Politics

[Legacy]

Always fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu5znlyX9uY

 

[Irish YJ]

Always fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu5znlyX9uY

Is that Cack with a message to Bluto

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Unherd just published an article by Aris Roussinos titled "Covid has exposed America as a failed state":

It is remarkable how the effects of Covid on the international system mirrors its impact on individuals. Its lethality, in the acute phase, may be lower than we feared, yet there is a risk of sudden catastrophic relapse after a seeming period of recovery, and the long-term effects are of a gravity we can only dread.

Within states and in the relations between them, as in individuals, the coronavirus searches out and exacerbates the underlying morbidities, exaggerating them until total system failure. When the international system collapses, it will be with Covid, and not of it.

The greatest morbidity the virus has latched onto in the global order is the rivalry between the United States and China. This contest is not new — International Relations scholars have long debated the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ named after the agonising and destructive struggle between Athens and Sparta chronicled by the Greek historian, wherein a rising power is inexorably drawn into conflict with the hegemon it displaces.

When Germany challenged British hegemony at the beginning of the last century, the first wave of globalisation ended in global conflict and then a pandemic; we must hope that this current pandemic, rapidly bringing about the end of the second wave of globalisation, will not similarly end in confrontation between the two great powers.

In this coming struggle, America is starting with a great and self-inflicted handicap. Obama’s attempts to reposition US foreign policy away from its destructive and self-defeating entanglement in the Islamic world and towards the coming confrontation with China failed, distracted by the bloody chaos brought about by the Arab Spring and by the Washington foreign policy “blob’s” unwillingness to wean itself off wars it cannot win.

Trump’s much-touted withdrawal from the Middle East has likewise seen the US bolster its forces in the region with tens of thousands more troops than his term began with, and allowed his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to pursue a burning fixation with regime change in Iran that is unlikely to end in America’s favour.

America has frittered away 5 trillion dollars on its Middle Eastern adventures, indebting itself to China in the process, and burned its domestic and international political capital to an unimaginable degree —with nothing at all to show for it. Now that the architects of this self-inflicted catastrophe wish us to join them in their next global adventure, we must think carefully.

Let’s remember how we got here. Only a couple of months ago, warning about dependence on China and the fragility of our supply chains, and urging decoupling from the aspiring hegemon, was viewed as the preserve of cranks of Right and Left, considered romantic at best and xenophobic at worst.

When Trump urged the same thing for the United States, China’s autocrat Xi was treated to a standing ovation at Davos, and hailed as the new champion of the global liberal order. But now Larry Summers, the high priest of globalisation and of America’s offshoring to China, is warning us against fragile supply chains and the urgency of decoupling with no reference at all his long and glittering career midwifing this catastrophe. Here is the global system, finally stripped of all illusions.

The result is the total discrediting of the US-led order, an order of which China’s rise is as much a direct product as it is a challenge.

The truth is that globalisation, the central political dream of Clinton and Blair, Obama and Cameron, was never real. It was a process by which advanced Western economies unilaterally surrendered their manufacturing capacity to a rival, growing power, China, which instead of reciprocating according to the Panglossian calculations of the neoliberal theorists, practiced a traditional and ruthless mercantilism in pursuit of its own interests. As the American political theorist Michael Lind recently wrote in Tablet:

“Politicians pushing globalization like Clinton may have told the public that the purpose of NAFTA and of China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO) was to open the closed markets of Mexico and China to ‘American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.’ But U.S. multinationals and their lobbyists 20 years ago knew that was not true. Their goal from the beginning was to transfer the production of many products from American soil to Mexican soil or Chinese soil, to take advantage of foreign low-wage, nonunion labor, and in some cases foreign government subsidies and other favors.”

The idea that a global liberal order could, like an iPhone, be designed in America and made in China was the product, where it was sincerely held, of pure ideological delusion. In its entire 5,000 year history, China has not spent one single day as a liberal democracy. The belief that a repressive autocratic regime would suddenly transform into a liberal democracy by being handed more wealth and power was patently absurd. Yet it is the people who held and promoted this claim for decades who intend to lead the world into a great power confrontation — against the China for whose rise they are directly responsible.

Globalisation was always the grand illusion of naive liberalism, taken advantage of by illiberal and non-liberal actors to pursue their own ends. It is the liberals, the TINA bluechecks, who are the artless rubes in this story. Indeed, it is they who deserve much of the blame now being directed at China. In Lind’s words:

“The United States has not been the naive victim of cunning Chinese masterminds. On the contrary, in the last generation many members of America’s elite have sought to get rich personally by selling or renting out America’s crown jewels—intellectual property, manufacturing capacity, high-end real estate, even university resources—to the elite of another country. When asked whether the rapid dismantling, in a few decades, of much of an industrial base built up painstakingly over two centuries has been bad for the United States, the typical reply by members of the U.S. establishment is an incoherent word salad of messianic liberal ideology and neoclassical economics. We are fighting global poverty by employing Chinese factory workers for a pittance! Don’t you understand Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage?”

For a brief few decades, the shift in production to China made a handful of Western individuals unimaginably rich, while lowering the living standards of the middle and working class. It began to turn the First World into a Third World society of stratified, vastly uneven wealth even as it raised China into a First World superpower. For the benefit of a few billionaires, Western societies have immiserated their voter base, dramatically weakened themselves, and helped shorten the lives of hundreds of thousands of their own people.

