”...that there are “questions” about how the Twin Towers actually fell, etc.—-and once your foot is in the door, you’re opening to going down the rabbit hole.”

...wait a minute!  There are a lot of witnesses that say they heard a third plane coming from the Grassy Knoll.  Explain that!...

It’s basically the McCarthy narrative about communism, rinsed off and varnished with a Muslim veneer.

I’d take it further.  It’s McCarthyist paranoia about communism enhanced with an added layer of Islamophobia.

Part of why this all appears so disjointed to any rational person is the paradoxical nature of their outrage.  They attempt to create a non-existant connection between Obama and the Islamic religion, but when they aren’t doing that, they’re bleating about his alleged socialist tendencies, with some of his opponents opting to characterize with the more loaded word “communist”.

One of the chief talking points of Western nations against Soviet-era communism was the suppression of religious practice that took place in that nation, especially during the most brutally tyrannical years under Josef Stalin.  As America is a nation that considers religious freedom a fundamental right of all people, the idea of a government that punishes and imprisons citizens for practicing their religion of choice is appalling to American sensibilities.

The point being, whatever words one might use to describe the Soviet Union, “theocracy” wouldn’t one of them.

Switch over to the Islamophobic criticisms of Obama, and the wingnuts are trying to paint a picture of a president whose allegiance lies with some of the most oppressive Islamic theocracies in the world.  During the Iranian uprising in 2009 over Ahmadinejad’s likely fraudulant re-election, wingnuts were screaming at Obama for not immediately launching a full-scale aerial bombing campaign against Tehran.  They really, really believe his loyalty lies more with violent Muslim zealots than it does with “real Americans”.

But they also believe that he was personally mentored by Saul Alinsky and Frank Marshall Davis during his formative years, two men who hardly embody violent religious extremism, but can rightly be considered proponents of socialist/communist ideology.

So which is he?  A godless statist follower of Karl Marx, or a stealth follower of the prophet Muhammad intent on turning the US into a caliphate governed by Sharia law?

I saw a funny bumper sticker a few weeks ago along these lines, which included a Nazi swastika, Soviet hammer and sickle, and Muslim crescent, and beneath those symbols was the tagline, “Pick one, wingnuts, because he can’t be all of them!”

I don’t think Bush held back the bigots because of Iraq, or at least not only. I think he did it because he is BFFs with the Saudis and holds their hands on strolls through the garden.

I love Howard Dean and his unapologetic willingness to call out wingnuts for who they really are and his staunch promotion of progressive policy, but this may be the first time where I’ve been really disappointed in him.  He’s just plain wrong on this issue, and his statements about Park51 have only added fuel to the fire over the completely non-controversial proposal to build a community center on the not even remotely hallowed ground where a Burlington Coat Factory now sits.

The thing thta angers me the most is the fact that a vile third-rate wingnut hateblogger like Pamela Geller signlehandedly turned something that was once considered so innocuous that Laura Ingraham basically endorsed the plan while interviewing the wife of the very moderate Imam Rauf on Fox News Channel in December 2009.

If we are gonna be fair in how we deal with this matter, I think Geller’s extreme hatred for all one billion Muslims on earth needs to be addressed.  And no, that isn’t hyperbole.  The woman has said on many occasions that she ultimately doesn’t believe there is such a thing as a moderate Muslim, that the entire religion is one of extremism.  A 13 year old Jordanian girl born in raised in the U.S. is every bit as evil and dangerous as Mohammad Atta in Geller’s eyes.  She is also an extreme Zionist, and when Jewish writers have called for a peaceful two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, she refers to them as “Jewicidal Jihadists”.

What makes all of it most appalling is that Geller, herself a Jew, is promoting the exact same sort of violent eliminationist rhetoric that was used by a failed Austrian painter 70 years ago to exterminate 6 Million of her fellow Jews.  And yes, I am comparing this evil Jewish woman to Adolf Hitler, because the only thing that separates them is the ability to carry out their wishes.  Given the power to do so, I have no doubt she would implement a “Final Solution” to systematically execute millions of Muslim men, women, and children in gas chambers.

And that the so-called “liberal media” enabled her psychotic ravings to gain enough traction to affect public opinion absolutely disgusts me.  This “controversy” should never have been given even one second of coverage outside of Fucked Noise and Wing Nut Daily, and by engaging in it, the rest of the media has created the illusion that the opposing opinions on the matter are equally valid.  They aren’t.  If this group has the money to build a community center on private property that complies with local zoning ordinances, then there is nothing to debate, case closed.  Geller and her supporters are perfectly free to whine all they want, but when that whining is elevated to a level that literally threatens the possibility of this project moving forward, we have failed as a nation to live up to our stated ideals.  Obviously this isn’t the first time we’ve been in that position, but it’s still maddening nonetheless.

She is a horrible, horrible, psychotically evil human being, and everytime a Muslim kid gets beat up in America because of their religion, she and other like her deserve some of the blame.  Earth will become a better planet once her time on it ends.

I was ready to praise the mayor up and down 5th avenue until he came out with a bizarrely anti-Indian piece of advice for the governor regarding the cigarette tax issues with the Senecas.  Something along the lines of “Get your cowboy hat and a shotgun”

let’s not forget the transparent stupidity/cupidity of the MSM, on this, and so many rightwingnut fantasies. the failure of the major media to act like actual journalists, and show this nonsense for what it is, instead of treating these nutjobs like the nutjobs they are, contributes to “joe sixpack” having few sources to turn to, for the truth. they get lied to flat out by FOX at night, and then treated like rubes by the wp & nyt’s in the morning.

small wonder so many people think obama is a “secret muslim”.

This is tangential, but I was just watching CNN and I’m not sure who was bloviating, but I think it was Billy Graham’s son. He proceeded to say that one can’t practice “true Islam” in the US because “you can’t beat your wife” or “punish your daughter” if they “misbehave.” So, in one sentense, we have horrid misogyny and claims that muslim men own “their” women, islamophobic and racist claims that all Muslim men are abusers and that Islam requires violence against women, and a bizarre implication that Christians don’t abuse. He then concluded by addressing all Muslims that might be watching to inform them that “Jesus died for your sins.” None of this racism, bigotry, and unbelievable cultural insensitivity was challenged by John King. He did bleat “not everyone agrees with you.” So, really, what we can expect from spineless democratic politicians when a journalist refuses to challenge absolutely vile racism and bigotry taking place on his show?

Aaaaand Howard Dean just announced on Olbermann that this is not a civil rights issue. Remind me, why should I vote for these dudes again?

Show me someone getting on an airplane with a 20 something muslim who says hes not paranoid and I’ll show you a liar.
Comment #6: JohnMckay

You callin’ me a liar?  And just, exactly, do you tell that your fellow passenger is a Muslim?  Or do you mean just any Middle-Eastern gentleman, because they all look alike to you?

Arrrgghh, why am I feeding the troll?

Another parallel between McCarthyism and today’s Islam-baiting is its sheer ridiculousness. McCarthy would hold hearings purporting to prove, say, that the Army was in danger from Communists within because a dentist was promoted to major.

The comments about how similar this is to anti-Communist paranoia is spot-on.

Given the increasingly geriatric nature of the Republican demographic, part of me wonders if some of the stuff about “Socialism” and “Communism: is early senility. To someone like me, who only knows the USSR from the history books, it’s almost comical.

Today on the radio Glenn Beck* actually talked about the menace of the “Communist Party”.Not just “Communism”, mind you, the Communist PARTY. AFAIK there are only oh, three countries in the world with powerful Communist parties now. And only one of them (Cuba) can still be considered even vaguely leftist.

I mean, really. The “Communist Party” is a threat? In the 21st Century? What’s next, screaming about the threat of the German Kaiser? The looming threat of the Jacobins? The subversive nature of the Catharist heresy?

*I can’t wait until I get a new car next month that has free Sirius XM so I can finally escape the grip of Clear Channel!

The insistence that all Muslims are to blame for the actions of a few, that there is a vast Muslim conspiracy to take over America, is strongly reminiscent of not only the commie-scare, but the persistant claims that there is a vast Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, too.

I’m betting Fox will take the lead, maybe using Beck, in STOPPING the controversy, as a way to tell our Government who has the REAL power in this country.

As the resident Zionist, and one that considers himself to be a very pro-Israel person who thinks that Arab/Muslim leadership needs to play a more constructive role in the peace process*, I think that that Geller is a disgrace to Zionists of any strip, secular or religious, left or right. The entire controversy is stupid and the Cordoba House should be allowed to be built where ever regardless of the beliefs of the people behind it. This is the law and the proper, ethical thing to do.

*Will elaborate this if asked to, but I do not want to start a flame war unrelated to the topic.

As the resident Zionist, and one that considers himself to be a very pro-Israel person who thinks that Arab/Muslim leadership needs to play a more constructive role in the peace process

If by “Zionist” you mean someone who believes in Israeli statehood in a part of Palestine, well, you’re not alone here.

This in spite of Israel’s dumb-ass, counter-productive poilicies of the last decade, both military and political. Being a supporter of Israel now must be what it felt like to be a foreign admirer of America during the Cheney/Shrub administration.

Kwillow: No I’d say that the Communist analogy is more accurate than the Vast Jewish Conspiracy. Fear of Communism always involved the fear of masses of Communist “hoards” descending down upon the “West” and destroying it. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion stuff always involved a small, shadowy cabal using conspiracies to manipulate people unaware of what was really going on. A good part of the rightist fear about Muslims revolves around the fact that there are somewhere over a billion of them and they fear that a a hoard of Muslim “barbarians” is about to destroy everything they hold dear.

  If you want to find the replacement for the Vast Jewish Conspiracy, I’d say that the rightist feelings towards the LBGT community comes closest since it involves a fear of a smallish amount of people using conspiracies and subversion.

  Or to put it bluntly, the Muslims are the new Communists and the LBGT community are the new Jews. This does not mean that the right is okay with either Communists or Jews now. Its just that they have more pressing enemies. Its a numbers thing when you get down to it.

How the hell does John McKay know if any of the 20somethings on his flights are Muslim? I’ve never taken a plane flight where they called out religions as they checked boarding passes, which airline does that?

How the hell does John McKay know if any of the 20somethings on his flights are Muslim?

He’s probably the kind of culturally illiterate dumbass who mistakes Sikhs for Muslims because they wear turbans, or doesn’t realize that the majority of Arab-Americans are Eastern Rite Christians of various stripes.

Ben D, a Palestinian state is inevitable and necessary for the survival of the Jewish state as a Jewish democracy and the right thing to do. Personally, I think that Israeli leadership isn’t that bad even though I hate Netanyahu and that Palestinian leadership isn’t much to talk about either. Most leadership in the Middle East, in power or in opposition, is much to talk about. Netanyahu will eventually not be Prime Minister and is replacement is more likely to be to his left than to his right.  It tends to range between corrupt to incompetent to radical. Launching thousands of missiles after an evacuation of an occupying power is not a good way to make the people of the occupying country believe that it is physical safe for them to give you independence even if it is emotionally satisfying.

  Israel is going to need to make painful compromises but so are the Palestinians. No Palestinian leader or ally is even thinking of preparing the Palestinian people for this, while Israelis are routinely informed by many sources, friend and foe, of this. Israel leadership can also act dramatically and dynamically if necessary, the Gaza withdrawal for all its problem was a sign of this.

The insistence that all Muslims are to blame for the actions of a few, that there is a vast Muslim conspiracy to take over America, is strongly reminiscent of not only the commie-scare, but the persistant claims that there is a vast Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, too.

If you ever wanted to know how the German people managed to work themselves up to the point of Kristallnicht - now you know.

What’s ironic about all this is that the Muslim minority in North America (I did this to include Canada) is probably the best-integrated one in the entire western world, and the wingnuts either too stupid to realize it or secretly wish we could have an alienated, poorly integrated Muslim minority like they do in Europe, and want to make that happen.

Lee—

The whole situation wants to make me scream. I wish it could have been solved in the ‘90s before Hamas gained such a foothold. Say what you will about Fatah and Arafat, but at least they were nationalist, left-wing, and mostly secular (Palestinian Christians were included in Fatah) instead of a bunch of reactionary, right-wing religious fanatics like Hamas.

And if it wasn’t for the fact that we had religious fanatics as factions on both sides, the issue of Palestine would have been solved by now just like 99.9% of post-WWII border disputes have been.

