[Posted by my friend, Kyle Pearson, on another thread. Reproduced here with his permission. Brilliant.] A problem with self-appointed leftist elitists.... A) The phrase leftist elitist is UTTERLY without meaning. As in: nonsensical, without ANY semantic value, ABSOLUTELY oxymoronic. One cannot have an elitist who is a leftist. Those two concepts are fundamentally at odds with one another - so either you dont understand elitist (which is what im betting on, since the Rethuglican party is filled with the lackeys and servants of the truly elitist families in the US), or you dont understand leftist (which, come to think of it, you also dont seem to have a very good grasp of: the left opposes institutionalized power structures that breed inequality, oppression, and class-based injustice - all of which are precisely the things elitists seek to reinforce). B) ... is that they and only they know what is factual.... Well, actually, the problem with an awful lot of Americans, these days, is that they confuse ill-informed opinions with facts. Facts are material truths. They cannot be denied. They are real, and they can be measured, defined, and proven true or not true. The vast, vast majority of pablum that appears on Faux News is either outright lies, crude and utterly unpatriotic prevarication, or simply vile innuendo. The few consistent threads that run through all of their reporting are: 1) Poor people are to be blamed for being poor, and nobody should care what injustices or physical hardships they suffer because they deserve it, because theyre lazy, greedy, and selfish. 2) Rich people should be praised and respected for being wealthy, and any laws or taxes that inconvenience them are evils of the system that any right-minded person will recognize are unjust violations of human rights. 3) Black people have things too easy, and there is no such thing as institutional racism. 4) Prisoners are always guilty, DAs, police, and other authorities are always right - unless the victim is white, and rich, in which case the reverse is probably true. 5) The US was founded as a Christian nation, and far right wing evangelicals (whether Catholic or Protestant) should be allowed to promote whatever religious claptrap they want, because the only problem with America these days is its lack of Christian values. and: 6) America, its corporations, its military, its police, and its intelligence agencies are always without fault in anything they do abroad because America is always the good guy, and any single American is more valuable than an entire nation of non-Americans. By extension, whenever anything bad happens abroad, then NO MATTER WHAT THE EVIDENCE ACTUALLY SHOWS, it must always be the fault of the people who Faux News targets as its domestic political opponents, because it is only through the faliure of the weak, selfish, greedy, and non-Christian that anything done by the American government could possibly fail. Long story short: Fox News is predictable, shallow, and notorious for inventing stories (that it floats as news) to fit the facts, rather than reporting facts as they occur. Anyone who says that Fox News is a legitimate news source automatically marks themselves as an imbecile in the eyes of EVERY other educated person on the planet. Yes - they are that transparent. All you need to do is say you watch Fox News here in Taiwan, and you are automatically accorded (and treated) like a high-functioning moron: everyone, from every country, will smile and bob their head at you while you prattle on with the utter nonsense you have accepted on faith, and then, when your back is turned, we all shake our heads in disbelief and say something perhaps like Oh, hes a nice guy, but how in the world can he believe all that bullshit? And then, typically, most people just shrug their shoulders and say: Americans. The truth is, Tony, that thanks to Fox news and the Republican Party (and Obamas R2P crowd, which are really just neocon Democrats who have allied themselves with AIPAC strain of Republicans) have done more to destroy the American reputation abroad than any single group in American history. You may complain about Obamas policies, but you are complaining about all the wrong things: Obama is TOO much of a Republican, TOO much a lover of Israel, TOO deeply involved in military, murder, and the neocon vision of Forever War -- but neither you nor your friends here on this thread can see it. By endorsing Fox News, you are endorsing Forever War, inequality, hereditary nobility for the ultra-rich, institutionalized prison slavery, and the most oppressive future imaginable for the generations that follow. Are the Democrats to blame? You bet they are - but your endorsement of Fox pulls the political center in the EXACT opposite direction of where it should be going. You want the quality of life in America to improve? Stop the wars. Curb the police state. Free the prisoners. Make prisons become something like they are in Norway, and Sweden - pull them away from the Guantanamo Bay model. Free education for all. Curb corporate influence over our political system - it was the Republican Party as a whole that allied to stop us from overturning Citizens United. Make elections fair. Stop rigging elections (conscienceless gerrymandering, Diebold, vote caging, voter ID laws). Cut the military budget. Create some sane gun laws. End the Drug War. Bring back the War on Poverty. End trickle-down policies. End institutionalized unemployment. Keep religion private, and leave it WELL out of the public sphere. These are all things Fox News and the Republican Party mock as weak, irrelevant, or confused. These are the things you, by endorsing Fox, stand *against*. And flip it around, what does that mean you stand for? Religious intolerance, and state-mandated religious faith. Forever War. Institutionalized prison-slavery, and the long-term (as in: for decades) torture of men and women for non-violent crimes like owing too much debt, petty theft, drug use, and driving drunk. Shattered neighborhoods divided by race, and oppressed by unemployment, violent police brutality, Vast inequality, where the wealthy are accorded every privilege and comfort, while the vast majority of Americans are left impoverished by illness, enslaved to debt, and are left enslaved to a job that works them literally to death, with no savings, heirlooms, or estate of any sort to pass along to their children. Rigged elections. Corporate domination of every aspect of our life, with no right to privacy, and no available avenues for building a small, street-level business where prison or corporate-sponsored legal prosecution is not a looming likelihood.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 03:02:08 +0000
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