"Ms Slone" was last nights movie from Netflix. Well worth watching especially seeing the way a congressional hearing was 'supposed' to go. Not a bunch of old fogies asking biased softball political questions to a dwarf with a bad memory. Jessica Chastain rules the Washington-based political thriller “Miss Sloane” with such steely authority that you are hard pressed to imagine another actress playing the imperious, largely unsympathetic title character. In the opening moments, Elizabeth Sloane, a formidable Washington lobbyist, legendary for her deviousness and determination to win at all costs, impassively describes her professional modus operandi. “Lobbying,” she declares, gazing straight into a camera, is about “foresight.” It involves anticipating an opponent’s next move and calculating your response ahead of time so that nothing takes you by surprise.
wyatt cenac new show is great https://showsnob.com/2018/04/30/wyatt-cenacs-problem-areas-power-to-truth/
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, a historian's account of the rise of militarized white suprimecist movements and their origin in Viet Nam war and its aftermath, focusing on the roles they've played domestically as well as internationally as part of the mercenary contributions to wars in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. The author, Kathleen Belew, is an untenured Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. I'm pretty sure this will wrap up tenure and promotion. She does a good job drawing connections that most of us miss, all without exaggerating the size of the problem. Basically, white-power domestic terrorism, in her reading, is a form of blowback from the state-sponsored violence in Viet Nam and other places since then. From the Author's NPR interview in April: On the myth of the "lone wolf" terrorist — for example, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh Portraying the Oklahoma City bombing particularly as the work of one, or a few actors worked to totally erase what the country had understood about white power violence before that event. One of the misconceptions is that Timothy McVeigh acted alone or with a few conspirators. But McVeigh — a simple social geography of Timothy McVeigh shows that he was involved in this movement for years before the bombing. So this points to a motivated and ideologically framed attack. What seems new and alarming in our current moment is not new. These events were covered in the front pages of national newspapers, on morning news magazine shows, and yet, somehow we lost the understanding of this movement, such that the altercation in Charlottesville can seem astonishing to people without this history. On the link between America's ongoing wars and the rise of the alt-right The history shows us that this movement never received a definitive stop in court or in public opinion. In every surge of Ku Klux Klan activism in American history, there's a strong correlation with the aftermath of warfare. The aftermath of warfare has correlated with widespread violence across all groups of American civilians, not just veterans but throughout American society. And in those surges of violence, groups like this have found resurgent memberships. https://www.npr.org/2018/04/22/6043...one-wolf-terrorists-are-really-part-of-a-pack Perhaps the most chilling point, if her reading is correct, is that the judicial system isn't really prepared to deal with this problem.
Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities by sociologist Chad Broughton. What Nixonland is for politics and history, this book is for Economics and sociology. "Economic globalization is not the nub of the problem ... it's how the American Political system responded (and failed to respond) to it. European Countries, on the other hand, have adopted variations of "flexicurity," a set of taxpayer-funded labor market and social policies that seek to provide employers with felxibility and workers with broader economic security. These policies provide portable health insurance, more secure and portable retire ment benefits, expanded unemployment, skills-building ... etc" This passage doesn't account for the real strength of this book, which is the author's extensive field work interviews with displaced Maytag workers from my hometown, Galesburg, IL, and factory workers in Reynosa, Mexico, which is where Maytag off shored the factory. The book gives a pretty good descriiption of the effects of NAFTA, especially through the personal histories of some of my West Central Illinois homies and Mexican factory workers, the luckiest of whom were former farmers who lost the land that had been in their family for centuries (small farmers in Mexico were probably harder done by than the factory workers ... some of whom had brutal lives, some of who had better lives, and some of whom are still struggling to get by on half their income. Oh, and the connecting between NAFTA and the drug cartels was pretty good, too.
I've been reading this for the past few days. Holy shit, what a great read. This is what investigative journalism is all about. Spoiler alert: Elizabeth Holmes is evil. Takeaway: lawyers working for clients with deep pockets can destroy anyone. Note to self: if ever put in the position of having to defend yourself against someone like David Boies, buy a gun and shoot him in the head during your first meeting. Save yourself some time, money, and do the world a favor.
I can't remember where I saw it, but I caught an interview with her that I could barely watch because my bullshit detector was going off. I'm like, "people are giving her money for this shit?" I have no background in tech or medicine, and I can tell she's an empty pants suit. Then again, note who got elected President in 2016.
