Category Archives: Ahimsa

A vile turd by any other name

Below is an irrefutable op-ed by Anthony Conwright, about the renaming of the Slaveholder Rebellion of 1861 to The War Between the States and finally The Civil War. This metamorphosis happened over the course of decades as the result of political lobbying by Confederate sympathizers.  Conwright draws the straight line to Trump doing the same thing at warp speed with his January 6th Day of Love when peaceful, victim patriots went to the Capitol where they were met by violent libtard cuck traitor cops… Those who refuse to learn the lessons of the past, as they say, are continually fucked the same way.

We are living, as the curse goes, in interesting fucking times.

If you can’t open the op-ed by clicking the image above, use this “gift” link.

US Army definition of fascism from 1945

This full description of fascism was provided to US Army personnel in the European theater toward the end of World War Two, when  democracy had finally, and at tremendous cost, was about to defeat fascism and reach a cautious stand-off with communism that would turn into the Cold War.  This is from the great Heather Cox Richardson:

The political ideology called fascism grew out of World War I, when former socialist Benito Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

This theory drove the Axis powers during World War II, and in 1945, the United States War Department explained to U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II what fascism was. The government focused less on the ideology of fascism than on its practical outcome.

Fascism, the pamphlet Army Talks explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.” source

And here’s how it’s done in a modern corporate society:

The sickening smiles at the end, between the journalist who asked a tough question and the tough guy who repeatedly danced away from answering it, are all about access. If you want someone like Jordan on your network, you have to smile and thank him at the end for stonewalling and essentially lying to your audience. Note that none of these guys are ever familiar with anything a journalist asks them about.

Then there is this tough guy presidential hopeful Nazi wannabe, bullying a retired public servant who gave the best available advice about preventing the spread of Covid, as his president lied about and weaponized the pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands Americans (including Herman Caine, who contracted the disease at a Trump rally), while countries that followed the practices Fauci advocated prevented countless deaths.

And finally, the State Department’s loyal lapdog to the Leader, presidential aspirant Little Marco, Viceroy of Venezuela, scourge of Cuba. He announces that the US wants to abolish the The International Criminal Court, take it down brick by brick because it weaponizes “statute” and “so-called international law”. The ICC was set up after decades of advocacy by idealists and humanists to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It was created in response to the atrocities of the Nazis and the Japanese, and others, including the Soviet Union, during World War Two, and, horrifically, through the present day.

The US has never been bound by the ICC, Reagan explicitly repudiated its jurisdiction over the US when the ICC tried to hold him accountable for his illegal mining of Nicaragua’s harbor to aid the far-right Contras — who he also illegally gave millions to through the sales of munitions to Iran (Iran-Contra “scandal” — see Bill Barr, Act I) something explicitly barred by American law.

Trump hates the ICC because, theoretically, or even just symbolically, it could still move to hold him accountable for various war crimes, including the ongoing killing of over 200 fishermen at sea (accused, without evidence, of drug dealing — not a capital offense except in Duterte’s Philippines something he’s facing trial for at the ICC) and the reckless, pitiless murder of 165, mostly girls, at a girls’ school in Iran, not to mention war crime attacks on civilian infrastructure.

Getting rid of the International Criminal Court is the dream of every war criminal and mass murderer. If you think these people aren’t Nazis, think again.

Sorry, WordPress won’t allow me to embed this short video highlighting this last point.  Here’s the link:

https://youtube.com/shorts/BVuCJn993PI?is=0zavOcsim3I9XeJB

Everybody knows who these people are

Dictators will be dictators, and the spoiled, sadistic children of wealthy psychopaths make the worst kind. People who align themselves with dictators to advance their own ambitions must always conform to the dictator’s wishes.   To displease the leader, in even a small way, easily results in getting fired from the position you were grotesquely unqualified for, except for your performative loyalty to the ego of your insecure master.  There is one requirement for the job: blind obedience to the leader’s ever changing whims and no hesitation to tell any lie the leader needs told.  

