Tag: Politics

Zeitgeist 8/25/26

The last week of August is always weird…

It’s that quiet time when nothing is really happening, but the whole world seems to be full of a kind of denied anticipation/dread of what comes next. We’re just under two weeks out from a delayed American Labor Day — this year it lands on the last day it can mathematically be, September 7th. It feels like we’re getting an extra week of “summer.”

Kids are waiting for school to start. The produce section at the local grocery store is still full of stone fruit and tons of obviously-local leafy greens, but the greens are a little bit leggy and the peaches are taking on that late-season sweetness that I wait for the whole year, even though it means they’re about to disappear from the farm stands.

I still haven’t seen any Hallowe’en candy® or heard anyone mention Pumpkin Spiced Everything®. That will all magically appear on September 8th, and at that point, we’ll all start wearing our fall colors and anticipatorally bringing along a sweater, just in case.

Some years, I’ve even noticed that the weather will change, as if on cue. These long-but-shortening Summer days will be and feel of the season almost past, and then that one week the feeling in the air will be different. The air will be noticeably cooler, you’ll take note of a few harbinger trees which are starting to take on their fall colors. City streets will be busier, the highways less so.

And then at the end of the month there’ll come an entire week of rain every day, and on the other side of that, those just-in-case sweaters will come out of our bags and get pulled over our shoulders. It’s all downhill from then on.

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Speaking of downhill,

AI slop, obvi.

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Speaking of downhill, the American Empire looks to be toast. Stinky Don and his Stupid Minions are making every destructive wrong decision they can come up with, and it’s costing us in every corner of the world. The economy is still appearing to hold up, though not well, but all of the underpinnings are being eaten away at a precipitous clip. (How are those “strategic reserves” hanging in, Donny boy?)

The cracks are beginning to appear domestically, but on the international stage, things are much worse, as evinced by the fact that we’ve just learned that 15 US military bases around the Persian Gulf have been completely obliterated. We are not welcome there. Even the Saudis aren’t defending us, having restricted access to their airspace to US armed forces in response to ongoing attacks from Iran (on US bases on Saudi soil, and due to Irans rising power.)

We continue to burn through our allyships and Pumpkinhead is trying hard to align the US with rogue pariah nations who have the authoritarian leadership style he obviously wants to instill here at home. He is more unpopular with the electorate here than he was after the January 6th, 2021 riot in DC. None of this is sustainable. If he somehow manages to eke out a win* in the midterms, I can’t imagine how this country will ever recover. Our only hope is to check his power now. A shortfall, no matter how compromised the election might be, will only encourage these morons to push all of their terrible policies into overdrive.

As it is, some revision of the world order is in progress, and this country is going to have to face up to its new reality. I hope we can find some way to minimize the damage being done, but I’m not hopeful.

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It’s a beautiful, bright morning, I’m working on the blog I enjoy writing, I have my second cup of coffee here on the desk sitting on one of my old COVID masks which I now use as a coaster. I love my home and I’m not willing to be chased out of it.

Hope you are the same.

Ameleks

Sometimes the world won’t leave me alone.

The other night, I woke up from a dream about Netanyahu callling the Palestinians Ameleks, and how that was a justifucation for destroying them. I did something I almost never do, and came into my office, got on my computer and searched the term “Amelek.” Here’s what I learned:

The Torah and the Old Testament say that when the people of Israel were walking through the desert to return to their own land after being delivered from slavery in Egypt, they were attacked by the Ameleks. This act made the Ameleks the enemies of God, in the eyes of the Hebrews. But then, they thought that God himself had created the Ameleks to cause the Hebrews misery. It’s all very confusing and contradictory, but that’s how they thought.

In the Bible/Torah, it says if Moses kept his staff held high while the battle continued, the Israelites would win. If he let it drop, the Ameleks would win. Aaron and Tur helped Moses keep his staff high. This is not in any way superstition or homoerotic symbolism. Get your minds out of the gutter, heathens.

The Ameleks were a nomadic people who mostly lived in and around Canaan, which is in the southern part of modern-day Israel. They had moved into the area because of the void left by the Hebrew tribes being enslaved in Egypt.