The obvious solution, one that is quite simple, is to share the fucking land. But fighting over “holy” sites in Jerusalem throws a huge monkey wrench into the entire process, Jewish fanatics and Muslim fanatics arguing over sites of ancient myths with a third faction (evangelical Christians) egging them on.

Ben D., I agree with you that Arafat was immensely better than Hamas, although how left he was is debatable. Arafat’s mistake was not even making a counter-offer to Barak’s offer. Israel’s mistake was not withdrawing the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank immediately after signing Oslo. Actually, the mistake was building them in the first place. Occupying the West Bank and Gaza after the Six Day War was inevitable considering the reaction of Arab leadership but the settlements were a really, really stupid idea, considering that many of the people drawn to live in them would be uncontrollable rightist nationalists. The West Bank settlements are going to come down eventually, it just might unfortunately require literally doing some head-thumping on the settlers. Its a pity but a necessity.

The insistence that all Muslims are to blame for the actions of a few, that there is a vast Muslim conspiracy to take over America, is strongly reminiscent of not only the commie-scare, but the persistant claims that there is a vast Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, too.

It’s more tied together than you think:  a lot of the paranoia about Communism was tied into anti-Semitism.  Many of the prominent Communists (especially in the US) were Jewish (like Emma Goldman) and that was always a huge part of the anti-Communist paranoia.

The International Jewish Conspiracy and the International Communist Conspiracy were always assumed to be the same thing, with those “shadowy cabals” directing the hordes.

although how left he was is debatable.

Arafat perssonally I don’t know, but Fatah is a member of the Socialist International. Like a lot of Arab movements in the ‘60s it’s a mixture of Arab nationalism and socialism.  Far far preferable to the medieval idiocy of Hamas and Hizbollah. 

It’s a real puzzle to me what has happened to the Arab world since the 70s. Hard to believe now, but secularism used to be en vogue in the Arab world. To a lesser extent it has happened to Israel, too, post-1967. Zionism used to be a leftish if not leftist, secular movement that was at best distrusted by conservative and religious Jews, now they want to hijack it along with their evangelical Christian “allies” to apocalyptic ends.

I also cannot help think that about 60% of the flame level here has to do with Good Old Economic Insecurity, somewhere at the bottom.  People are scared, losing their homes, retirement, jobs, etc.  Someone on another blog wanted to know why the hell 500 wingnuts show up every time there’s a demagogue.  A lot of it it because at least 300 of them are retired wingnuts with plenty of time on their hands, but I’d be at least 100 of the rest are unemployed and freaking the fuck out.  (Yes, the DisinFoxNation Machine is also to blame….) 

I know the fear and freak factor of being unemployed - I’ve been out since February with no end in sight.  It is fucking scary and totally all consuming if you let it.  Add in some general ignorance and baked in racism, and off we go. 

And the LSM is totally out to lunch on this and licking their chops as they watch people foam at the mouth.  They should be ashamed of themselves for letting this shit go on and on while unemployment is so high, we have so many other serious problems, etc. etc.

Occupying the West Bank and Gaza after the Six Day War was inevitable considering the reaction of Arab leadership but the settlements were a really, really stupid idea, considering that many of the people drawn to live in them would be uncontrollable rightist nationalists.

Where Arab leaders really screwed over the Palestinians (one of many times, but this was the worst) was when Egypt and Jordan annexed the Gaza Strip and West bank respectively after 1948 rather than setting up a nascent Palestinian state. This could have been done even without recognizing their borders as final at the time, or even recognizing Israel at all, the same way Taiwan bills itself was the “Republic of China”.

If that had been done it’s quite possible Palestine would be celebrating it’s 62nd year of independence.

Just as an addenum, I hate referring to “Muslim leadership” with regard to the Palestinian leadership. Palestinian Christians are a non-trivial minority, as are the Druze. Calling the Palestinians a “Muslim” nationality is as bad as calling the United States a “Christian nation”. “Arab” is the best term, especially since the Muslims outside of the Arab world didn’t care about the Palestinians as a cause célèbre until the late 70s or so as a rather cynical move.

I was also sorely disappointed in Dean. This is one fucking issue the left cannot afford to be bullied on. Either we have religious freedom or we don’t. Full stop. And this issue isn’t just about lower Manhattan - there are communities across the country that are protesting against mosques. This is dangerous shit. To those who ask “where are the moderate Muslims who condemn terror”, the answer is: right here! They’re your neighbors. Get to know them. Or, you know, if you are a Christian, love them even.

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.

“Get out,” others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.

But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.

Via Digby.

If Democrats weren’t cowards, they would accuse conservatives of aiding and abetting Al Qaeda. I’d like to kick Harry Reid in the nuts but I doubt he has any.

The fallicy of the hidden Islamic takeover of America not only is a result of inherent and deep-rooted racisms and prejudices, but it is also, in my educated opinion, the result of an inability or refusal of pols and pundits to critically evaluate the degree of threat posed by terrorist organizations like Al Qiada.

Radical terrorist groups are generally incapable of bringing down governments themselves; they rely on an overreaction by the targeted governments in suppressing civil liberties (esp on ethnic groups similart to the terrorist) thereby creatng the conditions by which the state looses legitimacy with the people.  The targeted gov acts as a force multiplyer, increasing the efficacy of the group’s efforts to cause as much damage and chaos as possible.

American conservatives imbue the Islamic terrorist ( see the KSM trial in NYC) with a level of sophistication and skill that makes Jason Bourne look like a two-year old with a cold. Its a sign of fear and confusion of who and what the enemy acually is.

Mnemosyne at 24: Emma Goldman was a left anarchist, not a communist. Entirely different ideology but equally hated by the right.

Ben D.,  a few things. Strictly speaking there were many different schools of Zionist thought, of which Labor Zionism was one and the dominant one until the 1970s. However, there were Religious Zionist and Right Zionists since the beginning of the movement. They just did not become prominent until later. The first Zionist work, “Rome and Jerusalem” and Moses Hess, was both socialist and religious.

  By Muslim leadership, I wasn’t necessarily referring to Palestinian leaders or even other Arabs but non-Arab Muslims that involve themselves in the conflict by painting Israel as part of a war against Islam and encouraging the Palestinians to indulge in futile and counterproductive behavior. I.e., Former Prime Minister Matathir of Malaysia or the current President of Iran, whose name I can never remember the spelling of. The Palestinian analogy to people like Geller, who encourage Israelis to indulge in their worst actions. People who do not have to live with the consequences of these actions.

  Dr. Efraim Karsh, who might be a bit too ardently pro-Israel for your tastes, argues that the reason the Egyptians and Jordanians did not set up a Palestinian state was because the intent of the Arabs if successful in Israeli War of Independence was to split up Israel/Palestine between them. Egypt was to get the Negev, Jordan the center, Syria the Galilee, and Lebanon a coastal strip from the border to Akko. Another failing of Arab leadership was putting the Palestinians in camps and stewing the seeds of extremism rather than absorbing them into their populations like all the other population transfers that happened at the time.

Another reason why the fear of the vast Muslim conspiracy makes no sense is that the Islamists spend most of their times arguing and fighting other Muslims to even bother with America and Europe usually. They completely lack any organizational skills necessary to do what conservatives fear they want to do.

but non-Arab Muslims that involve themselves in the conflict by painting Israel as part of a war against Islam and encouraging the Palestinians to indulge in futile and counterproductive behavior.

Understood now. That category of people are the very ones I referred to as the non-Arab Muslims who cynically inserted themselves into the fray since the 1970s for their own transparent ends. Namely, ginning up Jew-hate in the hope that this will distract their people from turning their attention to the deficiencies of the authoritarian systems said leaders are in charge of.

Before the ‘70s, in fact, Israel and Iran (and Pakistan!), based on purely realist politics, were natural allies. Iran based on both wanting to contain Arab nationalism and on geography (“checkerboard” alliances), and Pakistan beecause it, like Israel, is a nation founded on a partition based on ethno-religious lines.

I was also sorely disappointed in Dean. This is one fucking issue the left cannot afford to be bullied on. Either we have religious freedom or we don’t. Full stop.

No kidding. If there was ever a moment for Dean to reiterate his hot-headed, “I hate Republicans and everything they stand for,” it was this thing over the Cordoba House. You have the Republican party quite blatantly fomenting the very anti-American sentiments of anti-religious and anti-minority hatreds, and that’s something where public figures need to clearly stand up for what’s right and condemn people like Geller, Gingrich, Palin, and Fox News. I’m not afraid to say it: when they advocate and side with those protesting Muslim mosques and community centers both in Manhattan and around the country, it’s a reason that I hate what Republicans stand for. They make basic American values we supposedly teach in class out to be lies.

They make basic American values we supposedly teach in class out to be lies.

I’m sorry?  Torture, spying without warrants, indefinite detention, and even assassination on the President’s whim were compatible with your “basic American values”?

The myth of “America” your kids get indoctrinated with in schools seems to have died a long time ago.

<blockquote>The myth of “America” your kids get indoctrinated with in schools seems to have died a long time ago.</bllockquote>

Would you prefer segregation and slavery?

Those values aren’t things that are already realized, or were ever realized, but things to strive towards.

PiaToR, you know what? You live in NZ, and you can fuck right off about your opinion of my country’s values.

BTW, PiATOR, have you ever attended a high school history class in an American school?

Before the ‘70s, in fact, Israel and Iran (and Pakistan!), based on purely realist politics, were natural allies.

They still are (add Turkey into the mix there as well).  No possible border disputes with each other, democratic institutions that are established and moderately-to-mostly functional, especially compared with the countries between them.

It gets into chicken and egg land, but if Israel and the Palestinians could be sorted out somehow (so the Iranian religious leadership and the nutbars in the civil government didn’t have that as an excuse anymore) I could easily see rapprochement betweeen the two happening fairly quickly.

I didn’t include Turkey because they are, for the most part, still a friend of Israel. At least until Israel’s recent overreaction to the Gaza blockade runner, which is yet another example of their tone-deafness in foreign policy since the early 2000s.

PiaToR, you know what? You live in NZ, and you can fuck right off about your opinion of my country’s values.

Not saying anything one way or the other about the opinion, but speaking as another foreigner: you live in a country that is an interventionist superpower.  You live in a country that has extensive political and economic ties around the entire world.  Your country broadcasts its internal news, opinion, and political issues around the world.  What your country does effects a tad more than the people within its borders.  If you don’t like that other people might have opinions concerning your country, you are living in the wrong country.

interventionist superpower

Is there any other kind?

[emphasis mine]

But your point is well-taken and that’s why I’m not exactly weeping over the prospect over a 19th-Century style multi-polar world of Great Powers by the middle of this Century rather than one superpower or two competing superpowers. Takes the heat off, so to speak.

Dude, John, just because someone’s not a pants-wetting scaredy-cat child like you, it doesn’t mean they’re a liar.

You know what makes me paranoid, John? Irrational, stupid, dangerous reactionary dumbshit freaks. Being on a plane with you would scare the crap out of me.

The freaking Israelis do, God bless ‘em.

LOL no.

Especially since a Palestinian can look very much like an Israeli. Israel uses behavioral, not racial profiling on their national airlines. As it turns out, “their” smarter than that.

Show me someone getting on an airplane with a 20 something muslim who says hes not paranoid and I’ll show you a liar.

How can anyone tell whether or not someone they don’t know is a Muslim?

There are brown-skinned Muslims of Arabic or Persian descent, but there are also caucasian-looking European Muslims as well as very dark-skinned Muslims of sub-Saharan origin.  Islam is a religion, not an ethnic group, dipshit.

But in answer to your question, the last two flights I took there were individuals whose complexion and facial features indicated they were of Middle Eastern background.  And while I’m sure there were some inbred trailer trash racists on the flight (perhaps your cousin/wife) pissing themselves because of them scary AY-RABS, I wasn’t concerned, nor did I notice any signs of apprehension from other passengers near me.

Believe it or not, most of us aren’t as racist as you, though unfortunately, Islamaphobia is still frighteningly high, given some of the recent poll data showing how fucking idiotic nearly 20% of Americans are.  Considering the ridiculous level of security that has been been implemented in air travel since 9/11, do you really think there’s much of a chance that Islamic terrorists are ever going to repeat what happened 9 years ago?  Seriously, even if somehow or other they managed to comandeer a plane, do you think the passengers will just sit there and let them plow it into a building without a fight?  Since 9/11/01, there have been precisely zero fatalities or physical injuries to innocent passengers involving jihadist Muslims and commercial airplanes, including the failed attempts by Mr. Shoe Bomber and Mr. Underwear Bomber.  Every single day, Muslims board airplanes throughout the United States, and somewhere between 99.99999999999% and 100% of those Muslims aren’t plotting sinister acts against their fellow passengers or major skyscrapers.