These events didn’t just happen. Factories didn’t just uproot themselves and migrate to China like flocks of concrete geese. These were conscious, willed acts presented to us as faits accomplis — which we must now consciously and painfully undo, in full historical awareness of how this all took place.

It was in winning the first Cold War that the United States set the stage for its own eclipse, though our own entanglement in this mess is the product of the Second World War. In 1945, the United States found itself the victor through its possession of a vast industrial base, sheltered by geography from the destruction we European powers had wrought upon ourselves. The Soviet Union could not keep up with America’s industrial power, able to churn out both weapons and consumer goods with dizzying speed and sophistication.

Yet when the rival superpower collapsed, exhausted, the United States took the wrong lessons from the fall of communism. American policymakers convinced themselves their global dominance was due to the success of their liberal ideology rather than of their industrial might, and that the sudden, unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union was due to the vindication of liberalism rather than of the awakened nationalism of Russia’s subject peoples.

Drunk on victory, and searching for a new project, American policymakers decided to remake the world in their own image. In 1993, the National Security Strategy of US National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher melded the doctrine of imperial hegemony with the free market orthodoxies that had taken root in the Reagan era. As the realist International Relations scholar Patrick Porter notes:

“Christopher’s version assumed that the United States ‘must maintain its military strength’, ‘stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’, and ‘knock down barriers to global trade’. Lake’s premise was that ‘America’s power, authority, and example provide unparalleled opportunities to lead,’ that its security rested on the rise of market democracy abroad.”

Our present moment, in all its dangers, results from this fusion of the two strands of liberalism at the very apogee of American power: the belief that the unfettered free movement of goods, capital, services and people would raise global living standards to endless new heights, and that it was America’s manifest destiny to oversee a worldwide liberal order of free trade and unchallenged US hegemony.

Distractedly giving away the industrial base that won them the first Cold War to their rival in the second, American administrations of both parties plunged headfirst into the post-historical future. It took less than a decade for reality to crash into the World Trade Center, but by then it was too late. America’s policymakers had been captured by their grand delusion, and they refused to let it go even as the empire found itself over-extended in war after war, entered into with noble liberal aims utterly divorced from reality, and from which it was unable to extricate itself.

Just one decade after 9/11, despite America’s mauling in Iraq, pious liberals saw in the Arab Spring a chance to spread their creed to oppressed masses crying out for liberal democracy, and watched with confused horror as the armed factions of the Middle East turned instead to the older and more powerful forces of religious fervour, ethnic conflict and sectarian hatred. Lost in a fantasy world of their own imagining, Americans could not begin to understand the world they dreamed of changing.

America’s rapid rise to global hegemony and equally rapid decline is a grand historical tragedy of the highest order, and as in classical tragedy, the root cause is the protagonist’s central character flaw. Born of 18th-century liberal ideals, and centred on a sacred set of texts, a constitution and declaration of independence debated with rabbinical exactitude and religious fervour, for the United States, that flaw is its civic religion of liberalism.

While we at least, like our neighbours in Europe, have older traditions on which to draw, and with which we can temper liberalism’s zealous certainties, America was liberal from the start and will remain so until the end; with no countervailing influence, in America liberalism mutated into a fundamentalist religion. It is only through this zealot’s devotion to liberalism that American policymakers sincerely believed they could bomb Afghan shepherds and bribe the Chinese politburo into becoming fellow acolytes.

Their certainty in liberalism’s manifest destiny to spread itself over every corner of the earth goes beyond reasonable analysis: it is a purely religious faith. Despite the failure of its devotees to achieve success wherever they have tried it, they will not stop, and cannot. It is a compulsion, a religious duty impossible for them to abandon, shared by both factions.

America’s crusading zeal is not just for export: through some magical process, all manner of political thought is in the United States transmuted into religion. Trump’s opponents on the liberal and radical left have mangled French postmodernist theory into a dour and millenarian Calvinism. On the populist right, the QAnon conspiracy theory is rapidly evolving into a widespread religious cult, a Manichaen heresy with Trump as its central vengeful deity.

Now the two opposing sects of American liberalism, conventionally characterised as political parties, are at war with each other, in a so far relatively bloodless battle for the nation’s soul. What the Reformation did tragically for Christianity in Europe, America’s political culture war is repeating farcically with liberalism.

If we observe the American war on Covid, we see it is America’s Chernobyl moment as much as China’s. The United States is by far the world’s worst-affected country in terms of total numbers, and its outbreak is still far from over. The symbolism of American states forming regional blocs to counteract the incompetence and total incapacity of its central government to save lives or arrest the virus’s progress lends weight to The Atlantic’s charge that the US now resembles a failed state.

The image of the Surgeon General of the richest and most powerful empire that has ever existed instructing Americans in a Twitter video how to improvise a mask out of a T-shirt — a T-shirt prominently advertising an opioid overdose antidote — is a potent symbol of deep and existential rot.

It is a country embroiled in political conflict over even the basic facts of science, from biology to medicine: because the American President promoted one potential Covid cure, half the country became devoted to its efficacy, and the other to its harmfulness. Had Trump condemned hydroxychloroquine, no doubt the same war would have taken place in reverse, with liberal commentators ostentatiously guzzling the drug on video to widespread approval.

Trump is a morbid symptom of this chaos, rather than its cause. The forthcoming election, which pits two gerontocrats of dubious mental acuity against each other, resembles the late Soviet era, before the regime collapsed under its own absurdities. America indeed represents a strange inversion of the Soviet collapse: the economy dwarfs that of any other nation, save China; its empire is still intact, and its military spans the globe more powerfully than any single challenger.

