But Chomsky makes sure to note, in an extended paragraph, "I don't suggest that he's anything like Hitler. Hitler had an ideology, horrible ideology. ... As far as Trump is concerned, the only detectable ideology is pure narcissism."
Let us set aside the well-known fact that Trump keeps a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. There is something absolutely naïve afoot among soft-socialist bourgeois scribblers. Maybe people do not remember, since it was sixteen years ago, but a common question about George W Bush was... how can he be so... stupid? Here is a typical scree from The Atlantic senior editor Jack Beatty in 2001: "he has the kind of difficulty with language, syntax, and coherence that, had he been born George Smith rather than George Bush, would likely have consigned him to a low-status job—speech being a cruel marker of class disadvantage." And yet, when it was time to pull together and root for Amerika's genocide of over 1.5 million Iraqis, The Atlantic was ready to publish Richard Brookhiser's dick-riding of W that goes to great lengths to show how no, Bush is not stupid, he gets up and does his job as U.S. President every day - including specifically, that he likes to hear from people he disagrees with, which goes against the "echo chamber" myth that plays off the bloodthirsty invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as self-righteous idiocy.
Here's war pig David Frum himself in the Atlantic recently: "Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures." Well, just a minute. Trump is sitting in the White House. He is the ostensible boss of everyone at the Pentagon. Over 43% of Americans approve of the job he's doing, and that number hasn't fallen below 36%, ever. One might say that 36% support is not very good - but still, it's eighty million adult Amerikans who are pleased with how he is doing. A national television channel is devoted to predicting what Trump wants to hear and broadcasting that exclusively, and everyone around him is in constant fear of what might happen if they don't enable him to do whatever he wants - does that sound like failure, if we're talking about a "narcissistic psychopath"? To me it sounds like the loftiest ambition a psychopath could fulfill.
In hindsight, does anyone believe George W Bush was simply the Don Quixote of Capitol Hill? After his turn at the helm of the US regime wrapped up, even credulous opposition remora Jonathan Chait cashed in on both sides of the stupid vs evil debate, taking down such glass-jawed opponents as professional moron David Brooks and the urine-scented Jennifer Rubin. A common reacharound offered by journalists "critical" of Trump, as noted in The Hill for example, is that Trump has nothing on Bush - confirming that yes, Bush knew exactly what he was doing when he lied his way into an illegal war, deregulated the housing market, and tortured any poor soul offered up by Saudi Arabia at the gates of Abu Ghraib. (On the other hand, Bush didn't rape an unknown number of children with his close, lifelong friend Jeffrey Epstein, so, as often happens, comparing all-round Evil Scores proves more difficult than expected.) I admit that I myself have joked about Bush being dumb, and I still laugh when it is implied that he loves bananas. But we know now that whether Bush was stupid or not, he was malicious. He wanted bad things to happen, and he succeeded.
So, my fellow Amerikans, it's time to grow up a little bit and put the same logic to Trump. Trump and his administration are being given so many excuses for why they might be "unintentionally" endangering millions of people's lives, that they don't even have to come up with their own. For example, Trump is going senile, he can't see, he is addicted to drugs, he's addicted to the internet, and he doesn't even want to be president. As for his response to the covid-19 pandemic, some imply that he is adopting a "wildly irresponsible" plan out of short-term interest, attempting to stave off rock-bottom until after November. A nearly incoherent piece in the New York Times imagines that Trump is trying to emotionally manipulate voters by raising their Anger or Fear levels in ways that incapacitate Democrat voters but not Republican ones.
Why are these writers trying so hard to avoid saying what we all know? Trump wants people to die. Most of the articles linked above actually agree with this, but see it as a "tactic" that serves a more abstract political goal. By the same logic, Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs wanted to skin women, as a tactic to create extremely tasteless fashion - and it's his fashion faux pas that is really supposed to bother you. Supposedly, Trump wants people to die because it is expedient for him, in service of a larger agenda.