That so many people like you can take the horrible actions of 19 men and their ideological leaders and assign blame to all one billion human beings whose only connection is that they all practice the same religion is utterly appalling.

Al Qaeda ≠ Islam
Osama bin Laden ≠ Islam

The fact that AQ and OBL consider themselves adherents to the Islamic faith does not mean that the entire Muslim world supports the actions and/or ideology of that group or their leader.

There are many, many self-proclaimed Christians throughout history who have perpetrated evil… assuming you are a Christian, do you think it would be fair for me to say that you support child rape, since David Koresh, who was also a Christian, raped children and declared that his Christian God approved of him doing so?  Do you think it would be fair to hold you personally responsible for the actions of every pedophile priest in the world?

The United States was not attacked by Islam on 9/11/01.  We were attacked by the footsoldiers of a violent fringe Muslim organization who believed they were on a mission from God to deliver retribution for America’s imperialist activities in the Muslim world.  The entire Muslim world is no more responsible for the actions of those 19 lunatics than you or most Christians are personally responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by people like David Koresh.

If you think it is wrong to blame all Christians for the sins of some Christians, practice what you preach, ass.

The insistence that all Muslims are to blame for the actions of a few, that there is a vast Muslim conspiracy to take over America, is strongly reminiscent of not only the commie-scare, but the persistant claims that there is a vast Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, too.

Precisely, which makes it even more appalling considering the source.  Pamela Geller, the wingnut blogger who banged on this drum until the MSM started booking her for interviews, is Jewish.  And she’s the individual who succeeded in pushing this “controversy” from the fringe wingnut blogosphere onto CNN and the pages of the NYT.

For those unfamiliar with Geller’s history, she was one of the first to declare war against Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs back in 2008 when he started calling out the lunacy of his former rightwing allies.  I know Johnson left a bad enough taste in a lot of progressives’ mouths that many will never forgive him, but if you had never known about his website prior to today, you’d be inclined to think he was part of the progressive netroots given the anti-wingnut positions he’s promoted in the past 2 years.  He’ been very direct in calling out the Islamophobic bigotry involved in this Park51 controversy, which is actually pretty astounding for those who remember his blogging in the middle of the Bush years, considering how much Islamophobic bigotry he himself once spewed himself.  I still really don’t know what precisely pushed him over, but I have trouble believing that his conversion is completely insincere at this point.  Pretending to have that anti-wingnut a worldview would be a hell of an act to maintain for as long as he has been maintaining it if it wasn’t sincere.

Wait,

Show me someone getting on an airplane with a 20 something muslim who says hes not paranoid and I’ll show you a liar.

? What’s wrong with that statement? If I were a 20 something muslim, I’d be damn paranoid getting on an airplane:  what if Anne Jacobson was there?

As to JM’s later statement that he can visually identify people who are likely to have the same beliefs as Mohammed Atta, oy.  Quite a few Indian-Americans have been permanently injured, and a few killed, on that basis of such convictions.

As for Bush’s motives, the thing is, pace Kanye, Bush is not a bigot on a personal level, for all that his policies and appointees did incalculable harm to various minorities.  Not only does he know Saudis, he knows a number U.S. Muslims—many voted for him—and, like Pataki and the Giuliani of 2001, was interested in maintaining order in the U.S.  What I’m saying is, you don’t have to assume that he was so forward-looking or so image-oriented as to be thinking, “This’ll make us look better late in 2003”:  you just have to assume that his idea of leadership, however fucked up in other ways, necessitated that the U.S. not turn into Gujarat.

Howard Dean, who last month praised Newt’s intellectual leadership, can I think be written off altogether.

PiaToR, you know what? You live in NZ, and you can fuck right off about your opinion of my country’s values.

Uh-huh.

Which part of “torture, spying without warrants, indefinite detention, and even assassination on the President’s whim” do you consider to be part of your “basic American values”, Tyro and BenD?

“I’m saying that young men who look like that make me paranoid”

Latinos? East Indians? Ethiopians? Sephardic Jews? You might need some medicine for that - like, over 25% of the world’s young men make you antsy.

One thing that should be pointed out is the fact that the White House, to some degree, has fueled this Islamophobia in how it has dealt with the false rumors that President Obama is himself a Muslim.  Deputy WH Press Secretary Bill Burton responded to the Pew Poll indicating nearly one out of five Americans believe Obama is a Muslim by saying, “The president is obviously a Christian.  He prays every day.”  The unfortunate implication of Burton’s statement was that Muslims are not as pious or prayerful as Christians.  And whether he meant it that way or not, the response reinforced the notion that Christian = good and Muslim = bad.

The best way to answer questions regarding the president’s religion should be modeled after the remarks made by a former Secretary of State two years ago on Meet The Press:

Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian.  He’s always been a Christian.  But the really right answer is, what if he is?  Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America.  Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?  Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.’  This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

There are many, many things that Colin Powell has been really wrong about.  He was not wrong in the blunt way in which he directly confronted the inherent Islamophobia behind the “Obama is a Muslim” bullshit.  I think Powell’s comment on the matter was one of the most courageous and forthright statements made in response to false rumors about Obama’s religion, because it not only called out the falsehood of the rumor, but also called out the inherently Islamophobic nature of the rumor.  Those who promote the “Obama is a Muslim” meme are not only exposing their own bigotry, they’re hoping to gin up bigotry among their fellow citizens as well.  That one-fifth of my fellow citizens are participating in this Nazi-like garbage makes me ill.  And yes, hating a group of people and ascribing all of the world’s evils to them solely because of their religion is EXACTLY what the Nazis were doing in 1930s Germany.

When progressives push back against the false rumors about Obama’s religion, they need not do so with an air of indignation that reinforces the bigotry that being called a Muslim should be considered insulting.  “No, Obama isn’t a Muslim.  But so fucking what if he was?  Why would that be a bad thing?”  That’s how it ought to be addressed.

9-11 was caused by sexually repressed fundamentalists.  You may rest assured that I am always afraid whenever I am in the presence of sexually repressed fundamentalists.

Radical terrorist groups are generally incapable of bringing down governments themselves; they rely on an overreaction by the targeted governments in suppressing civil liberties (esp on ethnic groups similart to the terrorist) thereby creatng the conditions by which the state looses legitimacy with the people.  The targeted gov acts as a force multiplyer, increasing the efficacy of the group’s efforts to cause as much damage and chaos as possible.

So, so true.  What’s really sad is that I don’t know if we can even correctly call the level of Islamophobia in this country “fringe” anymore, when 62% of Americans now say they are opposed to a religious group exercising their rights to legally acquire property and build a community center on that property simply because of their particular religion.

I believe the embarrassingly bigoted public reaction to projects like Park51 is PRECISELY what Osama bin Laden was hoping would happen in America in the wake of 9/11.  I believe OBL celebrated our invasion of Iraq and that he wants the American Islamophobia ginned up so much that it eventually boils over into World War III.  There aren’t enough al-Qaeda members in the world to rip America to shreds on their own, but there are more than enough xenophobic Americans willing to do the work for them.  And what so many of my clueless “moran” fellow citizens don’t seem to get is that when they hop on “let’s punch an AY-RAB” bandwagon, they are playing right into OBL’s game.  The wingnuts who shriek the loudest about barbaric practices of violent jihadists are ironically the quickest to defend America’s engagement in similar barbaric practices.

Young men who look like that on an airliner make me paranoid.

And please tell me, you racist inbred cracker, what exactly does “that” look like?

I’m going to take a wild stab at that and say “brown, but not like my Mexican gardener”.

I have such a fear of flying (but I still fly), that this conversation is almost funny to me.  I couldn’t be more terrified if I knew for a fact that terrorists were shooting missiles at my plane as it took off.  So no, I don’t notice people around me unless they make the mistake of bringing themselves to my notice.  My last cross-country flight a woman did that.  My terror is very self-contained.  Unless you were studying body language you probably wouldn’t know that I was afraid on the plane.  Maybe due to that I hate people who don’t contain their fear.  And as we were taxiing down the runway, this woman actually yelled out “what’s that noise”.

No one answered her, and I looked around.  THe man sitting across the aisle from me caught my eye and said “that’s a completely normal noise”.  I nodded at him and then set my eyes on her.  I literally wanted to kill her.

I have no idea if there were any Muslims on the plane.  But John, maybe you are afraid of flying.  It’s okay to admit that, because once you do you can deal with it.  It sounds like your fear is causing you to obsess over possible Moslem passengers, because you think they’re a controllable factor while you know that if the plane crashes into a mountain, or the sea, or into another plane, you have no control over that.  It’s lack of control that is the most common root cause of fear of flying.  And that’s what you have.  You’re trying to tell yourself it’s the Muslims you fear, not the flying, because you believe that fearing Muslims is rational.

I recommend going to a hypnotist and getting a tape made.  They’re very soothing to listen to and I feel it may help you.  Good luck okay?

PiaToR, you know what? You live in NZ, and you can fuck right off about your opinion of my country’s values.

Uh-huh.

Which part of “torture, spying without warrants, indefinite detention, and even assassination on the President’s whim” do you consider to be part of your “basic American values”, Tyro and BenD?

I have no idea why I’m wading into this, but here goes.  PiaToR, I think you are a great commenter here and I mostly agree with a lot of your criticisms of America.  I think most progressives would acknowledge that America’s checkered history warrants much criticism.

That said, sometimes when making these criticisms, you can come across as antagonistic and condescending, almost like you’re trying to pick a fight.  I think for the most part, with the exception of douchebag racist trolls like John Mckay, those who post here tend to share a progressive worldview, albeit to varying degrees with each person having their own particular niche interests.  I certainly don’t think most of the non-trolls here think of America as some mythical sacred place that should be shielded from all criticism, but when the criticism comes across as an attack on all Americans in general, people who happen to be American tend to get defensive.

I can’t speak for anybody else, but I personally had no choice about which country I would be born in.  I’m guessing the same is true for you as well.  In my case, it wound up being the United States of America.  I assume you were born in New Zealand, but please correct me if that assumption is wrong.  Stereotypes typically contain some kernel of truth, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be hurtful or misleading.  As a group, Americans are typically stereotyped as dumb, arrogant, crass, rude, overbearing, culturally illiterate McSlobs.  And while it’s true that we have more than a small handful of people that fit that description perfectly, the belief that most Americans are exactly like the worst stereotype outsiders have of Americans is itself a product of closed-minded prejudice.  I don’t know what personal experiences you have had with average Americans outside the blogosphere, but I can assure you that most of us aren’t as awful as the worst stereotypes make us out to be.  If your only experience has been with those of the previously described McSlob variety, I’m sorry that you’ve had to deal with those assholes, because I can’t stand them, either.

There are a lot of terrible American citizens.  And there are a lot of good American citizens.  For the most part, most Americans, like most humans, aren’t all good or all bad.  There is much to criticize with how this country has behaved in its foreign endeavors, and there is much to criticize in how this country has dealt with the least privileged of our own citizens.  But for 99% of Americans, there is very little we can do on an individual basis to fundamentally change the entire nature of this Republic, and there is absolutely nothing we can do to erase this nation’s past failings.  In 2008, something many thought they would never live to see happened, and a black guy got elected to the most powerful office in this country, and he’s finding out that that even with the amount of authority he has been given, he cannot singlehandedly right all of America’s wrongs simply by snapping his fingers.  And I’m not exonerating him for times when he could have acted more courageously but did not.  He has made wrong decisions of his own accord since he has been in office, and he rightly deserves to be criticized for those things.  But even if he always stood for the most progressive position possible, he would still find that he could not singlehandedly right all of America’s wrongs.

I think it’s actually a good thing for non-Americans to express their criticisms of American policy to progressive Americans, and I think the concerns raised are often quite valid.  There is a special value in an outsider’s opinion, because even though most people want to believe they are always objective and unbiased, it’s hard to deny the difficulty in being completely objective about the country that has always been your home.  That said, I don’t think it serves anyone well to express anger about America’s moral failures in the form of condescending animosity towards potential allies because they happen to be American.  And while that may not have been your intent, that is sometimes how it comes across, at least from my POV.  Just my $0.02.

That said, sometimes when making these criticisms, you can come across as antagonistic and condescending, almost like you’re trying to pick a fight.