Yet at its centre the US echoes post-Soviet Russia in its epidemics of death by drug overdose, in its collapsing middle class, its worsening health outcomes and declining life expectancies, the capture of the state and economy by rapacious oligarchs, and in the occasional bouts of interethnic violence leading to demonstrations, riots and broader political dysfunction.

As the veteran American diplomat Richard Haass sadly observes: “Long before COVID-19 ravaged the earth, there had already been a precipitous decline in the appeal of the American model. Thanks to persistent political gridlock, gun violence, the mismanagement that led to the 2008 global financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and more, what America represented grew increasingly unattractive to many. The federal government’s slow, incoherent, and all too often ineffective response to the pandemic will reinforce the already widespread view that the United States has lost its way.”

What, then, is the appeal of this model to wavering allies in a new Cold War? The idea it can be considered a viable model of governance to follow is now patently absurd. As I sit typing this, troops are deployed on the streets of cities across the country, their Humvees still painted desert tan, as looters smash and burn and ransack shops, and protestors march against rubber bullets and tear gas; the tools of imperial policing are now brought to bear on the metropole.

It is surely impossible to view the US at this point as anything other than a cautionary tale, a burning city on a hill, which evokes only the desire for our own society to avoid its fate. In his Tablet essay, Lind glumly muses about a near-future United States withering into a “deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion, with decayed factories scattered across the continent and a nepotistic rentier oligarchy clustered in a few big coastal cities”.

While an America in decline may throw up a more competent caudillo than Trump in time, it is difficult to reasonably conclude that it possesses the societal solidarity to wage a decades-long, global struggle against a near-competitor. It is hard to imagine an American governing class scandalised at calling Covid a Chinese virus waging an existential conflict against China to a successful conclusion.

The country’s politics were torn apart, for four years, by a handful of Russian Facebook posts promoting Trump; how then will it cope with China’s far greater penetration of social media, of American commerce and industry, of universities and politics, of all the institutions of 21st century American life? We do not know, yet, who will win this year’s election, nor whether the losing party, will, as in the previous election, attempt to overturn the result and further delegitimise the entire political process.

Perhaps the era of losing parties accepting election results has gone for good in America, now both sides view their opponents as a Schmittian enemy to be vanquished for eternity. America is too lost in its own internal conflict to contemplate a grander, global struggle with any confidence.

In any case, America’s foreign policy is disastrous in its own terms, even before Covid started coursing through its system. As the International Relations scholar Philip Cunliffe observes, America is that curious paradox, a revisionist hegemon, restlessly driven by ideology to overturn the very global order it charges itself with maintaining, producing what he terms a “cosmopolitan dystopia” that undermines America’s own position.

American attempts to overturn regimes which offend its liberal values have produced overwhelmingly negative results for the global system, spreading chaos and enhancing the reach and power of its geopolitical rivals. America’s record in these endless wars has not been one of success. Defeated, outflanked by Iran in Iraq, and clutching defeat from the jaws of victory in eastern Syria, America’s hegemonic military power and tactical skill has been relentlessly undermined by the total detachment from reality displayed by the Washington blob which determines the goals and course of the nation’s wars.

In a manner we can safely assume is not replicated in China, the architects of America’s endless policy failures, like the Iraq War, are not punished by the system, but awarded further sinecures and promotions by an establishment which rewards failure and hobbles success. Defeat is baked in from the outset: the rot is now so widespread it will likely become terminal.

American decline is starkly measurable in outcomes, even as its ballooning defence budgets sap the country’s economy. The United States can no longer keep its client states from each other’s throats, causing wars to break out even within the US alliance system: Qatar and Turkey’s attempts to establish Muslim Brotherhood governance projects across the Middle East and North Africa are directly challenged by the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s support for notionally secular strongmen, in a proxy conflict dragging in France and Russia and threatening Europe’s security.

Even a recent coup attempt in a bankrupt and unstable South American country failed despite Pompeo’s loudly-voiced support, which should have been America playing in easy mode. As in any horror movie, the threat’s coming from inside the building: all America’s rivals need do, like Russia in Syria, is exploit the contradictions and weaknesses of US policy, and turn the superpower’s weight and power against it at minimal cost and risk to themselves.

Unlike Iraq, or the Taliban emirate, however, there is fortunately little prospect of the United States engaging in open conflict with China. As Pentagon planners warn, it is unlikely that America will win even a limited naval engagement in China’s Pacific sphere of influence, let alone attempt a ground war against a billion-strong nuclear power.

Instead, we can expect a hybrid war that stops short of open confrontation, involving information warfare on social media, the hacking and sabotage of key infrastructure, the economic blackmail and extortion of allies through sanctions and tariffs and a dangerous jockeying for position as Covid accelerates the collapse of weak states across the ME and Africa, already teetering on the edge of failure.

The internet will surely emerge as a central battleground, and one which poses a far greater risk to America’s open, divided, and already-penetrated system than to China’s hermetically-sealed national internet: indeed, it is doubtful the worldwide web as we currently understand it will long survive a great power confrontation.

As hacked power grids and water treatment plants fail, and passenger planes mysteriously fall out of the sky, and top secret documents are released on social media, the rest of the world will find itself in the uncomfortable position of deciding which side presents the safest bet: and Covid has begun this process sooner than anyone expected.