“Amelek” is what Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have called the Palestinians. The Israelis think the Palestinians are the enemies of God. It doesn’t matter, though, because the Palestinians can’t be the Ameleks, because, over the course of generations, thousands of years ago, the Hebrews wiped out all the Ameleks.

Somehow we need to turn away from the path we’re trundling down as a species. We’re fixin to kill the world and ourselves with it if we don’t straighten up. The ideals and morals of the ruling class of this time are bereft of value and actively destructive. We have to change course.

And patterning behavior after tribal disputes from thousands of years ago doesn’t seem like a very good way to conduct ourselves. Especially when those tribal disputes ended with the death of an entire people.

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Arrogant

In a recent thread on a social media site, I posted a link to an article on The Intercept which includes a recording of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer trying to brow-beat progressive Democratic primary candidate Levi Tillemann into getting out of the of the race for the Colorado’s 6th Congressional District in favor of the DCCC’s preferred candidate, high-powered corporate lawyer Jason Crow. I offered it as evidence that the Democratic Party is anything but democratic.

Anyone who has noted the behavior of the DCCC and the DNC for the last few years knows of any number of instances where the party leadership has quashed (or attempted to quash) progressive and leftist voices from prominence within the party, all the while demanding that all progressives fall in line with their centrist views and preferred candidates. For many, including myself, this pattern of behavior has been disturbing as well as alienating. Some of us have begun organizing within the party under the banner “Justice Democrats,” others have left the part altogether, some for the Green Party, others for the Democratic Socialists and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, publicly questioning the motives and actions of the Democratic party leadership inspires many rank-and-file Democrats to shout down any criticism of the party and/or its methods. Two years out from the 2016 election, woe be to anyone who has the temerity to mention that they supported Jill Stein, as I did and still do, or, in some circles, brings up Bernie Sanders.

I have been told that I am personally responsible for the Trompe presidency. I’ve been called a self-centered child. No matter that my gender is female, I have been called a “Bernie Bro” more than a few times. I’ve been told repeatedly, as I continue to stand up for myself, that I am arrogant. I have recently been told that the country is “in flames” because of my support of, and vote for, the Green Party’s presidential candidate.

At the point where any discussion of non-support for the Democratic Party and/or its leadership reaches this level of rhetoric, the possibility of further reasonable discourse would appear to have been trashed. You will almost certainly be told, as Steny Hoyer helpfully explained to Levi Tillemann, that you don’t understand “how the world works.”

I created this post in response to such a discussion. The first draft of it was filled with the hurt and anger I felt, mixed with amusement when the person I was having an exchange with concluded their final post in the thread with “Up yours!” My assumption, based on prior experience, was that I would be unfollowed and/or blocked. I also assumed that it then wouldn’t matter what I said or did, there would be no way to reach yet another centrist Democrat, and that political discussions of any sort are no longer worthwhile: everyone is so wrapped up in narrative that an actual discussion of the merits of any particular point of view aren’t productive: either we already agree or I won’t be listened to because there is no incentive to go beyond one’s tribal viewpoint.

But the person I had had the argument surprised me: they reached out via private message, explaining their point of view, and when I sent a thoughtful response, they thanked me for it. I found that hopeful.

We are still very far from being on the same page in our opinions, but I think that at the end of this minor crisis in our long-distance friendship, we found that the friendship is still intact, and we are also more likely to hear each other’s views without perceiving them as an attack or threat. The risk turned out, in this case, to be worth taking, and neither of us has had to back down from our positions in order to move forward.

What this means for situations like the Hoyer/Tillemann exchange above is less clear. My hope is that Levi Tillemann stays in the race for the Colorado 6th. I believe that he will, but I say that from clear across the country and from outside the Democratic Party. I’d be more willing to support Democratic candidates if I knew that the DCCC and DNC were allowing the voters to choose their candidates rather than the party leadership dictating to those voters who their candidates should be.

In truth, I believe that the party would be stronger, the country would be stronger, the candidates the party picks will be stronger for having earned the voters’ support through cultivating a more direct and authentic connection with the voters, rather than fishing for advertising $$$ via the DCCC and the DNC.