[mikema63]

@mikema63

I'm going to have to disagree with you, Hillmike. Identity politics fuels all that intersectional stuff about creating distinctions between people and consciously creating divisions. The working class focus of Marxism includes, by proxy, rights for women and other at-risk or oppressed groups. In China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and even famously the Soviet-backed Afghan government made impressive strides for women's rights that outshined the capitalist world. Socialism has no rationale for oppressing women and LBGT individuals.

In contrast, it is fundamentally impossible for liberalism to ever resolve issues of equality, poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, etc because inequality and an impoverished yet powerless workforce is the basis of capitalism.

Sivad seems to be a social Democrat not a Marxist.

Regardless, Socialism can be good or bad for, as an example, gay people. Stalin took over the USSR which Lenin had led to accept gay people and rolled that back.

There is no fundamental garuntee that a socialist country will provide civil rights to everyone. Claiming that there is no rational for socialism to do this misses that people don't need rational reasons to do things. It also misses that abusive power structures also exist in Marxist societies so things like sexual abuse aren't solved.

There were also a variety of racially motivated policies in the USSR like operation ulussy where they forcefully deported the kalmyk people. In 1937 the Soviets decided to systematically eliminate the Polish minority.

Bringing up a few positive examples doesn't prove that socialist societies will always spontaneously provide social justice.

Pointing out that capitalism can't produce a perfect society also doesn't invalidate my position. It cant be perfect but it can be better and ignoring the very real divisions in our society between various minorities and the white working class to focus on working class issues will not make those divisions go away.

Indeed ignoring the strongly held beliefs, history, and structures in a country that reinforce those divisions won't go away after a communist revolution unless they are specifically and delebritly addressed.

And besides, we don't have a Marxist revolution on the horizon. We have capitalism with an at best future of some sort of social Democratic reform. (Which I might add, I'm not against economic reforms. I support a lot of policies that would help all working class people). I not only have every right to address the problems in front of me but I have the responsibility to speak out about them when people try to shut down and invalidate those experiences, problems, and policy fixes so they can win some imaginary war with me about how I'm out to destroy the working class by wanting to get married and have protections from being denied services or a job because of my sexuality.

I'm not out to prevent working class policies by supporting BLM. Nor am I some lying social climber trying to profit off my sexuality as sivad alleged.

[Sivad]

Sivad seems to be a social Democrat not a Marxist.

I'm not a social democrat, but I do think social democracy is a step in the right direction.

[foxdemon]

Which has nothing to do with desire. You brought that into it, and that's way more creepy than Hillary refusing to "shut up."

You were the one who described Hillary’s detractors as ‘stalkers’. You are thus implying they harbour some desire for her. Which they don’t. That is a rich girl’s fantasy of being at the centre of men’s attention.

OK, so then you display an apparent obsession with hairy alt-right misogynists. This must also be part of your fantasy.

1+1=2


Look lady, I got some bad news for you. Most of those alt-right misogynists are gay. Mikema has got a much better chance of getting them into the sack than you do. You should give up in them.

[Sivad]

I'm not out to prevent working class policies by supporting BLM. Nor am I some lying social climber trying to profit off my sexuality as sivad alleged.

You've repeatedly demonstrated bad faith as an interlocutor and you're extremely dishonest in your politics which does naturally raise questions about your integrity so it's understandable if people come to suspect your motives in general.

[anna]

You were the one who described Hillary’s detractors as ‘stalkers’. You are thus implying they harbour some desire for her.

No I'm not. That's your read of it, which is telling.

The dictionary definition:

noun
1.
the act or an instance of stalking, or harassing another in an aggressive, often threatening and illegal manner:
adjective
2.
of or relating to the act of pursuing or harassing:


So you might want to work on reigning in your fevered imagination.

Which they don’t. That is a rich girl’s fantasy of being at the centre of men’s attention.

OK, so then you display an apparent obsession with hairy alt-right misogynists. This must also be part of your fantasy.

1+1=2


Look lady, I got some bad news for you. Most of those alt-right misogynists are gay. Mikema has got a much better chance of getting them into the sack than you do. You should give up in them.

What asinine drivel. None of the alt-right misogynists I know and/or have read are gay. None of them. They're either red pill MGTOW gamers who've never been in a long term relationship or they're evangelical Christians who looked the other way so they could pretend they didn't know what Trump was. Because God sent him to MAGA, yes he did!!

