The Newest Neocon Joyride

I posted a Tweet of Glenn Greenwald on Facebook today (and see here):

I added some additional commentary by Glenn Greenwald:

The amazing thing is it's the same people, it's David Frum and Nicolle Wallace and Matthew Dowd and Bill Kristol and Max Boot," Greenwald said. "All these neocons back then who were doing this and made themselves the enemy of the country. They ended up in complete disrepute by the end of the second Bush-Cheney term, are now back in the saddle doing it on behalf of Democrats on their cable networks, on their newspapers' op-ed pages. And it's like people have no historical memory, they cheer for these people because they rehabilitated themselves by opposing Trump and that's all they know.

Right on cue, I received this comment:

The invasion of Ukraine is NOT like Vietnam,Korea, etc. and equating it with that is aPutin-friendly talking point. Do you work for FOX now?

To which I responded:

Are you suggesting that because I'm against a war with no stated end-game and no stated benefit to ordinary Americans, a war that is enriching America's vast military-industrial complex, a war that pushes us ever closer to the trigger point of an already extremely dangerous risk of nuclear holocaust, and a war that is sucking up massive financial resources that should be helping desperate Americans,, that I'm pro-Putin and that I work for FOX?

[More . . . ]

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Regarding the Progressive Side of the Abortion Debate, Where are the Women?

I'm pro-choice. My preference is to see Roe v Wade upheld. That said, if you're up for a challenge, try to find the word "women" in any recent article or tweet about abortion by the Washington Post, NYT, ACLU, NARAL or MSNBC.

More about Titania McGrath . . .

Continue ReadingRegarding the Progressive Side of the Abortion Debate, Where are the Women?

Musk Derangement Syndrome

Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense points out one of many deranged articles about Elon Musk, this one at the New York Times (image of the NYT headline below). Nellie's comments:

Pretty bad that baby Elon Musk didn’t solve apartheid: The Times has a new profile of Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa until he was 17, then emigrated to Canada so he wouldn’t have to serve in the military.

No matter, the Times’ effort is to smear him literally because he happened to be born into a country with a reprehensible government. Here’s what the reporter wrote: “Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid government propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege.”

The word the Times was searching for to describe information flow in apartheid-era South Africa the exact opposite of “unchecked speech. It’s censorship. Newspapers blacked out their own columns in protest of government censorship. So determined are these writers to smear Musk and jam history into our modern language, they are literally rewriting apartheid as a problem of misinformation and too much free speech.

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The Flagrant Dishonesty of Most Arguments For and Against Abortion

In 2019, Caitlyn Flanagan published a noteworthy article about abortion that recognized that most "arguments" about the legality of abortion are dishonest.  Most of these "arguments" have zero chance of moving a person on the other side of the issue to a new understanding or a new position. Most such "arguments" fail because they refuse to give the other side its best foot forward. They are worse than straw man arguments or least charitable readings.  They are like athletic competitions where only one team takes the field.  Most of these "arguments" are thus political rants and rallying cries, not good faith discussions.

Here is an excerpt from Flanagan's excellent article, titled "THE DISHONESTY OF THE ABORTION DEBATE: Why we need to face the best arguments from the other side":

The argument for abortion, if made honestly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire consequences to women of making a very simple medical procedure illegal. The argument against it doesn’t take even a single word. The argument against it is a picture.

This is not an argument anyone is going to win. The loudest advocates on both sides are terrible representatives for their cause. When women are urged to “shout your abortion,” and when abortion becomes the subject of stand-up comedy routines, the attitude toward abortion seems ghoulish. Who could possibly be proud that they see no humanity at all in the images that science has made so painfully clear? When anti-abortion advocates speak in the most graphic terms about women “sucking babies out of the womb,” they show themselves without mercy. They are not considering the extremely human, complex, and often heartbreaking reasons behind women’s private decisions. The truth is that the best argument on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowledge that fact, you aren’t speaking or even thinking honestly about the issue. You certainly aren’t going to convince anybody. Only the truth has the power to move.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons with permission by Mark Baylor

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