Author: Diane Griffin

Diane is a writer of Fantasy, an intermittent blogger, and a generator of nonsense.

Tulsi Gabbard is a Fighter: She Could Be Just What This Country Needs Right Now

Tulsi Gabbard found out yesterday that she will not be included in the third Democratic Presidential Debate, having met the fundraising requirement to be included — at least 130,000 unique donors to her campaign — but failed to meed the polling requirement of at least 2% support in four qualifying polls, only one poll from each polling entity can count: the polls must either be national polls, or they must be from one of the first four “early” states — Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, or South Carolina.

On Five Thirty Eight blog, where they aggregate polls, I counted 8 national polls and 7 polls in early states where Tulsi scored 2% or higher. The question is, why don’t more of these polls count? What criteria did the DNC use to select which polls they would use to qualify candidates? Looking at the list there are certainly some polls that are more reputable than others, certainly, but why didn’t the Emerson College poll count, for example? No one outside of the DNC inner circle knows.

Where other candidates may have used not meeting the criteria established by the DNC as a reason to drop out of the race, Gabbard seems to have only gotten more determined. She went on Fox News and spoke to Tucker Carlson about the need for transparency the same day that the debate participants were announced (yesterday, as of this writing). While some may look sideways at her choice of venue, it is clear to those of us who are watching her campaign at all closely that she would not have been able to get on MSNBC to discuss this issue. If she’d been brought on at all, the topic of conversation would likely have been “Assad apologist” beginning to end. MSNBC is not known to be particularly supportive of progressives.

Below is a clip from her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.

A Few Thoughts on the 2020 Presidential Race: August 27, 2019

The recent Monmouth University poll showing Bernie Sanders (20%), Elizabeth Warren (20%) and Joe Biden (19%) in a statistical dead heat would seem to be an outlier. The other polls that have come out recently show Biden as the frontrunner, Bernie Sanders in second place, and Elizabeth Warren running about 2-5% behind Bernie. I wonder what difference in methodology produced this poll’s results, which I believe to be more accurate than most current polling.

As of now, it appears to me as if this is a three-way race. All of the others with hats still in the ring are markedly behind, and barring some surprise, will stay that way. Of the three, my preference is definitely Bernie, but I could see myself holding my nose and accepting EW as a compromise. There is no way in hell I will be voting for Joe Biden. If Biden becomes the nominee, I’ll be voting Green.

Just so we’re clear.

Biden is unacceptable to me for the following reasons: first and foremost, I believe Anita Hill. Biden was the chair of the judiciary committee for the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and his performance in that instance was abysmal. Second, Biden has told us already that if he becomes President, nothing will change. He’s clearly beholden to the corporate interests who are funding his campaign, who have funded virtually all of his campaigns, and that is who he will answer to as president. I also perceive him to be a white liberal-style racist, regardless of the fact that he was Obama’s veep.

Elizabeth Warren does not thrill me. There are things I like about her, but I see her playing footsie with the Oligarchs. I think that’s her lane. She is pretty far on the left end of the spectrum (which is actually pretty moderate in comparison the rest of the world’s politics), but she has very carefully positioned herself just to the right of Bernie Sanders. That, in combination with her efforts to show herself to be willing to work with the Old Boys, is smart strategy. I definitely see her path to the nomination, and it’s crafty of her to find it and hew it out for herself. The real question with Warren is, how beholden will she be to those corporate interests? How much of her carefully-thought-out agenda will she be able to accomplish?

Bernie, on the other hand, is a well-known quantity. He’s had the same belief system since the 60s. He’s not inflexible, but you always know where Bernie’s coming from. He’s a classic New Dealer. He also has an uncanny gift for being right on the issues. Remember that internet meme, “For every mistake this country has made, there’s a video of Bernie Sanders trying to stop it”? That’s who he is. It shouldn’t be a rare thing, to live your life with conviction the way Bernie has, but in this world, at this time, it is. His positions come from that deep moral conviction, and he has backbone.

He’s 77 years old, a year and two months older than Joe Biden. But where Biden appears to be suffering some cognitive decline (face it, he is!) Bernie is as lucid and quick as a president should be. I think he’ll be that way if he lives to be 100. There is no evidence of old brain that I can see, and he’s also healthy and physically active. I honestly believe he could do two terms.

The question is, can he convince the country that he could withstand the vicissitudes of office? That’s a heavier lift. Possibly too heavy. The other hard sell in this country is to get people to understand that his policies will work. This is one way that Warren is beating Bernie right now. She is making the case for her competency to do the things she has laid out.

Bernie has that competency, but can he get the public to see that? He has to, if he’s to win.

bernie meme

Thoughts after reading Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire by Judith Herrin

I appreciate Herrin’s activism on behalf of the Romans of Constantinople, and as often happens when I delve into history, I find that I appreciate Western Europe and the way it has acted in the history of the world less and less.