I recommend with some very minor qualification a book by Reason.com's higher ed reporter, Robby Soave called Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump. It focuses mostly on young lefty college students, but much attention is paid to the alt-right. As is to be expected by a libertarian, there's a focus on free speech and the way the left AND THE RIGHT is willing to trample it (Soave distinguishes his critique from hacks on the right). Most useful is the way he traces the rise of "Intersectionality" and its many effects. @superdave 's critique of wokeness came to mind while reading it, and @Q*bert Jones III concerns about the highly problematic narrowness of lefty identity politics are also reflected. My main qualification involves some minor mistakes: He writes as if "Marxism" and "socialism" are synonymous, and at some point he talks about graduate programs in "critical theory" and seems to assume that "critical theory" means the same thing as it did when Horkheimer and Adorno coined the phrase at the founding of the Frankfurt School, but it's expanded far, far beyond its origins as a sociology grounded Karl Marx's writings. Oh: And jacket blurbs by Tucker Carlson and Meaghan McCain almost made me blush when I checked it out of the library. The Guaridan's headline is apt: The Wake Up Call the Left Won't Read. https://www.theguardian.com/educati...view-robby-soave-tucker-carlson-meghan-mccain Panic Attack is a methodical, earnest and often insightful work of reporting and analysis, not a fiery polemic. Investigating the limits and self-defeating tendencies of the social-justice left, Soave believes “intersectionality” has become a snake eating its own tail. To him, it is a discourse that claims to embrace the complexity of the human experience yet more often reduces human beings to categories; a crusade against privilege often led by well-heeled students at outrageously expensive universities; a movement for inclusivity that is frequently exclusive, polarizing and toxic. “[F]raming a specific issue in identitarian terms makes it less appealing to people who do not identify with the category of marginalization in question,” Soave argues. This, he says, makes issue coalitions “less diverse” and “prone to tactical errors, such as engaging in performative acts that confirm the wokeness of the in-group but scare off” prospective allies. Though most of the book is about the digital-age left, Soave also looks at the right. Like Angela Nagle and Shuja Haider, he sees leftwing outrage culture and rightwing trolling culture as symbiotic and self-perpetuating, though he takes pains to avoid a false moral equivalence between the social-justice left and the racist alt-right. It is “wrong to blame the left for the alt-right’s bad behavior and odious beliefs”, he writes. “The alt-right is a white nationalist movement, wholly undeserving of public sympathy” and “a testament to the enduring power of racism”.
Read this one and couldn't put it down until it was finished. Agree, this is exatly what investigative journalism looks like, very interested how will Holmes get out of this one...
Finished reading Timothy Synder's "Bloodlands" about the mass killing in 1930's and 1940's in the lands between Germany and Russia. It was good, but didn't offer much new information. It did contain this aside though. In discussing General Plan Ost, Synder states: "Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor." I don't disagree, but the statement surprised me.
Tentatively, depending on who accurate the sub-subtitle turns out to be... The United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post Truth America (And What We Can Do About It) (2019) by Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff After describing the typical coverage of politics in which both sides are represented by official statements, and then mentioning the effects of this trend in the 2016 campaign Elected leaders have long expressed aversion toward the press. For example, former President Lyndon Johnson once said, "being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do by stand there and take it." However, the complaints made by Trump and Clinton express something different. They both recognized that in the four decades since Johnson's jackass joke, the press has become less focused on holding politicians publicly accountable and more focused on furthering corporate interests Trump, needless to say, is really good at exploiting this, corporate interests and entertainment being his life. Along these lines... Trump can be seen as the temporary face of an increasingly invasive corporate algorithm, one that views civil liberties, the public interest, the commons, and the democracy-centered institutions mandated to serve them as enemy forces to be administratively "deconstructed." The algorithm unifies by distraction and extraction -- distracting the population from the common good and the civic agency required to defend it, while extracting data, resources, and power from the public sector and transferring them to the private sector -- a euphemism for the rich. In the process, the United States increasingly drifts toward becoming an authoritarian society in which government represents and protects the interests of the wealthy few. As corporations succeed in replacing the notion of a "citizen" with that of a "consumer," their power concentrates, producing characters like Donald Trump. As damaging as Trump is . . . his moment will pass. The algorithm will remain.
The Age of Illusion: How America Squandered its Cold War Victory, an excellent book by former soldier and current professor emeritus at Boston University Andrew Bacevich. Highly critical of Donald Trump as well as the foreign policy establishment that seems to be really good at finding endless resource-wasting wars. Bacevich is well positioned to analyze the last 50 years of politics, and his perspective is unique in that he publishes regularly in The American Conservative as well as places like Democracy Now and The Nation. In fact, his post-retirement is mostly dedicated to The Quincy Institute, which is dedicated to uniting conservatives and progressives (it received initial funding from dueling bete noires George Soros and The Koch Foundation. Quoth the Quincy Institute's website: The foreign policy of the United States has become detached from any defensible conception of U.S. interests and from a decent respect for the rights and dignity of humankind. Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself. Moreover, much of the foreign policy community in Washington has succumbed to intellectual lethargy and dysfunction. It suppresses or avoids serious debate and fails to hold policymakers and commentators accountable for disastrous policies. It has forfeited the confidence of the American public. The result is a foreign policy that undermines American interests and tramples on American values while sacrificing the stores of influence that the United States had earned. The Democratic nominee needs to get this guy on his foreign policy team. It's worth noting that Sanders reached out to him in 2016.
Here is a movie I strongly recommend people to watch. They don't need to leave their computers. HD quality with English sub-titles. Whether you agree or disagree with the political message in the movie, I think you will agree it is entertaining, educational, and well made.
Premiering July 22, this three-part docuseries examines how lawmen took down the New York City mob—and features an eye-opening cameo from one Donald J. Trump. https://www.thedailybeast.com/netfl...y-mob-ties-in-fear-city-new-york-vs-the-mafia
what is this movie called? It's been link deleted in this youtube acct. But it might be available to find elsewhere by its name??
Some seemingly can - Ingmar Bergman, Boris Pasternak, Tolstoy. Leonard Cohen. 1960s Bob Dylan... Lionel Messi
The movie is called Damascus Time. You can go to the link below here and find both a video of the trailer for the movie as well as the full movie with English subtitles. https://inoor.fr/damascus-time-be-vaghte-sham/
thnx much. I don't usually post in politics board - keep my energies for the separated argument thread over on the LFC board .. but occasionally read what's been posted here ....
This should be required reading in every US History class Fantastic and depressing read, would make my blood boil