[skinster]

CLINTON, ASSANGE AND THE WAR ON TRUTH
On 16 October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation aired an interview with Hillary Clinton: one of many to promote her score-settling book about why she was not elected President of the United States.

Wading through the Clinton book, What Happened, is an unpleasant experience, like a stomach upset. Smears and tears. Threats and enemies. "They" (voters) were brainwashed and herded against her by the odious Donald Trump in cahoots with sinister Slavs sent from the great darkness known as Russia, assisted by an Australian "nihilist", Julian Assange.

In The New York Times, there was a striking photograph of a female reporter consoling Clinton, having just interviewed her. The lost leader was, above all, "absolutely a feminist". The thousands of women's lives this "feminist" destroyed while in government - Libya, Syria, Honduras - were of no interest.

In New York magazine, Rebecca Trainster wrote that Clinton was finally "expressing some righteous anger". It was even hard for her to smile: "so hard that the muscles in her face ache". Surely, she concluded, "if we allowed women's resentments the same bearing we allow men's grudges, America would be forced to reckon with the fact that all these angry women might just have a point".

Drivel such as this, trivialising women's struggles, marks the media hagiographies of Hillary Clinton. Her political extremism and warmongering are of no consequence. Her problem, wrote Trainster, was a "damaging infatuation with the email story". The truth, in other words.

The leaked emails of Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, revealed a direct connection between Clinton and the foundation and funding of organised jihadism in the Middle East and Islamic State (IS). The ultimate source of most Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia, was central to her career.

One email, in 2014, sent by Clinton to Podesta soon after she stepped down as US Secretary of State, discloses that Islamic State is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Clinton accepted huge donations from both governments for the Clinton Foundation.

As Secretary of State, she approved the world's biggest ever arms sale to her benefactors in Saudi Arabia, worth more than $80 billion. Thanks to her, US arms sales to the world - for use in stricken countries like Yemen - doubled.

This was revealed by WikiLeaks and published by The New York Times. No one doubts the emails are authentic. The subsequent campaign to smear WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, as "agents of Russia", has grown into a spectacular fantasy known as "Russiagate". The "plot" is said to have been signed off by Vladimir Putin himself. There is not a shred of evidence.

The ABC Australia interview with Clinton is an outstanding example of smear and censorship by omission. I would say it is a model.

"No one," the interviewer, Sarah Ferguson, says to Clinton, "could fail to be moved by the pain on your face at that moment [of the inauguration of Trump] ... Do you remember how visceral it was for you?"

Having established Clinton's visceral suffering, Ferguson asks about "Russia's role".

CLINTON: I think Russia affected the perceptions and views of millions of voters, we now know. I think that their intention coming from the very top with Putin was to hurt me and to help Trump.

FERGUSON: How much of that was a personal vendetta by Vladimir Putin against you?

CLINTON: ... I mean he wants to destabilise democracy. He wants to undermine America, he wants to go after the Atlantic Alliance and we consider Australia kind of a ... an extension of that ...

The opposite is true. It is Western armies that are massing on Russia's border for the first time since the Russian Revolution 100 years ago.

FERGUSON: How much damage did [Julian Assange] do personally to you?

CLINTON: Well, I had a lot of history with him because I was Secretary of State when ah WikiLeaks published a lot of very sensitive ah information from our State Department and our Defence Department.

What Clinton fails to say - and her interviewer fails to remind her - is that in 2010, WikiLeaks revealed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had ordered a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the United Nations leadership, including the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent Security Council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.

A classified directive, signed by Clinton, was issued to US diplomats in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks.

This was known as Cablegate. It was lawless spying.

CLINTON: He [Assange] is very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence. And ah, he has done their bidding.

Clinton offered no evidence to back up this serious accusation, nor did Ferguson challenge her.

CLINTON: You don't see damaging negative information coming out about the Kremlin on WikiLeaks. You didn't see any of that published.

This was false. WikiLeaks has published a massive number of documents on Russia - more than 800,000, most of them critical, many of them used in books and as evidence in court cases.

CLINTON: So I think Assange has become a kind of nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator.

FERGUSON: Lots of people, including in Australia, think that Assange is a martyr for free speech and freedom of information. How would you describe him? Well, you've just described him as a nihilist.

CLINTON: Yeah, well, and a tool. I mean he's a tool of Russian intelligence. And if he's such a, you know, martyr of free speech, why doesn't WikiLeaks ever publish anything coming out of Russia?