Agenda for what? What is the ultimate victory for Trump? Is it four or eight more years as President? Forty or eighty more years of GOP control over the US political system? Elevation of the Trump family within the network of elite families that run Amerikan imperialism? But if Trump is such a narcissist, if he is really the goldfish-brained clownfish we all know he is, do we really see him taking such a long view with each calculated maneuver? And while we're asking questions: if Trump only wants common people to die because it's expedient for a bigger plan that has nothing to do with killing lots of people, wouldn't there be times when letting common people die was not expedient and he would seek to avoid it? Can anyone list those times when Trump did something to help poor people survive?
Or, is his goal the restoration of Amerika to its "former greatness," as he himself claims? I don't think it's controversial to say that MAGA is a slang term for open white supremacy and subjugation of women. How could this goal be accomplished in any other way than killing people? The establishment of a white ethnostate, or a "truly free market capitalist" state for that matter, is inseparable from mass murder. If we simply admit that Trump wants to see lots of people die, what ICE has become under his administration makes sense. Separating families allows lots of people to die unseen, away from anyone who would remember them, while pimping out their valuable orphans to white adoptive parents. Predicting a future 80 years from now with temperatures 7° C above the present and carbon emissions doubled, and doing everything possible to bring that future about, has no logical explanation in narcissism, autocracy, oedipal anger, a fetish for human skin tanned orange, or any other internal state of mind, unless that state of mind wants to see as many people die as possible.
The restoration of white nationalism and the restoration of capitalism are symbiotic movements in the Trump administration, as a return to the Jim Crow era, meant to lock surviving workers out of upward class mobility, requires an enormous apartheid state to ensure surplus value falls into the right hands. Again, we return to the same basic political program of mass murder, because it's much more costly to suppress crowds of former homeowners than it is to take the homes of dead people. It's much more costly to support small dairy farmers who meet a real demand, but are no longer competitive due to the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, than it is for those farmers to lose everything and starve, and have their farms bought for virtually nothing by a national dairy conglomerate. Trump may or may not understand the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit - but none of the pundits I've linked above do. Because if they did, they would understand that capitalism in crisis can be rescued quite easily, by destruction on a massive scale.
The economic catastrophe that has bloomed from the seed crystal of covid-19 is already being managed with this simple tool. For example, even though consumer demand for dairy is very high, and prices for dairy are also very high, huge amounts of milk are being dumped... straight into the ocean, maybe. Under communism, where all the people of the nation had democratic control over what the nation produces and how it uses its national products, this extra milk, which is already not being produced at a profit, would simply be free. Perhaps it would be subsidized to still be delivered to the same kitchens it was intended for, so that they can continue to make food for their communities even if they can't perform the same function of hosting them while they dine. But a planned economy would easily manage this "problem" of having too much of a good thing.
Instead, rational people find they have "excess" milk, because they live in an anarchist system of suppliers and purchasers fending for themselves with no national direction of production for the common interest. In fact, despite having an abundance of a product that everyone wants, dairy farmers are financially struggling. This very informative page gives us a lot more information: first, that even if this $19 billion bailout went entirely to the dairy industry, it would cover about one month of wasted milk. This article, written in June of last year, also complains that, even though dairy technology and yield per cow has increased over time, this has had the unwanted effect of driving prices down so low that smaller farms are not able to turn a profit, while simultaneously (the article doesn't admit this, but it's an obvious side effect of moving from small family farms to large industrial dairy facilities) driving down wages - exactly as Marx predicted in his formulation of the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit.
For those who want to restore milk to its former greatness, what could be better than the current situation? People are buying milk out of panic. The government is going to be forced to get involved and pay off the dairy industry's obligations while it continues to collapse. Small competitors will fold up. Vast herds will become dog food before their udders can explode. The public will get used to milk costing an irritating, high price. Dairy workers can have their wages and even employment status reduced (if they are pushed into becoming subcontractors or paid under the table), while their potential replacements, desperate survivors of the covid-19 summer, grow dramatically in number each day. Sure, lots of individual farmers will suffer and die. Lots of children will be malnourished with calcium-poor diets. But after that period, we who own stock in the milk industry will see a great return on our portfolio.
