Sunday, April 22, 2012
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Ted Nugent should be in jail
updated 5:33 AM EDT, Thu April 19, 2012
Editor's note: LZ
Granderson, who writes a weekly column for CNN.com, was named journalist
of the year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association and
a 2011 Online Journalism Award finalist for commentary. He is a senior
writer and columnist for ESPN the Magazine and ESPN.com. Follow him on
Twitter: @locs_n_laughs.
Not because he doesn't
like Barack Obama but because he got up in front of a group of people
and insinuated he would attempt to assassinate Obama if he's re-elected.
Or let's put it this way: A man with a truckload of guns has threatened
the life of our president while the country's at war.
Nugent's words were: "If
Barack Obama is elected, I'll either be dead or in jail this time next
year," which sounds to me like he's open to directing his disapproval of
Obama in a way that is violent and unlawful. When you see that
statement next to Nugent comparing Obama and his colleagues to coyotes
that needed to be shot, as well as the need to "ride into that
battlefield and chop their heads off in November," I don't see how that
rant cannot be looked upon as a threat on the president's life.
I don't care how you feel
about Nugent's music or Obama's policies, it seems that if there were a
First Amendment line to cross, that would be it. And yet, the reality
is the Secret Service will spend a little time investigating Nugent,
determine he's not a true threat, and move on. If the Supreme Court can
rule in favor of an 18-year-old man who, in voicing his opposition to
being drafted for the Vietnam War, said: "If they ever make me carry a
rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ," then it's
doubtful anything is going to happen to Nugent.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Tea Baggers in Full On Meltdown
Notice: Free Republic has been in full rebellion mode since 2008 and will remain so for the duration
April 11, 2012 | Jim Robinson
Posted on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 9:04:00 PM by Jim Robinson
No more Doles!! No more McCains!! No more RINOS!!
NO ROMNEY!!
Those who cannot stomach rebellion might as well start looking for a new home on the net!!
Those who have ignored my hundreds of posts on this crucial issue or who have doubted me these last three or four years might as well get used to it. FR will never support the abortionist, homosexualist, socialist, mandate loving, constitution trampling liar Mitt Romney.
In case you haven't noticed, a TEA Party rebellion is on and Free Republic signed on years ago. There is no turning back. No more crap from the GOP-e!! They've screwed us for the last time!! Karl Rove and Mitt Romney, et al, loathe conservatism and loathe the tea party and took it upon themselves to use their money and connections to destroy nearly every one of our conservative tea party candidates while pushing their big government RINOS. That makes them the enemy. I will not reward that betrayal by giving them my support or my vote.
FR is and will remain a pro-life, pro-limited government conservative site!!
We are beholden to NO ONE!! We bow to no kings!! We bow to NO RINOS!!
I'd rather fight and die like a man than bend over and be screwed by a RINO!! I refuse to kiss Karl Rove or Mitt Romney's rings!! They can kiss my rosy red ass instead!!
FUMR!! FUGOP!!
Long live the rebellion!!
Hope my message is clear.
FreeRepublic.com
Monday, April 9, 2012
Let the Worst States Secede--Goodbye South Carolina, Arizona, and Texas
All states are not created equal, as this summer's performances in Congress
and other political platforms show anew. Some states are pretty great;
some are just plain trouble. Take the following three, for example:
South Carolina has been a plague on the house of the Republic since the start. Fiercely protective of slavery even as a colony, it was the first state to secede from the Union. Apparently when you go down there, men still wax proudly about the firing on Fort Sumter, the final catalyst for the Civil War. And then there was the earlier beating in the Capitol: A South Carolina congressman back in those divided days caned Charles Sumner, the leading abolitionist senator from Massachusetts. In the 20th century, South Carolina sent arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond to Washington decade after decade to represent the Palmetto State. Right now, the state has given us two outspoken Republican senators--Lindsay Graham and freshman Jim DeMint. Graham just denounced immigrants who come to this country, as he delicately put it, "to drop a child." That degradation of political discourse shocked even the jaded in the politerati--but outrage is nothing new to defiant South Carolina, the last to surrender, flying that Confederate flag even to this day. Call me a damn Yankee, but South Carolina is always on the wrong side of history. [See who supports Graham.]