You’re damned right I’m angry.  What I see is the possibility of history repeating itself, of America going actually fascist.  And the toxic levels of propaganda you people live in, the myths of America’s “unique values” and “exceptionalism” are one good reason why that seems more likely.  They parallel the lies the Germans told themselves about the superior culture of the Volk.

See how easily they’re trotted out to justify invasion and occupation…

The things I listed have all happened.  They are still happening.  Any talk about “American values” in the face of that simple fact strikes me as an attempt to justofy, excuse or minimise.

You are a country that tortures prisoners, that detains people without trial, that invades and assassinates.  You are not “the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave”.  You are not “the Last Best Hope of Mankind”.  You are not “the Indispensible Nation”.

What I fear is that the next generation, the kids I see growing up around me, are going to have to face down and fight an American Reich some day - just as my grandparents’ generation had to do with the German Reich.  And if you think that’s loony and overblown, ask yourselves - did you ever imagine ten years ago that American politics would be revolving around justifications for torture and whether Muslims could be treated as Enemies of the People?

One more Sept. 11th, one election with the teabaggers winning, and the inevitable economic crisis they cannot solve requiring a distraction - that’s all it would take.  What exactly did Argentina’s junta do when it was faced with domestic problems they were unable to solve?

Canada’s oil sands.  Venezuela.  Invading Iran.  A trade war with Europe or China.  “Pacifying” Mexico. The list of possible targets is huge - and likely to suck the rest of us in.

Hi Johnmckay. I live in a very diverse community (in the Midwest even). Tons of Muslims. I see women in headscarves or veils pretty much every single day. You know what they’re doing? Buying groceries, doing laundry, driving the kids to school. It’s almost like they’re normal people just like everyone else! In conclusion you are a worthless pantswetting wuss. I hope the Scary Arabs(tm) on your next airline flight come over to your seat and shout “Boo!” because you’ll probably have a heart attack.

Okay, John McKay is just making me giggle-snort right now. As it happens, my earliest memories of being on planes involve a whole passel of “men like that” - big, swarthy, middle-eastern, and likely muslim men. My mother about had heart failure when she took me down the aisle and the Turkish Olympic Wrestling team (of 1972) proceeded to ruffle my hair and pass me around for hugs, but as a three-year-old, I thought it was great.

So as it happens, my associational memory with the people John is evidently talking about is of complete strangers grinning at me and making a tremendous fuss about how adorable I am. Hardly the foundation of great fear.

Piator that’s interesting.  I have given some thought to what this country would be like if the far-right facist movement were to gain power.  Sarah Palin as President, etc.

I had only considered what they might do with their power projected inwards, towards me and had never considered what they might do with their power projected outwards. 

That’s certainly something to think about and of course you have every right to be concerned.

That’s certainly something to think about and of course you have every right to be concerned.

Whining that he has a right to be concerned misses the point. When he starts telling us what we believe and what our country’s (ostensible) value system is, well, then he cab go fuck himself in his antipodal hut. Now maybe PiaToR agrees with Newt Gingrich that we are actually a nation whose national values are inherently intolerant, but he doesn’t get to tell us that. Any more than he gets to tell Muslims what their value system is.

I’m sorry Tyro, I did not get past your first sentence.

Did you just say I was WHINING????

Is that what you just said?

“I had only considered what they might do with their power projected inwards, towards me and had never considered what they might do with their power projected outwards.”

Since WWII, we’ve been the proverbial bull-in-the-china-shop.  Our every action sends ripples out across the Earth.  When we behave well (which isn’t often enough) we can have a positive influence on a lot of what goes on politically and culturally.  But when we behave badly, we can be devastating.

We have supported dictators and overthrown democratic governments, plundered and manipulated, acted against the best interests of people all over the globe, and we justified all of it as anti-Communist, or pro-American business interests, or the War on Drugs (or sometimes all three at once).

The last decade of fearful acceptance of increasingly limited domestic civil rights, officially sanctioned use of torture, assassination, domestic spying, detention without trial, the beginnings of a police state with the formation of the Department of Fatherland Security — all of these should be alarming to anyone who has ever believed in even a sliver of what America claims to be.  It’s truly sickening.

And when some ass like JohnMckay comes by to remind us all of ongoing presence of the American Hardcore Loony 25%, that’s just the icing on the shit cake…

JohnMcKay: I’m probably about as close as you could get to an ideal test case of “person to be paranoid about flying with Muslims” as you could find anywhere - as it happens, I’m planning an east coast->west coast flight tomorrow with my young daughter. Fathers protecting their little girls is what every prosecutor dreams of in a jury, right?

Anyway, my reaction to you is to tell you to fuck off.

Don’t you get that Muslims are your neighbors, your kids’ friends at school, and your co-workers? (Although I’ll admit, I haven’t had any twenty-something Muslim co-workers for a few months since that one guy turned 30, but we’ll probably get some new transfers in in September)

Seriously, if you honestly feel like that, how do you leave your house in the morning? Have you ever been to a large city? Come to NYC sometime, it’s great! I look forward to your breakdown at the large number of “men who look like that” doing scary things like selling halal shish kebabs from streetcarts. (Many within easy walking distance of the WTC site! Oh noez!)

Earlier in the thread, PIATOR commented “If you ever wanted to know how the German people managed to work themselves up to the point of Kristallnicht - now you know” and I have to disagree.  I can believe the situation is analogous, but I can’t use that to gain any extra understanding of Kristallnacht since have not a clue how America got here. I cannot understand the people on the other side - obviously, some are just engaging in disingenuous pandering, (and JohnMcKay seems to be trolling for fun) and that I understand, but I really don’t understand the people being pandered to. Even my right-wing, evangelical Christian co-worker - who I can usually rely on for an explanation of what’s going on in that sphere - thinks this Park 51 nonsense is bizarre.

Anyone have any better resources for figuring out what’s going on? The America I see reflected in the opposition to the Park 51 center just doesn’t reflect any America I know, and my image of America was first formed during the Reagan years.

Remind me again, did anyone here say that torture etc are part of basic American values?

This post wasn’t even about torture or detentions. It’s about religious freedom.

Still waiting to here if you’ve ever attended a history or social studies class in an American high school.

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:

Given that the the primary strategy of Osama Bin Laden is to drive a wedge between western liberal society and moderate Islam, so as to radicalize the global Muslim population, he must be laughing his ass off at this entire debacle.

Why must Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich provide aid and comfort to our enemies?

Oh, and you,PIATOR, are quite the exceptionalist. You think the USA is exceptionally evil, that is, compared to other western countries which is flat out ridiculous.

Do you know what the British did to Northern Irish rebels? The atrocities France committed in the Algerian War? Those are just two examples from very recent history. How about the Swiss voting to actually ban new mosque construction? The French President calling Muslim immigrants “scum?” Ever heard of the Danish Peoples Party? Silvio Berlusconi?

Anyone have any better resources for figuring out what’s going on? The America I see reflected in the opposition to the Park 51 center just doesn’t reflect any America I know, and my image of America was first formed during the Reagan years.

What happened is that Rupert Murdoch sent some of his Fox News’ lackeys to some teabagger rallies to shoot video of a few hundred angry old white people which they then claimed was like totally the largest protest gathering of Real ‘Muricans in the history of America who were sick of the sekret soshulist muslin in the White House.  And rather than pointing and laughing at Rupert’s joke of a “news” network, the rest of the MSM followed their lead and started treating these idiots like they were a legitimate grassroots movement whose incoherent and nonsensical ravings about government’s evil plans to take over government-run Medicare were worthy of being portrayed as a valid opposing viewpoint.  And then the White House started acting spooked by these people and gave timid and spineless responses to patently absurd questions that didn’t even deserve to be dignified with any response other than “Are you fucking serious?  Are you really asking whether or not the president is a Muslim?  Give me your press credentials, get the fuck out of this press room, and never come back, you annoying little douchebag.  Anybody else care to ask a question that only a fucknozzle flunkie would ask?”

Anyway, that’s the basic gist of “what happened”.

Ben D at 71, I have a developing theory about people about non-Americans who see America as “exceptionally evil” when compared to other western countries or just other countries. Basically, it seems that since around the French Revolution, a segment of non-American leftists have always been disapointed with Americans for being “insufficiently left and/or revolutionary” because the American Revolution wasn’t as radical as the French Revolution. Therefore, the American Revolution wasn’t a “real revolution” at all but a conflict between two privileged groups. This “original sin”, not having a “real revolution” means that everything subsequently done by the American governmetn and/or people is evil.

  Its only a segment of non-American leftists that believe this but it has a large influence in the general thought process. The American government has done some pretty heineous stuff, domestically and in other countries, but so has practically every other government on the planet, regardless if the government was left or right or center, democratic or not. This is only considering recent, post-WWII history to. Even social democratic Sweden has some rather serious skeletons in their closet, with history of forcibly sterilzing certain classes of people in the name of the social good.

  Another thing is that many non-Americans like to complain about how evil the American government and/or people are in order to cover up their own misdeeds as a country and/or people, past or present. So you get non-Americans criticizing America for this controversy while ignoring the fact that many European countries make life unpleasant for their Muslim citizens and immigrants in ways much more severe than what is happening in America, with things like hijab bans and the like.

BTW, question for Amanda or anybody else. What is a CHOAD?

Ben, your bigotry is showing.  PiaToR doesn’t lose the right to criticize the US just by living elsewhere.  The notion that nobody outside our borders can criticize us is incredibly offensive (though not, sadly, unAmerican).  If you really think we’re so much better than everyone else as to be above criticism, you’re part of the fucking problem.

The “choad,” also called the “taint,” is the stretch of skin between the genitals and anus.

Where did I say he doesn’t have the right to criticize? Tyro may have said that but I didn’t.

BTW, question for Amanda or anybody else. What is a CHOAD?

It’s a kind of all-purpose bad word. Some say it refers to the taint. Others say it refers to a penis, especially a thick penis.

#73

There’s a simpler explanation too: feelings about Earth’s last superpower are bound to be strong, whatever the actual objective character of the people who inhabit it.

You’re challenging him to provide evidence that he’s attended an American high school, which is clearly dismissive.  As if attending an American high school were a) actually an indication of any level of civic education, or b) a prerequisite to criticism of America.

Lee, yes, but remember there’s also a right wing brand of anti-American sentiment not covered by that explanation. You know, “America is a land inhabited by racially degenerate mongrels who have no real culture” etc. People like LePen espouse this view, as did Hitler and Mussolini.

AnglScarlett, I meant that PiaToR was whining, not you.

atheist I am not getting what is all purpose about a “thick penis”?

I only did that, libdevil, because he seems to be under the illusion that American history is taught just as it was in the 50s, which is absurd.

Even in my high school in a southern town the atrocities against Native Americans, slavery, segregation, and McCarthyism were all extensively covered, just to name a few. And being dismissive of a criticism is hardly the same as saying he has no right to it.

@ tyro - okay, thanks for the clarification.

I am very open to what piator has to say though.

though someone else did have a point when they said that America is not exceptionally evil either.  People with great power over others pretty much suck and always have.

Ben D. at 81, yes but it was leftist anti-Americanism that is being discussed here.

Libdevil, PIOTR’s line of criticism has existed since America was founded, long before superpowerdom.

All purpose BAD about a thick penis I meant to say!

I find John’s repeated use of the word “paranoid” enlightening, given that it means experiencing “baseless or excessive suspicion.” At least he is being honest about his motives and mental state! I feel sorry for him; living in a constant state of supervigilance must be taxing.

[what is] All purpose BAD about a thick penis I meant to say!

Indeed

“There’s a simpler explanation too: feelings about Earth’s last superpower are bound to be strong, whatever the actual objective character of the people who inhabit it.”

It doesn’t even necessarily stem from being (the current) Last Superpower on Earth.  When England was a superpower, there were people who benefitted and liked it, and there were those under the boot who resented it.  Same for France, Spain, Portugal, and all the way back to Rome, Greece, Egypt, The Persian Empire, etc.  And that’s just greater Europe/Middle East.  There have been many Asian empires that have risen, had their moment, and fallen too.

Originally there was little idealistic bullshit being thrown around when it came to building empires and exploiting people.  Everyone understood it was driven by raw greed, hate, envy, and ego.  Whoever has the biggest balls made as many people as they could their bitches.

