First, above and beyond mere politics… if you seriously want to help civilization be resilient against shocks the future might bring, consider (in the U.S.) taking training for CERT – your local Community Emergency Response Team. It’s a really interesting and fun 20 hour course given by your local fire department and you get cool green equipment and a badge! And once a decade maybe some light duties to help keep your family and neighbors safe.
== Explicit: Haters of Democracy ==
It’s baaack. One of the top propaganda memes used by oligarchs to foment chanting dopes to pour hatred upon…democracy.
They must! Everyone can see that the Republican base is in freefall demographic collapse, not just from the growth of cities or the rise of minorities but from defection by their own children, the smarter half of them who continued educating and learning into their twenties. The wave of voter suppression bills across Red America are desperation measures, justified by same-old ancient ravings against ‘mob rule.' Despite the fact that average levels of education and knowledge among Democrats is now much higher than for Republicans. (And I do offer counter-tactics.)
So how do they justify direct and open attacks against democracy itself?
There is a standard catechism that takes many forms.
Recently on "PenceNews” there spread a supposed quote from Karl Marx:
"Democracy is the road to socialism… Socialism leads to communism."
Hence why voting needs to be restricted.
Except, of course, that Marx said no such thing! In fact it is an almost direct quote from Adolf Hitler. Way to choose your sources, guys.
Though MAGAs and other styles of confederate recite it as one of their many masturbatory incantations, they flee the instant you offer a wager over it, or any part of the scenario, ever having happened, even once, in the history of human civilization. (Damn inconvenient facts!). YOU should read and be armed against this magical mantra, which your uncles are doubtless reciting, which justifies treason against the very same democratic republic that gave these ingrates everything.
As for Marx saying that democracy beguiled workers into thinking they could lead fine, middle class lives... well he was right! FDR and the Greatest Generation, after smashing the Nazis and containing the Stalinists, proceeded to promote an empowered middle class that kept drawing in wave after wave and caste after caste of the formerly underprivileged. Call it 'beguiling' away revolutionary fervor, if you like.
Or else recognize that Marx simply never imagined a great industrial nation behaving fairly, with decency, flattened wealth disparities and gradually improving justice. But that's exactly what was happening...
...until the empire struck back, stealing from working folks under "Supply Side Theory" and using Fox+KGB agitprop to restart the American civil war. And thus they seem bent on resurrecting Marx's scenario from its well-deserved grave.
If that zombie (Marxism) is back, shambling across every college campus on Earth, it is your fault, you wretched-stupid inheritance brats and other parasites out there. Wake up and fire your sycophants. Or else learn how to ride a tumbrel.
== The one tactic ==
Alas, no one has the guts or imagination to confront these imbeciles with wager demands, with large escrowed stakes over falsifiable assertions, testable by facts. (And I offer the bets to be judged by panels of retired, senior military officers; watch the yammerers blanch!) When so confronted, they always flee.
But here are challenges specific to this imbecilic malarkey:
- Name one advanced, liberal democracy, including socialist Scandinavian ones, that ever turned communist. Um, one.
- Show us where Marx said that!
- Vladimir Putin called the fall of the USSR "history's greatest tragedy" and while dropping all the hammer-and-sickle symbols, he installed all former KGB agents and commissars as Russia's new oligarchy, while the renamed KGB uses all the same methods toward the same goal: our downfall, including Trump and blackmailing most of the GOP political caste.
So who are the commies now?
Whatever, Ivan.
== A fifth column ==
MAGAsphere is abuzz with the latest lunacy. If the Republicans win back the House in 2022, then choosing Donald Trump as Speaker and 2nd in line for the presidency. Oh, please, make that your platform, GOP? “As a reminder, by the time Trump left office in January, he had the lowest approval rating of any President "since scientific polling began," at 34%, with a 61% disapproval. Plus, a Quinnipiac poll released after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol found that 59% of Americans believe Trump should not be allowed to hold office ever again.” But a majority of the shrinking GOP minority is growing crazier and more frothing rabid by the minute.
== Politiclly redolent Miscellany ==
They did a huge 4-year test in Iceland, with 2,500 workers (1% of the labor force) where they paid the workers the same amount for about 36 hours of work (9 hours a day) just 4 days a week and, surprise!, productivity remained the same or even improved in the majority of workplaces. The trials led unions to renegotiate working patterns, and now 86% of Iceland's workforce have either moved to shorter hours for the same pay, or will gain the right to, the researchers said. Of course this means some will have two jobs. Or work on their own startups, or. dive into amateur avocations – some targeting excellence.
With Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko track QAnon's leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe―appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines.
(Note the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was concocted in the very same Kremlin basements that are now foisting QAnon upon us.)
What most critics fail to point out should be the most obvious thing… that the mad right’s central theme is to accuse their opponents of doing what they do far more. For example, rates of proved pedophilia and predatory sexual perversion among prominent Republican politicians, pundits or backers – proved or blatant – are vastly higher than rates among prominent Democrats. Provably twice or three times the rate and anecdotally as much as six times! Likewise rates of moral turpitude in red states (excluding Utah) vs. blue states in everything from domestic violence, STDs, teen sex/pregnancy/abortion, gambling, drug use and so on. And especially the confederate right’s close relationship with casino moguls, mafiosi, petro sheiks, inheritance brats and “ex”communist “former” KGB agents.
A top judo move in politics - seldom done - is to show how your opponents hypocritically harm the things they claim to value. Accuse a confed of racism or ignoring climate calamities or the poor or science? He'll shrug you off as a smug-patronizing, free-spending, smartypants nerd-lib who prefers the poor be our 'clients' than empowered capitalists.
So, instead (or in addition) show how the right is far more wasteful and the worst enemies of the market competition they claim to love! Far worse on deficits. Pals of monopoly and oligarchic market cheating. And traitors to the supply chain health on which the entire economy depends. Who is addressing these national emergencies? Made far worse by GOP neglect & sabotage, these underpinnings of the economy are being saved by Democrats.
Finally, we need constant reminding the axiom on propaganda most often attributed to Joseph Goebbels:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
That's from the only book Trump used to keep by his bed.
