Radio Paradise

Recently Active Forum Topics:

Page: 1, 2 Next

rhahl

Posted: Feb 10, 2021 - 6:34am
optimist: According to an old Soviet joke, a pessimist thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, while an optimist thinks they can.

rhahl

Posted: Feb 6, 2021 - 7:36am

double-talk:

Equating zero wages for no work with a minimum wage for some work is double-talk.

“Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force. Making it illegal to pay less than a given amount does not make a worker’s productivity worth that amount—and, if it is not, that worker is unlikely to be employed.”

— Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

That is, if everyone got a living wage for work there would be many more jobs to go around, since those earners could pay for goods and services employing others. See the definition of money below.

rhahl

Posted: Feb 4, 2021 - 2:08pm

rhahl wrote:

Preemptive counter-revolution:

What is the “fascist” program that does something the ruling class needs, and isn’t doing for itself already?

Because if the ruling class doesn’t want it, fascism isn’t happening. Only if they become scared enough of a left working-class movement that threatens their control of society will the capitalists turn to the fascists. Until then, “fascism” exists as a frightful lure to get the liberals and the self-mutilated left to go along with various forms of repression that will mostly be used against them. This is the state of preemptive counter-revolution—the state in which the left eats itself in advance, ‘Cause Fascism!

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/the-american-farce-unravels-shreds-of-january-6th/

if you had to sum up the playbook of the successful counterrevolution against social democracy, it would be “make sure the government always breaks their hearts.”

— Steve Randy Waldman@interfluidity

rhahl

Posted: Feb 2, 2021 - 10:52am
Money: Money is created by spending, and before any of it is retrieved (actually, cancelled out) through taxation. It’s not tax-and-spend, but spend-then-tax. And it’s an entirely political process. If you doubt this definition at all, explain why a lunch-counter hamburger cost 10 cents in 1962.

rhahl

Posted: Feb 1, 2021 - 8:21am

Preemptive counter-revolution:

What is the “fascist” program that does something the ruling class needs, and isn’t doing for itself already?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/the-american-farce-unravels-shreds-of-january-6th/

rhahl

Posted: Jan 27, 2021 - 7:51am

Post-Journalism:

After two years of media frenzy came an awkward moment. The New York Times had reorganized its newsroom to pursue this single story—yet, just as it had missed Trump’s coming, the paper failed to see that Trump would stay.

Yet what looked like journalistic failure was, in fact, an astonishing post-journalistic success. The intent of post-journalism was never to represent reality or inform the public but to arouse enough political fervor in readers that they wished to enter the paywall in support of the cause. This was ideology by the numbers—and the numbers were striking. Digital subscriptions to the New York Times, which had been stagnant, nearly doubled in the first year of Trump’s presidency. By August 2020, the paper had 6 million digital subscribers—six times the number on Election Day 2016 and the most in the world for any newspaper. The Russian collusion story, though refuted objectively, had been validated subjectively, by the growth in the congregation of the paying faithful.

https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting?s=09

rhahl

Posted: Jan 25, 2021 - 9:55am
Frenemy: The enemy of my enemy is my frenemy.

rhahl

Posted: Jan 24, 2021 - 6:35am
Trump's MAGA Party: See, George Wallace, Huey Long, Eugene Debs.

rhahl

Posted: Jan 20, 2021 - 7:39am
Hypocrite: Hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue. This could be the best definition of any word in human use.

rhahl

Posted: Jan 19, 2021 - 3:22am

hard right turn:

According to Stephenson, the steady elimination of good jobs had combined with concerns about immigration and the Affordable Care Act to drive many people she knew in the area to take a hard right turn.

“When I left, they were into golf clubs and fishing poles,” she said. “When I got back, it was automatic weapons.”

https://asiatimes.com/2021/01/the-radicalization-of-a-dead-capitol-hill-rioter/

rhahl

Posted: Jan 16, 2021 - 5:31am

inverted totalitarianism:

[Chris Hedges uses this phrase all the time but never adequately explains what it means, at least to me.]

While what Wolin called the “classical totalitarian regimes” of fascist German and Soviet Russia aimed at the constant political mobilization of the populace, "inverted" totalitarianism aims for the mass of the populace to be in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the populace has given up hope that the government will ever significantly help them.

