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Yes please, lets turn this thread into yet another I HATE TRUMP and YOU'S ALL COMMIES and INSURECSHUNISTS thread. It's not like you've got enough of those already.
I think that any chance of this being a serious thread went out with the first sentence; calling this a left to extreme left board.
There are conservatives, like on this forum; who loathe and oppose Trump, even if they are a minority on the right.
to continue, and apropos, where traditional left meets traditional right, Glen Greenwald via substack
Snip
But perhaps there is another explanation other than righteous, earnest transformation as to why the top U.S. General has suddenly expressed such keen interest in studying and exploring "white rage”. Note that Gen. Milley's justification for the military's sudden immersion in the study of modern race theories is the January 6 Capitol riot — which, in the lexicon of the U.S. security state and American liberalism, is called The Insurrection. When explaining why it is so vital to study "white rage,” Gen. Milley argued:
What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here, and I do want to analyze it.
The post-WW2 military posture of the U.S. has been endless war. To enable that, there must always be an existential threat, a new and fresh enemy that can scare a large enough portion of the population with sufficient intensity to make them accept, even plead for, greater military spending, surveillance powers, and continuation of permanent war footing. Starring in that war-justifying role of villain have been the Communists, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Russia, and an assortment of other fleeting foreign threats.
According to the Pentagon, the U.S. intelligence community, and President Joe Biden, none of those is the greatest national security threat to the United States any longer. Instead, they all say explicitly and in unison, the gravest menace to American national security is now domestic in nature. Specifically, it is "domestic extremists” in general — and far-right white supremacist groups in particular — that now pose the greatest threat to the safety of the homeland and to the people who reside in it.
In other words, to justify the current domestic War on Terror that has already provoked billions more in military spending and intensified domestic surveillance, the Pentagon must ratify the narrative that those they are fighting in order to defend the homeland are white supremacist domestic terrorists. That will not work if white supremacists are small in number or weak and isolated in their organizing capabilities. To serve the war machine's agenda, they must pose a grave, pervasive and systemic threat.
Viewed through that lens, it makes perfect sense that Gen. Milley is spouting the theories and viewpoints that underlie this war framework and which depicts white supremacy and "white rage” as a foundational threat to the American homeland. A new domestic War on Terror against white supremacists and right-wing extremists is far more justifiable if, as Gen. Milley strongly suggested, it was "white rage” that fueled an armed insurrection that, in the words of President Biden, is the greatest assault on American democracy since the Civil War.
Within that domestic War on Terror framework, Gen. Milley, by pontificating on race, is not providing cultural commentary but military dogma. Just as it was central to the job of a top Cold War general to embrace theories depicting Communism as a grave threat, and an equally central part of the job of a top general during the first War on Terror to do the same for Muslim extremists, embracing theories of systemic racism and the perils posed to domestic order by “white rage” is absolutely necessary to justify the U.S. Government's current posture about what war it is fighting and why that war is so imperative.
None of this means that Gen. Milley's defense of critical race theory and woke ideology is purely cynical and disingenuous. The U.S. military is a racially diverse institution and — just as is true for the CIA and FBI — endorsing modern-day theories of racial and gender diversity can be important for workplace cohesion and inspiring confidence in leadership. And many people in various sectors of American life have undergone radical changes in their speech if not their belief system over the last year — that is, after all, the purpose of the sustained nationwide protest movement that erupted in the wake of the killing of George Floyd — due either to conviction, fear of loss of position, or both. One cannot reflexively discount the possibility that Gen. Milley is among those whose views have changed as the cultural climate shifted around him.
In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
You, um, mentioned him first. He was replying to your comment.
“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
I was referring to InExile's comment. Like I said, he was responding to you.
“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
To counterbalance what is now a left/extreme-left board: a nicely written view of the past four years from a European who like me has been watching increasingly aghast over the last decade.
I really don't think your typical conservative is looking into things all that deeply. This sounds like a specific sub-set of conservatives, rather than all of them. Like, how many actually know about the Steele Memo? How many EVER believed that Trump co-operated with Russia? I don't think any of the Boomer-Cons or even Millennial-Cons I know were any board with any of that, and the ones that are interested in stuff like the Steele dossier are rare super-nerds.