The same thing is true throughout the Amerikan economy. Trump can easily "fix" healthcare, that is, restore the healthcare industry to profitability in a way that doesn't require constant, massive fraud and extortion of sick people. All he has to do is kill people who provide the least amount of profit to the healthcare industry. When the crisis ends, a great number of nursing homes will have gone out of business, their facilities bought up by private equity and a certain percentage shuttered to create scarcity for the survivors. Trump could easily solve urban housing crisis: let lots of people die. Think about how much your rent would go down if 20% of your city's population died! Traffic? A few days of bumper-to-bumper hearses will unclog those arteries. If we agree Trump is a sociopath, isn't this how a sociopath thinks?
Trump has a definite ideology, despite Chomsky's equivocation. It's fascism. The fascist program is the complete union of nation-state and capital, burning labor power in a bonfire to achieve its aims. Beyond the accumulation of value, these aims are largely theoretical; what matters is the bonfire of enemies, which enthralls the fascist gaze. In covid-19, Trump has an opportunity to kill a lot of people, and he's taking full advantage of it.
You might be saying, well, I guess we should get Democrats into power this year, if Trump is really so evil. But unfortunately, Amerika, the Democratic Party wants you to die too. Mass death is such an attractive political program, and represents such a great opportunity for business, that your pathetic, human life is never going to get any respect from people who have careers as politicians. Again, with this reality in the front of our minds, certain confusing encounters begin to make perfect sense. Well, have a great day in the greatest country on earth. I need to go tag over the "Thin the Herd" graffiti that has started appearing on sidewalks in my hip urban neighborhood.
Edited by swampman ()
dimashq posted:front page
The conditions for recovery are already there, not surprising since megacorporations like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are immensely profitable and only benefitting from the crisis and the new normal of social isolation. The only real contradiction is that Trump represents both capital and white settlers who are the small business owners and farmers threatened by capital concentration. Obviously you're right that Trump will always choose monopoly capital or will be forced to but this I think does explain some of the seemingly contradictory policies which would be fixed under the purely neoliberal deathkult of Biden.
Quarantine itself was a social compromise from the top-down and can be ended at the whims of the state. Though I will say the crisis will inevitably lead to a debt crisis which will spiral out of control and a return to the pre-crisis stagnation at an even lower level given the new debts of the past month. My greatest fear is the warmongering and racist frenzy against China as the real "solution," I've never seen it at this level in my lifetime, much worse than after 9/11 imo given the greatest strength of the "enemy." That too can be rationalized under Biden who's major foreign policy goal is to separate racism against Asian-Americans and Chinese people with the hope of a rational, multicultural war. Of course that's not gonna happen but then again, Biden will lose anyway.
No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois – keepers of cafes and restaurants, marchands de vins , small traders, shopkeepers, handicraftsman, etc. The shopkeeper had pulled himself together and marched against the barricades in order to restore the traffic which leads from the streets into the shop. But behind the barricade stood the customers and the debtors; before it the creditors of the shop. And when the barricades were thrown down and the workers were crushed and the shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barred by a savior of property, an official agent of credit, who presented them with threatening notices: Overdue promissory note! Overdue house rent! Overdue bond! Doomed shop! Doomed shopkeeper!
Salvation of property! But the house they lived in was not their property; the shop they kept was not their property; the commodities they dealt in were not their property. Neither their business, nor the plate they ate from, nor the bed they slept on belonged to them any longer. It was precisely from them that this property had to be saved – for the house-owner who let the house, for the banker who discounted the promissory note, for the capitalist who made the advances in cash, for the manufacturer who entrusted the sale of his commodities to these retailers, for the wholesale dealer who had credited the raw materials to these handicraftsman. Restoration of credit! But credit, having regained strength, proved itself a vigorous and jealous god; it turned the debtor who could not pay out of his four walls, together with wife and child, surrendered his sham property to capital, and threw the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had once more reared its head threateningly over the corpses of the June insurgents.
The petty bourgeois saw with horror that by striking down the workers they had delivered themselves without resistance into the hands of their creditors. Their bankruptcy, which since February had been dragging on in chronic fashion and had apparently been ignored, was openly declared after June.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch02.htm
Jamie Black-Lewis felt like she won the lottery after getting two forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program. Black-Lewis saw the $177,000 and $43,800 loans, one for each of the spas she owns in Washington state, as a lifeline she could use for payroll and other business expenses.