— Paul Street

rhahl

Posted: Jan 15, 2021 - 10:22am

coup d'etat:

1) If what happened on January 6 was an actual coup, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg would have been detained, and CNN and MSNBC shut down. If it was an insurrection, the Capitol would have been burned to the ground, and its occupants disposed of. It was a protest, nothing more. The fact that Trump may have used this protest to promote sedition is a separate matter. But disrupting the counting of Electoral College votes, while illegal, is not a coup. Words matter.

https://twitter.com/RealScottRitter/status/1347918212030222339

2) That was certainly not a “coup”. Top military strategist Edward Luttwak, now advising the Pentagon on cyber-war, tweeted, “nobody pulls a coup during the day”. That was just “a show, people expressing emotions”, an actually faux coup that did not involve arson or widespread looting, and relatively little violence (compare it to Maidan 2014): talk about “insurrectionists” walking inside the Capitol respecting the velvet ropes.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/01/13/9-11-was-prelude-1-6-holy-grail/

rhahl

Posted: Jan 14, 2021 - 5:49am

Trumpism:

1) The subtext of the Trumpian counterrevolution has been, in fact, restoring the American dream, the bright prospects of social ascent, to its rightful owners — that is, to white Americans, and to them only. - Walden Bello

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/14/america-has-entered-the-weimar-era/

2) Politically, the Deplorables only have Trumpism. And that’s why Trumpism, with a possible avenue to become an established third party, must be smashed. As much as the 0.0001% is more terrified by the possibility of secession or armed revolt, they need urgent pre-emptive action against what is, for now, a nationalist mass movement, however inchoate its political proposals. - Pepe Escobar

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/01/13/9-11-was-prelude-1-6-holy-grail/

rhahl

Posted: Jan 13, 2021 - 5:40am

The F word:

“Whether the other races live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture.”

SS leader Heinrich Himmler, 1943

"Whatever supposed fascist traits one finds in Putin or Trump—or in “snowflake” campus agitators and “nanny state” progressives—one does not find such barbarity. Avoiding careless use of the F-word does not normalize the far-right; what it resists is the normalization of thoughtless and demonizing political discourse.

"Today is not the 1930s. We do not face a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression or a legacy of aroused passions, thwarted hopes, and unprecedented violence to rival the aftermath of the Great War [Or, I would add, the trauma of WW I itself.] And while liberal democracy is an anomaly in human history and should not be taken for granted, liberal-democratic norms still enjoy wider legitimacy than they did a century ago.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/02/donald-trump-fascist-nazi-right-wing/

miamizsun

miamizsun Avatar

Location: (3261.3 Miles SE of RP)
Gender: Male

Posted: Jan 12, 2021 - 5:42am
NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: .. and here's me thinking they were just a fashion item.

NoEnzLefttoSplit

NoEnzLefttoSplit Avatar

Gender:

Posted: Jan 12, 2021 - 4:59am
miamizsun wrote: you're that warm can of beans in my heart .. and here's me thinking they were just a fashion item.

miamizsun

miamizsun Avatar

Location: (3261.3 Miles SE of RP)
Gender: Male

Posted: Jan 12, 2021 - 4:48am
oldviolin wrote: miamizsun wrote: attention ho? if we only had an example... If you insist on saying mean things about me I'm not going to let you be my friend anymore... you're that warm can of beans in my heart

rhahl

Posted: Jan 12, 2021 - 3:15am
Weimar Republic: Hey Joe, Weimar called. They want 5,000 tickets to the Inaugural Ball.

oldviolin

oldviolin Avatar

Location: esse quam videri
Gender: Male

Posted: Jan 11, 2021 - 11:30am
miamizsun wrote: attention ho? if we only had an example... If you insist on saying mean things about me I'm not going to let you be my friend anymore...

miamizsun

miamizsun Avatar

Location: (3261.3 Miles SE of RP)
Gender: Male

Posted: Jan 11, 2021 - 9:39am

Proclivities wrote:

rhahl wrote:

Narcissism:

"The narcissist divides society into two groups: the rich, great, and famous on the one hand, and the common herd on the other … The narcissist admires and identifies himself with ‘winners’ out of his fear of being labeled a loser. … his admiration often turns to hatred if the object of his attachment does something to remind him of his own insignificance.”
— historian Christopher Lasch, 1979

New to me. I thought narcissism was a matter of pure self-regard.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2...

Mr. Lasch apparently tailored his own translation for the word, but he's a historian, not a grammarian or a psychiatrist. Dividing society into to groups is not narcissism, it's binary thinking. Last time I checked "narcissism" still is a matter of self-regard, self-importance, excessive need for attention and admiration, lack of empathy for others, etc. Clinical narcissists do not tend to identify themselves with "outside" groups, since they believe that pretty much everyone else is "the common herd".

attention ho?

if we only had an example...

Page: 1, 2 Next