I can guess what some dummies out there are now thinking: "So, Cannon thinks Epstein was innocent?" No. Read the previous paragraph again.
I often run into this sort of illogic -- and frankly, I'm losing faith in humanity's capacity for reason.
Example: A couple of years ago, a right-wing gossip site spread an absurd rumor that Roman Polanski was present when his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered. I made a short video (part of an abandoned series) to prove something that should have required no discussion: Polanksi was on another continent at that time.
The response? Here's a sample comment:
Only a real scumbag would want to defend the rights of anybody who would prey on a child. Who are you???I'm sure that Samantha Geimer herself, who seems to be a perfectly reasonable person, would wince at this nonsense. Obviously, my video was about the Tate murder, not about the later crime.
I expect my piece about Epstein to result in a similar outburst of insanity, no matter how carefully I document everything.
Melania Tell-All. This news heartens me. Many dismiss Melania as just another beauty who married for money, but I feel that something more is going on. I may be wrong, but I suspect that she has at least one important secret. Her former confidante Stephanie Winston Wolkoff may finally unveil the mystery.
Wolkoff herself is a bit of a Mystery Woman. She was a key figure within Trump's scandalous inaugural committee -- and of course, she signed an NDA. Are we finally going to learn to truth about where the inaugural money went? If she breaks her NDA, what kind of legal danger will she be in?
I was always under the impression that one cannot be held to a contract to do something illegal. To cite the most obvious example, a hit man cannot be sued for failing to kill someone. If Wolkoff was privy to illegal activity while working for the inauguration, does the NDA still hold?
Liberals are fighting on Trump's chosen turf. Have you noticed? This is supposed to be election season, yet nobody is talking about the impeachment. Nobody is talking about Trump's vomit-inducing evils along the border. Nobody is talking about the danger to the Surpeme Court. Nobody is talking about Trump's incessant lies. Nobody is talking about his history of criminality. Nobody is talking about his "unindicted co-conspirator" status in the Cohen case. Nobody is talking about the Trump family's foreign graft. Nobody is talking about the betrayal of the Kurds.
Few are talking about Russia. Few are talking about treason. Few are talking about Trump's rape of the Justice system. Few are talking about the mishandling of the economy, which may soon get much worse.
Instead, everyone is talking about the following:
1. RACE RACE RACE.
2. Statuary.
3. Slavery.
4. The inherent evil of the entire American experiment.
Those four debating points place us squarely within Trump's chosen terrain. Instead of discussing Trump's many (many many many) failings, the left has focused on the very things that Trump wants us to talk about.
Reached for comment on Sunday, the Trump campaign’s communications director, Tim Murtaugh, said—in a statement knocking Biden for not being as passionate as Trump is about statue vandalism—that “there is a loud, visible, and sometimes violent faction on the extreme left that seeks to delegitimize America’s very existence.”The lefties fell into the Trumpist trap. Honestly, I would not be surprised to learn that some of these "lefties" are in Putin's pay. Race is Trump's chosen turf. As long as the focus stays there, Trump wins.
“President Trump has made clear he will not stand for that,” Murtaugh said. “By contrast, the first instinct of Joe Biden and his party is to agree with the agitators that there is something fundamentally wrong with America and that there always has been.”
Here's the latest example of Talking Point #4 -- the American experiment was evil from the start. NYT writer to believe that Thomas Jefferson never did anything for the cause of freedom.
Thomas freakin' Jefferson.
Good lord. I don't know what to say.
As noted above, we live in a world in which one must prove that Roman Polanksi is innocent of his wife's murder. And now we're being asked to prove that the author of the Declaration of Independence furthered Enlightenment values.
No. I refuse to offer said "proof" -- for the same reason I refuse to prove that the Earth is round. If you are emotionally wedded to the belief that the Earth is flat, no words of mine can change your mind.
Instead, let me ask you one question, Mr.
But I doubt that you will ever address that issue, Mr. Truscott, because the vast majority of modern slave-owners are not white people of European descent. Any attempt to help living victims of slavery would do nothing to buttress your ever-so-chic attempts to guilt-trip white Americans.
Nowadays, every time someone mentions the name "Thomas Jefferson," the knee-jerk response is "Sally Hemmings." I doubt that our utterly nescient present generation can name one other thing that Jefferson did or said; hell, they probably can't even name the century in which he lived. But they do know that he fucked a slave. That's all they know. Worst of all, these young dimwits honestly believe that this is all they need to know.
If Truscott is not being paid directly by the Trump campaign, they ought to cut him a check. He deserves it.