Born in 1945, the American Empire was the global boomer, sitting astride the earth like it was a ride-on lawnmower, frittering away his children’s inheritance on cheap Chinese gewgaws and blaming everyone else for his poor decisions and for the decline of his powers. It is natural then, that it will be laid low by what is cruelly termed the Boomer plague, and we will do well to escape the hardship and bloodshed that attends the collapse of empires with as little harm to ourselves as possible.

 

[Bluto]

Unherd just published an article by Aris Roussinos titled "Covid has exposed America as a failed state":

Good article. Thanks for posting.

 

[Ndaccountant]

“Our goal should be that in twenty years those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public. We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them” (Antifa, p. 206)


So, to summarize....you exercise your right to vote, but not in the way others want you to. Therefore, you run this risk of being potentially physically confronted by those who don't like your vote. Got it.

 

[ACamp1900]

“Our goal should be that in twenty years those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public. We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them” (Antifa, p. 206)


So, to summarize....you exercise your right to vote, but not in the way others want you to. Therefore, you run this risk of being potentially physically confronted by those who don't like your vote. Got it.

Sounds pretty,... idk, fascist, to me.

 

[Irishize]

Good article. Thanks for posting.

I agree. Now we need bright folks w/ solutions to address our missteps but in today’s two-party system being committed to globalization it doesn’t look the change for the better is on the horizon.

 

[zelezo vlk]

Excellent article shared by Whiskey above!

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Here's a good thread by @GrayConnolly:

In their very different ways, Bernie Sanders & Donald Trump both upended the 1990s uniparty consenus. Bernie lost primary battles but his heirs likely win the war. Trump is the President. Both took on a dead consensus on economic liberalism & dumb wars. Only social issues remain.

Much punditry & commentary does not know it is dead yet. When the Boomers and their subscriptions finish, legacy media collapses. No one under 50 knows who a George Will or Maureen Dowd is let alone cares what they think. Liberalism is a barren ideology & leaves no children.

The Right that emerges from this time will be more orientated to families & workers, not big business. Even in an age of mass suffrage, the Right has won most elections by addressing grievances whilst defending foundational structures. It loses when it leaves Bismarck for Hayek.

The Left that emerges will be, in some ways, more interesting. The political Left will be stuck with the liberal refuse the Right no longer wants or needs. Whether a more worker-focused Left will wants to be stuck with the "bikram yoga currency trader" bloc is yet to be seen.

No one should mourn the death of the liberal consensus. A world in which woke capital underpays workers struggling to pay for basics while observing all the pieties of 'pride month' or what have you hashtaggery deserves all that is coming to it.

Hopefully, whatever happens, there will be much more breaking of ranks. The work of Tucker Carlson on the Right, smashing, repeatedly the dead-hand of zombie Reaganism, needs a partner on the Left, which takes seriously family & moral breakdown as a danger to the most vulnerable

One of the worst aspects of social media is the inane herd following (esp by media that does it and is then surprised why it is dying) and the gauleiter-like policing of boundaries that should, in a free society, be crossed all the time by people who can think for themselves

There are many political ends on which trad conservatives and many on the esp old Left will agree: decent wages for workers, basic familial health care, schools that educate children with varying needs. We can argue about delivery but the 'protective' ends we actually agree on.

To finish where I began: Trump won only by winning many Bernie voters. When Trump was sworn in, his speech addressed in brutally honest terms the carnage that decades of economic liberalism had inflicted on workers. All the applause came from in front of Trump - none from behind.

 

[Circa]

I've read enough to make mesick and then I found Jimmy Dore. He has considered himself (same as I) a Liberal Democrat... Independent.... Then this day and age happened... Awe Shucks..



<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gyub6M8Qfqs" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>


I'm still confused. If anyone has any help on the save Biden campaign, please let me know. Send everything ya got. I'll go ahead and vote dimensia back into my mail-in-vote....


1 Party system has fooled us all.... (edit) 2 party

 

[Irish#1]

I've read enough to make mesick and then I found Jimmy Dore. He has considered himself (same as I) a Liberal Democrat... Independent.... Then this day and age happened... Awe Shucks..

I'm still confused. If anyone has any help on the save Biden campaign, please let me know. Send everything ya got. I'll go ahead and vote dimensia back into my mail-in-vote....


1 Party system has fooled us all.... (edit) 2 party

I support your right to believe what you want and to vote for whom you want. Having said that, Your continued droning that all of us have been fooled has run its course. You're basically saying that you are the only one that can see the forest for the trees and the rest of us are not smart enough to think for ourselves and make wise decisions.

 

[BleedBlueGold]

I'm quitting for the day: Just had three co-workers tell me Antifa is fake, made up, not an organized group, etc.

I just can't...

 

[ACamp1900]

I'm quitting for the day: Just had three co-workers tell me Antifa is fake, made up, not an organized group, etc.

I just can't...

There’s is a need for an ‘honest conversation’ in my office apparently. This ‘honest conversation’ is stunning lacking any honesty. It’s unreal

 

[yankeehater]

“Our goal should be that in twenty years those who voted for Trump are too uncomfortable to share that fact in public. We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them” (Antifa, p. 206)


So, to summarize....you exercise your right to vote, but not in the way others want you to. Therefore, you run this risk of being potentially physically confronted by those who don't like your vote. Got it.

I will put this here. Don't know his voting preference. Heard someone say making All Lives Matter claim is same as using the "N" word. Guess the Kings agree. Sacramento Kings play by play announcer forced to resign for tweeting ALL Lives Matter.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id...r-grant-napear-resigns-all-lives-matter-tweet

 

[IrishLion]

There’s is a need for an ‘honest conversation’ in my office apparently. This ‘honest conversation’ is stunning lacking any honesty. It’s unreal

I hope you spoke up, for real.