She’d halted pay for the 35 employees — including herself — at Oasis Medspa & Salon, in Woodinville, and Amai Day Spa, in Bothell, in mid-March, when nonessential businesses in Washington closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.When Black-Lewis convened a virtual employee meeting to explain her good fortune, she expected jubilation and relief that paychecks would resume in full even though the staff — primarily hourly employees — couldn’t work.
She got a different reaction. “It was a firestorm of hatred about the situation,” Black-Lewis said.
The animosity is an unintended consequence of the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package enacted last month. The law, the CARES Act, offered $349 billion in loans for small businesses struggling as a result of Covid-19. Banks, backstopped by the federal government, can fully forgive the loans under certain conditions. Among them, the bulk of funds must go toward payroll, salaries must remain intact and employee head count must not decrease. Businesses have until June 30 to rehire laid-off or furloughed workers.
Black-Lewis was trying to meet these rules, especially after her bank reiterated she must continue to pay workers for loan forgiveness. The anger came from employees who’d determined they’d make more money by collecting unemployment benefits than their normal paychecks.“It’s a windfall they see coming,” Black-Lewis said of unemployment. “In their mind, I took it away. I couldn’t believe it,” she added. “On what planet am I competing with unemployment?”
Black-Lewis is surely not the only entrepreneur to struggle with such dynamics.
More than 26 million Americans filed for unemployment in the five weeks ended April 18, erasing all the jobs created in the decade since the Great Recession. Lawmakers are poised to infuse an additional $310 billion into the Paycheck Protection Program, which exhausted its initial funding, this week.The coronavirus relief law increased weekly jobless benefits for recipients, boosted the duration of benefits and extended pay to previously ineligible groups of workers like the self-employed.
Specifically, the new law adds a flat $600 a week to the typical weekly benefits paid by one’s state. Those traditional benefits, which vary widely between states, replaced about 40% of one’s prior wages, according to a national average cited by the House Ways and Means Committee.The measure’s improved $600-a-week payments, which run through July, aim to boost that wage replacement rate to 100% for the average worker. But some, especially lower-wage workers, can come out ahead. Lawmakers were aware of the dynamic, yet felt the formula’s simplicity would get money out to people faster.
In Mississippi, a less-generous state when it comes to unemployment benefits, full-time workers making less than $21 an hour ($43,680 a year) would make more money on unemployment than from their job, according to an EconoFact analysis authored by economists Patricia Anderson and Phillip Levine.In California, a “medium benefits” state, the breakeven is around $26 per hour, or about $54,000 a year. And in Washington, a generous state, it’s $30 an hour, or about $62,000.
Pay among Black-Lewis’ employees — massage therapists, hair stylists and aestheticians — ranges from minimum wage ($13.50 an hour in Washington) up to about $60 per hour. Many work between 24 and 32 hours a week.It wasn’t just those on the lower end of the pay scale who were upset — even ones who would stand to make more money from their regular paychecks sided with lower earners, Black-Lewis said.
“They were pissed I’d take this opportunity away from them to make more for my own selfish greed to pay rent,” she said. The animosity isn’t necessarily universal among workers, she said. Some have since come around and want the business to survive until non-essential businesses can reopen.
The other workers may not have a choice, however. Since Black-Lewis has already made an offer to pay the workers, the state may deem them ineligible to collect unemployment benefits, according to labor economists.
Plus, Black-Lewis feels she needs to use the money according to the terms of loan forgiveness to avoid going into more personal debt for her business.“They the choice ultimately, but I don’t come out as the nice guy,” Black-Lewis said. “Bad will has been cemented into the business because I took it away from them.”
“There’s a bad taste from it,” she added. "We’ll recover. But it’s just a bummer.”