Dictators create one emergency after another, and solve them boldly, even if often idiotically.  Failure is not a problem, just blame communist saboteurs.

Observers are noting that the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly. . . [she then describes Trump’s looting of the budget for the National Parks for his own personal design projects and his firing of thousands of park staff] . . .

. . . The profligate use of our tax dollars for whatever Trump and his cronies want while the American people suffer is at least as representative of Trump’s reign as is the peeling, algae-filled, militarily guarded Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

This president and administration are turning the extraordinary resources of the American people—the things we the people have created over decades with our effort and our tax dollars—to their own ends. We are paying for their theft with a significantly diminished country, and even with our lives. . .

It is beyond question that unserious, unqualified, often hate-filled transactional loyalists are lined up behind the most immature and reckless — and, let’s be honest — unqualified and crazy, president in US history.   Bragging about ending his fifteenth, or perhaps fiftieth, war, he touted his Memorandum of Understanding with the mullahs, which he had signed for his 8oth birthday, to prove he is indeed the peace president.  Now he’s back to bombing Iran.  

Tonight, Trump made apocalyptic threats against Iran, posting that “United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

Well, at least there’s less talk in the media today about his wonderful secrets with suicided Jeffrey Epstein. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, as the fey Nazi Maga Mike pointed out to a roomful of the faithful the other day:

Yesterday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a Trump loyalist, warned a crowd at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C.: “If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats—y’all, impeachment’s not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. Ok, we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win the midterms.” source (for all above quotes)

And here are some remarks, fitting for a shameless Nazi (the best kind) who also hails from a stronghold of the American Ku Klux Klan, that demonstrate this principle of supporting the leader no matter what. What is a lie among fellow fascists?

Compare Coach Tooberville’s “analysis” to the following, from one of my favorite geniuses:

So it goes.

“You knew I was a snake, America, when you took me in.   Now, time to meditate.“

Nazis will be Nazis

I’ve noticed that sometimes things that appear unthinkable are actually predictable, even inevitable. Things you happily assumed were true, like lifelong membership in a beloved community, turn out to be illusions, once you see the alluring thing curdle and crumble exactly the same way over and over. Only in hindsight, once the damage becomes undeniable, can you see how destructive the unquestionable thing you thought was perfect actually was. The unthinkable is revealed to have been clearly preordained.

If you are in a cult, membership in good standing is the only consideration for those who revere the leader. The leader can rape members, it is God’s will, and besides, the rape victims are fucking liars. The leader can lie in the face of overwhelming evidence, he lies for a greater truth and it’s also a lie that he lied, vicious, traitorous liars said that about the always truthful leader. The leader can kill his cult members, if they are true believers they willingly pawn their lives for their leader’s divine vision. Such is the power of true belief in a worldview.

The Nazis recruited masses from those neglected Germans who had never had any political voice in German political life (Germany had only recently become a democracy). The Nazi movement made these invisible Germans feel like virile, heroic, indispensable players in world history. If they joined the party and sucked up to their leaders without question they could be promoted to unimaginable heights. An insignificant, uncharismatic, unqualified, not born wealthy or politically connected person who had no hope of ever having any power (think Stephen Miller, Jeffrey Clark, Mike Johnson, JD Vance, Gym Jordan, Kashyap Patel) could become the highly respected, rightfully feared Nazi in charge of sending millions to their deaths. Talk about a rush for someone whose highest goal in life is a feeling of superiority and power over others.

Then you have the born millionaires whose inherited wealth soon reaches the billions — the list is long: Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Steve Mnuchin, Elon Musk (trillionaire), James Fucking Dolan (NY Knicks owner) … you get the idea. They grow up believing they are geniuses, since they had the wisdom to choose wealthy fathers they never alienated by opposing. Since they consider themselves infallible visionary geniuses in all areas (and not psychopathic hoarders of obscene, never sufficient wealth at everyone else’s expense) they believe they have the absolute right to control others. Their will is unchallengeable law in the businesses they control.