It was only later on that this patina of high-mindedness about civilizing the “wogs”, and bringing religious enlightenment to the savages, spreading freedom and democracy, and such rot, got pasted on to make the immoral savagery a little more palatable to the proles back home and influence the judgement of future historians in their favor.

But there has always been an iron fist, even if sometimes it was covered by a velvet glove.

It looks like America’s reign as World’s Last Superpower is going to be among the shortest, with our own rapid economic/political decline and the rapid rise of China and India.

The song remains the same.

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was…

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
And I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again
Don’t get fooled again
No, no!
...

I think part of the anger at PIATOR is that some American values are clear-cut and others aren’t.  The Park51 freakout is anti-First Amendment, anti-the American value of religion not mattering.  Torture, for example, is more complicated.  Is it a punishment (8th Amendment)? Is it a violation of due process, self-incrimination, etc. (5th and 6th)?  These are places where Americans can legitimately disagree.  That doesn’t make torture moral or good, but it does determine whether or not torture violates “American values.”  If we decide it doesn’t, then we can discuss whether or not to modify our code of values so that torture is more specifically forbidden.

America, of course, is sometimes hypocritical (PATRIOT Act, Park51, etc.) and sometimes our values are perhaps not as good as some (Americans or otherwise) might like.  Maybe we will get there (we are still figuring out capital punishment and the recently exhumed torture debate, for example), but until we do the argument of whether those things are anti-American is an American argument.  Perfectly fine to think we are immoral, more offensive to call us hypocrites.

And I have a pretty unique experience with American high school history. I moved stateside in January ‘91, just as the first Iraq war broke out. The first semester of that year, I was taking modern Rusdian history in then barely post-Soviet Russian high school. The second semester of that year I was taking US history in Brooklyn. Both courses touched on slightly on the respective countries’ atrocities. But the level of bullshit, half-truths, justifications, and indoctrination into “our special values” was pretty comparable. I remember, because it was my first indication that maybe we didn’t immigrate to the bastion of civil rights, justice, and freedoms after all. Not to say that I think this is a horrible place, but this country has done some awful things right from the start, and so any talk about “unuque values” is not quite justified, while most criticism certainly is.

Launching thousands of missiles after an evacuation of an occupying power

A minor point, and I agree with most of the comment, but I can’t let this piece of misinformation pass.  There were no “thousands of missiles”.  There were a couple of dozen attacks, none involving casualties, before the Israelis started bombing Gaza.  These attacks were not carried out by the Hamas-led Palestinian government, which was actively engaged in trying to prevent them, but by extremist groups trying to undermine Hamas.

I only did that, libdevil, because he seems to be under the illusion that American history is taught just as it was in the 50s, which is absurd.

Even in my high school in a southern town the atrocities against Native Americans, slavery, segregation, and McCarthyism were all extensively covered, just to name a few. And being dismissive of a criticism is hardly the same as saying he has no right to it.

FWIW I’m the high school class of 03, YMMV.

Mike,

The rise of China, of India, of Brazil doesn’t mean that the US will no longer play a role in world affairs. It just means the US will be one of many Great Powers rather than a unipolar Superpower which is a good thing, for the world and the US. Unipolar systems suck.

the panicked claims that we’re going to start following sharia law instead of our nation’s secular laws

The irony about this, of course, is that Iman Rauf has written a book, “What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right With America,” is which he argues that Islamic law, properly understood, requires a tolerant, American-style liberal democracy.

“It just means the US will be one of many Great Powers rather than a unipolar Superpower…”

The point I was trying to make is that any superpower/Great Power is resented and blamed for a lot of what goes on.  Some of this is unfair, much of it is well deserved. 

America is no more a Shining Beacon of Freedom and The Last Hope of Mankind than it is the World’s Greatest Criminal State.

And I agree that it will be good for all when America has to share the spot light with other great nations (again)...

Yes that’s true, Mike, but that kind of bullshit is hardly unique to America. Ask the French about their “civilizing mission” sometime, or the Brazilians about their racial utopia.

“Yes that’s true, Mike, but that kind of bullshit is hardly unique to America. Ask the French about their “civilizing mission” sometime, or the Brazilians about their racial utopia.”

Agree 100%...

I certainly carry my own knee-jerk prejudices of certain demographic groups. I also have the grace to admit that they’re generally wrong and try to treat everyone fairly in spite of them.

The irony about this, of course, is that Iman Rauf has written a book, “What’s Right with Islam is What’s Right With America,” is which he argues that Islamic law, properly understood, requires a tolerant, American-style liberal democracy.

Well no wonder the wingnuts are up in arms against his project.

“I certainly carry my own knee-jerk prejudices of certain demographic groups. I also have the grace to admit that they’re generally wrong and try to treat everyone fairly in spite of them.”

...and that seems to be the difference (often) between a “conservative” and a “liberal”.

The liberal tries to recognize faults they have and tries to figure out how to overcome them.  They are not always successful, but they typically will admit they are works-in-progress.

The conservative wants to pretend they have no faults, and, when one is pointed out, will deny that it’s really a “fault” because “it’s just common sense”, and gets upset when they realize not everyone agrees with them and wants to coddle their particular skewed perspective.  And then they claim their 1st Amendment Rights have been eliminated because there are some people who disagree with the conservative and say so instead of keeping it to themselves.

It’s fascinating to me how some wingnut, like Pam Geller, will adamantly deny they are racist just before spewing out some racist comment like “There are no moderate Muslims, they all want to kill us and force us accept Sharia law, therefore we can’t allow a YMCA for Muslims in New York, or anywhere else, the Constitution be damned, Wolverines!”...

I’m just curious as to what would satisfy PIATOR at all. Should all of us American leftists lay down our heads and die in the sand?

WE KNOW IT IS FUCKED UP, THAT IS WHY WE ARE ON THE LEFT. Treating us like we are a-OK with torture and rendition because we…what? Were born here? Still live here? Haven’t fled to NZ like all decent-hearted nonfascists yet? Haven’t each individually become president and singlehandedly fixed it all yet? ...that is what sets me off, and I imagine Ben and Tyro too. 

If PIATOR is so concerned, I suggest he leave his cushy little nation and come here, and try to help us do a goddamn thing about it. I’ll happily take his place in NZ, I could use the health insurance.

My perspective is that outside criticism of America is not only worthy and valid, but also necessary to an accurate full analysis of what exactly America is.

I disagree with any sort of assertion that America is a divinely inspired or endowed exceptional country or idea, and I think some Americans carry their jingoist mythology of America to disturbing extremes in which they literally cannot acknowledge any wrong ever perpetrated by America.

Having said that, conflating the United States of America in 2010 to Nazi Germany is so ridiculously over the top that it’s barely worthy of serious discussion.  While I have no doubt that America has many critics in the world, I seriously doubt most of those critics consider us analogous to Nazi Germany.  There’s some serious fucking Godwinism going on in that insinuation, and I think it not only unfairly characterizes America as much worse than it actually is, it also minimizes the brutal severity of Hitler’s atrocities.

I understand that there is a lot of resentment towards the arrogant and boorish cowboy “our shit doesn’t stink” affect that some Americans exude, in particular the 43rd President of the United States.  And I think the resentment is quite often valid and warranted.  I know that more than a few Americans carry themselves in precisely that disgustingly hubristic manner.  That said, I didn’t vote for the guy that people “wanted to have a beer with”, and I didn’t support his imperialistic wars of terror.  And there are quite a few Americans who feel the same way as I do.

When you reduce the totality of what a country is to only the most heinous actions perpetrated by that country, it’s possible to portray any country on earth as a truly evil place.

America did not invent oppression, and long after we are gone - and I have no illusions that this country will exist in perpetuity, as no country in the history of the world has existed in perpetuity - there will be some other great big evil country perpetrating evil in the world.

The truth of the matter is that America, like every other superpower nation/empire in the history of humankind, has been responsible for a lot of really terrible things.  But we have also been responsible for a lot of really good things.  Those are typical consequences of any nation that has attained the status of “global superpower”.  Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  As American power has increased on the global stage, so has our tendency and ability to abuse that power.  And the same can be said for every empire that preceded us as well.  Human beings are often prone to be greedy and selfish, and this paradigm has been true for all of recorded history.

Those who proclaim that America is the greatest nation that ever existed and can do no wrong are completely clueless about who we really are.

And by the same token, those that assign full blame on America for every single thing that is wrong in the world - that somehow all of the world’s problems would magically disappear if only America didn’t exist - are also completely clueless about who we really are.

Is America the most oppressive nation on earth?  I think a case can be made that we’re pretty bad in some respects, but are we as oppressive as China?  I don’t think so, though I suppose the argument gets more nuanced depending on who would be considered the oppressed people in that analysis.

Anyway, I’m all over the place here, but my main point is that characterizing America as either the greatest and most benevolent nation or the worst and most malevolent nation on earth reveals an extremely naive and intellectually incurious perspective in both cases.  A thorough analysis of who or what exactly America is and has been involves quite a bit more nuance.

It isn’t that there is any valid moral justification for all of the atrocities of America that you pointed out, PiaToR.  There isn’t.  It’s that reducing the entirety of America’s identity to nothing but its most heinous wrongs doesn’t fully describe who or what America is, and would lead any person who had no prior knowledge or experience of America to think that we are the most abominable society in earth’s history and that America must be harboring the 300 Million most evil human beings to ever live.

Maybe your fears of an emerging “American Reich” aren’t insanely neurotic.  Of course, if those fears are ever realized it would indeed be horrific for all of humanity.  But right now, I’m not quite ready to start using my resources to plot my escape route to South America should I feel compelled to evacuate the country as a would-be Fuhrer ascends to power.  It does make for a pretty formulaic apocolyptic movie script, however.

There is no such thing as ‘American values’. There is no such thing as ‘national character’ in general. These are mythologies. As Amanda said in another post earlier this week, WHICH America? There is no single, monolithic, American tradition.

The nation is a bourgeois delusion. It’s a way in which the elites of a country manufacture a sense of unity and solidarity between classes that are historically antagonistic and have no common interests. So yes, I AM anti-American, because I oppose the MYTH of America. Just like I oppose the myth of a Quebecois ‘distinct nation’ at home.

Murrow Fan, it’s true we can’t be accurately compared to Nazi Germany, and although we have made some very troubling moves in the direction of fascism, we aren’t anything like as bad as them yet.

But I do think it’s very valuable to destroy the illusion many of us have that the creation of a real fascist America is impossible.  We have always had far more tendencies toward fasicsm than we have ever had toward socialism, and there have always been forces here who would welcome a hard right-wing America with open arms, even while believing that America in any form is a land of unparalleled freedom…

Hey JohnMckay @44, I’m not even a girly man, I’m just a weak little girl who flies probably about fifteen times on an annual basis what you’ve flown in your entire life, and guess what? I’m not afraid of 20-something Arabic-looking men in the least. Want to know why? Most of the world aren’t terrorists. You can piss your pants every time you see someone with brown skin get on a plane if you like, but please don’t think we’re all as scared as you.

Also: an American worker has more in common with a Chinese or French worker as he does with an American capitalist. But more importantly, an American capitalist has more in common with a Chinese capitalist than an American worker! Capital has no national boundaries, national ties or patriotic urges. Not having a single ounce of patriotism has worked well for the masters of the world, so maybe we ought to learn from their successes.l

Wow, MurrowFan, you sure do like to write an awful lot!

BlackBloc, people espouse whatever value system that works for them. Nation-states adhere to certain value systems with the intention of preserving their existence and identity. And in that sense, the principles on which our government operates are clear, and the arc of history has attempted to place those principles into practice as all levels of society. So you either believe in them, or you don’t, and you’re lying about your profession of those values. And Newt Gringrich is clearly lying when he acts as though he believes in principles and values of the American government.

But I do think it’s very valuable to destroy the illusion many of us have that the creation of a real fascist America is impossible.

Agreed, and truthfully, much of what happened under Bush led me to fear the possibility of that precise thing happening.

What quelled my fear was the ultimate verdict the American people levied upon Bush in the 2006 and 2008 elections.  And while President Obama is proving himself to be much further to the right than I and many of his supporters had hoped he would be, the fact that we were so completely appalled by how terrible Bush was that 70 Million of us were willing to put aside 400 years of racist thinking to cast our votes for the first African-American candidate to become president says that Americans do have a limit to how much movement towards fascism we’ll accept before we intervene.