You can keep Arizona, too. Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, brought the Grand Canyon state to a pretty pass by preparing to enforce harsh new immigration laws, parts of which were just struck down as unconstitutional by a judge. This is the hottest summer anyone can remember in that desert--and I don't mean the soaring temperatures. The way Brewer proposes to pursue and question people suspected of being illegal immigrants is pretty much un-American--and another sad outcome of how we as a populace have lost our bearings since September 11, 2001. (More on that to come in future posts.) The two Arizona senators, Republicans Jon Kyl and John McCain, are also part of the problem in Washington. Kyl, the minority whip, is aggressively obstructionist and persuades or coerces others not to give a glimmer of daylight to anyone or anything favored by President Obama. His opposition to confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is the latest case in point. As for McCain, he has changed his stance on so many issues that he is not the man he used to be in 2000. The once cheerful maverick is now running hard just to win re-election--just to be senator--but it's not clear what for anymore. [See who donated the most to McCain's campaign.]
(con't) Let the Worst States Secede--Goodbye South Carolina, Arizona, and Texas
South Carolina has been a plague on the house of the Republic since the start. Fiercely protective of slavery even as a colony, it was the first state to secede from the Union. Apparently when you go down there, men still wax proudly about the firing on Fort Sumter, the final catalyst for the Civil War. And then there was the earlier beating in the Capitol: A South Carolina congressman back in those divided days caned Charles Sumner, the leading abolitionist senator from Massachusetts. In the 20th century, South Carolina sent arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond to Washington decade after decade to represent the Palmetto State. Right now, the state has given us two outspoken Republican senators--Lindsay Graham and freshman Jim DeMint. Graham just denounced immigrants who come to this country, as he delicately put it, "to drop a child." That degradation of political discourse shocked even the jaded in the politerati--but outrage is nothing new to defiant South Carolina, the last to surrender, flying that Confederate flag even to this day. Call me a damn Yankee, but South Carolina is always on the wrong side of history. [See who supports Graham.]
You can keep Arizona, too. Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, brought the Grand Canyon state to a pretty pass by preparing to enforce harsh new immigration laws, parts of which were just struck down as unconstitutional by a judge. This is the hottest summer anyone can remember in that desert--and I don't mean the soaring temperatures. The way Brewer proposes to pursue and question people suspected of being illegal immigrants is pretty much un-American--and another sad outcome of how we as a populace have lost our bearings since September 11, 2001. (More on that to come in future posts.) The two Arizona senators, Republicans Jon Kyl and John McCain, are also part of the problem in Washington. Kyl, the minority whip, is aggressively obstructionist and persuades or coerces others not to give a glimmer of daylight to anyone or anything favored by President Obama. His opposition to confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court is the latest case in point. As for McCain, he has changed his stance on so many issues that he is not the man he used to be in 2000. The once cheerful maverick is now running hard just to win re-election--just to be senator--but it's not clear what for anymore. [See who donated the most to McCain's campaign.]
(con't) Let the Worst States Secede--Goodbye South Carolina, Arizona, and Texas
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Republicans Really Are Fascist
Far-right, extreme right, hard right, radical right, and ultra-right are terms used to discuss the qualitative or quantitative position a group or person occupies within right-wing politics. Far right politics involves support of strong or complete social hierarchy in society, and supports supremacy
of certain individuals or groups deemed to be innately superior who are
to be more valued than those deemed to be innately inferior.[1]
The far right's advocacy of supremacism is based on what it perceives
as innate characteristics of people that cannot be changed.[2] This has been confused with the centre right's criticism of inferior behaviour, such as laziness and decadence, that lead people to inferior situations in comparison to others.[3]
The centre right - unlike the far right - claims that this is not
innate and that people can end their behavioural inferiority through
changing their habits and choices of behaviour.[4]
The far right claims that superior people should proportionally have greater rights than inferior people.[5] The far right has historically supported elitist society based on belief of the legitimacy of the rule of a claimed superior minority over the inferior masses; and that the superior minority by virtue of their superiority have the right to make mandatory decisions upon the inferior masses that decide what roles certain elements of the masses are to pursue and other issues.[6]
Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are deemed inferior and undesirable.[7] At the most extreme, far-right movements have pursued oppression and genocide against groups of people on the basis of their alleged inferiority.[8] Far right politics commonly includes authoritarianism, nativism, racism and xenophobia.[9]
Far right is commonly associated with persons or groups who hold extreme nationalist, xenophobic, racist, religious fundamentalist, or reactionary views.[10] Typically the term is applied to fascists and neo-Nazis,[11] although there is a running dispute among scholars about where fascism resides along the left/right spectrum.[12][13][14][15] However major elements of fascism have been deemed as clearly far right, such as its goals of the right of superior people to dominate while purging society of claimed inferior elements; and in the case of Nazism, genocide of people deemed to be inferior.[16]
Source: Far-right politics
The far right claims that superior people should proportionally have greater rights than inferior people.[5] The far right has historically supported elitist society based on belief of the legitimacy of the rule of a claimed superior minority over the inferior masses; and that the superior minority by virtue of their superiority have the right to make mandatory decisions upon the inferior masses that decide what roles certain elements of the masses are to pursue and other issues.[6]
Far-right politics may involve anti-immigration and anti-integration stances towards groups that are deemed inferior and undesirable.[7] At the most extreme, far-right movements have pursued oppression and genocide against groups of people on the basis of their alleged inferiority.[8] Far right politics commonly includes authoritarianism, nativism, racism and xenophobia.[9]
Far right is commonly associated with persons or groups who hold extreme nationalist, xenophobic, racist, religious fundamentalist, or reactionary views.[10] Typically the term is applied to fascists and neo-Nazis,[11] although there is a running dispute among scholars about where fascism resides along the left/right spectrum.[12][13][14][15] However major elements of fascism have been deemed as clearly far right, such as its goals of the right of superior people to dominate while purging society of claimed inferior elements; and in the case of Nazism, genocide of people deemed to be inferior.[16]
Source: Far-right politics
Saturday, February 18, 2012
The Banality of Evil
by Edward S. Herman
The concept of the banality of evil came into prominence following the publication of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt's thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.