A brilliant motion picture spectacle was made about the power of a great individual’s will (though the hero of the story was born lower middle class) Triumph of the Will. The impressively choreographed pageant of German discipline, mass conformity, and ecstasy, at Mr. Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, flashed gorgeously across screens all over Germany. Wide eyes gleamed with the reflected light of the glittering, stirring spectacle as it magically bounced off those movie screens. All you need, boys and girls, is a convincing, lushly presented, relentlessly one-sided story to sell your worldview to masses of people (no matter how objectively incoherent or mad your story is) — if you have the money and influence to make sure millions watch it. The most necessary talent for a dictator is an instinct for public relations, and the very best advertising people to make the most powerful ads in support of that instinct.

I’ve been regularly exercising my First Amendment right to express my opinions on this blahg read by very few people (I’m not on any other “social media”). Lately bots seem to have been checking in to monitor these obscure posts, which are harshly critical of both the Nazis of old and their American counterparts in our own day. Some days I suddenly have hundreds of visitors. I’m sure I’m on one of Palantir’s lists of people to be rounded up and given special treatment (sonderbehandlung), if the blessed day arrives for these natural aristocrats to decide who is worthy of living and who must be eliminated (Lebensunwertes Leben [1]). They are lunging headlong toward that glorious day, exactly like the Nazis did — by brute force, fueled by the power of hatred, and an intense 24/7 propaganda blitzkreig. Heather today gave a nice snapshot of the Nazi theory of power in a democracy:

Much of [Nazi political theorist Carl] Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who himself almost certainly has not read Schmitt—asserted this view in August of last year when he said: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Alex Kaplan of Media Matters notes that since Trump took office in 2025, his loyalists have urged him simply to declare a national emergency in order to justify dictating new voting and election rules to the states.

The U.S. Constitution gives to the states the authority to conduct elections, but the Trump administration wants state voter lists, at least in part so it can run them through a tool designed to find noncitizens who might have applied for benefits for which they’re ineligible. That system, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements and, confusingly, also abbreviated as SAVE, is not designed for voter rolls, and as Liz Dye explained today in Public Notice, it explicitly did not cover U.S. citizens.

But, Dye explains, between last April and last August, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration linked the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to the master file from Social Security, called NUMIDENT. Then they reprogrammed SAVE to upload voter rolls for mass citizenship screening. source

The truth, reflected in the extremist Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database, is that the fraud rate in US elections is miniscule, in the single digits across millions of votes. The Heritage Foundation’s database shows a total of hundreds of cases of fraud, going back decades, covering years of elections where over a billion votes were cast. The incidence of fraud is something like 0.0001%. Bill Barr himself said under oath that he told Trump his claims of massive voter fraud changing the election outcome in 2020 were “bullshit.” The Heritage Foundation‘s own Hans von Spakovsky speaks for all these voter fraud Nazi motherfuckers. “Illegal aliens” and other non-citizens are not voting. They are not trying to vote. Create a fake emergency and then take bold steps to fix it.

Hitler’s party never found it necessary to change a word of the democratic Weimar Republic’s constitution. They merely invoked Emergency Powers after rushing through an Enabling Act immediately after their parliament building was burned down. The rest, as they say, is history.

All I can say at the moment is “fuck these Nazi putos”.  They are marching behind a deranged and demented figurehead of extremely limited ability, reckless, incapable of strategic thinking or compromise while projecting overweening confidence, who has repeatedly, continuously lied to and already alienated masses of his own followers.  Those true believers in the MAGA cult will follow him to hell.  Nobody else is going down there with him. 

See you down here, Donny boy

[1] from Wikipedia: The phrase “life unworthy of life” (German: Lebensunwertes Leben) was a Nazi designation for the segments of the populace which, according to the Nazi regime, had no right to live. Those individuals were targeted to be murdered by the state via involuntary euthanasia, usually through the compulsion or deception of their caretakers. The term included people with disabilities and later those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of Nazi Germany. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust.[1] It is similar to but more restrictive than the concept of Untermensch, subhumans, as not all “subhumans” were considered unworthy of life (Slavs, for instance, were deemed useful for slave labor).