We need reasonable voices and legitimate conversation from all angles, not just echo chambers where people repeat what they heard on [left-leaning network] or [right leaning network].

I'm a liberal snowflake in a lot of ways, but I do what I can to be a voice of reason when friends or coworkers go over-the-top in conversations, from either side.

I have friends that are 'offended at everything' liberal, and I have friends that are 'take my guns from my cold dead hands' conservative. I'm usually able to find some middle ground with everyone, though.

It's the same sentiment as always, and sounds like a meaningless platitude at this point... but we REALLY need 'big' voices on both sides willing to speak and make a 100%, honest-to-god effort at hearing each other out.

But the gap continues to widen, instead, because people aren't willing to speak up without going on the immediate offensive/defensive.

 

[Irishize]

Here's a good thread by @GrayConnolly:

This is a good thread. It got me wondering: What would the 1992 (& maybe even the 1996) POTUS election have been like w/ multiple 24-hr “news” networks & social media as pervasive as it is today? Could Perot have pulled it off? He’s no nuttier than Bernie or Trump so I don’t think social media brings him down any further than Clinton, Bush Sr or Dole.

Perot was able to ensure Clinton never had 50+% of the vote in either election. That’s w/o the 24 hr news cycle & social media exposing every lie & misstep that every politician ever made (or allegedly made).

Look at how the majority of Americans having video cameras in their hands at all times can reveal truths that were previously dismissed as conspiracy theories or hearsay.

 

[Irishize]

I hope you spoke up, for real.

We need reasonable voices and legitimate conversation from all angles, not just echo chambers where people repeat what they heard on [left-leaning network] or [right leaning network].

I'm a liberal snowflake in a lot of ways, but I do what I can to be a voice of reason when friends or coworkers go over-the-top in conversations, from either side.

I have friends that are 'offended at everything' liberal, and I have friends that are 'take my guns from my cold dead hands' conservative. I'm usually able to find some middle ground with everyone, though.

It's the same sentiment as always, and sounds like a meaningless platitude at this point... but we REALLY need 'big' voices on both sides willing to speak and make a 100%, honest-to-god effort at hearing each other out.

But the gap continues to widen, instead, because people aren't willing to speak up without going on the immediate offensive/defensive.

REPS

This is the bottom line. Is it really worth losing friends or at least losing respect from our peers b/c we think our “side” is right & the other “side” is wrong?

I found this in a daily devotional I just finished. This is not meant to offend the followers of other beliefs on this board.


What if…

...we exhibited patience?
...we chose not to be offended?
...we quit taking everything so personally?
..we changed the degrading way we talk to others?
...we focused on what we did have in common?
...we chose the big picture?

Let’s not forget that God so loved...the world. Every single soul on this planet, past, present, and future, He loves. While we’ll never have His capacity to love people, we are still called to love others.

Followers of Jesus can’t quote enough Bible verses to force someone to believe in Jesus. What we can do is represent Jesus by showing love, respect, and empathy, all covered with equal parts truth and grace.

At the end of the day, the point of loving people we disagree with is unity. Whether the issue is petty or prominent, we can choose people first. Because if we, as followers of Jesus, want people to know our Savior and Lord the way we do, that’s where we have to start. Let’s represent Jesus well so that others want to know Him. And when they do, the Holy Spirit is quite capable of leading them to adjust any viewpoints that are inconsistent with His truth.

 

[Bishop2b5]

There’s is a need for an ‘honest conversation’ in my office apparently. This ‘honest conversation’ is stunning lacking any honesty. It’s unreal

There's no such thing as an honest conversation in today's PC world. It's code for "You'll accept my version of things no matter how dishonest or detached from reality or else."

 

[ACamp1900]

There's no such thing as an honest conversation in today's PC world. It's code for "You'll accept my version of things no matter how dishonest or detached from reality or else."

Spot on to what happened today. Hell, question any over the top claims and you’re a Nazi is pretty fitting for this morning’s ‘emergency meeting’

 

[Bluto]

There’s is a need for an ‘honest conversation’ in my office apparently. This ‘honest conversation’ is stunning lacking any honesty. It’s unreal

What was the conversation about?

 

[ACamp1900]

What was the conversation about?

Why baseball can’t come to an economic agreement to save their season,.....

 

[Irish YJ]

Good riddance!

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Congratulations <a href="https://twitter.com/RandyFeenstra?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RandyFeenstra</a> on winning the GOP primary in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IA04?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IA04</a>!<br><br>Steve King’s white supremacist rhetoric is totally inconsistent with the Republican Party, and I’m glad Iowa Republicans rejected him at the ballot box.</p>— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPChairwoman/status/1268030749611044869?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 3, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Bluto]

Why baseball can’t come to an economic agreement to save their season,.....

I can see how that would get heated. For starters baseball is boring as shit. Second, you don’t even have to pay attention until September. If you guys reconvene can you ask why the statue of Fernando Valenzuela isn’t even in the country?

There is a equity and diversity working group at my work that I was basically told I had to be my departments rep for. Anyhow, they trotted out a bunch of stats showing how diverse our organization was in the different departments. When I asked why management didn’t have its own category I looked around the room and you’d have thought I took a dump in the coffee pot. Lol.

