Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Election 2016 Part 5: Left-Wing Self-Examination

by Leave a Comment

In the most recent installment of this series, I discussed the massive and vocal cadre of sore losers and sour grapes on the left.

[Again, I voted for neither Trump nor the Clintons, and as such, stand independent of partisanship here; indeed, in an earlier post, I condemned a sore-winner element in the ranks of so-called conservatives.]

In fairness, however, not all left-wingers were such bad sports about the fact American democracy worked as designed. Other liberals admirably took to self-analysis and introspection, looking inward and at themselves and one another, collectively, in the search for what went wrong, instead of reflexively and emotionally blaming the omnipresent other. These leftists I respect and uphold as aware and analytic thinkers, even as I disagree vehemently with their opinions on issues. To wit…

LATTE PARTY
The rise of someone as outwardly onerous as Trump rightly compels the left do so some soul-searching in many ways. One is with the direction of the Democrat Party, where a leftist analog to the Tea Party, rooted in the far-left/socialist, more ideologically pure Sanders/Warren wing, already is gaining groundswell support against the Goldman Sachs wing that dominates the party. For laughs I’ll call this insurrection the Latte Party.

Do you expect the same leftists who decried the rise of the Tea Party on the Republican side to behave similarly toward the Latte Party revolt in their own ranks? I doubt it, except for those few who truly buy fully into the corporate/globalist model of neoliberal leftism, which really is an ideological self-contradiction if ever there was. At least the Latte Party nee Sanders socialists are genuine in their ideals, instead of sellouts to the system like Obama, the Clintons, and their political sycophants.

I actually support the Latte Party ideal in principle, even as I disagree with damn-near everything they stand for issues-wise, because they do agree with Trump’s campaign talk on one of the few substantial ways I also do: the swamp needs to be drained. The globalist Bilderberg puppets and one-world-governance sellouts need to go — from Republican and Democrat parties alike.

THE INTROSPECTIVE LEFT
Finally! It took long enough. The best thing the left wing can do is what too few already are: looking inward and blaming themselves for their own bigotry and intolerance toward the right, and toward the ignored minority of working-class Rust Belters who ultimately made the difference in tilting just the right states Trump’s way. Unsolicited advice: for your own sake, liberals, listen to those few who have a clue what really went wrong and what to do about it.

For starters, you can find no clearer voice than Nicholas Kristof in this remarkably introspective and brilliant column. Take note, too, it may be the only time I ever compliment Kristof on anything. Then take heed and understand what he is trying to tell you! The fact that a majority of left-wing academics in one peer-reviewed study would engage in overt religious discrimination in hiring (a Federal crime, violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964!) should go against everything for which “progressivism” has struggled; yet there is the cancer, right in liberalism’s own gut.
When just one single Princeton faculty member and a janitor contributed to the Romney campaign in 2012. So much for “diversity” on campus. Is it any wonder the “intellectual elite” is seen as distant, detached, unrealistic, insular, ivory-tower, and (ironically) ignorant? Complain about that perception all you want, but it exists for a reason. Fix that reason.

Then given the often ferocious pro-Hillary partisanship involved, the condescension, dismissiveness, and glib invalidation of others’ concerns are but a mild terms for how the media behaved leading up to this election! This column, also from the left, offers motivation to return to balance, impartiality and treating opponents like they are worth hearing. As the author rightly alludes, the left has been masterful at preaching empathy but wretched at practicing it with regard to the right, evangelical Christians, and poor whites. Fair-use excerpt:

    Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid. It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. … We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. … That’s the fantasy, the idea that if we mock them enough, call them racist enough, they’ll eventually shut up and get in line.

Clearly the Trump voters (and again, I was not one) did not react as desired by the left when told to shut up and get in line. Instead they turned out en masse, motivated as never before, to install a President even less qualified than Barack Obama (something I thought impossible eight years ago).


These ladies have a point. Remember, I did not vote for Trump. Yet I sympathize with the plight of the great majority of those who did, who are non-racist, non-sexist, who just want to have a better life, who don’t want government interference in their personal and business issues, nor Federal theft of their hard-earned wages to subsidize sinful causes and waste and bureaucratic inefficiencies. I don’t think Trump will provide that, but after the last eight years of a failed radical-left-wing Presidential experiment, the most extreme leftism this nation has known in the White House, I don’t blame Trump voters for their desperation.