When you work for a compulsive liar

Understand, first of all, why people lie.  If the truth is embarrassing, especially if it’s humiliating, someone with a propensity to lie will always lie.  If confronted about the lie, they will lie again, make you the liar for accusing them of lying. 

This hideous, maddening cycle will be familiar to anyone who has ever been close to, or worked for, someone who can never be wrong no matter what.  If you can’t be wrong, and the facts clearly show you are, then the facts are fucking liars and so are you for bringing up those lies.

Trump is perhaps the most prolific compulsive liar in American history. He’s up there with the all-time heavyweight liars of world history. He may be number one (though, it is said, he smells like number two). If he gets his ass kicked in an election, obviously, the election was rigged, he was cheated out of a victory he actually won by a landslide, was the victim of a massive bipartisan fraud, and when you are the victim of fraud, as he told his enraged crowd on January 6th (a day of love, obviously), you get to play by very different rules. You fight like hell to make your truth the real truth and violence is totally justified because the liars who cheated you won by being scumbags who viciously rigged everything against you and deserve whatever they get, including death.

Picture working for a vengeful, childish asshole like this guy.  Lying is a condition of employment.  You can’t tell the truth.  If you do, the boss will fly into a rage.  When asked if Biden won the 2020 election you deliver the company line “well, he was sworn in as president on January 20, 2021…”.  When pressed on whether Biden won you must not give an inch, must continue this line of idiotic equivocation.  If you say “yes, senator, Biden won…” then you are out of a job, out of the party, out of the cult, out of business, kaput.  Plus, you face an excellent chance of death threats on your phone day and night.  Everybody who works for Trump knows this.  

Still, sometimes there are slip ups, like this, from a recent convert to MAGA spokesman for those furious that Obama “gave” Iran $1.6B in the JCPOA deal where Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons.

Trump is trying to cover over the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets [in his birthday Memo of Understanding — not a final agreement] by saying “no money will exchange hands.” But this morning, Vice President J.D. Vance told CBS that in addition to that $24 billion, Iran will also have access to $300 billion in funds for reconstruction. source

Oopsie.  Et tu, CBS?

Liars lie, that’s not news.  I guess the news is that the central characters of Trump’s inner circle appear to have been captured on tape, discussing various illegal ways to allow the president to do whatever pops into his insane head.  If Stephen Miller, our foremost, infernally powerful, Jewish Nazi, orders 3,000 brown immigrants captured, detained and deported daily, and the boss loves the idea, then… fuck it, suspend habeas corpus (the right to a hearing to contest your confinement)… change administrative rules to make a loophole to avoid giving habeas corpus rights to those illegally detained, invoke the Insurrection Act… kill more “paid protesters” like Renee Good and Alex Pretti… 

The squealing among Trump’s inner circle about the New York Times report on secret meetings in the Situation Room (without the president present) that someone tapped into our nation’s most secure SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) is an unintentional admission, as Lawrence McDonnell points out, that the reporting is super accurate.  NY Times reporters Haberman and Swan couldn’t have transcribed all those verbatim quotes without a recording. 

More lies are now needed to cover the lying lies that some liar recorded and made them lie in their own voices on a tape that doesn’t exist, like Epstein, who never actually existed, never knew the president, never shared any “wonderful secrets” with him — and the president certainly wasn’t rough with fourteen year-olds’ nipples, where did those stupid, lying quotes come from and, more to the point,  who was the traitorous leaker? — the boss was always a gentle lover who always had consent from every woman and girl he ever touched — no, wait, he never touched anybody! Epstein and those little bitches are all LIARS!!!

Trump is not playing five dimensional chess, he doesn’t even know what a game is. Point out that he just took a crap in his pants and he will angrily scream: “NO! YOOOO took a crap in my pants!!!!” I know you are, but what am I? Another win for the Winner-in-Chief.

Early this morning, Trump posted on social media: “On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’” source

Be there, fans, will be wild! There should be, literally, hundreds there, mad as hell and ready to rumble.  You go, Mr. President, sir!

