25 Dems vote to outlaw boycotting Israel

Good. Now we know who to primary in the next election. And who to not support in the Dem primary for President.

Tulsi Gabbard on AIPAC

She posted the meme below with this comment: "We need to support fellow progressives like Ilhan Omar when they speak out against corporatist organizations like AIPAC. Speaking out against AIPAC is NOT anti-Semitic." Repeat incessantly: "It's all about the Benjamins baby."

Why the Green New Deal frightens regressives

Samantha Bee explains. The degree to which regressives are flipping out is the degree to which the Green New Deal makes perfect and necessary sense. Yes, that is a reasonable and accurate indicator.

Omar's truth about AIPAC: "It's all about the Benjamins baby."

But corrupt establishment Dems can't stand the truth, which is that AIPAC buys them off to promote inhumane Israeli policy. So they forced Omar to apologize even though her truth was in no way anti-Semitic; it was truth about the money influence. One of the few progressive Dems, Haaland of NM, got it right, saying Omar's statements referred to money in politics, nothing else. That establishment Dems are calling it anti-Semitic is just a ruse to detract from the truth of Omar's accurate statement, so I'll repeat it here: "It's all about the Benjamins baby."

And remember: Those same corrupt Dems are trying to pass a law to make it illegal to even talk about boycotting Israeli's inhumane policy. WTF is up with that? "It's all about the Benjamins baby."

AOC on democratic socialism

"It's not about a government takeover; it's about how much do workers have a say in your business. […] It's about a more nuanced understanding about how our economy should work." Once again she frames it in a way that is acceptable to most Americans while debunking the regressive, negative framing. You can take or leave the commentary following her statement.

Colbert's Russian Roundup

He catches us up on how they try to hack our brains. Just being aware of it helps us to question the information we receive.

When politicians say 'free trade' it's really public theft

The article innocuously calls it upward redistribution but let's frame it accurately: Public theft.

"In the real world what passes for 'free trade' is pretty much any policy that redistributes income upward […] a central component of every trade deal for the last quarter-century, is a very costly form of protectionism. Needless to say, the beneficiaries of this protectionism tend to be in the high end of income distribution. […] The long and short in this story is that 'free trade,' as it appears in Washington policy debates, is pretty much whatever the rich and powerful want it to be. It has nothing to do with the economic concept of free trade; it is about redistributing more money from everyone else to them."

Bill and Melinda Gates on taxes

They are for fair tax rates on the wealthy as explained in this interview. This is how responsible billionaires talk about the issue. They also donate a lot of money to worth causes because as Melinda said the wealthy have a responsibility to give back to the community that gave them so much.

Pissed on economics in one image

Let's call it what it is: Pissed on economics.

Language v. experience debate

Bruce started this FB and Ning thread. My initial response is below. See the links for much more.

That discussion is the straw that broke my IC back. To me they are a bunch of dogmatic, religious fundamentalists of the privileged access to direct and superior experience variety. It's almost as bad as trying to reason with a Dumpster, since both denigrate valid reasoning.

At least a few of the postmetaphysicians in this forum agree with the following critique:

"Two main aspects of Derrida's thinking regarding phenomenology remain clear. Firstly, he thinks that the phenomenological emphasis upon the immediacy of experience is the new transcendental illusion, and secondly, he argues that despite its best intents, phenomenology cannot be anything other than a metaphysics. In this context, Derrida defines metaphysics as the science of presence, as for him (as for Heidegger), all metaphysics privileges presence, or that which is. […] Phenomenology is a metaphysics of presence because it unwittingly relies upon the notion of an indivisible self-presence, or in the case of Husserl, the possibility of an exact internal adequation with oneself."

And consistent with Balder, according to Caputo:

"Deconstruction is an experience of the impossible, which means that différance is an 'absolutely general condition' of experience. […] Différance is not an absolute but a point of view whose fruitfulness Derrida invites us to consider and explore. It is not an intellectual intuition but a framework or condition of experience. That does not reduce it to a theory of mere appearances as opposed to a noumenal being outside time and space […] since the point of departure of phenomenology, no less than deconstruction, is to undo the phenomonal/noumenal binarity."