 

[ACamp1900]

I can see how that would get heated. For starters baseball is boring as shit. Second, you don’t even have to pay attention until September. If you guys reconvene can you ask why the statue of Fernando Valenzuela isn’t even in the country?

There is a equity and diversity working group at my work that I was basically told I had to be my departments rep for. Anyhow, they trotted out a bunch of stats showing how diverse our organization was in the different departments. When I asked why management didn’t have its own category I looked around the room and you’d have thought I took a dump in the coffee pot. Lol.

For that first paragraph,... our BBQ is off bitch. I hope you catch polio.

 

[drayer54]

Good riddance!

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Congratulations <a href="https://twitter.com/RandyFeenstra?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@RandyFeenstra</a> on winning the GOP primary in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IA04?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IA04</a>!<br><br>Steve King’s white supremacist rhetoric is totally inconsistent with the Republican Party, and I’m glad Iowa Republicans rejected him at the ballot box.</p>— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) <a href="https://twitter.com/GOPChairwoman/status/1268030749611044869?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 3, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

This was a very interesting race. Lots of Iowa Republicans were unhappy about this because they felt King got an unfair shake by the press and by the party. Feenstra got painted as a RINO and King's base is passionate. However, King almost lost this seat in 18 and the race was a toss-up yesterday. Overnight it shifted to solid-republican.

King isolated himself and this is a good move for the party.

 

[Irish YJ]

This was a very interesting race. Lots of Iowa Republicans were unhappy about this because they felt King got an unfair shake by the press and by the party. Feenstra got painted as a RINO and King's base is passionate. However, King almost lost this seat in 18 and the race was a toss-up yesterday. Overnight it shifted to solid-republican.

King isolated himself and this is a good move for the party.

King is a nut bag. Some of the stuff he gets crushed for is silly, but there's a lot of stuff he's done that's straight up stupid racist. I'm happy IA was smart enough to get rid of him. Some of those VA guys should join him in the unemployment line.

 

[Irish#1]

This is a good thread. It got me wondering: What would the 1992 (& maybe even the 1996) POTUS election have been like w/ multiple 24-hr “news” networks & social media as pervasive as it is today? Could Perot have pulled it off? He’s no nuttier than Bernie or Trump so I don’t think social media brings him down any further than Clinton, Bush Sr or Dole.

Perot was able to ensure Clinton never had 50+% of the vote in either election. That’s w/o the 24 hr news cycle & social media exposing every lie & misstep that every politician ever made (or allegedly made).

Look at how the majority of Americans having video cameras in their hands at all times can reveal truths that were previously dismissed as conspiracy theories or hearsay.

Perot was just ahead of his time. Even if you would have todays media coverage back then, I'm not sure the country would have been fed up enough to elect a businessman back then. He would be a polished version of DJT without all of the stupid tweets. If Perot would have run today he would get my vote whether he ran as D or R.

 

[Bluto]

For that first paragraph,... our BBQ is off bitch. I hope you catch polio.

I’ve been prepping for Polio by burning white sage for the last 2 weeks! Jokes on you.

Don’t get me wrong I like going to baseball games. At no other sporting event that I’ve been to can you just sit around, shoot the shit and drink beer without paying full attention and not really miss anything. Also, that rally monkey the Angels had was entertaining/really weird.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Gracy Olmstead just published an article at Mere Orthodoxy titled "The Cost of Food in America":

Americans often boast about the cheapness of their food. Here in the U.S., we spend less on food than any other country in the world (about six percent of our budget, on average). Even other first-world countries—like most European countries—devote more than twice the amount to food spending that we do.

This cheapness has a lot to do with the commodity crops we raise (such as corn and soybeans), and the resulting proliferation of cheap processed goods. But it also has to do with a growth in monopolies throughout the U.S. food industry, and a system of food production which emphasizes efficiency and quantity at all costs.

It was only a matter of time before Americans realized that this “cheap” food was not actually cheap. Countless unseen, uncalculated costs go into our supposedly inexpensive food system. But few would have guessed that a worldwide pandemic would make those costs so painfully, tragically clear.

Over the last several weeks, we have begun to reckon with the true nature of our food system—to recognize the processing and distributing bottlenecks that fill our system, as well as the human and animal rights atrocities which often hide behind those pleasant price tags at the supermarket. Most tragic of all are the deaths—of dozens of human food workers, and thousands of chickens and pigs thus far—which stem from a food system that has put efficiency and profit above all else.

In April, reports began to surface of widespread Covid-19 infections within meat processing factories. The meat industry is dominated by giant agribusinesses like JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and Smithfield, all of whom own meat processing facilities employing thousands of workers.

“The same features that allow a steady churn of cheap meat also provide the perfect breeding ground for airborne diseases like the coronavirus: a cramped workplace, a culture of underreporting illnesses, and a cadre of rural, immigrant and undocumented workers who share transportation and close living quarters,” USA Today reported. “As of May 20, officials have publicly linked at least 15,300 COVID-19 infections to 192 U.S. meatpacking plants, according to tracking by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. At least 63 workers have died.”

Many workers reported they were unable to procure masks or other protective gear. Others told their supervisors that they were feeling ill, but were not allowed to go home. Author Michael Pollan recently wrote for the New York Review of Books that “meatpackers have successfully lobbied regulators to increase line speeds, with the result that workers must stand shoulder to shoulder cutting and deboning animals so quickly that they can’t pause long enough to cover a cough, much less go to the bathroom, without carcasses passing them by. Some chicken plant workers, given no regular bathroom breaks, now wear diapers.”

