Who is crazy?

The mainstream media is going after anyone who dares to stray from what they consider to be the proper boundaries of discourse. He dares to treat mainstream political discourse "as the political freak show that it is." That's why Alan Grayson, who is one of the few people in Congress who is really working hard to get to the bottom of serious problems, has a big target on his back--he is being labeled as crazy by a mainstream media that doesn't know what to do when someone asks real questions about real issues. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com explores this problem at length, pointing out the other side of the coin, that in Media-World, those who are certifiably insane are being labeled as "sane" as long as they stay within predesignated boundaries. For example:

Just consider who is supported and embraced by those who slap the "crazy" label on the forehead of every perceived dissident. Hillary Clinton -- the ultimate embodiment of Democratic Party Seriousness and Sanity -- supported the invasion of Iraq by warning of scary weapons and Al Qaeda ties that did not exist . . . and she spent her campaign beating her chest and doing things like threatening to "totally obliterate" Iran. While in office, Barack Obama has endorsed putting people in cages with no charges, assassinating American citizens with no due process, eavesdropping on Americans en masse with little oversight, increasing military spending beyond its shockingly inflated levels while searching for ways to cut Medicaid and Social Security, and blocking judicial review of presidential felonies and war crimes on the ground that those criminal acts constitute vital "state secrets" and must be protected. Most Serious, Sane Democrats have supported all of that insanity.
What honest person can argue with Greenwald's list? But he was just getting warmed up. There's a lot more, including this:
Meanwhile, the GOP establishment from top to bottom spent a decade cheering on torture, disappearances, abductions, unprovoked wars, chronic presidential lawbreaking and truly sick McCarthyite witch hunts. Both of the Sane Parties conspired to transfer, with little accountability, massive amounts of public wealth to the very Wall Street firms which virtually destroyed the entire world economy, while standing by and doing very little about tragic levels of joblessness or the future risk of Wall-Street-caused financial crises; kept us waging war for a full decade in multiple countries (while threatening others) even as we near the precipice of bankruptcy, the hallmarks of under-developed nation status and the disappearance of the social safety net; and are so captive to the corporate interests which own the Government that they viciously compete with one another over who can be a more loyal servant to those interests.
Greenwald is not suggesting that those who step out of the mainstream are always correct about everything they say. But he does give credit to Alan Grayson, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul for not buying into most of the rubbish that we are being fed by the media. We live in world painted upside-down by a media that is largely not about traditional Fourth Estate values. Rather than feed us information that will allow a democracy to thrive, the mainstream media, based on its constant miserable failures over the past ten years, is clearly more interested in destroying those who dare to ask questions that might threaten our corporate-military-prison-industrial-Complex.

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Another anti-gay reaction formation – a growing list.

Here's the report from Huffpo (with video):

Early Wednesday morning, State Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Calif.) was pulled over and arrested for drunk driving. Sources report that Ashburn -- a fierce opponent of gay rights -- was driving drunk after leaving a gay nightclub; when the officer stopped the state-issued vehicle, there was an unidentified man in the passenger seat of the car.
Based on the constant stream of incidents like this, we ought to just assume that men who disparage gays are gay. Freud calls this type of situation a reaction formation.

Continue ReadingAnother anti-gay reaction formation – a growing list.

Building lifeboats

I know that my past few posts have been bleak (see here and here), but now I must temper that sense of despair with some hope. Things are bad, and will probably get worse, but that's not to say that they will not get better. But here's the trick: we all have to stop relying upon someone else for solutions. Forgive me if I sound like a politician for just a moment: we must "be the change" we want to see in the world. I cannot tell you how to solve the peak oil problem, or the unfolding economic collapse, or climate change, or the corruption which has become endemic in our political system-- you have to figure it out for yourself. I'm not selling a prepackaged kit which contains all of the answers, and I would probably distrust anyone who was. But that's precisely why I still have hope. If we are going to make it through the challenges facing us, we must learn to pull together again as a community and actually attempt to create our own solutions. There can be no more delegation to those in Washington. We cannot afford to wait for decades as they attempt to muster the political will to combat the flood of money which has so damaged our electoral and political processes. We simply don't have time to fix the system that's been damaged beyond repair.

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Climate: OJ and the Haystack

Why Climate Change Denial Is Like the O.J. Trial is an interesting article. The essence is that the climate denialists are using the same techniques as the OJ defense team: Find anything resembling a needle in a vast haystack of data, then claim that the presence of the needle casts doubt on the character of the haystack itself. Because there is an overwhelming pile of evidence in support of anthropogenic global warming, there are bound to be occasional pieces of data that can appear to contradict the mass of affirmative information. The pile is overwhelming, especially to non-scientists. Therefore few have the patience to understand the whole thing. Those who want to spin the counter argument claim that, because the two sides are both represented, therefore the issue is in doubt. And, as in the OJ trial, if there is cause for doubt, then no action is to be taken.

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The ugliness and the hope

Jeremy Rifkin has a few things to say at Huffpo. First, the problem:

In a nation that has come to think of human nature as competitive, even predatory, self serving, acquisitive and utilitarian, is it any wonder that those very values have led to a "winner take all" syndrome in the marketplace in which the rich get richer while everyone else becomes marginalized, and the well-being of the larger community, including the biosphere, becomes eroded?
And then the hope:
If we listen very closely, we can hear the whisper of a new dream in the making, one based on what youth around the world are beginning to call "quality of life". In this new world, the American Dream seems almost provincial, even quaint, and entirely unsuited for a generation that is beginning to extend its empathic sensibility beyond national identities, to include the whole of humanity and the entirety of the planet as their extended community. If the American Dream served as the gold standard for the era of national markets and nation-state governments, the dream of "quality of life" becomes the standard for the emerging biosphere era. . . The empathic civilization looms on the horizon.

Continue ReadingThe ugliness and the hope