I want to clarify my last statement, which I basically took from a headline I saw on The Onion on November 5, 2008: “Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress”.  The point being that while I think Obama and his campaign team deserve an enormous amount of credit for the campaign they ran, they certainly benefitted tremendously by being able to run as the opposition to the catastrophically shitty GOP administration in power.

I have to think McCain was probably as pissed off at Bush the night he lost as he was at anybody else (though he may have been more pissed off with his incompetent running mate), because I really think the GOP was screwed from the get go in 2008 given how loathed Bush had become by 2008.  George W. Bush went from having one of the highest approval ratings ever for a president in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (he was over 90%) to leaving that office with the lowest approval ratings ever.  He managed to squeeze every bit of electoral juice out of America’s 9/11 PTSD to get himself just barely re-elected in 2004, and it all went downhill for the GOP from there.  Everything he touched turned to shit, and America expressed its disgust for Bush in the next two elections on a grand scale.  2008 was about as close to an inevitable election as I can ever recall in recent history.  Though there were some tense moments throughout the primaries and the final few months, in hindsight I would have been shocked if we didn’t elect a Democratic POTUS after the the total clusterfuck created by the Republican incumbent.

My attitudes may again shift depending on how bad this November’s elections go (and I’m resigned to the fact that they’re practically guaranteed to not go well), but right now I’m not in panic mode about the possibility of a full-blown fascist government taking power anytime soon.

“PiaToR, you know what? You live in NZ, and you can fuck right off about your opinion of my country’s values.”

PiaToR. You know what? Unfuck right back on. I don’t care if you want to criticize my countries’ values. Or say pretty much whatever about it, because it’s a.) all true and b.) I don’t get worked up about such things.

My mother just happened to give birth to me in Hancock, MI. I did, however, choose to stay in the State of Michigan, so I do get worked up when people bash that.

“Hi Johnmckay. I live in a very diverse community (in the Midwest even). Tons of Muslims. I see women in headscarves or veils pretty much every single day. You know what they’re doing? Buying groceries, doing laundry, driving the kids to school. It’s almost like they’re normal people just like everyone else! In conclusion you are a worthless pantswetting wuss. I hope the Scary Arabs(tm) on your next airline flight come over to your seat and shout “Boo!” because you’ll probably have a heart attack.”

Anyone else reminded of the great scene in “Harold and Kumar Go To Guantanamo Bay” where they show Kumar on the plane from the old lady’s perspective and he’s got a long black beard and doing this awesome little hand gesture of a plane crashing? Thanks, John, that hand gesture gets me every time.

And, as others have said, assume Bin Laden has Pandagon up on the Pakistani cave internet. Who would be his favorite Pandagon commenter? If you decide to go there and pick up the award, do wear a tracking device, por favor.

BlackBloc, part of what you say is certainly true. Thomas Jefferson said a merchant has no country.

Funny, the teabaggers quote him an awful lot but I never heard that from them!

BlackBloc -

I respect your position because it calls into question the concept of nations across the board, and opposes the practice of nationalism and jingoism wherever it occurs.  As you said, you are anti-American, but I’m assuming that your position is consistent, and that you are also anti-Canadian, anti-Australian, anti-Japanese, anti-German in your opposition to the existence of nation-states.

BlackBloc, people espouse whatever value system that works for them.

Yes, in the sense that people’s value systems always end up being the rationalization of what they would have done anyway out of pure self-interest. People don’t value freedom because they like it in the abstract, they value freedom because they benefit personally from being free. People espouse feminism because it gives them, personally, something for women to become more equal to men (for women themselves, the benefits are self-evident).

@113: Sure, but in the sense that someone might be against racism across the board, yet reserve a whole lot more of his criticism to white people because, well, they have most of the power in this country, similarly I have a whole lot more to say against the imperialistic United States because the UK or Canada just don’t have as much power or an impact in the now (and when they do it’s mostly as part of a greater group, like the G8/G20).

And of course my position makes me a bit wary of the position of someone like Lee, because I consider that if you’re on the Left and a nationalist of any kind (Quebecois nationalist, American exceptionalist, Zionist, Stalinist-style ‘communism in one nation’/Russian imperialism) then you’ve missed a memo at some point.

Most, 90%, of terror attacks are committed by muslim men in their 20’s.

That’s funny, I could have sworn McVeigh, Rudolph, the Hutaree gang, etc… were Christians.

@102: Granted my bias is that a person of Middle Eastern or Central Asian background is likely to be professional and academic, because I have close friends and colleagues from Turkey, Bahrain, Iran, and Kazakhstan, but that’s just me.

an American worker has more in common with a Chinese or French worker as he does with an American capitalist.

Not quite: an American engineer has more in common with a French engineer than he does with an American farmer. Who has more in common with an Italian farmer than he does with his American counterpart.

And yet: people will support their neighbor over someone on the other side of the world they don’t know. Maybe you didn’t learn anything from WWI.

Not to mention the two different gangs of racists who were arrested because they had made (poorly thought out) plots to kill Obama.

Maybe you didn’t learn anything from WWI.

Oh *I* learned from WWI. I think the rest of the world might not have. And given the current political climate in the USA it seems they didn’t learn (the right thing from) WWII either.

BlackBloc at 105: This from a person who advocates re-education camps, like they worked so well every other time they were attempted.  But don’t worry, this time the re-education camps will be run by the right people and will be a stunning success at installing proper anarchist, syndicalist values in the middle and upper classes, transforming them in the process. (Sarcasm off).

  National and ethnic identities are about as real as any other form of identity, whether it be based on gender, class, religion, political ideology, sexual orientation, or hobby. That is they are combination of things that either exist originally or grew organicallly and things that were manufactured to complete the process. Classwise, I’m probably, horrors to you, upper middle-class and proud of it, but I’m also an American and relate more other Americans regardless of class, religion, and race than say a Japanese person of the upper-middle class. We share much of the same cultural background even with regional variations while what I have in common with a Japanese upper-middle class person is an income level and maybe some sort of vague ethical notions. Likewise, as a Jew I feel that I relate more to a working-class Jew than an upper middle class Thai because of a shared culture and background.

John, let me get this straight. When people say that they live in Muslim communities, or fly a lot without fear, or have Muslim colleagues, those are just “pretentious” personal anecdotes.  When you say that you’re afraid of men who look like they might be Muslim, that’s…not a personal anecdote? Interesting.

Rea at 96: Um no. According to Wikipedia, used because its the most neutral source possible in these circumstances, by January 2009, nearly 8,600 rockets have been launched into Israel from Gaza since January 2001 and a substantial proportion were after the withdrawal from Gaza.

What’s there to be proud about your class, Lee? Are you beholden to the lie that your class background is at all a feature of your *merit*, even in America?

I’ve never advocated the use of reeducation camps. I have used the imagery in self-derision in the past (I think the words were “we don’t hate upper class people, we’ll be fine with them once they get out of reeducation camps”).

The closest to that that I come to that is that I believe in the future workers commune, the fact that you’re a precious little engineer (or that you were middle management… which will be obsoleted as a job) won’t stop you from being on toilet scrubbing duty for the office every few weeks… just like everyone else will be when their turn in the rotation comes up. And if you think that’s debasement it says a lot about what you think of the people who are forced by economic conditions to be on toilet scrubbing duty 24/7.

Most, 90%, of terror attacks are committed by muslim men in their 20’s.

Actually, if we’re strictly talking about hijacked commercial jetliners in the United States, 100% of “terror attacks” have been committed by Muslim men in the past decade, though not all of them were in their 20s (Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, was 33).  There was that whacko in Austin a few months ago and some stupid kid in Florida a few years back who wanted to see what it felt like to ram small prop planes into office buildings, but neither of those incidents involved hijacking commercial jetliners.

So yes, 100% of the one and only “terror attacks” that have occurred in the United States in the past decade involving commercial airliners was committed by Muslim men.

Additionally, it should be noted that 100% of all bombings of U.S. federal buildings in the past 20 years were perpetrated by rightwing caucasian male anti-government Gulf War vets, and 100% of all troglodytes posting as “JohnMckay” on Pandagon today are douchebag wingnuts.

@BlackBloc

How large do you think that those communes can be while still being equitable?  My problem with the idea of living communally is that (from the limited reading and visiting I’ve done) I would never want to live on one, not because I necessarily object to being required/expected to contribute to all the shit work, but because it seems to result in more monotony, less diversity, more bureaucratic stalling. 

Population control is certainly a problem that existing communes face and, in my opinion, dividing the work most equitably resulted in less work getting done overall.  That is, of course, fine for those that want to live in such a society, but it doesn’t seem to me to be very workable large-scale.  At the commune I visited, very few people choose to live most of their lives that way.  Even those that tried and enjoyed it eventually choose to live differently.

@113: Sure, but in the sense that someone might be against racism across the board, yet reserve a whole lot more of his criticism to white people because, well, they have most of the power in this country, similarly I have a whole lot more to say against the imperialistic United States because the UK or Canada just don’t have as much power or an impact in the now (and when they do it’s mostly as part of a greater group, like the G8/G20).

Of course.  Whatever terrible things have been caused by Swedish jingoism would absolutely be dwarfed when compared to the terrible things that have been caused by American jingoism, and it would be silly to try to equate the overall impact of the two, even though the root human motivation is essentially the same.

My point was that your criticism is pointed directly at a tendency that is not uniquely American, and though that tendency as practiced by Americans has caused far more harm than it has as practiced by most other modern nations in the world and therefore warrants far more criticism, your criticism is not specifically anti-American at its core, but anti-jingoism at its core.  It’s just a matter of fact that American jingoism tends to be far more detrimental to the world at large than examples of jingosim displayed by smaller, less wealthy and less powerful nations.

It’s basically about scale.  The hubris that is exhibited by the modern United States is not particularly different from the hubris exhibited by prior major world powers.  And when America as we know it ceases to exist, most assuredly that mantle of hubris will be taken up by some new superpower.

On my last Amtrak trip to Chicago, there was a Muslim woman wearing a full-on face veil travelling with her husband. You know what happened? NOTHING. And I would much rather be “pretentious” than be a whiny wet-pants wussy. You should bring a binky on your next flight to calm you down.

Atheist, A Feminsit at 128: This is the classic problem with communes. They work with small numbers of ideologically minded people, especially if we are talking about the people who set up the commne, but fail when people do not want to be there. Most people really do not want to be members of communes. Its why the kibbutz movement in Israel never expanded beyond a minority. The best set-up for society at this time seems to be a liberal democracy with a mixed economy a la Scandanavia and most of the rest of Europe, Costa Rica, Canada, and elsewhere.

  Its a compromise between the capitalist and socialist utopias but sometimes compromise works.

Someone hand McKay a fresh pair of undies: apparently in his lily-white world even the SIGHT of a dark-skinned air traveler loosens his sphincters.

Sack up, dude!  You’re making the reichwing look like a bunch of mewling crybabies.  Oh wait…....

The best set-up for society at this time seems to be a liberal democracy with a mixed economy a la Scandanavia and most of the rest of Europe, Costa Rica, Canada, and elsewhere.

Capitalism is capitalism, whether it is private capitalism or state capitalism. There’s no ‘mixed economies’ here. Socialism is worker control, not nationalization.

The liberal ‘mixed economy’ model only works because of colonialism allowing Western governments the possibility to bribe one segment of the working class into becoming a ‘middle class’ (an artificial class) that can only sustain its lifestyle by taking away ressources from developping nations.

These are not stable constructions, but the death throes of the capitalist model, and there’s a reason why all these temporary gains from the New Deal are disintegrating in front of your eyes while the economy (and the government rhetoric from the right) reverts more and more to 19th century robber baronism. Capitalism IS robber baronism. It cannot exist and be humane at the same time in any sustainable manner. The welfare state is an ahistorical quirk that will have lasted only a couple decades as a hiccup between capitalism and socialism, and it existed only because the rich played divide and conquer by bribing part of the working class with what is essentially its own money (the working class gets most of its plusvalue taken away by capitalists, and only an infinitessimal part of it is given back under the welfare state).

Blackbloc, you’re awesome: never change!

Again if I see a middle eastern man in his 20’s or 30’s on an airliner he stands out.

How do you know he’s middle eastern? And by definition, you don’t notice the middle eastern men who don’t stand out. And in any case, most Arab-Americans in the USA are Christian.

Oh please. There will never be widespread socialism. There will just be vicious oligarchy followed by inevitable nuclear destruction. You can’t keep forgetting that people just utterly blow, and they seldom miss an opportunity to make each other suffer.