This speed, of course, creates a voluminous supply of cheap meat. But the “incredibly streamlined and consolidated [meat] industry” tends to foster “dangerous work on a good day, with steadily increasing production speeds, injury rates twice the national average, and illness rates 15 times normal rates,” according to Eater reporter Caleb Pershan.

What’s more, as plants have had to close due to infection rates, that consolidation has come back to bite consumers—and the farmers who rely on these processors to get their product to market. As Pershan notes, “about 50 meat processing plants are responsible for as much as 98 percent of all U.S. meat slaughter and processing.” Production capacity for pork and beef are down 25 and 10 percent, respectively, while slaughter of pork and cattle are down 30 percent year-over-year. Closures at processing facilities are creating a “logjam effect,” which impacts our entire food system:

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the country was experiencing record pork and beef production. Now hog prices are spiraling downward, costing famers dearly. Many animals will be ‘depopulated,’ an industry euphemism for being killed without being processed and sent to market.

Commercial pigs like Sorenson’s are raised inside barns their whole lives, and grow about two and a half pounds a day. If they’re not sent off to slaughter, they get too large for their quarters — roughly 7.2 to 8.7 square feet per animal, according to an industry publication’s recommendation. Slaughterhouses won’t accept animals if they get too big, and they can even become too heavy for their own legs. There’s nothing to do but euthanize them. In Minnesota, 10,000 hogs are being euthanized per day, Department of Agriculture officials tell the Star Tribune.

In a recent episode of the Strong Towns podcast, host Chuck Marohn compared this crisis to one described in John Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath: starving workers sit outside vineyards where farmers are letting their grapes rot on the vine because it costs too much to get them to market. The seemingly simple solution—let those nearest, in need, eat the grapes—seems economically impossible to the farmers who could make it happen.

Here, too, an entire system of regulation and contracting, distribution and processing, creates an ironic, tragic impossibility: grocery store shelves sit empty of meat and eggs, while neighboring farmers euthanize the animals that might offer them to local consumers. As Marohn points out, we haven’t yet experienced a widespread crisis of hunger because of this—thanks, in large part, to the soup kitchens, food banks, and other local ministries that are getting food from farmers and restaurateurs and distributing it to those in need. But the problem’s impact on workers, animals, shoppers, and the land is still dire, and needs to be addressed.

Our treatment of food workers and farm animals did not become cruel just as this crisis began. For decades, farm hands and food processing workers have been severely underpaid and taken advantage of: as the Los Angeles Times reported in 2016, farm workers are some of “the least politically powerful employees in the nation.”

The Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers survey found that farmworkers earn an average annual income of $12,500 and $14,999. Yet despite unfair pay and instances of maltreatment and poor work conditions, many farmworkers avoid protest or push back. They fear losing their jobs, their homes, or being deported.

In her book One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search For the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture, Stephanie Anderson chronicles some of the horrific conditions field workers experience:

As researchers have noted, every day on the job is dangerous for fieldworkers: ‘The rate of death due to heat stress for farmworkers is twenty times greater than for the general population.’ … Fatality and injury rates for farmwork rank second in the nation, second only to coal mining. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that U.S. agricultural workers experience 10,000 to 20,000 acute pesticide-related illnesses each year, though they also admit that this is likely a significant underestimate.

These pesticide-related illnesses go beyond temporary sickness. Cancer, loss of toenails and fingernails, recurring rashes, breathing problems—these are just a few of the health issues field workers develop. Pregnant women, who must continue working or lose their jobs, experience miscarriages or give birth to children with physical deformities or developmental problems. Estabrook documents cases of pesticides being sprayed directly on pregnant workers in the field.

The meatpacking industry, Eric Schlosser recently wrote for The Atlantic, employs the same ruthlessness in the name of profit: “The priority more important than anything else at an American slaughterhouse,” he writes, is that “The chain will not stop.” This means that “Whenever possible, worker injuries aren’t allowed to slow the throughput. ‘I’ve seen bleeders, and they’re gushing because they got hit [by a knife] right in the vein, and I mean, they’re almost passing out,’” one former slaughterhouse worker told him, “‘and here comes the supply guy again, with the bleach, to clean the blood off the floor, but the chain never stops. It never stops.’”

At some point, these “accidents” cease being accidents, and turn into something different, Schlosser argues:

An accident is when you walk down the street, step on a banana peel, slip, and hurt your back. When thousands of meatpacking workers are suffering the same kind of amputations, lacerations, and cumulative-trauma injuries every year, those aren’t industrial accidents. They’re a business decision.

Our system is not just antithetical to the wellbeing of humans—although that is and should be the primary focus of our concern at present. One must also consider the way our system has evolved to treat animals over time: how we have progressed from the humanely sized, diverse farm of yesteryear to today’s “factory farms.”

“Under normal circumstances, the modern hog or chicken is a marvel of brutal efficiency, bred to produce protein at warp speed when given the right food and pharmaceuticals,” Michael Pollan writes for the New York Review of Books. “These innovations have made meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans … [But] there will always be a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience (not to mention ethics); the food industry opted for the former, and we are now paying the price.”

What if, Pollan asks, “there were still tens of thousands of chicken and pig farmers bringing their animals to hundreds of regional slaughterhouses”? An outbreak could still impact the system—but because the system was less concentrated, it would not debilitate the entire industry. “Meat would probably be more expensive, but the redundancy would render the system more resilient, making breakdowns in the national supply chain unlikely,” he suggests.

