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The Mating Calls of Violent Men!

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics, Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Ann Coulter, Genocide, Islam, Muslims, Native Americans, prejudice, Racism, Right Wing Politics, Syria

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Please accept my apologies for posting this piece of filth

So this morning I’m surfing the hashtags on Twitter, cause I have plenty better to do of course, but anyway…

…and I come across the image to your left. It’s just one of many memes produced every day by the right wing hate machine. This one in particular happens to have been retweeted by professional bigot Ann Coulter.

I look at this image and I can’t help but think of the words ‘nits make lice.’ the saying is popularly attributed to Colonel John Chivington, another of history’s great war-mongers who didn’t care to distinguish children from enemies. Ostensibly charged with protecting the people of Colorado from Cheyenne and Arapaho, Chivington wasn’t much good at fighting real warriors, but he sure knew how to kill women and children, and on November 29th, 1864, he knew exactly where to find a band of Cheyenne who weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t going anywhere, because they’d already been placed under the protection of the army at Fort Lyon. Chivington didn’t care.

Neither do people who produce images like this.

Sadly such folk are not such a fringe group in America, or in other parts of the western world. Today the net is also abuzz with talk of plans from Narcissa Trump to force Muslims to register all across the nation so we can keep track of them. We’re still hearing the echoes of a Jeb Bush plan to admit only Christian refugees to America. And of course calls abound to reject all Syrian refugees out of some generalized fears about terrorism. Some are concerned about the possibility of terrorists inserting themselves into the refugee population. Many more simply refuse to think of any Muslims, or those coming from Muslim regions, as anything but terrorists.

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Because of course what some Afghans do is the best argument against helping Syrians in distress

I find myself waxing nostalgic for the days after 9-11 when President Bush carefully made it clear that our nation is not at war with Islam. I’ve never been a fan of Bush, but in this regard he at least held the rising tide of right wing malice to within certain degrees of sanity. In the intervening years, pseudo-conservative culture warriors have been working damned hard to overcome that limitation, and they have made great progress. They want a general war between the west (and Christendom) and Islam itself. Sometimes folks will qualify this by saying we are at war with ‘radical Islam’ as if ‘radical’ were ever enough to clarify the difference. These people want desperately for America to commit to general war against proponents of Islam all over the world.

And in this respect, they want very much the same thing that terrorists want. It’s as fascinating as it is disturbing to the dance of dangerous men and their couch-bound cheerleaders. Nothing brings the bigots out from under the rocks that hide them in America quite like events such as Paris. They find in terrorist acts a real source of empowerment, and they use that empowerment as much to attack moderates here in the west as any radicals abroad.

What is the worst thing about Isis? To so many right wingers, that would be Obama.

…or liberals in general.

What these war-mongers want doesn’t have much to do with ending terrorism or defeating actual terrorists, but they will make life miserable for those who happen to live near terrorists, who happen to look like terrorists, or (in the case of Syrian refugees) who happen to have already been hurt themselves by such terrorists. They would have been right at home with Chivington and the Colorado 3rd.

Each act of terrorism is an opportunity for right wingers to push aside the rest of us, to finally defeat their own domestic enemies and set the nation and the world at large on a violent course. They see in Paris and every act by the terrorists proof positive that their own violent worldview is the correct one, and that our nations must ever more place warfare at the center of public policy. That our own war efforts may have similar effects in far regions of the world could hardly be an objection to such a mind-set. It is synergy in action, the benefits of an ever escalating rhetoric of violence. As much as these people hate each other, they hate the rest of us more.

Its tough not to see a measure of alliance between terrorists and those who would reduce of American policy to a war against them, and against all of Islam. In some cases, this connection would be concrete, because you can bet the KKK and everyone at Storm Front are among the voices flooding social media this last week. In other cases the connection takes more thought. But each act of violence brings both forth cries for more of the same. These messages come ostensibly from enemies, and yet they coalesce into an odd sort of harmony.

The mating calls of violent men!

These violent men only have eyes for each other. And if they have their way, the world at large will soon be nothing but a battle ground between such people.

It will also be a dance hall for the morbidly obsessed.

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CNN Runs an Article on Wikileaks’ Release of Syrian Emails, …Wait a Minute, No it Doesn’t!

05 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Bias, Editing, Journalism, Julian Assange, News, Politics, Syria, Wikileaks

Yes, this is the photo they used as well.

I don’t have a lot to say about this news story, but it’s worth a look. …a look at the three paragraphs that CNN devotes to the stated topic of the article before reverting to a bog-standard narrative about Wikileaks and the legal troubles of Julian Assange.

I suppose we could learn a thing or two about media bias here.

– Perhaps a bit about the limits to the oft-cited left wing bias of the media, which is certainly true for a certain range of issues in the culture wars of the U.S. That bias quickly reverses course when substantial features of the world political economy are at stake. Wikileaks does far too much to threaten those interests.

…which is why the topic makes a much better sex scandal.

– There may also be a lesson in here about the way that news stories get their titles. Seriously, you click on a link to an article entitled; “Wikileaks Releases 2.4 Million Syria emails,” and you get a story about its founder’s legal troubles. It isn’t all that uncommon, and the author may not be at fault. Still someone is responsible for this. Someone chose to run a story under a false flag. And that someone ought to get noogies from his boss every morning for the rest of July.

…unless, it is the boss. Then he gets Indian burns.

– Or perhaps there is a lesson in here about editing? Who knows what interesting information might have been in the original piece. The 3 paragraphs on the initial topic certainly hint at interesting and juicy information, shortly before reverting to old news. I think there is a pretty good chance there was something worth reading in that original story.

…and I wonder if they will ever let us read it?

– And most of all, I suspect what we have here is a story about the economics of news reporting and the growing tendency to regurgitate the same old shit, all the while calling it news. It will take time and work to sort through the Wikileaks material, and it will take some knowledgable folks to do that. Why put out that effort when you could just take some old stuff about a long-running story and slip it under the sexy new title about a genuine news development?

…cut corners much?

But hey, I’m sure that with good sound journalistic practices like this, CNN will quickly put the whole Supreme Court ruling fiasco behind them! And seriously, this may be yet another extension of that story. Is the misleading title an attempt to finesse the issue of time, a means of holding off the story while they look over the material? Possible.

…but still damned foolish.

Please pardon me now. I’m off to see if I can find someone who actually did a story about the Syrian email leaks.

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