Hermann Göring-level contempt

Now it’s no longer taboo, in light of mountains of evidence in support of the comparison, to refer to Todd Blanche, Stephen Miller, Lyin’ Ted, MAGA Mike, Hegseth, Lutnick, Bessent, RFK Jr,. Elon Musk, Jared Kushner, Trump and his accursed spawn, as Nazis.  Nazis will be Nazis, and they always act the same way — indomitable and contemptuous of so-called decency (Hitler called conscience a “Jewish invention”).  The contempt Trump and his best people proudly show for law and the ideals our country was founded on was not exceeded by the most infamously contemptuous of the Nazis.  Think Hermann Göring.  They have all demonstrated that they will follow any insane order from their mad leader, justify protecting a network of pedophiles, a nationwide chain of concentration camps, every voter suppression effort imaginable and the cold blooded murder of American citizens in their cars, on the street.

It’s not even a news story, apparently, when these floundering fascists (in this case Trump, Blanche and Trump’s children) openly defy a federal judge’s order to produce their argument for why their fake “settlement” of a non-case, for their sole, corrupt benefit, was not a fraud on the court. June 12 was the deadline for Trump and Blanche to defend their corrupt, bogus, self-dealing “settlements”. I was very much looking forward to reading their stuttering, incoherent arguments. No argument was submitted at the deadline.

[Correction, there was a submission, not responsive to any of the judge’s three major questions Trump/DOJ were required to answer, though it was submitted late on June 12 (after closing time, apparently). I learned this from Michael Popok on the Meidas Touch network. Bloomberg alone seems to have reported on Trump’s denial of fraud and his attack dog lawyer Alejandro Brito’s attack on the judge, as well as the 35 retired federal judge’s who intervened to remind the judge she still had jurisdiction over the “case”. I haven’t been able to find a copy of this legal masterpiece on-line.]

The Trump DOJ essentially in contempt of a federal court order produced crickets from mass media. No real update on the story since Trump and his DOJ followed federal appellate judge Emil Bove’s advice (from before his lifetime confirmation, when he was number 3 at DOJ) and told a federal judge to go fuck herself. AI had this to say (incorrectly, as it turned out, apparently they filed it late on June 12th)

Absolutely nobody but Michael Popok at Meidas Touch is reporting on this, as though this eye-poppingly criminal conspiracy to defraud the court to further enrich the historically corrupt Mr. Trump is not a subject of even minor public interest.

Of course, in fairness to everybody — there were so many other stories demanding attention in the realm of Trumpish impostures. News broke about a panicked damage control meeting in the Situation Room (secretly, and illegally, recorded by someone there) to strategize about how to protect Trump for accountability for the many wonderful secrets he shared with his best friend, suspiciously suicided incarnation of evil Jeffery Epstein. The demented birthday boy yesterday used the Lincoln Memorial, which his gigantic Arc de Trump will dwarf and obscure the view of from Arlington National Cemetery, as a backdrop for his glorious gladiator fight in a $60,000,000 (including $700,000 to restore the damage to the lawn) cage built on the south lawn of the White House to celebrate his birthday. He gave UFC fighters the honor guard pomp usually reserved for foreign dignitaries and the funerals of top military commanders.

Workers took his name off The Kennedy Center, as ordered, with Trump kicking and screaming, incoherently litigating and in the end demanding an extra 12 hours to do it, but a huge curtain remains in place so nobody can photograph the absence of the insane orange two year-old’s name. He promised, again, that a big birthday deal with Iran is being signed, He bombed Iran, a nation he bombed with no legal justification and has continually branded the aggressor, in coordination with his friend Netanyahu, who he now describes as a difficult man. Meanwhile, the troubling theocrats in Iran continue to be much more credible on the subject of “peace talks” than the Orange Polyp and his chorus of performative liars.

