PHILOSOPHY: “On Truth” / Arthur Schopenhauer
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Category Archives: Writing
GREEN PARTY: “Third-Party Politics”
h/t: Being Liberal
There are 40 people on one side of a road. There is one person on the other side of the road.
A bread truck pulls up and the driver gives the one person — standing there alone (perhaps impatiently tapping a Gucci-loafered foot and checking his Rolex) — 40 LOAVES OF BREAD. Then the driver gives the group of 40 people, in varying states of dress and hunger, ONE LOAF OF BREAD to share among themselves. He drives off.
~ Jill Stein, paraphrased from a workshop in NYC 3.23.13Dr. Stein used this scenario to illustrate how the top 1% of our citizenry controls 40% of the wealth of this country. The bottom 40% controls only 1% of the wealth.
Also of interest:
KPFA Ralph Nader interview
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/83373
Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word:
“Candidates talk drugs, climate, indefinite detention at third-party debate”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755883/ns/msnbc-the_last_word/#49545259
“I’d rather vote for what I want and not get it,
than for what I don’t want and get it.”
~ Eugene V. Debs
Related articles
- American-Style Fascism (mathaba.net)
- Only way for Green Party to get into debate: Get arrested (VIDEO) (timesunion.com)
- Jill Stein vs. ‘Too Lateness of America’s Fate-ness’ (correntewire.com)
ATHEISM: “Non-believing Countries” / Greg Graffin Ph.D.
ATHEISM: “The Brief Lucidity of Life Before an Endless Naught”
ATHEISM: “Ann Druyan About Her Husband Carl Sagan” / MUST READ!
QUOTATION: “Celestial Dictator” / Christopher Hitchens
INTELLECTUALISM: “The Treason of the Intellectuals” / Chris Hedges
The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false.
[…]
The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.
The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.
[…]
Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally.
[…]
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Paul Baran, the brilliant Marxist economist and author of “The Political Economy of Growth,” is “only one condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead … to withstand … comfortable and lucrative conformity.”
CORPORATE MEDIA: “The Day That TV News Died” / Chris Hedges
I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news. But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq.
Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war—were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network. He would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read. Donahue never returned to the airwaves.
[…]
Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.
The lie of omission is still a lie.
Related articles
- Phil Donahue on His 2003 Firing from MSNBC, When Liberal Network Couldn’t Tolerate Antiwar Voices (aislec.wordpress.com)
- Phil Donahue: Chris Matthews Was ‘Threatened’ By Me (huffingtonpost.com)
QUOTATION: “On Education” / Albert Einstein
h/t: Richard Dawkins Foundation Facebook
for Babers!
AMURIKAN IDIOCY: Thirty-seven Percent of Amurikans are Absolute Idiots! / Mark Morford
. . . A whopping 24 percent [of Americans] believe dinosaurs and man hung out together. Eighteen percent still believe the sun revolves around the Earth.
Do you believe in angels? Forty-five percent of Americans do. In fact, roughly 48 percent – Republicans and Democrats alike – believe in some form of creationism.
In sum and all averaged out, it’s safe to say about 37 percent of Americans are just are not very bright. Or rather, quite shockingly dumb. Perhaps beyond reach. Perhaps beyond hope or redemption. Perhaps beyond caring about anything they have to say in the public sphere ever again. Sorry, Kansas.
Did you frown at that last paragraph? Was it a terribly elitist and unkind thing to say? Sort of. Probably. But I’m not sure it matters, because none of those people are reading this column right now, or any column for that matter, because reading anything even remotely complex or analytical is something only 42 percent of the population enjoy doing on a regular basis, which is why most TV shows, all reality shows, many major media blogs and all of Fox News is scripted for a 5th-grade education/attention span. OMG LOL kittens! 19 babies having a worse day than you. WTF is up with Justin Timberlake’s hair?!?
It is this bizarre, circular, catch-22 kind of question, asked almost exclusively by intellectual liberals because intellectual conservatives don’t actually exist, given how higher education leads to more developed critical thinking (you already know the vast majority of university professors and scientists identify as Democrat/progressive, right?) which leads straight to a more nimble, open-minded perspective. In short: The smarter you are, the less rigid/more liberal you become.
Always Question Authority 