Oh please. There will never be widespread socialism. There will just be vicious oligarchy followed by inevitable nuclear destruction.

That’s pretty much the only options available to us, yes. (I’m not sure the destruction will be nuclear per say… there’s a bunch of other ways we can do ourselves in.) It’s one or the other, and I’m still hoping on the first for some irrational reason.

The economic crisis is not just this isolated event, but a part of the unending boom and bust cycle of capitalism which amplifies itself each time and becomes worse and worse as the world’s economies become more and more linked to each other. The last Great Depression resulted in a world war and millions of death because the liberal democracies lost all credibility and the socialist powers were unable to fight the rise of fascism (vicious oligarchy). It will happen again in much the same manner when this crisis worsens, unless the Left organizes some form of counter action. And we’ve already shown the Left in the West is mostly a disorganized mess unable to do any action of consequence.

Canada has already reduced its welfare state to tatters in 15 years, only the few last ones being the responsability of a conservative *minority* government (the Liberals were able to ravage it by themselves before that). Europe is pretty much following suit.

Your conservatives are not (that) dumb. By delaying significant health care reform for long enough, by the time you get to revisit the question and try to push it beyond its current incarnation as nothing more than a subsidy for the insurance industry and into something like universal coverage, and the Left won’t even have Canadian or European health care to point to as an example of how it can be done. These things will have been gutted and removed from our own countries.

Capital has no national boundaries, national ties or patriotic urges. Not having a single ounce of patriotism has worked well for the masters of the world, so maybe we ought to learn from their successes. BlackBloc @108

Some talking head in a movie recently (Capitalism: A Love Story perhaps) said that when capitalism and democracy come into conflict, capitalism should always win.  That sums up the mindset of the corporatists; democracy is something to keep the underlings fighting amongst themselves while the Masters of the Universe make the world go ‘round.

Earlier in the thread, PIATOR commented ”If you ever wanted to know how the German people managed to work themselves up to the point of Kristallnicht - now you know” and I have to disagree.  I can believe the situation is analogous, but I can’t use that to gain any extra understanding of Kristallnacht since have not a clue how America got here.

Did you ever wonder what the lead up to that period looked like to the ordinary German inside the events?  We know from our perspective how it ended, but what was it like leading up to it from inside the nation?

Having said that, conflating the United States of America in 2010 to Nazi Germany is so ridiculously over the top that it’s barely worthy of serious discussion.

I did not compare you to Nazi Germany.

I compared you to Germany before the Nazis took power, say 1929-1930, and it was a limited comparison.  Try reading some of the wingnut diatribes against Islam and comparing them with Nazi propaganda against Judaism.

What quelled my fear was the ultimate verdict the American people levied upon Bush in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

The only one that counted was the 2004 election.  Bush won that nicely - on the strength of a popularity bounce from starting a war.  This was despite the open acknowledgement of torture - which says all that needs to be said about what Americans really value.

There are three very serious problems facing the US over the next couple of decades:

i, Global warming and its impacts, including refugees from Mexico and points south.

ii, Peak oil and a sharp and permanent rise in oil prices.

iii, As mentioned above, the destabilisation of late corporate capitalism, with the wealthy essentially looting the body politic as opposed to creating wealth.

None of these problems is simple; all will require permanent change, loss and pain.  A putative right-wing American government is fundamentally unable to cope with them - but they can turn to distraction instead.

Shorter BlackBloc: All attempts at socialism have failed previously because they haven’t followed MY one, true system. The fact that multiple stabs have been made at the socialist utopia and all have devolved into systems that required large amounts of human rights abuses to maintain themselves might indicate something.

  People are social beings but we are also individuals. Conservatism, especially the radical American libertarian, fails because it does not recognize the social nature of humanity and the need for community. Dog eat dog is not optimal for human happiness, it cotradicts human happiness. However, most humans aren’t happen on communes either because a good deal of us have a developed enough sense of individuality and privacy to fail in purely communal societies. Too many humans find them chaffing at best and opressive at worse. When society is prosperous and most people do not live on the margins than the needs for individualism, self-expression, and privacy exist. Humans are best at muting these needs when life is lived on the margins.

  Liberal democracies with mixed economies work because they fufill the human need for individualism and community. The liberalism democratic nation-state at the local and national levels provide for the communal need, it allows people to work together through governmental and non-governmental bodies when the machinery of state functions. However, by allowing for a market and commerce, by not communalizing and collectivising the entire economy and by not forcing people into communal living arrangements against their will; the human need for independence, privacy, and competition is met in a non-bloody and violent way.

the human need for independence, privacy, and competition is met in a non-bloody and violent way

Non-violent? Here are some of the direct fruits of capitalist liberal democracies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_diamond

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Carlo_Giuliani

http://www.soaw.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinochet

The fact that multiple stabs have been made at the socialist utopia and all have devolved into systems that required large amounts of human rights abuses to maintain themselves might indicate something.

It indicates that total war is necessary to cause social progress.

It indicates that total war is necessary to cause social progress.

And if you’re wrong - as the evidence suggest you are - then you have the aftermath of a total war AND a failed political system.  Huzzah!

People are social beings but we are also individuals.

And not only that, but we have an affection for people who look like us, speak like us, and act like us. And this is what is tricky about the American experiment: we have to maintain a delicate balance and constant reinforcement of who “us” is. That is what makes Palin and Gingrich so dangerous with their demagoguery over Patk51: they are betraying the social compact of the US which ensures everyone here is regarded as “us.”

The very simple reason anarchist utopia that BlackBlock is advocating will never happen is that all labor isn’t equal and there’s no way to make it equal. Everyone can scrub a toilet, but not everyone can design and maintain the infrastructure that makes the toilet flush. So while that civil engineer is taking time out from her job to put in her two-week toilet-scrubbing duty, who is doing her job? Is she putting in her regular shift as engineer and then scrubbing toilets? Doubt she’s happy with that arrangement!

I’m deliberately simplifying, but the anarchist utopia is predicated on the idea that people are interchangeable and that anyone can do any job given the right training and be happy doing it. But, in reality, people have different talents, aptitudes, and varying levels of intelligence. I think the idea that all labor is important and should be valued equally is a great idea, but that’s as far as I’m willing to take it. The revolution could erase all class differences, but a cook will never be able to run the country, no matter what Lenin said.

Attn BlackBloc: And I can cherry pick the worst examples of socialist utopia like Cambodia’s Killing Fields or the famine in the Ukraine caused by Stalin’s drive for agricultural collectivization in order to paint all socialists as bloody thirsty monsters. Where did I argue that capitalism is a good and pure?

Tyro: Slightly related to your point but the best quote I’ve seen in defense of the nation state was on usenet, when I participated on usenet, “but I need something that I can associate with thats bigger than my family and neighborhood and smaller than the entire world.”

Phoenician: I disagreed with you in the past but in this we are in full agreement. I’m not exactly anti-violence or war but violence is a very dangerous thing and the decision to use it must be made with great consideration and its use must be as limited as possible. Like fire, it can get out of hand if not controlled. Violence should be avoided in all possible situations, including self-defense. I’d rather run away than actually hurt somebody. Also, as much as I find the behavior of certain people or groups of people evil or disgusting, I have no wish that they suffer any physical harm if possible. Even a paper cut. Wishing somebody dead because their class is equally evil to wishing somebody dead because of their gender, race, or religion.

  Elena: I’d take it a bit further to the right than you would. A certain amount of social hierarchy and mobility, upward and downward, seems necessary for a well-functioning society and most humans seem decidedly unhappy when everybody is the same materially. This doesn’t mean that poverty is necessary but I think that exact material equality isn’t really healthy. Many people need something physical to strive to for motivation. There should be a minimum guaranteed lifestyle but there shouldn’t be a maximum guaranteed lifestyle.

Everyone can scrub a toilet, but not everyone can design and maintain the infrastructure that makes the toilet flush.

Geez, maybe we should have some sort of motto about that. Maybe “from each according to their ability” might encompass that part of the philosophy?

If a job can be done by anyone, then it should be done by everyone. If a job needs special talents than those people with special talents should do it. It’s not exactly rocket science.

The only way your objection makes sense is if you actually believe people who work in shit jobs have no other talents or abilities, and that their position doing these shit jobs is their own fault and not that of an economic system of class oppression.  The lie of merit-based class division.

Wishing somebody dead because their class is equally evil to wishing somebody dead because of their gender, race, or religion.

Your gender, race or religion is not directly responsible for the death or suffering of other people. Class is, if you’re a capitalist.

This is probably not going to be worth it but it has to be attempted. BlackBloc, several things. Your first error is that you are composing a very simplistic, dualistic version of the world. Have there been capitalists who have caused untold human suffering through commercial exploitation. Yes. There have also been businesspeople who have striven to become rich or at least well-off without doing anything unethical or immoral. Your second error is assuming that gender, race, and religion has never been responsible for human suffering. The only problem is that all three things have been causes of human suffering. Would Amanda have to post so much about sexism if gender hasn’t been a cause of human suffering? Feelings of religious superiority have led to all sorts of persecution all over the world. Finally, the race thing never leading to direct harm is just silly with even a cursory glance at human history.

  Finally, evil people are still people and should be treated as such. Treating the indecent with decency is a good thing. I do not believe that I possess the intelligence and wisdom to determine who deserves to live and die. Therefore, I prefer not to kill anybody even if they seek my blood.

  Also, what do you do with the children of the people you killed because they were “evil capitalists”? Past a very early age, all you are going to get is a child very angry and bitter that you murdered their mommy and/or daddy. Do give the infants of “evil capitalists” away to proper working-class families or put them in institutions and kill the children old enough to be angry at you for murdering their “evil” mommy and/or daddy? Would you kill children for your utopia?

  Yes, I am a proud squishy liberal.

  Your system will only lead to despair and misery, not utopia. Systems based on spilling human blood, even the blood of “evil people” will do that.

Geez, BlackBlock, it’s not like I don’t know, grew up learning all about the various parts of the philosophy. And observing the practical applications of it, which clearly worked out so well. I know all the mottos in two languages. They have a nice ring to them. They don’t take care of the problem of who is going to decide what those “abilities” and “needs” are and how those things are going to be distributed. It’s a lovely philosophy, it really is. It’s just that every practical application of it has failed because those making decisions just happened to have more needs than abilities. Once you get beyond a commune, the only way for it to work is to have a planned economy. Which, at best, can give everyone an equally shitty standard of living. At which point most will find black market means to fill their needs and those who don’t will find themselves on the bottom of the pile again. And then the whole thing will collapse. Planned economies don’t work and I don’t see folks marching to a Maria Mies-style commune. And, you know, I’m actually a socialist philosophically. But slogans don’t actually offer any practical solutions.

Elena at 150: And black markets are more exploitative and violent than markets that are legal and regulated by the government. Thats why goods and services that most people recognize as illicit and immoral are only available on the black market.

The only one that counted was the 2004 election.  Bush won that nicely - on the strength of a popularity bounce from starting a war.

Whether he actually won that election at all is somewhat a matter of dispute, given the amount of irregularities that occurred in the state of Ohio.  The electoral college results were narrow enough that Ohio alone determined the winner in the end; had Ohio gone blue, Bush would have been out.  That said, it’s hardly accurate to say that Bush won the 2004 election “nicely”, though it is fair to say he that he recieved far more support than he deserved.

I don’t think he won it on a “popularity bounce” because of Iraq, but rather on a “fear-inspired bounce” aided largely by a video of a bearded cave-dwelling jihadist ghost reaffirming his “Death to America!” screed that conveniently emerged literally days before the election to remind us, “Hey, 9/11! Boo!”  Couple that with the worst Democratic presidential campaign since the last Massachusetts Democrat ran for the presidency in 1988, a campaign that could be summed up as “Vote for me, because I suck less than Bush” and that tried to avoid directly confronting the Swift Boat bullshit that was used to smear the party nominee, and conditions couldn’t have been more favorable for a president as lousy as Bush to squeak by with the narrowest victory necessary to get a second term.  On top of that, historical analysis indicates that most U.S. presidents get re-elected as a rule, even quite a few undeserving presidents.  Failing to win a second term is not only a repudiation of an incumbent’s first term, it indicates an especially high degree of public disgust with the sitting president.  While I agree that if ever there was a POTUS who deserved that degree of repudiation it was Dubya, only two U.S. presidents who were elected to the presidency lost when they ran for a second term in my lifetime… Carter and Bush 41.  Prior to Carter, the last elected president (keeping in mind that Ford was never elected) to lose a re-election campaign was Herbert Hoover, in 1932.  After leading America into the Great Depression.  Part of Dubya’s victory can be attributed to Americans’ tendency to be (small-“c”) conservative when it comes to ousting incumbents, particularly when they remain relatively popular within their own party base.  The last two incumbent presidents given the boot at the polls were not only unpopular with the electorate as a whole, but also within the bases of their own parties, as evidenced by the fact that both Bush 41 and Carter were challenged by fellow party members in party primaries.  Bush 43 was not primaried, which very likely made the difference between victory and defeat for him.