Again, Ferguson said nothing to challenge this or correct her.

CLINTON: There was a concerted operation between WikiLeaks and Russia and most likely people in the United States to weaponise that information, to make up stories ... to help Trump.

FERGUSON: Now, along with some of those outlandish stories, there was information that was revealed about the Clinton Foundation that at least in some of the voters' minds seemed to associate you ...

CLINTON: Yeah, but it was false!

FERGUSON: ... with the peddling of information ...

CLINTON: It was false! It was totally false! ...

FERGUSON: Do you understand how difficult it was for some voters to understand the amounts of money that the [Clinton] Foundation is raising, the confusion with the consultancy that was also raising money, getting gifts and travel and so on for Bill Clinton that even Chelsea had some issues with? ...

CLINTON: Well you know, I'm sorry, Sarah, I mean I, I know the facts ...

The ABC interviewer lauded Clinton as "the icon of your generation". She asked her nothing about the enormous sums she creamed off from Wall Street, such as the $675,000 she received for speeches at Goldman Sachs, one of the banks at the centre of the 2008 crash. Clinton's greed deeply upset the kind of voters she abused as "deplorables".

Clearly looking for a cheap headline in the Australian press, Ferguson asked her if Trump was "a clear and present danger to Australia" and got her predictable response.

This high-profile journalist made no mention of Clinton's own "clear and present danger" to the people of Iran whom she once threatened to "obliterate totally", and the 40,000 Libyans who died in the attack on Libya in 2011 that Clinton orchestrated. Flushed with excitement, the Secretary of State rejoiced at the gruesome murder of the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi.

"Libya was Hillary Clinton's war", Julian Assange said in a filmed interview with me last year. "Barack Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it? Hillary Clinton. That's documented throughout her emails ... there's more than 1700 emails out of the 33,000 Hillary Clinton emails that we've published, just about Libya. It's not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state - something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.

"So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it's the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

"Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself was no longer able to control the movement of people through it."

This - not Clinton's "visceral" pain in losing to Trump nor the rest of the self-serving scuttlebutt in her ABC interview - was the story. Clinton shared responsibility for massively de-stabilising the Middle East, which led to the death, suffering and flight of thousands of women, men and children.

Ferguson raised not a word of it. Clinton repeatedly defamed Assange, who was neither defended nor offered a right of reply on his own country's state broadcaster.

In a tweet from London, Assange cited the ABC's own Code of Practice, which states: "Where allegations are made about a person or organisation, make reasonable efforts in the circumstances to provide a fair opportunity to respond."

Following the ABC broadcast, Ferguson's executive producer, Sally Neighbour, re-tweeted the following: "Assange is Putin's bitch. We all know it!"

The slander, since deleted, was even used as a link to the ABC interview captioned 'Assange is Putins (sic) b****. We all know it!'.

In the years I have known Julian Assange, I have watched a vituperative personal campaign try to stop him and WikiLeaks. It has been a frontal assault on whistleblowing, on free speech and free journalism, all of which are now under sustained attack from governments and corporate internet controllers.

The first serious attacks on Assange came from the Guardian which, like a spurned lover, turned on its besieged former source, having hugely profited from WikiLeaks' disclosures. With not a penny going to Assange or WikiLeaks, a Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. Assange was portrayed as "callous" and a "damaged personality".

It was as if a rampant jealousy could not accept that his remarkable achievements stood in marked contrast to that of his detractors in the "mainstream" media. It is like watching the guardians of the status quo, regardless of age, struggling to silence real dissent and prevent the emergence of the new and hopeful.

Today, Assange remains a political refugee from the war-making dark state of which Donald Trump is a caricature and Hillary Clinton the embodiment. His resilience and courage are astonishing. Unlike him, his tormentors are cowards.
http://johnpilger.com/articles/clinton- ... r-on-truth

Clinton is just a splendid case study in the delusional self righteousness of liberals. ...Liberals are deplorable, their politics are depraved, and their administrators are human filth.

[foxdemon]

What asinine drivel. None of the alt-right misogynists I know and/or have read are gay. None of them. They're either red pill MGTOW gamers who've never been in a long term relationship or they're evangelical Christians who looked the other way so they could pretend they didn't know what Trump was. Because God sent him to MAGA, yes he did!!

The alt-right misogynists that YOU know are hetro? And how do you know that? Wait...actually I’d rather not know.


OK, putting aside the fact that Democrats are sex obsessed and that too many Democrats (eg: Bill and Harvey) find it challenging to keep their hands of other people’s private parts, let’s move on to another topic.