Trump and his lackies are spraying the firehose of mendacity, with the insane Tulsi Gabbard, friend of Assad and Putin, suddenly chiming in about US biolabs in 30 countries, including Ukraine, that Fauci is somehow responsible for. Trump is madly posting gibberish every moment he’s awake, even as he continually falls asleep in public and appears to be dying — though 22 doctors recently signed off on his bill of perfect health. He has the heart of a 65 year-old, we are to believe.

His MAGA suck-ups in Congress also snuck through, at 4 a.m., another 70 BILLION dollars for his masked shock troops who will not be required to abide by the US Constitution. ICE will continue to wear masks, break car windows, illegally enter homes, schools, courts and churches without judicial warrants, indefinitely detain people who have committed no crime, keep them in abusive privately owned concentration camps kept secret from the public, even murder American citizens on video, when necessary and proper.

So, I suppose we can forgive the press (and thank Bloomberg and Meidas Touch) for not taking a single note of his missed June 12 deadline for Trump to explain to the court why he should not be punished for filing a fake lawsuit against an agency he controls, and giving himself and his accursed children (and all of their associates) a preemptive pardon for all past frauds on the IRS/US Treasury in a “settlement” worth probably hundreds of millions for a long history of tax chicanery. All I can say is “USA! USA!!!” Trump looks more fucked every day.

Sports in a corporate culture

Trump sat behind bulletproof glass at Madison Square Garden with his fellow self-made son of a billionaire James Dolan. The cheapest seat in the building, outside of the suite of free luxury box seats provided to Trump, Lutnick and co., was the $1,500 standing room ticket NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani bought for himself. The average ticket price was over $10,000, maybe over $20,000 — VIP courtside seats were over $50,000 each.

The NBA championship brings in obscenely HUGE dollars for the owners and their corporate alter-egos. The NBA commissioner himself welcomed Trump’s visit that closed down ten square blocks around MSG, imposed TSA restrictions on the fans wealthy enough to attend the game and created even more traffic pressure and chaos in the already choked center of downtown (not to mention the loss of a ton of money for local businesses). Here’s NBA commish Adam Silver, from a blandly apolitical take on ESPN (owned by Dolan?):

Though Trump and high-profile basketball stars such as LeBron James have exchanged social media barbs over the years, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the president was a “genuine Knicks fan” who was “welcome” at the most-anticipated NBA game in New York since the Knicks’ last Finals appearance in 1999.

“What makes sports so special, especially when there’s so much that divides people, is that it’s something we have in common,” Silver told ESPN’s “Inside the NBA” during a pregame interview. “We should look for those things we have in common and build off that.” source

Inspiring words from this handsome corporate rascal:

Hannah Arendt speaking to this moment

Nothing is more dangerous to nature and humanity than an inability to think.    This inability to think is deliberately, mindfully fostered by those who make the most money, and seize great power, when  people can’t think.  Without critical thinking it is impossible to choose well between complex alternatives, to accurately identify problems in the first place, to protect ourselves from predators. 

A populace that can’t think is ideal for manipulation, many of them will be ready to tolerate or commit atrocities for an incoherent “cause”.  The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, as Francisco Goya the painter observed.   Here’s Hannah Arendt, who clearly identified this central villain of human history, from a few generations ago.  

American children raised watching TV, and devices, see more than 10,000 hours of advertising, tailored to their baby minds, before they learn to read. Today attention spans are shattered, brains and social interactions rewired, by constant smartphone notifications from people trying to sell something, push some idea, inoculate the “user” against critical thinking by amplifying their own prejudices and likes and silencing opposing ideas. The algorithms that cater to our personalized prejudices are making a small number of neuroatypical men unlimited billions of dollars as they emotionally and intellectually immiserate billions of vulnerable human beings.

We are at the “mercy” of psychopaths at the moment. Only we, by acting together and thinking as critical problem solvers, can stop these merciless, insane bastards who would have everything. They will own everything even if it takes destroying the earth itself, the biosphere, all the animals and all but a handful of specially selected humans who will live on militarized luxury islands, in outer space or in well-furnished spas deep under the ground. Fuck those putos.