Amanda Claire Starbuck, a senior food researcher at Food and Water Watch, agrees: as she told the Los Angeles Times,

The highly consolidated, industrial food system is in fact less resilient than the regional, diversified systems it replaced. We need smaller, more diverse crop-and-livestock systems and regional food hubs.

Is it possible for us to decentralize the food system, to try and restore some of the diversity and resiliency we’ve destroyed? Politicians like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker are trying, via antitrust and anti-monopoly legislations, to fight against the idea (in the words of Schlosser) that ours is a government “of big corporations, by big corporations, for big corporations.” With a president and USDA head who strongly support big agribusiness, however, this has been (and likely will continue to be) an uphill battle.

But perhaps this is not a battle we can afford to give up. In Simone Weil’s The Need For Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, she describes the working conditions of an industrial factory employee, and suggests that these conditions attack the very dignity and humanity of those engaged in them:

From one day to the next, [the worker] finds himself an extra cog in a machine, rather less than a thing, and nobody cares any more whether he obeys from the lowest motives or not, provided he obeys. The majority of workmen have at any rate at this stage of their lives experienced the sensation of no longer existing, accompanied by a sort of inner vertigo, such as intellectuals or bourgeois, even in their greatest sufferings, have very rarely had the opportunity of knowing. … [T]he abolition of the proletarian lot … depends upon the creation of forms of industrial production and culture of the mind in which workmen can be, and be made to feel themselves to be, at home.

Weil here hits on a psychological, spiritual need that exists beyond the very basic demands which we should put upon our food industry. It should be obvious that workers should not be sprayed, lacerated, or killed in the name of cheapness or corporate profit. It should be obvious that they ought to be paid a fair wage, that their bodily needs such as hydration, proper shelter, and sick leave should be addressed. But beyond that, the work itself ought to encompass dignity and honor, creativity and pride. If we cannot offer that, then we are still treating our food workers poorly.

The same could be said of the animals we raise: in his book The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God’s Creation, farmer and author Joel Salatin argues that a food system should respect the dignity and beauty of the hog or chicken by offering them an atmosphere that fosters their happiness and wellbeing. A system that supports this honors God, and respects His creation. A system that does not, Salatin argues, is “pornographic”:

The whole idea of pornography, which of course the Christian community universally condemns, is instant and expedient gratification of a sacred act sanctified by marriage. Where is the Christian who dares to identify the pornographic food system that revels in death-inducing, sickness-encouraging, and creation-destroying orgies of self-indulgence? Strong language? Have you walked into a confinement factory chicken house lately? How about a confinement hog factory? Just like pornography disrespects and cheapens God-given and –sanctioned specialness in sex, factory-farmed hog houses disrespect and cheapen the God-sculpted specialness of pigs.

Many worry that obeying our moral obligations in the treatment of food workers, the cultivation of crops, or the raising of pigs would make food too expensive. One economist told the LA Times, “There’s a moral obligation to bring low-cost food to American consumers as not everyone can afford to buy grass-fed beef or antibiotic-free pork.”

But again, our food isn’t really cheap. We just pay the bill in other ways—say in a water supply that makes people sick, land that is severely eroded and depleted, or in a climate that is steadily deteriorating. We also pay for this food system when we go to the doctor’s office: as Pollan notes,

“Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. …Unfortunately, a diet dominated by such foods (as well as lots of meat and little in the way of vegetables or fruit—the so-called Western diet) predisposes us to obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension and type-2 diabetes.

These ‘underlying conditions’ happen to be among the strongest predictors that an individual infected with Covid-19 will end up in the hospital with a severe case of the disease; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that 49 percent of the people hospitalized for Covid-19 had preexisting hypertension, 48 percent were obese, and 28 percent had diabetes. Why these particular conditions should worsen Covid-19 infections might be explained by the fact that all three are symptoms of chronic inflammation, which is a disorder of the body’s immune system.”

Undoubtedly, a system with more expensive food would require us to spend money in different ways. It would also require us to eat less meat, and to cultivate a food system in which the cereals we grow are nutritious and wholesome (a more diverse array of organic grains and legumes, for example, could help supply a cheaper meal base for Americans without sacrificing health).

But up until this point, we have not been willing to consider such sacrifices or changes—reform is hard and expensive, after all. It also requires us to oppose the powers that be: the aforementioned corporations who currently dominate our industry, and woo us with their promises of ease and cheapness.

But we must begin protecting the men and women who feed us, the land and water we rely on, and the animals whose bounty provide us with sustenance. This is not optional, for those of us who see ourselves as Christians, and thus as stewards of God’s creation. It is, in fact, a mandate: to love, to cherish, to protect, and to uphold.

As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his papal message for the World Day of Peace in 2010, “Our present crises – be they economic, food-related, environmental or social – are ultimately also moral crises, and all of them are interrelated. …We can no longer do without a real change of outlook which will result in new life-styles, ‘in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments’.”

We should not subsist on the suffering of others. The voices of those who suggest that we do not have to are often quieted or ignored. But even now, we can cultivate a food system that is different: one that is dignity-filled in its rhythms and methods of stewardship.

As Salatin puts it, “Perhaps nothing defines the hand of God more eloquently than when it makes something beautiful out of something ugly.” May we be part of this transforming work.

 

[zelezo vlk]

Thanks for that article, Whiskey. It reminded me of this talk by Alasdair MacIntyre that Pater Edmund shared recently.

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