So why do Democrat feminists have an issue with Bernie?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/womens-convention-bernie-sanders

The Women's Convention is worse off without Bernie Sanders
Jamie Peck
Jamie Peck
By inviting Bernie Sanders, the Women’s Convention was strengthening its project and appeal. It’s a shame he is no longer going to attend the event
bernie sanders
‘The petition also accuses Sanders and the convention’s organizers of ‘stoking factional divisions among natural allies.’ Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
View more sharing options
Shares
1,574
Comments
227
Contact author
Saturday 21 October 2017 03.39 AEDT Last modified on Saturday 21 October 2017 03.55 AEDT

Since Bernie Sanders was first announced as an opening-night speaker at the upcoming Women’s Convention in Detroit, a small but vocal group of people started expressing their outrage. Fueled by misleading headlines like “Bernie Sanders Headlining An Event Called The Women’s Convention Is Peak 2017”, citizens and professional pundits maintained it was bad to let Sanders, a man, speak at a convention devoted to the political advancement of women’s rights.

There was even a Change.org petition, which was successful at getting Sanders moved to a panel. It may or may not shock you to learn that despite my intense commitment to feminism, I do not share their anger. In fact, I’m a little annoyed the organizers caved. (After all this, Sanders announced on Thursday that he would be skipping the event altogether in order to visit Puerto Rico.)

Sanders was meant to be one of 60+ speakers, all of whom but two are women. (As far as I know, there are zero transgender or gender non-binary speakers booked, but no one seems to care about that.) Sanders was never the “headliner;” Congresswoman Maxine Waters, whose phrase “reclaiming my time” was adopted as the convention’s tagline, was and remains so.

I agree that women’s movements must be spearheaded by women and gender non-conforming folk, but men have a role to play, too, and two out of 60 seems like a safe ratio.

Advertisement

While not everyone criticizing the organizers’ decision is motivated by 2016 resentment, the Change.org petition contains a good amount of it. Among other things, it accuses Sanders of “contribut[ing] to a decades-long campaign of deception about the record of Hillary Clinton,” hardly an objective or verifiable claim, and “attack[ing] the Democratic party,” as if that’s synonymous with being anti-woman.

Sanders’ efforts to help elect Democrats (including Clinton) aside, pretending the Democratic party is inherently aligned with women’s interests and thus above critique is a dangerous false equivalency that’s been used to silence left-critics for decades.

The petition also accuses Sanders and the convention’s organizers of “stoking factional divisions among natural allies … especially women and minorities,” which seems to refer to disagreements between self-described feminists on the question of Clinton v Sanders, which is often a proxy for the more relevant battle of neoliberalism versus social democracy.

But while there’s less disagreement among progressives than some people want you to think — a 2017 Economist/YouGov poll found 80% of people who voted for Clinton for president favor expanding Medicare to cover all Americans — these are important debates to be having.

To suggest that they’re in any way Sanders’ doing, and that women and minorities cannot handle having them, is fairly infantilizing. They still don’t understand that for Sanders’ feminist supporters, it’s never been about him specifically, but the ideas for which he advocates.

Perhaps the most valid argument against Sanders’ inclusion in the event is his handling of the Heath Mello debacle, for which I myself have criticized him. While the Omaha mayoral candidate promised he posed no present or future danger to reproductive rights, Sanders muddied the waters with a statement that could fairly be interpreted as saying Democrats should compromise on choice if it helps them win elections.

Advertisement

But prominent Democrats – including Nancy Pelosi, Tim Kaine, and Hillary Clinton – have made innumerable unambiguous statements of this nature. That doesn’t make it OK, but it does call critics’ sincerity into question.

If we are to judge people on policy, not gaffes, Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan would do more for reproductive rights in America than anything since Roe v Wade with comprehensive coverage of abortion care.

And true reproductive freedom includes the freedom to have and adequately care for children, a choice that would be empowered by the kind of broad, redistributive programs for which Sanders is an effective messenger.

Beyond abortion rights, he’s shown a lifelong dedication to many issues that affect women and gender non-binary people disproportionately to men, including healthcare, education, housing, and workers’ rights.

By inviting the most famous face of class politics to be one of many speakers at their conference, the Women’s Convention was strengthening its project by looking at all of the ways women are oppressed – including economically.

If you really care about women, it might be smart to stop bickering over who gets the best slot and get to work on some of these crucial issues.