I'd say the last few years would be eye-opening to anyone who had remaining faith in the media institutions, because those are basically total trash. Reasonable updatng of priors requires placing every expert, from the CDC to the FBI to the FDA, into the "Occasionally Trust but Always Verify" at best, and "Assume they lie as much as Used Car Dealers" at worst. But that's not your typial conservative who is only watching Fox News or whatever. Fox News would be put into the same "assume they lie as much as Used Card Dealers" category.
"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck
I really don't think your typical conservative is looking into things all that deeply. This sounds like a specific sub-set of conservatives, rather than all of them. Like, how many actually know about the Steele Memo? How many EVER believed that Trump co-operated with Russia? I don't think any of the Boomer-Cons or even Millennial-Cons I know were any board with any of that, and the ones that are interested in stuff like the Steele dossier are rare super-nerds.
I'd say the last few years would be eye-opening to anyone who had remaining faith in the media institutions, because those are basically total trash. Reasonable updatng of priors requires placing every expert, from the CDC to the FBI to the FDA, into the "Occasionally Trust but Always Verify" at best, and "Assume they lie as much as Used Car Dealers" at worst. But that's not your typial conservative who is only watching Fox News or whatever. Fox News would be put into the same "assume they lie as much as Used Card Dealers" category.
but that's not how your average partisan thinks, and let's face it, the actual subset of non-partisan conservative (or for that matter, non-partisan liberal) is vanishingly small these days.
so the number of "typical conservatives" who "occasionally trust but always verify" Fox News is not a big number -- and the vast majority of THOSE lean towards the "...but I trust NewsMax/Breitbart/whatever I saw on Facebook implicitly".
they might not know every last theory that Fox is pumping, but the majority of them believe that Biden isn't a legitimate President.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov
That's kind of what I am saying, the "typical" conservative that is described in the OP isn't actually reflective of the typical partisan that I run across, at least in my daily life. The typical partisans that believe the election was stolen would have believed it in 2016, too, because then the illegal immigrants stole it instead of Fulton county stuffing boxes full of fake votes. Same conclusion reached because these are partisans.
There are a vanishingly small number of people I know that match the OP description, but their opinion on 2020 election fraud is more "hmmm, maybe" and less "oh yeah, that definitely happened!" And if you tell them that no expert has found evidence of fraud, yeah, their thought process pretty much exactly mirrors what the OP describes. That's not sufficient to PROVE fraud, it just means they aren't going to trust anyone saying "oh, yeah, we definitively ruled it out."
"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck
One of the most remarkable things for me is the 2016 election had and still has the insistence from the left that it was totally corrupt and bought by Putin and the right claiming it was and is beyond reproach, with each group now pivoting to the exact opposite of their previous views. I still see all of the nonsense from 2016 being repeated here as fact even now; no doubt the 2020 will suffer the same fate.
In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
One of the most remarkable things for me is the 2016 election had and still has the insistence from the left that it was totally corrupt and bought by Putin and the right claiming it was and is beyond reproach, with each group now pivoting to the exact opposite of their previous views. I still see all of the nonsense from 2016 being repeated here as fact even now; no doubt the 2020 will suffer the same fate.
Which nonsense from 2016 is being repeated here as fact on the WAB?
“He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”
Originally posted by Officer of EngineersView Post
Kicking kids off lawns is a career?
I was terrorizing the population by running half the city's fleet of buses and taking double decker's out myself each day for sh*ts and giggles.
Now I find myself in demand sending freight here, there and everywhere as the logistics and supply systems slowly grind to halt. Economically the just-in-time distribution model hasn't been working nearly so well post-covid in the nether regions of the world.
I keep looking for an easy sedentary job, but immediately everything turns to crisis. Maybe it's just me.
As for children, my two are fairly grown up and complete geeks, though I have inherited two more through a new tryst. How's your wee princess?
In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
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