The point of this article, which was pretty well hidden by the fact that they only talked to the rich white trash and buried the worst of it at the end after a ludicrous quantity of irrelevant graphics and advertisements, is that she is ripping money straight out of "her employees" pockets for the sole reason of protecting herself from having to take on personal debt to keep "her business" afloat (giving rent to the landlord of the shuttered building, and no other expenses). And its just generally unfortunate that is causing "a bad taste" but "we" will just get through it and these things couldnt be avoided. The actual impoverishment of the workers in this story is not a problem. She doesn't give a fuck about that, neither does the writer. She's sad that they're angry at her for stealing their earned public benefits, and promising to not give them back.
These poor people are having their income cut in half and the workers are being fully denied any agency over their own lives for no other reason that they had the misfortune of selling labor to this specific vermin at some point in the past. And now they are serfs, with their income bound to this ones personal financial desires. The parasite chose to take on the loan and then told the workers they had to accept their old salaries, and that's it. The workers have no rights or choice in the matter, simply because someone who once oppressed them spontaneously decided to do so again - weeks after summarily firing them all when their labors no longer produced enough profit. Because this owner desires to not pay back the loan, the workers either accept the massive reduction in income, or they "quit" and are no longer eligible for any unemployment at all.
This is a great example of the class dynamics intentionally woven into the barbaric american regime's response to this catastrophe: everyone in power is focused entirely on maintaining and further entrenching the exact specific caste relationship that existed prior to the epidemic, and not at all on minimizing its effects on human beings. The one fundamental which must be preserved at all costs is that the american workers must never for a second have any hope of any improvement of their condition. This minor parasite's victims are not human beings, they are nothing more than former part time haircutters, and they are required to maintain no better than the exact same level of oppression, precarity and squalor they endured previously. The wealthy, on the other hand, have access to special financial tools to ensure they maintain their class status and unwavering control over the workers livelihoods in spite of their personal failings as business administrators.
Instead of giving money directly to the working class, the Congress of the United States of America, under the direction of Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, instead deliberately chose to mandate to their former employers the specific responsibility to snatch public aid money away from the workers as a condition of maintaining their social class position. The parasite cannot benefit from these workers' labor, but they are required by law to force those workers into the precarious position where they are forbidden from accessing necessary benefits which they have earned as compensation for their previous labors. This compels them out of their safe state-mandated quarantine and into the dangerous workforce during a deliberately uncontrolled pandemic. Every single detail of this was intentional, because the government of the United States of America wants you to die.
During the last week in March, Georgia processed more claims for unemployment insurance than the state did in all of 2019. In the span of seven days, workers made 390,000 new jobless claims, and the Georgia Department of Labor says the state issued nearly $42 million in unemployment benefits.
Then the full force of coronavirus closures struck state coffers. Over the course of about three weeks in April, Georgia has paid out some $600 million in unemployment claims, according to the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce. The state has processed more than 1 million jobless claims, blowing past records set during the Great Recession. It’s unclear how much money is still left in the state’s unemployment trust fund, which started the year at $2.6 billion — but without intervention, it may last only a matter of weeks.
A course correction may be coming. On April 20, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp announced that he would lift the state’s stay-at-home order for certain conspicuously non-essential businesses, including health clubs, hair salons, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys. Those businesses could re-open this Friday. Restaurants, meanwhile, can resume dine-in service as of Monday. The establishments that the governor just whistled open account for a huge share of those new jobless claims. Workers in restaurants and retail alone make up about a third of the state’s workforce.
Critics have hammered Kemp’s decision to reopen the economy as “reckless” and “insane.” This weekend, business owners across the state are allowed to ask their employees to clock back in, even though Georgia has not yet met the so-called gating criteria outlined by the federal government for ending social-distancing protocols. It’s not just a question of red tape: Testing has revealed more than 21,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases in Georgia, a number that continues to climb. More than 1,000 new cases were identified since April 21. The state’s coronavirus case count is the 10th worse nationwide; its death toll stood at 872 on April 23.
In Albany — a small town in the poorer and predominantly black stretch of rural Southwest Georgia that has lost 110 residents to the pandemic — local leaders spoke with dismay about Kemp’s decision to reopen jobs. Dougherty County Commission Chairman Chris Cohilas said that people should continue to shelter in place and practice social distancing. “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do something,” Cohilas said.