Normalizing the Unthinkable
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. The late Herman Kahn spent a lifetime making nuclear war palatable (On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable), and this strangelovian phoney got very good press. ~
In an excellent article entitled "Normalizing the unthinkable," in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of March 1984, Lisa Peattie described how in the Nazi death camps work was "normalized" for the long-term prisoners as well as regular personnel: "[P]rison plumbers laid the water pipe in the crematorium and prison electricians wired the fences. The camp managers maintained standards and orderly process. The cobblestones which paved the crematorium yard at Auschwitz had to be perfectly scrubbed." Peattie focused on the parallel between routinization in the death camps and the preparations for nuclear war, where the "unthinkable" is organized and prepared for in a division of labor participated in by people at many levels. Distance from execution helps render responsibility hazy. "Adolph Eichmann was a thoroughly responsible person, according to his understanding of responsibility. For him, it was clear that the heads of state set policy. His role was to implement, and fortunately, he felt, it was never part of his job actually to have to kill anyone."
Peattie noted that the head of MlT's main military research lab in the 1960s argued that "their concern was development, not use, of technology." Just as in the death camps, in weapons labs and production facilities, resources are allocated on the basis of effective participation in the larger system, workers derive support from interactions with others in the mutual effort, and complicity is obscured by the routineness of the work, interdependence, and distance from the results.
Peattie also pointed out how, given the unparalleled disaster that would follow nuclear war, "resort is made to rendering the system playfully, via models and games." There is also a vocabulary developed to help render the unthinkable palatable: "incidents," "vulnerability indexes," "weapons impacts," and "resource availability." She doesn't mention it, but our old friend "collateral damage," used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, came out of the nukespeak tradition.
(con't) The Banality of Evil
The concept of the banality of evil came into prominence following the publication of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt's thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.
Normalizing the Unthinkable
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. The late Herman Kahn spent a lifetime making nuclear war palatable (On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable), and this strangelovian phoney got very good press. ~
In an excellent article entitled "Normalizing the unthinkable," in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of March 1984, Lisa Peattie described how in the Nazi death camps work was "normalized" for the long-term prisoners as well as regular personnel: "[P]rison plumbers laid the water pipe in the crematorium and prison electricians wired the fences. The camp managers maintained standards and orderly process. The cobblestones which paved the crematorium yard at Auschwitz had to be perfectly scrubbed." Peattie focused on the parallel between routinization in the death camps and the preparations for nuclear war, where the "unthinkable" is organized and prepared for in a division of labor participated in by people at many levels. Distance from execution helps render responsibility hazy. "Adolph Eichmann was a thoroughly responsible person, according to his understanding of responsibility. For him, it was clear that the heads of state set policy. His role was to implement, and fortunately, he felt, it was never part of his job actually to have to kill anyone."
Peattie noted that the head of MlT's main military research lab in the 1960s argued that "their concern was development, not use, of technology." Just as in the death camps, in weapons labs and production facilities, resources are allocated on the basis of effective participation in the larger system, workers derive support from interactions with others in the mutual effort, and complicity is obscured by the routineness of the work, interdependence, and distance from the results.
Peattie also pointed out how, given the unparalleled disaster that would follow nuclear war, "resort is made to rendering the system playfully, via models and games." There is also a vocabulary developed to help render the unthinkable palatable: "incidents," "vulnerability indexes," "weapons impacts," and "resource availability." She doesn't mention it, but our old friend "collateral damage," used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, came out of the nukespeak tradition.
(con't) The Banality of Evil
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