters into our own hands.
Those are our ‘choices’.
I strongly suggest we hang all of the sitting politicians before we even start to clean up the mess they made.
Troubleshooting 101, FIRST ‘eliminate the cause of the problem’, and THEN clean up the mess!
But I digress!
He goes on to explain how our pseudo-democracy was hijacked by the same people who want to erase ‘the New Deal’.
The most disturbing part of this is the hijackers disregard for the enmity they are creating among the portion of the population that does the heavy lifting.
Which is to ask if the ‘Jack ass Tea Partiers’ realize they are going to be the ‘ingrates’ new/replacement Jack ass?
But let’s back up a step and address the disturbing political meme of ‘those who want to erase the New Deal’.
Long deemed the political equivalent of the electoral ‘third rail’, most politicians have steered clear of the ‘self-funded’ social retirement system.
Now they have the chutzpah to call it an ‘entitlement program’!
(If YOU Paid for it baby, you bet your sweet backside YOU’RE ‘entitled’ to it!)
But NO! These mother-fuckers want to turn the public retirement system over to Wall Street (so the ONLY ones capable of retiring will be the fat cat bankers!)
[Can’t hammer a nail to save their worthless lives but you should see ‘em chisel!]
it should be lost on no one that the current president ‘endorses’ the idea of cutting ‘entitlement spending’ while believing in a ‘strong military’.
You don’t need me to tell you that WE (citizens of the US) have become the biggest ‘sponsors of terror’ on the freaking planet.
Something ‘everybody knows’…
The question following that one would be…what are we going to do about it?
I can always hope but I suspect those behind the destruction of our civilization already know when they squeeze the trigger it will trip a lot of other, er, booby traps.
Which is to opine that the wheels won’t come ‘flying’ off the wagon of civilization, they’re gonna get ‘blown off’.
If they’re not ready they’re gonna get crushed…
But so is everybody else.
Oh, one last tidbit, a nagging little thing Mr. Hedges said in citing an appearance on NPR concurrent with an interview of Paul Krugman.
A disturbing comment, made more disturbing by the notion of ‘if this is the ‘prevailing attitude’ of the so-called intelligensia, was how climate change was going to trump the financial crisis.
Could this be the thinking behind the ‘engineered collapse’ of Western civilization?
I sure as hell hope not.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
As most of you are aware, I don’t personally scour the web looking for topics to write about…mostly because I don’t see the need.
There are some very good ‘aggregators’ out there who provide some amazing insight on the big picture every day with pretty much ‘one stop shopping’.
Today’s offering is one I haven’t addressed before, it is something that has been conspicuous only by its absence
While most of you don’t have an hour and fifteen minutes to watch the accompanying video, part of the topic of Mr. Hedge’s talk is ‘where are the ‘intellectuals’?
Chris Hedges: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
The video starts after the introductions.
"Unfettered, unregulated capitalism...turns everything into a commodity, human beings become commodities, the natural world becomes a commodity, that it exploits until exhaustion or collapse. In essence it cannibalizes itself, and this is the process that we are undergoing."
Chris Hedges
The essence of statism, of the far left or the far right, is to objectify the individual and diminish their value to some measurement held by the state itself.
This is what can turn market capitalism into corporatism and then fascism, often in a reaction against the rising of the people against economic repression of crony capitalism and corruption.
Hedges helps to illustrate this. He is certainly further to the left of my own more centrist views, but I find his perspective interesting. And certainly a refreshing perspective given the corporatist and dehumanizing skew to most modern American dialogue where all creation is weighed in the balance of money.
I’ll synopsize as best I can for those of you who don’t have the hour plus to watch this most enlightening video. (Me, I’ve got nothing but time…sad, isn’t it?)
What I enjoyed most about this particular talk is hearing ideas I’ve been saying for years finally repeated by someone who matters!
What he does is walk the listener through the, er, ‘tearing down’ of the liberal establishment.
Most gratifyingly, he then agrees (with me) that there aren’t any liberals (of consequence) anymore.
He then goes on to point out another major problem I have yet to hear anyone with an audience announce, he goes on to say we DON’T HAVE THE TOOLS TO FIX OUR CURRENT MESS!
Those tools exist on the inside only! If our politicians refuse to clean their own house we can only look on in horror…or take matters into our own hands.
Those are our ‘choices’.
I strongly suggest we hang all of the sitting politicians before we even start to clean up the mess they made.
Troubleshooting 101, FIRST ‘eliminate the cause of the problem’, and THEN clean up the mess!
But I digress!
He goes on to explain how our pseudo-democracy was hijacked by the same people who want to erase ‘the New Deal’.
The most disturbing part of this is the hijackers disregard for the enmity they are creating among the portion of the population that does the heavy lifting.
Which is to ask if the ‘Jack ass Tea Partiers’ realize they are going to be the ‘ingrates’ new/replacement Jack ass?
But let’s back up a step and address the disturbing political meme of ‘those who want to erase the New Deal’.
Long deemed the political equivalent of the electoral ‘third rail’, most politicians have steered clear of the ‘self-funded’ social retirement system.
Now they have the chutzpah to call it an ‘entitlement program’!
(If YOU Paid for it baby, you bet your sweet backside YOU’RE ‘entitled’ to it!)
But NO! These mother-fuckers want to turn the public retirement system over to Wall Street (so the ONLY ones capable of retiring will be the fat cat bankers!)
[Can’t hammer a nail to save their worthless lives but you should see ‘em chisel!]
it should be lost on no one that the current president ‘endorses’ the idea of cutting ‘entitlement spending’ while believing in a ‘strong military’.
You don’t need me to tell you that WE (citizens of the US) have become the biggest ‘sponsors of terror’ on the freaking planet.
Something ‘everybody knows’…
The question following that one would be…what are we going to do about it?
I can always hope but I suspect those behind the destruction of our civilization already know when they squeeze the trigger it will trip a lot of other, er, booby traps.
Which is to opine that the wheels won’t come ‘flying’ off the wagon of civilization, they’re gonna get ‘blown off’.
If they’re not ready they’re gonna get crushed…
But so is everybody else.
Oh, one last tidbit, a nagging little thing Mr. Hedges said in citing an appearance on NPR concurrent with an interview of Paul Krugman.
A disturbing comment, made more disturbing by the notion of ‘if this is the ‘prevailing attitude’ of the so-called intelligensia, was how climate change was going to trump the financial crisis.
Could this be the thinking behind the ‘engineered collapse’ of Western civilization?
I sure as hell hope not.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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