Albany Mayor Bo Dorough agreed. “We are not ready for this,” he told NBC News this week. He said that Kemp’s decision to prevent local leaders from issuing more restrictive orders where necessary was misguided and irresponsible. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, the state’s biggest city, has also shared her concerns about the reopening order.
Public misgivings about Georgia’s scheme even reached the White House. In a surreal spectacle on Wednesday, President Donald Trump casually threw Kemp under the bus for acting with the haste demanded by the president. Nevertheless, two other GOP-led states, South Carolina and Tennessee, plan to follow suit.
Some Democratic lawmakers in Georgia worry that the governor’s real priority in reopening its service economy is flattening the curve of public benefits. “The first thing that came to my mind when Governor Kemp relaxed the shelter-in-place order was: What happens to people who are currently on unemployment?” says Georgia House Representative Dar’shun Kendrick, who represents the state’s 93rd district. “What happens if they fear for their safety and don’t want to go back to work?”
And so on. Note the list of types of businesses to open tomorrow on Friday, services in which social distancing is quite literally impossible. The reason is because Kemp wants to kill Americans (specifically black people as they suffer higher death rates here than all other demographics) en masse, directed by the US government behind close doors.
swampman posted:I regret to update this thread with the sad information that Donald Trump has asked covid-19 sufferers to huff bleach
Impeccable thread timing
in some areas, detainees who are deemed to be a low risk to the public are being let out; some lawsuits have been successful at forcing jails and prisons to release folks who are awaiting trial, or who are in for certain low-level offenses. where i live, more than 80% of of the city's jail population are only locked up because they couldn't afford to post bail, but our sheriff is adamant: no one who can't afford to buy their way out will walk free (pending trial). they're testing the guards but get stingy when it comes to seeing if there's an uncontrolled outbreak among the inhabitants. the state is now handing out free tests to anyone who isn't behind bars, but only managed to perform a handful of tests in the state's prisons until last week, when hundreds of cases were confirmed, only to double this week. in one facility alone
Edited by zhaoyao ()
招瑤 posted:prisons and jails around the country have become coronavirus hotspots while municipal, state, and federal authorities cool their heels waiting for prisoners to die. marion correctional institution in ohio reported on monday that 1950 of the 2500 people being held there have tested positive, along with a third of the pigs on staff. governor devine is considering the early release of less than 200 prisoners across the state, saying "we are trying to do this very thoughtfully." inmates are not receiving medical care until they are on the verge of death. a quarter of arkansas' confirmed covid patients are locked up. while the attorney general says "protecting the health and safety of all arkansans, including those who are incarcerated, continues to be the top priority of the state," prisoners report lacking access to soap, sanitizer, cleaning products, and protective equipment. many prisons in north carolina aren't even testing inmates. neuse correctional institution is one exception; widespread testing there was performed as the situation was undeniable. 60% of the inhabitants of the prison have tested positive. you get the picture; across the country this pattern is repeated time and again.
in some areas, detainees who are deemed to be a low risk to the public are being let out; some lawsuits have been successful at forcing jails and prisons to release folks who are awaiting trial, or who are in for certain low-level offenses. where i live, more than 80% of of the city's jail population are only locked up because they couldn't afford to post bail, but our sheriff is adamant: no one who can't afford to buy their way out will walk free (pending trial). they're testing the guards but get stingy when it comes to seeing if there's an uncontrolled outbreak among the inhabitants. the state is now handing out free tests to anyone who isn't behind bars, but only managed to perform a handful of tests in the state's prisons until last week, when hundreds of cases were confirmed, only to double this week. in one facility alone
its pretty horrific, but also telling about how little they value correctional officers, barely more than the people in custody. at least in my state, most prisons are either in really small towns in the middle of nowhere or surrounding one large town which basically exists because of the facilities. theyre saying, not only are we ok with massive death of the inmate population but were fine sacrificing the populations of those towns as the guards bring it home to their families. hell, they can save the ~$45k a year it costs to house these people along with the ~$35k a year they pay the guards to terrorize them.