Combine all of these factors together, and you get an election scenario in which the frothing wingnut base was amped up about re-affirming their support for their Real ‘Murican Hero, in contrast to an uninspired Democratic base whose only motivation to vote for Kerry was the hope that he might suck less than Dubya.  It was the perfect scenario for the re-election of a guy who had no business being re-elected.  Bush got way more breaks than anybody anticipated at the start pf 2004, and loathe him as much as I do, Karl Rove has to be credited for putting together one of the most sinister yet effective campaigns I’ve ever seen.  They succeeded in making an actual Vietnam Vet appear to be a chickenshit coward, while making a genuine chickenhawk coward appear to be a manly man who would protect America from the scary Muslims who sent airplanes into our buildings 3 years prior.

Absolutely it was shameful that Bush was given 4 more years, but Democrats have a long history of ripping defeat from the jaws of victory, and John Kerry was no exception.  2006 and 2008 proved that even gullible Americans have a limit to the amount of wingnut bullshit we’ll suffer, however, and though that limit should have been reached in 2004, we proved that there are lines that we aren’t yet ready to cross.  When a geriatric white haired dude and his idiotic folksy “mama bear” running mate joked about bombing the shit out of Iran as something worthy of consideration, Americans resoundingly said “No fucking way are we gonna let Bible Spice get anywhere near the nuclear football.”

My biggest concern right now is the fact that Democrats have largely reverted to doing what they seem to do best - allowing wingnuts to walk all over them.  That always ends up messy.

@149: No, see, you’re wrong. Your very *existence* as a male/female, black/white/asian/etc or Christian/atheist/Muslism/other does not cause death and suffering. Patriarchy, racism, religious domination, these social constructs cause death and suffering.

Your very existence as a factory owner or a capitalist does cause death and suffering. Class is PURELY a social construct. You cannot be a capitalist unless you own capital. You cannot own capital unless you have private property, and you cannot have private property unless you took what is rightfully the property of all humanity. You cannot receive profit (dividends from shares) unless you took the plusvalue of others. It’s that simple. Your existence as a capitalist is in itself the cause of suffering. *Profit* is unethical and immoral. You cannot be a good capitalist.

The one saving grace is that since class is a social construct, the mere fact of changing society eliminates the capitalist class without the need to resort to mass killings. If you don’t own capital you’re not a capitalist. Expropriation is sufficient.

Murrow Fan at 152: If liberals and progressives were really concerned about the political abilities of our vehicle in the United States than we should either meet and form a new political party and start the long climb to national relevance; or get more involved with the workings of the Democratic Party besides voting in primaries and elections. I’m just tired of hearing criticism about how sucky the Democrats are at politicking by people not involved in the Democratic Party beyond voting.
 
  After WWII, when the conservative movement hated the Republican party for being the Democratic Party light and not immediately reversing the New Deal during Eisenhower, they spent many long and boring years taking over the Republican Party. Now liberals and progressives are making the same complaints about the Democratic Party but don’t want to do the long and boring work.

PiaToR @ #139:

In response to your point about addressing the climate crisis, absolutely America has a moral duty to make drastic changes to help avert that disaster.  But even if America did a complete 180 in how seriously it deals with climate change, that alone will only stall the crisis, but it will not be averted completely unless both China and India adopt radical change in their environmental policies as well.  And while I find it disgusting that many corporate interests who have no genuine concern about the climate crisis use China and India as convenient excuses for American inaction, their claims that it ultimately won’t matter unless change is adopted across the board aren’t entirely invalid.  They make for a cowardly excuse, but the fact is, while eliminating America’s carbon footprint altogether would buy the world some time, it won’t eliminate the crisis so long as the other two of the three world’s largest polluters don’t also commit to aggressive change.

And yes, I realize that China’s emergence as the world’s largest polluter must be considered in the context of their total population in comparison to ours.  Though the total amount of raw pollution produced by China is greater than that produced by America, the U.S. still far exceeds the world’s other major polluters in output per capita, as our population is less than 1/4 of China’s.  So it is completly fair to say that America has the greatest moral duty to mitigate our pollution output.  But climate crisis is a problem that cannot be solved by American action alone, though I do agree that we should be leading the charge to implement carbon-emission reduction policy, as Americans produce the biggest carbon footprints on a per person basis.  I don’t feel terribly optimistic about the matter, however.

Lee @ 151, absolutely; that’s partially why Russia exploded into violence after the Soviet controls collapsed. But, also, it has to be noted that in Soviet times, everything was black market, from music and books to jeans - things that aren’t inherently illicit/ evil like most things a Westerner imagines when thinking about the black market (e.g. trafficked humans or drugs). Because planned economy can’t create, import, and distribute enough goods, it creates a black market for everyday items and criminalizes possession of these items. I wish I knew what came first in ye olde Soviet Union -  the inability to produce enough jeans or the idea that jeans were a symbol of capitalist excess and one of the many Western tools for corrupting the ideological purity of Soviet youth!

Elena at 156: A year or so ago on NPR, there was a woman, whose name I forgot, being interviewed on how the CCP was able to reform China’s economy while the Communist Parties in the USSR failed miserably. One of her points was that the CCP, unlike the Soviet CP, recognized that you can’t deny people their fun, their blue jeans or action movies or video games. Otherwise people get miserable and start planning against you.

  Probably, the Soviet leaders decided that jeans were a corrupting tool of capitalism came before the inability to produce a sufficient amount of jeans was an issue. Its why Stalin favored Lamarkian evolution over Darwinian evolution..
 
  Seriously, one reason why the Communists failed big was that they had trouble deciding what goods should be made once the economy was collectivized besides the obvious necessities. Most of them had an inkling that they did not want a collectivized version of the consumer economy/popular culture society of the capitalist countries but couldn’t figure out what a collectivized economy and society should be. The most functioning of the Communist economies was the Yugoslavian one because Tito was basically okay with a collectivized consumer economy/popular culture society. Castro in Cuba seems to be, from what I can observe through the observations of others, a Latin American version of Tito. The more transformative Communist leadership tried to be, the more misery they caused.

Hmm, back to the original topic. What I find interesting is that what the demonization of Moslems is most similar to is not McCarthyism but to the demonization of Catholics. You know, how they would try to undermine our democracy since they would want the Pope to make decisions (the whole Catholic system is anti-democratic and so any follower would have to be also) and how they (especially Irish Catholics) were the dregs of society (and violent, Irish Catholics were considered drunkards, lazy, and violent as a class—why Harvard U became a private university so they wouldn’t have to accept them), ...

You would think Catholics at least would remember this stuff and react against it (after all it came up when JFK was running for President in 1960).

Wishing somebody dead because their class is equally evil to wishing somebody dead because of their gender, race, or religion.

I disagree, if the subtext of your argument is that not even the wealthy exercise autonomous choice over their social class.  I’m not going to debate the morality of wishing anybody dead, but ascribing the same immutability to class that is inherently characteristic of gender and race is patently false.  And while the comparison to religion is a little more justifiable, I still don’t think it’s an exact parallel.

While it could be said of newborns or young children of the extremely affluent that they had no personal choice about how wealthy or poor the family they would be born into would be, at a certain point, choice does become a factor in an individual’s class, especially when they come from a wealthy background.  I agree that those who are born into lower classes exercise far less and sometimes virtually no control over what class they belong to, and upward mobility is not something that is universally attainable, despite wingnut promotion of that myth.  And while few would think of downward mobility as something to aim for, it is entirely attainable for those who are wealthy.  Obviously, very few wealthy people have ever chosen that path, but that doesn’t mean that the choice is unavailable to them.

While I think human nature drives most people to want more rather than to want less, there is no real moral justification for hoarding exorbidant amounts of wealth.  And while I don’t necessarily consider all billionaires to be equally malevolent in the stewardship of the wealth they have amassed, I think it’s pretty difficult to be a truly altruistic person if you are hoarding enough wealth to feed thousands who starve for no reason more than your own self-gratification.  While I think the decisions by the Gates and Mr. Buffett to bequeath the vast majority of their wealth to charitable endeavors when they pass is laudable, I sometimes wonder what prevents someone like Bill Gates from putting 90% of his total net worth towards charitable endeavors right now?  He literally has so much money that he wouldn’t have to sacrifice a single personal luxury to do such a thing, not even the massive $50 Million complex he had built on the shore of Lake Washington that he and his family live in.

The amount of accumulated wealth of the world’s richest people is appalling when one considers that much of that money is just waiting to be inherited by heirs who did nothing to deserve it other than winning the genetic lottery of chance.  If your net worth is $30 Billion, your standard of living is unlikely to be thirty times better than the individual whose net worth is a “meager” $1 Billion.  At some point, when is enough enough?

No, I don’t have the precise answer for that question, but when I see a world in which the wealthiest 1 Million human beings own a larger piece of the collective global wealth pie than the other 6,999,000,000 human beings combined, there’s something completely fucked up about that picture.  Entire countries should not be left to starve just so that others can have marble foyers and gold-leaf trim in their 30,000 square foot temples of self-aggrandizement.  The earth has a finite amount of resources, but we have more than enough that billions should not have to live in utterly deplorable conditions while a microscopically small segment of the world’s population indulges in the most extreme forms of greed and gluttony imagineable.  You aren’t taking it with you when you take the dirt nap anyway.

Murrow Fan at 159: At this point the issue becomes, how rich is too rich and what should the maximum amount of material possessions should a person be allowed to own. Like you, I don’t have an answer but I’d prefer to exercise caution in the other direction, set up minimum standards of living rather than prohibiting maximum standards of living. I think the former would be a lot more workable and less likely to implode and explode with spilled over misery. The solution advocated by BlackBloc has caused misery for everyone except the party elite.

In response to your point about addressing the climate crisis, absolutely America has a moral duty to make drastic changes to help avert that disaster.

No, at this point I’m not talking about a moralistic “America should” do something about climate change.  I’m talking about America will get (IS GETTING hit by climate change) and the effects will come.  It’s like the difference in talking about how the Bush Administration *should* have spent more on infrastructure and how they actually *did* address Katrina.

One of those effects is going to be Mexicans fleeing north - permanently.  That’s going to get really ugly.

The problem with your plan of expropriation, BlackBloc, is that the IMPORTANT capital is human. And you cannot expropriate human capital. Frank knows how to make a sewage system work properly, and you’ll either pay him a return on the investments he made to gain that capital (education and experience), or you won’t have a sewage system, or you’ll recreate his original investment yourself and rebuild the human capital without him.

Redistribution to create social change (rather than to, say, feed a starving person at the expense of one who can’t store all the food they have) had a shred of credibility in Marx’s day, when (a) material capital was somewhat more important relative to human capital than it is today, and (b) people, particularly Marx, did not understand human capital the way we do now.

Times have changed. We know far more about how economies really work and how wealth is created than Marx dreamed of knowing. Economic and social analysis that starts from a Marxian framework is like trying to do biology by working from Linnaeus’ original notes: OK, this is relevant and historically important material, but it is not going to solve the modern technical problem. It’s obsolete.

The problem with your plan of expropriation, BlackBloc, is that the IMPORTANT capital is human.

Not quite.  Capital contributions to productivity are becoming more, not less, important than labour contributions.  So you’re stuck between the important labour contributions - those who create capital goods, programmers, engineers etc - and the not-so-important fungible people - computer operators, drivers, retail staff.

They aren’t individually economically important in the sense that their labor would be difficult to replace, PIATOR, but the human capital represented by a computer operator, truck driver, or retail staffer is enormous, and their training (not just for their immediate job) represents far more investment of wealth than anything the computer operator or truck driver will be using as a tool. Yes, the computer engineer has more human capital than the computer operator, but both of them are knowledge workers and both of them provide value in the enterprise because of the human capital they possess, not because of the machines they can lay hands on.

Or to put it another way, yes, capital contributions are more important than labor contributions, not least because much of what we call labor is actually capital.