Jan. 25, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
12:06
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Kyle Kalinsky of SecularTalk has launched a new political movement called the Justice Democrats, which receives strong support from the young Turks. | |
| The main goal of this movement is to conquer the Democratic Party by electing candidates who will not take corporate money and pursue policies that benefit the public. | |
| I'll leave a link in the description to his launch video in which he explains the policies of this movement in detail. | |
| I broadly agree with all of these, and I particularly appreciated the rejection of false accusations of bigotry by recognising them as distinct from actual bigotry. | |
| I think that we should support this movement. | |
| Removing corporate influence from politics is an objectively beneficial result for the working and middle classes, who will be better able to exercise a voice in politics. | |
| This could provide a left-wing home for the Obama-Trump voters, who are voting for their economic futures over high-minded, ideological concerns. | |
| Having politicians funded by the electorate with an explicit ban on outside funding would be eminently beneficial for voters, and keep the minds of the politicians firmly focused on their needs first. | |
| None of the problems we have today would be magnified to the point they are now if the political systems of the West were actually sensitive to the concerns of the voters. | |
| In general terms, there is a disconnect between the voting public and the political classes, and I think in many ways that Trump and Brexit were a form of protest vote against a system that was offering only a slow decline while the political classes enriched themselves. | |
| The working classes, Alinsky's smoldering embers, felt it necessary to make their voices heard, and as Michael Moore predicted it would, it felt good. | |
| Not once in either election cycle did the left offer a positive vision of the future. | |
| To people who have experienced years of steady decline, this is an untenable prospect. | |
| Better a rocky and uncertain future than a guarantee of worsening prospects. | |
| At the very least, an uncertain future might end up better. | |
| The left categorically refused to listen, and it lost control of the British government and the American government. | |
| In 2017, it might well lose control of the French government, and there's a remote possibility of the Dutch. | |
| In terms of the culture war, this is a rout of such catastrophic proportions that it would have been inconceivable just one year ago. | |
| The left is still coming to terms with how little power and control they have left. | |
| Things are changing and the left doesn't like it, and this anger is being manifested in various acts of protest and civil disobedience, to the point where it's being termed a revolution. | |
| This is petty. | |
| The left lost fair and square, because they didn't respond to the concerns of the people of whom they were completely out of touch. | |
| Moral grandstanding replaced the action of addressing the issues and became the left's entire debate strategy. | |
| You might win an argument by screaming racist at someone, but you are not persuading anyone of the rightness of your argument. | |
| Worse, you're probably actively repelling people, because attacking someone's character, even when it's justified, does not refute their points. | |
| It's a form of social control, but it's not a form of changing people's minds. | |
| The only persuasion that took place was to firmly implant in the minds of observers that the people doing the screaming are totally intolerant of the other person. | |
| Worse still though, is that this will often be on the grounds of their race and gender. | |
| You can have any kind of justification you like as to why a particular race or gender is an issue for you, but people who haven't drunk your Kool-Aid only see an open display of bigotry. | |
| The kind of rampant, consistent disrespect displayed by the left towards Trump and his supporters is way beyond the bounds of decency, especially as people who are even slightly to the right of Stalin are realising that he's actually going to implement his nationalist agenda and, quote, put America first. | |
| This isn't a bad result for most people. | |
| So Trump looks all that much better by comparison to the shrieking leftists who look like hysterical children. | |
| At the time of writing, Trump has signed 10 executive orders. | |
| Some of these have been really good ideas. | |
| A regulation freeze, a federal hiring freeze, expediting permits for infrastructure are all good, decent, sensible bits of administration. | |
| Allowing the Dakota and Keystone pipelines to go ahead and demanding the hiring of American workers is contentious, but it's still in keeping with Trump's other decisions. | |
| But I think most importantly, Trump killed the TPP. | |
| This is monumental. | |
| When the full text of the TPP was released, I spent hours putting it through a text-to-speech reader and uploading it because I thought it was going to be that important. | |
| It seemed like it was going to be a new treaty of Westphalia for the 21st century, and I think this and the TTIP were going to set the world order for hundreds of years to come in much the same way as the piece of Westphalia did. | |
| When I uploaded the hours of video, I did so because I honestly thought the forces behind this were practically unstoppable and I had to do something. | |