my town has been a little more responsive, dropping the county jail numbers from around 750 in march to just under 400 today. there was a mass release of about 150 people that the DA and sheriff agreed to but other than that its piecemeal and dependant on individual judges, probably half of whom think this is all being overblown. its really horrible to listen to voicemails from my clients in jail who tell me that the guy on the bunk over is vomiting blood or running high fever
Coupled with his only conscious ideology - his inherent racism - we have all the right ingredients for fascism. To see Trump’s personal characteristics and be blind to these exceedingly obvious implications is myopic in the extreme. I don’t know who this Chomsky guy is but he doesn’t sound very smart.
pogfan1996 posted:swampman posted:I regret to update this thread with the sad information that Donald Trump has asked covid-19 sufferers to huff bleach
Impeccable thread timing
Honestly this is a pretty big window for the thread to be well timed. Within a week or so he'll be mumbling something about how maybe the 5G cranks are onto something
Edited by swampman ()
while i agree with the majority of points put forward here i think the overall theme of "government wants you to die" is probably not accurate. i think it's more likely the case that the ruling class is simply indifferent to the death and destruction they carry out here or abroad for capital. if they really wanted mass death, i'm sure there are a lot more sophisticated ways to achieve that then randomly reopening businesses or promoting pseudoscience. i think what's currently happening is more typical of capitalist dysfunction then a coordinated effort by the deep state or w/e
TG posted:may have simply been an example of inertia
i think there's also the fact that using prison populations as research subjects is well established practice. having such tightly controlled population makes measuring contagion/symptoms/progression/etc very convenient in a way military bases or elderly care homes do not due to the much more easily ignored duty of care.
so i work in the NHS, nothing frontline but my partner is an ICU nurse and i have a lot of friends everywhere in the service. part of my job involves facilitating the discharge of patients from the hospitals in my city to the community, where they can be cared for at home.
anyway i'm sure you know that the tories botched the initial response in march, then botched fixing the botch, and that's why we're now on track to be the worst hit country in europe. at work we've been discharging 100s probably 1000s of patients into the community without testing them for covid. most of them elderly, or else vulnerable in some other way - learning difficulties, mental health or substance abuse issues, etc. we simply don't have the capacity to test them but clinical staff are under insane pressure to discharge anyway. so we're sending these people out to the community and care homes and we have no idea if they're covid positive or what, and no way of testing them once they're in the nursing home or wherever by which point they could be spreading covid all over the gaff.
this has understandably been disturbing us for weeks and today i found out that the death rate in england alone may be 30% - 60% higher than the government is reporting. we were talking about it at work today and it suddenly hit us that this is the point, this is the government's real strategy - force as many people as possible out of the hospitals to die in miserable conditions while telling the world that thanks to our responsible management of the disease none of the fancy new covid hospitals we've built are filling up and the hospitals are coping well. if they never got tested you can't technically say they died of covid and therefore of government neglect.
my thinking is this is entirely consistent with OP's point, a complete indifference to human life especially "unproductive" human life. hell they've decided to turn boris Johnson's experience into a redemption story, the etonian politician who apparently considered illness a sign of moral weakness converted by a harrowing near death ordeal. except still nothing has changed in how we're handling the pandemic and i doubt much will. homeless rates in london are skyrocketing despite a supposed moratorium on evictions, last weekend we found out that dominic cummings, a confirmed eugenecist, has been sitting in on the scientific advisory meetings - well outside his remit - and allegedly intervening to guide the way we've handled the crisis. this is absolutely being used as an attempt to "reset" capitalism, to try and carve off a surplus population of mostly economically inactive people because they will die unknown and unmourned. they may not have even formally decided this is what they're doing, it's just an inevitable byproduct of who they are and how they approach governance. but the results are there for all to see.
I want to really go out on a limb and defend the central thesis of this essay saying the government wants us to die... Nitpicking our own slogans to death will be the death of us... While it's fair to quibble over the nuances of "who" is wanting and "what" is being wanted, formulating it in this manner effectively and elegantly captures the reality of the situation. I remember having a realization like this in, i guess around 2010. When the deepwater horizon spill hit. And i realized that the inspiring media figure id somewhat passionately advocated for in my youth really didnt give a fuck if we all died, and that there could be no coexistence with the capitalist system that obama figurehead-managed for a decade.