The "Marxist" delusion. I'd like to republish a marvelous comment by a reader:
The new trend among America's "woke" liberals is to denigrate the American Revolution. Oddly enough, actual socialists regard the American Revolution as a great event worth celebrating. Compare the articles you'll find at the World Socialist Web Site, a thoughtful website run by real socialists (the kind who read books), with the drivel shoveled out by Jacobin, a hipster Stalinist magazine that regularly runs vile denunciations of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, the Founding Fathers, and anyone else whose name isn't "Bernie Sanders." Karl Marx regarded the Civil War as a noble war against slavery and Abraham Lincoln as a great hero of the working class. It's only the empty-headed "woke" types who dismiss Lincoln as a racist and insist (ludicrously) that the Union Army had nothing to do with the abolition of slavery.Just so! Most people don't know that Marx was a widely-read columnist for the New York Tribune. When Lincoln won re-election, Marx wrote the president a letter which begins with these words:
We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.Did Marx consider the American experiment inherently evil? No. Quite the opposite. The same letter to Lincoln concludes thus:
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.
The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.Karl Marx was not woke. Although he was glad to see the end of American slavery (and Russian serfdom), he focused almost all of his attention on economics, not race.
And that brings me to Jordan Peterson, the best-known opponent of political correctness and Identity politics.
He continually derides SJWs as Marxists. Following his lead, many rightwingers -- from the president on down -- have scared the public by hauling out the dreaded M-word. It's all a Big Lie: The philosophy driving Identity politics is postmodernism, which rose up in opposition to Marxism.
True, some Identity obsessives call themselves "cultural Marxists" -- a meaningless term -- but they, like Peterson, never cite Marx, and I doubt that most of them have even read Marx. I doubt that Peterson has either. Both sides are equally ignorant. Working in opposition, yet also working in tandem, they've concocted an absurd bogeyman: A "Marxism" without Marx.
Like him or loathe him, Karl Marx believed in Enlightenment ideals, which the postmodernists despise. Marx would have considered today's progressive intellectuals to be ludicrous and dangerous, due to their fanatical focus on Identity. To Marx, economics was all. You may not agree with his economic views (I don't), but you cannot deny that he remained true to his theme. His writings have no relationship to anything we hear from the Identity zealots.
Most SJWs couldn't read a book like Capital if you held a gun to their heads.
6 comments:
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not, about a CTA bus crash in Chicago. Supposedly, about 600 people filed claims saying that they were passengers on the bus. That seems to me what is happening with Epstein. I have no doubt that he did bad things, just as Bill Cosby did bad things. I also have no doubt that there are those claiming to be passengers on the bus. The whole Epstein case is odd, as you pointed out before, we have no idea where he got his money, what he actually did with these girls or how many girls there were. It always struck me as odd that there were no pregnancies or STDs. And I'm still waiting for somebody to do some real digging. Lastly, on another topic, the reason that Republicans are more effective with advertising is that they appeal to emotion while Democrats try to appeal to reason. Beyond that, explaining the Democrats reasoning would take five minutes and ads have to be less than a minute.
"Nobody is talking about Trump's vomit-inducing evils along the border. Nobody is talking about the danger to the Surpeme Court. Nobody is talking about Trump's incessant lies. Nobody is talking about his history of criminality. Nobody is talking about his "unindicted co-conspirator" status in the Cohen case. Nobody is talking about the Trump family's foreign graft. Nobody is talking about the betrayal of the Kurds."
For what it's worth, my Facebook feed (which it almost entirely liberals at this point) is filled with all of the above (except the Kurds....I don't see anyone talking about that, which is a shame). Of course the mainstream media doesn't care about anything that won't boost advertising dollars from big corporations. They probably (despite being constantly called the "liberal media") would love for Trump to win again, to keep the viewership, readership, and ad revenues high. Certainly so called "progressive" outlets are going to focus on the things you say they are, because that's being pushed right now (probably by Russian bots as you suggest, and probably also by Republican rat fuckers who want the Dems focused on anything but Trump's criminality and failings).
I also realize that my FB feed doesn't necessarily reflect the entirety of left wing voters. Still, I've seen plenty of discussion about the things you list, even from news sources (again though, not the big news orgs, of course).
Well, Gus, I don't do social media. (I'm anti-social.) So I'm heartened to learn about your FB experience.
Karl Marx was also a terrible snob. He insisted his daughter take piano lessons. He cut off his daughter when she married a Cuban man who had some African ancestry, too.
Yes, anon. And he also was nicknamed "The Moor" because his skin was dark. Very un-PC.
We should encourage politically-correct progs to slam Marx on these points. If they do so en masse, they might force Jordan Peterson to give up on the "You're a MARXIST!" insult.
To judge from reviews of Mary Trump's book written by those who have received copies it seems she is accusing her uncle of getting somebody else to sit his SAT for him. If this accusation stands up, Wharton will have no option but to revoke his Bachelor of Science degree in economics. In the meantime they will surely have to investigate.
In relation to the coronavirus she is quoted as writing that "(h)e'll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently (...) What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder." The phrasing in those two sentences is lawyered-up but this book will pack a powerful punch, to put it mildly.
Some suppose that if Trump does not stand for re-election then the Republican candidate will almost certainly be Mike Pence (who will already be president if Trump does a Nixon rather than an LBJ). They seem to forget that Pence has chaired the White House Coronavirus Task Force since February.
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