The Invisible Counterpoint

Original Article:  Kudos to Hillary for playing the woman card: If people are going to call her a witch, she’ll tell them she’s Hermione Granger FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2016 3:23 PM  Aunt Messy   Emporium   turney333   Jayne Cullen  Just for you, Aunt Messy: The fact that Hillary and Chelsea wore different color dresses intrigues me as well. They weren't unified, part of one-another -- all white. It was a white and red "split". Maybe not a priming of good-and-bad-witch, pure-and-bad-blood split... something which will soon be displaced onto Trump, as he gets portrayed as a foreign Russian devil, with noticeable female attributes. But I wonder if they were encouraging us to see Chelsea as the blood on Hillary's hands: that with Hillary elected, the future of the young would be a sacrifice of blood.  A subconscious communication: if you're tired of pushy, uppity, disrespectful youth -- you don't need to go Trump Republican... Hillary will make sure...

Original Article:  His dark materials: After that diabolical, masterful performance, Donald Trump could easily end up president FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 6:09 PM  Christine B.   BrainDrain  Yeah, your point is one Steven Pinker would corroborate with his "Better Angels of Our Nature." Permalink

Original Article:  Don’t blame Brits for the Brexit: The EU strayed from its roots in post-war unity to become a neoliberal technocracy WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29, 2016 4:23 PM  E.L. Deflagrante   kumicho  "we do not get that the member nations are not US states, but nations with thousands of years of history" I always wonder when people talk about the importance of the length of time a country has been a country, if they're thinking that somehow a race's history gets passed on through the genes. It's like as if some serum was injected into each young child, so they're inextricably infected with the millions of voices of their ancestral heritage. Within each one is actually a Jungian legion! I'm sorry, but weren't they rather just playing with their X-boxes and listening to their Taylor Swift? How exactly was the Magna Carta, Shakespeare, Chesterton and Churchill lurking somehow, even within that? Maybe it's rather that if you've been well...

Original Article:  No, Syrian refugees didn’t rape a child in Idaho: Right-wing urban legend shows how ugly anti-refugee movement has become WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22, 2016 7:52 PM  susan sunflower   Emporium  Good point about the similarity between this case and the scapegoating of Jews as child-abductors. Referring specifically to Jews, this was a minority actually leaps ahead in terms of childrearing, true child care, than the rest of Germans -- they were the most progressive group in the country.

Andrew O’Hehir’s Salon article: Appetite for destruction: White America’s death wish is the source of Trump’s hidden support I s an “October surprise” that could put Donald Trump in the White House already baked into the American electorate? That’s the frightening question one could derive from this week’s column by Thomas B. Edsall, one of the most useful (and least ideologically hypnotized) contributors to the New York Times. We can’t be sure how many people really support Trump, Edsall reports, since there’s considerable evidence that they aren’t telling pollsters the truth. Voting for Trump, it appears, is something white people do in the shadows. It’s a forbidden desire that is both liberating and self-destructive, not unlike the married heterosexual who has a same-sex lover on the down-low, or the executive who powers through the day on crystal meth and OxyContin. On some level you know the whole thing can’t end well, but boy does it feel good right now.

Critical thinking about the nature of authority might induce us to wonder why those stories are invisible, or spun as dry policy questions for readers of the business pages, while so much bandwidth is occupied with making fun of a few vaccine loons. It might cause us to notice that treating people who feel genuine uncertainty about mainstream medicine as if they were low-achieving children only makes the problem worse, and that it’s absurd to assert that questioning the Catholic Church or the National Football League is good, but questioning the name-brand institutions of the scientific world is bad. (Andrew O'Hehir "Anti-vaxxers are not the enemy" ) Questioning the Catholic Church and the National Football League is done by society's more progressive people. They want to see a reduction in self-flaggelant philosophies and activities. Questioning science is generally done by society's more regressive. Ongoing societal advancement -- which to them is a b...

Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote about the Republican victories in the midterm election, saying essentially that it really doesn’t matter if one party wins or loses because without systematic change, either way we’re headed for doom. Specifically he wrote:  This is not a “seismic shift” in favor of the Republicans or the so-called conservative agenda, no matter what John Boehner and Mitch McConnell may say this week. Reading an off-year election result as an indicator of larger societal trends is like interpreting a blizzard as evidence against global warming. The political clock is already ticking toward 2016, when the pendulum will swing in the other direction and Democrats are nearly certain to win back some or all of what they just lost in Congress. If the human conundrum known as Hillary Clinton runs for president she will be the prohibitive favorite; Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. No, what the dire 2014 midterms re...

Andrew O’hehir writes: Is traditional masculinity — assuming for a moment that we have any idea what that term means — under attack? Some of its defenders certainly feel that way. … If the panicky, defensive identity crisis of America’s declining white majority is a principal driving force in our nation’s bitterly divided political and cultural life (as I discussed here a few weeks ago, in the wake of Ferguson), so is the rearguard defense of masculinity. When Rush Limbaugh complains that nanny-state regulations on conduct are “feminizing” football, or the national leader of an elite fraternity writes an op-ed blaming drunken young women as the real villains in a perceived campus rape epidemic (rather than, say, rapists), it’s hard to say which feels stronger — the cluelessness or the desperation. As with the Caucasian rush to define the cop who shot Michael Brown as simultaneously the hero and victim of that tragic episode, this circling of the wagons around em...

Andrew O’Hehir wrote: […] Instead, I’d rather go beneath the surface to look at the structural function of these stories – the role they play in the cultural economy – where I think we can identify even more intriguing similarities. Both “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games” are fundamentally works of propaganda disguised as fantasy or science fiction. They’re not propaganda on behalf of the left or the right, exactly, or at least not the way we generally use those words in America. They are propaganda for the ethos of individualism, the central ideology of consumer capitalism, which also undergirds both major political parties and almost all American public discourse. It’s an ideology that transcends notions of left and right and permeates the entire atmosphere with the seeming naturalness of oxygen in the air. But at least if we acknowledge that it is an ideology, we can begin to understand that it limits political action and political debate, and restricts the heated warfare bet...

The odd Celts (photo credit: wikipedia) Andrew O’Hehir wrote this: When the Provisional Irish Republican Army agreed to end its paramilitary insurgency (and/or terrorist campaign) against British rule in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday accords of 1998, it was unambiguously a good thing for the people of Ireland and their British next-door neighbors. It’s not like everything suddenly became hunky-dory in the long and troubled historical relationship between those islands, but the peace has largely held – splinter groups and isolated sectarian violence aside – and an era of relative normalcy and increasing prosperity has followed. Given the global context of the 21st century, an intractable religious-cum-nationalist dispute between two tiny groups of white people in the northwest corner of Europe looks pretty close to irrelevant. But the end of the IRA’s guerrilla war had a less salubrious effect on the Irish-American population, and I say that in full awareness that on th...