For all of these corrective behaviors and nuggets of wisdom directed by a minority of seeing leftists toward their foaming brethren, my expectations that they have turned a leaf and will seek compromise with the right are low, given life experience and given the deep-seated core of anti-conservative resentment simmering or boiling (see above) from so much off the blue side of the sociopolitical spectrum. This includes the anti-conservative bigotry that motivates false-flag crimes and hate-crime hoaxes framed to look like they came from the “right”.

An election was won or lost, depending on your perspective — or mine from the third-party view, where we lost regardless. Yet life does go on. Get over it. Grow a thicker skin. Acquire a sense of humor. Enjoy the entertainment as your favorite pundits trample all over Trump and his surrogates for their buffoonery, tomfoolery and general ineptitude. Most importantly, get about improving your nation and loving your neighbor (even if it means tough love). Don’t just say stuff on social media, actually spend a chunk of your life to serve your society and country in some way.

The final chapter of this series of essays will cover select state (Oklahoma) and local (Norman-area) ballot selections and their implications.

Brexit: Calm Down, Knee-Jerk Reactionary Fools!

by Leave a Comment

Several days ago, a majority of the British people, in a fair and open democratic referendum, and with a margin comparable to the Obama-Romney election here, voted to pull out of the bureaucratic and regulatory quagmire known as the European Union.

I’m not going to pretend to be any sort of expert on the logistic or economic details of the “Brexit” maneuver. Yet I guarantee I’ve read more about it than 95% of the instant-experts on social media, who had no clue about it a month in advance, yet somehow grossly overestimate the meaningfulness of their day-after knee-jerk thoughts thereabout. All I can do is draw some parallels to tendencies I see every day in the news and in the society here, and draw upon experts I do read, most from the homeland of our former colonial overlords.

Brexit, in many ways, was inevitable. Ivory-tower left-wingers on this side of the pond have been casting the vote as “xenophobia” (example). Bullshit. American leftist Bill Maher, of all people, countered nicely: Is it really a phobia if you really have something to be afraid of?

Or, as Ian Tuttle put it: “They are unable to believe they may be wrong, so their opponents must be irrational bigots.” “Bigot”, of course, is a common, hackneyed, petty, laughable, increasingly meaningless, ad hominem slur, arising from the insular catacombs of a leftism that acts so self-congratulatory when some election result does go their way. No, xenophobia had nothing important to do with it. Instead, authentic, real-world concerns of real people did.

In addition to immigration, and likely more importantly, the issue of globalism was at play. The opposite of anti-globalism is not “xenophobia”. The latter simply is a convenient and patronizing pejorative used by the economic, bureaucratic and (pseudo-)intellectual elite for those they perceive as ignorant, drooling rubes. This is done to elicit head nods from the agreeable fellow members of the herd, as I’ve seen commonly on social media.

Go the globalists: “Clap clap clap…yes they’re xenophobes, clap clap clap, yes they’re xenophobes! Thank you sir, shall we pander to one another some more, and continue with our patronizing, elitist puffery…”

Instead the opposite of globalism is more properly termed sovereignty. Boris Johnson, who actually is English and is immersed in this issue deeply, elucidates this well, as he assures us all from within that the U.K. still is part of Europe, and isn’t going to collapse into a smoldering heap of ashes.

The reasoned people who supported this (yes, they exist!) cast a vote substantially for sovereignty, or if you prefer, against the slow-creep toward one-world governance. And yes, there were young voters who voted for this also; this fact is being swept under the rug. Minority or not, they clearly matter(ed). And yes, there were highly educated people who voted for this; that also is being conveniently ignored. I have read a few of their well-reasoned essays. But if one wants to take the easy road and label this “xenophobia”, it’s apparent the proletariat aren’t the ignorant ones.

Yet for expressing this layered, textured idea, I’ve been labeled “absolutist”. Hardly! Indeed, to dig deeper than that is the farthest from “absolutist”–but instead peels into layers of the onion that aren’t so readily apparent.