Since you’re here …
… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective, too.

I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m happy to make a contribution so others with less means still have access to information.
Thomasine F-R.
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to support it, our future would be much more secure.

[colliric]

What's it to you, really? She's a private citizen now.

You don't have to watch her. Exercise your right to change the channel.

I'm a taxpayer.... ABC is taxpayer funded.....

Technically paying for this shit...

[anna]

I'm a taxpayer.... ABC is taxpayer funded.....

Technically paying for this shit...

Awesome!!

[anna]

let’s move on to another topic.

Does this mean your manic episode has subsided, at least for the short term?

So why do Democrat feminists have an issue with Bernie?

I'm not a Dem, but from I've read, it's partly the idea of a man (even if the man is Bernie) speaking at a women's political convention, and partly the lingering resentment regarding Bernieites who chose not to vote for Hillary in the general after Bernie's loss in the primary. Their non-votes quite possibly gave us the orange weebil so the resentment seems understandable, although just as understandable is the Bernieites' contention that Bernie was being actively undermined by his temporarily adoptive party.

[Finfinder]

No I'm not. That's your read of it, which is telling.

The dictionary definition:

noun
1.
the act or an instance of stalking, or harassing another in an aggressive, often threatening and illegal manner:
adjective
2.
of or relating to the act of pursuing or harassing:


So you might want to work on reigning in your fevered imagination.



What asinine drivel. None of the alt-right misogynists I know and/or have read are gay. None of them. They're either red pill MGTOW gamers who've never been in a long term relationship or they're evangelical Christians who looked the other way so they could pretend they didn't know what Trump was. Because God sent him to MAGA, yes he did!!

who did you vote for

[anna]

who did you vote for

Primary: Bernie
General: Hillary

[Finfinder]

Primary: Bernie
General: Hillary

I wonder how much Hillary had to do with rigging the primaries against Bernie.

[Rich]

First off we still don't know for definite that Hilary won't be a candidate in 2020. But secondly and more importantly the Democratic party is yet to abhor her disgusting policies:

Pro Sunni Muslim terrorist, pro Al Qaeda, anti Russian, anti Assad.
Pro Saudi, while obsessing about the lesser evil Iran.
Support and collaboration for Black Lies Matter, anti Police hate
Support for mass Muslim immigration.
Support for Sharia Law.
Anti free speech
Anti 2nd Amendment

Trump is not wonderful but he's way better than Clinton and her many similarly minded friends in the Democratic Party.

[anna]

I wonder how much Hillary had to do with rigging the primaries against Bernie.

I don't think she did. For example, she did massively better than him in the South, in major part because of her longtime support among black voters. Maybe it's comforting (and perhaps convenient) to blame Bernie's loss on Hillary, but a good look at the numbers (76% to 22% in SC, for example) says there's more to it than that.

[anna]

First off we still don't know for definite that Hilary won't be a candidate in 2020.

Yes we do. She's already stated that she's done with being a candidate, although she plans to stay active in politics.

Trump is not wonderful but he's way better than Clinton and her many similarly minded friends in the Democratic Party.

"Trump is not wonderful" is the understatement of the century, but it's that kind of blindered thinking that allowed people to vote for such an embarrassment.

[Ter]

She's already stated that she's done with being a candidate, although she plans to stay active in politics.

I suspect that she will push her daughter into politics.
Chelsea regularly posts her opinions about current affairs although according to me her opinion doesn't count for anything. A spoiled brat.

[Finfinder]

I don't think she did. For example, she did massively better than him in the South, in major part because of her longtime support among black voters. Maybe it's comforting (and perhaps convenient) to blame Bernie's loss on Hillary, but a good look at the numbers (76% to 22% in SC, for example) says there's more to it than that.

its not like the DNC colluded against Bernie

I hope the Dems run her again, a 2 time loser, think of all that wasted money. All this protectionism by her rabid hypocritical fan base, is doing so much damage to the left, it's perfect. I do think Pocahontas Warren has the potential to be as vile and disgusting as the Beast though.

[Sivad]

Primary: Bernie
General: Hillary

Same. The Bernie phenomenon was a reaction to 8 years of the neoliberal Obama administration so I figured after 8 years of Clinton progressives would have the numbers and the outrage to take over the country. Hillary wasn't the lesser evil, she was the perfect evil. Too bad she didn't win.

[Rancid]

The instant I saw "Infowars" I stopped watching.