Think about what comes to mind when you hear the word “Byzantine” used as an adjective: a weak, decadent society that collapsed under the weight of its own corruption, with a huge and inefficient bureaucracy and too much of its energy spent on creating over-complicated and obscure art at the expense of running its own affairs. Before I became fascinated with it and began exploring, this is the impression my education had left me with.

Absolutely nothing I’ve read in the period of time it’s taken me to get through the three histories I’ve read — one of them contemporary (Anna Komnene’s The Alexiad), one written about 50 years ago (Vryonis Speros’ Byzantium and Europe), and this one, written in the last decade — confirms that set of stereotypes in any way. One of the things Herrin accomplishes with her fascinating popular history of that great, lost civilization is to delineate the history and meaning of that false negative view of the Eastern Roman Empire, and another is to overturn it completely. Even in its final throes, the empire was dynamic and progressive.

It seems certain that Europe as we know it would not exist had it not been for the efforts of the medieval Romans. When the first muslim jihad spread like wildfire across the world, overtaking the Persians, the cities of Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and flowing across northern Africa and into the Iberian peninsula, the Byzantines stood as a bulwark against their advances into Europe from the east. From the 7th century through to the mid-15th, they stood in the way of all incursions from that direction, allowing western Europe to find its footing in the wake of the collapse of the western Romans at the hands of the various Germanic tribes — Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and others.

All through the history of the eastern Empire, there was world-changing brilliance. At the very end, one of its great thinkers, the philosopher George Gemistes Plethon, helped bring to Western Europe the ideas and thoughtfulness of the classical Greeks, including Aristotle and Plato. The west might not even know about these crucial thinkers were it not for his efforts. Plethon died in Mistras in the year before the Ottoman Turks captured the capitol, Constantinople.

He had been active in the efforts to save the Empire  in its final years by aligning the see in Constantinople with the Latin Church. Even then, in the midst of negotiations which appeared at first to have been successful, western Europe’s prejudices and intentional misunderstandings were evident, and the agreement brought back from those meetings with the Latin church were not embraced by the Empire. As a result, the last vestiges of the Empire were consumed in just a few years’ time.

The Byzantines were a cosmopolitan, diverse, literate society. They were patriarchal, but women held power there. There were a few women, such as Zoe and Theodora, sisters who held power in the 11th century, A different Theodora in the 9th, Irene who held power in the 8th, and others as well, who sat on the Byzantine throne.

Constantinople was, in its prime, the greatest city in the world, an unrivaled center for commerce and culture. At the heart of Byzantium was their church, While the Catholics in Rome sought to dominate the world, they forgot that it was Byzantium that sustained them, that it was Constantine himself, beginning with the Ecumenical council he called in 325 CE that created the structure in which they exist. And today, there is still a see that is centered there. Bartholomew I, 270th Archbishop of Constantinople, Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, still reigns in modern-day Istanbul, at the center of a very small Greek community still living there.

If we look, we can see many ways in which the Byzantines are still with us, and that is at the heart of my fascination with them.

 

Posting On My Blog About Posting On My Blog About Me

I perceive that my writing energy, what of it there is, is being spent on correspondence. I wish this was not so, or that I was devoting more time to writing than I am. This is most apparent on Facebook, and to a lesser degree, on Twitter.

I think my twitter is super boring. I hate that I’ve let it become about leftist politics and the Democratic Primary horse race, which is already such a sh*t show that I can’t believe it. I really don’t like centrist Democrats. They’re so full of it.

The thing that’s annoying me the most is the seemingly successful smear job they’re doing on Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s get this straight: The candidate who is basing her campaign on the need to stop doing foreign regime change wars is, somehow, an imperialist. Also, someone with a 100% score from the HRC is a secret homophobe.

Got it.

And so it gets harder and harder to look at social media, because most of my friends are het up about politics, because politics is such a sh*t show right now, and because I’m also het up about politics, and sometimes I just don’t have the heart for it. I don’t even have the will to finish an argument when I start one. This stuff is BORING.

I’m sick of idiots, and I’m sick of the led-around-by-the-nose centrists who are bound to go fight for Biden Man (as I call him) when Biden Man is the latest example of the sort of Democratic pol who is, at heart, more responsible for Trompe (as I call him) than any other faction in the country, including his own base.

But I digress, egregiously.

I’m depressed, and therefore more distractible than usual, and the human race is draining me of hope right now. There are a couple of factors here. One is that I am feeling a bit rudderless about my writing, and less than productive. It’s hard to remember that I’ve done a couple of things since graduating, and that I can, if I choose to, keep the momentum going. I’m making that choice.

The other is that I am lonely and feeling spiritually dark. I’ve been embracing my inner goth. Winter is really hard for me, and it takes until around this time of year to get over it. So I think I have a one or two month window in which to be as productive as possible, then I have to start splitting time with the film fest I program for.

I have to start being very strategic with my time. I am picking projects I really want to do, and putting as much love into them as I can. That’s the way I know of to keep myself going. I need to be excited about what I’m working on. That’s why the write-every-day experiment that I tried earlier this spring failed so badly — I had to force myself to the computer every day, and that sort of thing just will not work with me. It’s a problem, but it’s the truth.