One of these is the supposed “regret” bloc that is receiving attention far out of proportion to its size of assorted well-publicized individuals. This is so short-sighted and irrational. If you’re going to vote one way and second-guess that the next day, you should have studied the issue better, or stayed home. Your vote is your word…too late now, grasshopper. That passionate one-night stand is done and you must live with your decision. Such is the case in any election in any nation.

Two days is much too short of a time to determine ramifications. The meaningful consequences of this vote, for better or worse, will unfold over 5-10 years. Rantings of pundits this soon thereafter are worthless drivel (it’s way, way, way too soon!)–much akin to NFL draft-grading before the players have even reported to training camp. That (including the aforementioned buyer’s remorse reactions) is itself reactionary, emotional, shortsighted.

Whither the shock and rage over losing value in the equities and monetary exchange markets? That is a very overstated, short-fused gnat fart when you graph it versus the past seven years’ bull market; if we do happen to go to into bear mode soon, factors far larger, deeper and darker than Brexit will be responsible.

Brexit is a sign simply and foremost of working-class disillusionment with an inertial and bloated bureaucratic establishment, globalist trade policy, unfettered immigration at the expense of domestic jobs and security, and loss of both economic and sociopolitical national sovereignty. It’s very loosely similar to some sentiments behind the Trump phenomenon here–but not necessarily in the way you might think at first.

Instead, it’s a manifestation of democracy as it should work: enough people get sick and tired of what those in power are doing and want to go a different way. Personally I wish that “way” in the U.S., were a truly intelligent leader like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, and not a conceited, false-conservative buffoon like Trump, who is driving me even farther out of the Republican Party than the reprehensible “RINO” establishment in DC did. But for all his flaws, he (along with the authentically principled, if misguided, Bernie Sanders) has figured out one thing: there is a lot of discontent with the “way things are” out there and an intense desire to knock it down and start over.

In the U.K., the people had their vote. Agree with it or not, we should respect it. Or as more than one Obama voter obnoxiously and pompously stated after 2008: “Deal with it”.

As for the anti-establishment sentiment here, I refuse to support a candidate entirely devoid of integrity, whether “establishment” (HRC) or pretending to be anti-establishment (Trump). I will not play that binary-choice game anymore. Hillary and Bill Clinton (and they are a package deal, remember) are classic corporate-globalist tools (not to mention corrupt as hell), and Trump is simply deranged. Neither gives a whit about the Constitution in full; either would ratchet domestic spying and Constitutional evasion to new levels. I’ll be voting third-party; hence, don’t blame me for whatever happens when either of those two egomaniacal head cases attains the presidency.

Elitist Double Standards? You Tell Me!

by Leave a Comment

The screen capture below (at the bottom, due to layout limitations) is from a rather ironic, public-domain web posting that is currently freely available online at the State Department, from 2012, when a particular employee worked there who since has resigned to pursue elected office.

In that light, I have three questions:

  1. 22 e-mails from a State Department employee’s personal, non-secured server are being declared “Top Secret” and withheld in full (not even in redacted form) from we the taxpayers. Since official classification is not just based on title or identification but on content, why is this declaration by the very same State Department for which the employee worked not sufficient by itself for prosecution?
  2. At least one of that State Department employee’s e-mails, placed on purpose on a non-secure personal server, contained information identified as “HCS-O,” which is the intelligence code for human spying. Since classification is not just based on content but on title or identification, why is this not sufficient by itself for prosecution?
  3. Who in State Department is going to be charged and jailed for contempt of court for open defiance of the Federal court order by releasing only a small minority (1,000 pages out of an 8,000-page batch) of that employee’s e-mails before the deadline?

Bonus question (phrased three ways…answer either or all):

I did not name the employee on purpose because that person’s name should not matter to the ostensibly celebrity-blind scales of justice. SO…

    a) What do you think would happen to any non-famous, low-level employee who conducted sensitive government business (including using classified-level content) on a non-secure, personal e-mail server with 1,300 messages taken all, or in part, from classified documents?

    b) Put another way, would/should that hypothetical grunt be given the exact same treatment, in strict equivalence, as the person now being investigated? Or

    c) Put another way, is/should there be a double standard for high-level, corporately funded managerial elites and ordinary government employees?