Isnt it kind of funny to think about it that way? I had the realization that there could be no coexistence with capitalism and that the existing system was murderous and vile ten years ago, but what did that realization spark. Ive just been going about my dumb desperate life, seemingly stranded from any possible route of actualization for my anathema political views. Even hindsight affords no comfort or clarity. What was the golden solution that we were not pursuing when Obama was engaging in his own litany of Trumpian outrages... What could it be... Do i need to say the v-word... No, not "vivian", hehe! When i think about the capitalists and their government wanting to a kill of us, i think...
"Violence", well that sure sounds like the no-nonsense, straight-talk hard-reality answer doesnt it. Ive been trying to parse this one for a bit and its a very nuanced problem, im the first person ever to realize that its a nuanced problem.
I mean, the justification seems pretty simple--the ruling class will not relent until they are liquidated out of existence, and although we want to do as much nice friendly expropriation as possible you know liquidation involves at least a little bit of death, and you know how stubborn people can be, and how some people are willing to die or better yet have dumb true-believer goons die for them for the sake of their class not being liquidated out of existence.
Then i guess the problem becomes, okay im justified, the capitalist government wants to kill me and actively sees merit in me dying, but im also a weak, tiny, alone little thing. Perhaps there is a little runaway horses aesthetic-fascist lurking somewhere in the hearts of many unassuming tiny alone communists who want to engage in blood sacrifice to justifiedly and glorifiedly take out one capitalist or whatever, but we should recognize this human rocket impulse for the fascism that it is. Do we want to win the contest of proving how willing to die we are, or do we want to win. Like really, really, really win, have a fully communist government and everything. Thinking strategy-first and putting aside the idea of adventurist violence, i guess the obvious step is that in order to successfully (metaphorical speech, protected under all known laws) "kill out" or liquidate the elements of the ruling class that want to "literally kill" (not metaphorical speech) us all, we have to get a bunch of people on our side so that we dont lose. but how do we get people over to our side? folks, i have made no headway on this one, and frankly i think that i may have done a little damage by my publicly erratic behavior and seemingly innate inability to prevail in the arena of rhetorical struggle. can i trust you guys to do this one? if you all (y'all) can amass a "revolutionary army" by winning the hearts of the people with your masterfully sown messages of communist subversion, then i will take on the burden of writing the wiki.
It makes me feel so good to hit "sleazebags" back -- much better than seeing a psychiatrist (which I never have!)
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2012
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/05/13/texas-jbs-meatpacking-plant-rejects-state-efforts-coronavirus-test/The state response team recently created to facilitate testing in the Texas Panhandle has checked thousands of workers at another nearby plant but has not been allowed to test the roughly 3,000 employees at the JBS plant in Cactus, said Seth Christensen, a spokesperson for the Texas Division of Emergency Management. JBS Beef said in a statement Tuesday evening that there are "no plans" for targeted testing of its mostly immigrant workforce "at this time." At least one meatpacking plant employee has died after being infected, and others remain hospitalized.
“We continue collaborating with local health and government officials," said Nikki Richardson, a company spokesperson. "Given that the coronavirus is a community-wide issue, we would actively encourage our team members to participate in a community testing program, should one become available.”
It appears as though in The Great State Of Texas, USA, the workers are legal property of their employer, who can deny medical care on their behalf by simply asking that they instead seek alternative care which the employer themselves states explicitly does not actually exist.
WORLD'S HIGHEST STANDARD OF DYING
shriekingviolet posted:
WORLD'S HIGHEST STANDARD OF DYING
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:Great news for Trump, as he loves talking about how amerikkka has Very Big Numbers, The Biggest.
swampman posted:But Chomsky makes sure to note, in an extended paragraph, "I don't suggest that he's anything like Hitler. Hitler had an ideology, horrible ideology. ... As far as Trump is concerned, the only detectable ideogy is pure narcissism."
Trump on notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford: "Good bloodlines. If you believe in that stuff, you've got good blood." pic.twitter.com/Vvoeu8pSXX
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 21, 2020