| I assumed their momentum and power would not be broken because of the vast resources behind the people involved and I was wrong. | |
| This is a major accomplishment and it's probably changed world history for the better. | |
| These are definitive wins for Trump. | |
| Instead of coverage of this moment, the press is nothing but wall to wall with apoplectic, autistic screeching about Trump's, quote, assault on abortion rights. | |
| I presumed this meant directly attacking Roe vs. Wade, but no, it's not. | |
| Quote, from the BBC. | |
| What's called the Mexico City policy, first implemented in 1948 under Republican President Ronald Reagan, prevents foreign non-governmental organizations that receive any US cash from, quote, providing counselling or referrals for abortion, or advocating for access to abortion services in their country. | |
| What's being described as an attack on abortion rights isn't even happening inside the United States. | |
| Moreover, this is a ritual that has been performed every time the presidency switches sides. | |
| Every Republican since Reagan has reinstated it. | |
| Every Democrat presumably since then has rescinded it. | |
| The hysterical overreaction to this by professional far-left activists who apparently have the power to lead the media by the nose on this issue is absurd. | |
| It makes the left look demented. | |
| This is the reaction of a group of people who have lost all sense of perspective. | |
| Instead of talking about non-issues like this or crowd sizes or whining about things that have yet to come to pass, why not talk about what's actually happening? | |
| The left is on a perpetual campaign of slander. | |
| Constant negativity is making you hated. | |
| Spicer's Q ⁇ A was eye-opening. | |
| He basically said, every administration has its narrative, so you must allow us ours. | |
| And the left cannot stand it. | |
| They act as if they are not already famous liars. | |
| And they're instead well known for their truth-telling. | |
| You are now discovering what it feels like to be us. | |
| Being constantly lied to by the people above you. | |
| Welcome to the real world, Neo. | |
| The powers that be have a propensity to tell half-truths when they're not outright lying. | |
| Put bluntly, you have no moral authority over Donald Trump. | |
| He won by doing what you do. | |
| He was simply able to bypass you via social media and the colossal attendance of his rallies. | |
| Kyle's Justice Democrats platform is a direct attempt to remove a major hurdle from politics in his country, and has currently got 17,000 people signed up to it. | |
| This is a good start for the first day. | |
| I know there will be plenty of people who don't like the young Turks, but this probably isn't because the Young Turks want to get money out of politics. | |
| It's a worthy cause and it's well worth supporting, even if it's not perfect. | |
| And it won't be. | |
| There is undoubtedly going to be many, many flaws with Justice Democrats, and that's why it's important for people who actually care to get off their rear ends and do something. | |
| It will get messy, you won't get everything you want, but you might get some of what you want. | |
| And this can definitely happen as well. | |
| Jeremy Corbyn has shown that a large, committed social movement can elect the leader of its choice to a major political party on the left. | |
| Be warned, though, that the bunker mentality can form, making people more radical in pursuit of a more perfect expression of their principles. | |
| This is the kiss of death for a left-wing movement and must be avoided at all costs. | |
| Even Obama described Corbyn's Labour Party as, quote, out of touch with reality, and the British public knows it, and the American public will know it too if this happens to the Democrats. | |
| This is why Corbyn is only slightly more popular than Tony Blair. | |
| This is a warning of a path the Democrats could choose to go down unless the moderate, sensible, level-headed people take control. | |
| Political realists must drive the new movement, not frothing at the mouth intersectional ideologues, and you know who I'm talking about. | |
| So, for any left-wing social movement to succeed in the United States, the following key points must be accepted as fact. | |
| 1. Trump is the president. | |
| 2. The United States is not Nazi Germany. | |
| 3. Donald Trump is not Hitler. | |
| 4. White supremacist countries do not elect black presidents. | |
| 5. Hillary lost because she was corrupt. | |
| 6. Corporate influence in politics has overruled the will of the people. | |
| 7. Your fellow citizens need your help, even if you have some kind of problem with their race. | |
| 8. Political violence is utterly unacceptable. | |
| And 9. Supporting political violence is a shameful sign of one's personal failure. | |
| Take your time because I appreciate that this will be difficult for someone who honestly believes the opposite of each of these statements. | |
| Once you have adjusted to your new reality, you do not need to apologize, but you do need to start addressing the issues themselves instead of the identity of the people experiencing those issues. | |
| You will have to discuss these ideas with people you might otherwise block out of principle, and you'll have to do it without resorting to calling anyone names. |
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