Quote from: philipma1957 on Today at 02:34:48 AM

There were liberals in the republic party and conservatives in the democratic party.

Rhino 🦏 was a nonexistent concept.

So, you are not old enough to remember even the 1960s—a quite recent time, as these things go.

Quote from: philipma1957 on Today at 02:34:48 AM

The most dangerous thing possible has happened right wing and extreme right wing are all republican.

left wing and extreme left wing are all democrats.

Bipartisanship is shot. It is a fucking mess.

Since when is “bipartisanship” a good thing? That is simply an obscurantist way of saying that (a) nobody should have principles, and (b) officially permissible opinion is narrowly confined to a false dichotomy: One-party rule, with two faces. That is, in fact, what you have in America.

The only “extremes” of anything that you have in either official faction of your bipolar uniparty are extremes of criminality. In both factions. Dominating both factions with nigh unanimity.

The much-ballyhooed “polarization” and “end of bipartisanship” are only a ploy of media hype, to regenerate interest in an entertainment that had been faltering. Voter turnout rates were plummeting, and that was not “apathy”: It was wising-up! More and more people were realizing that they are under one-party rule, and that the one party is a criminal gang hostile to the interests of the vast majority of Americans.

The illusion was being lost—and with it, the consent of the governed upon which the power of all régimes must ultimately repose. Thus stepped onstage Trump, a professional showman, to stir the pot just enough to get the enthusiasms flowing both for and against him.

Yes, Orange Bogey is manipulating the idiotic left just as much as he is manipulating the idiotic right: Without Trump, would anybody be eager to vote for Biden? Both sides are stupid enough to believe that Trump means what he says in his Presidential Tweets!

I think this means that his opponents must be marginally stupider: The Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd needs for me to explain to them that Trump is a liar, and his fans are fools, and all of Trump’s grandstanding rhetoric is meaningless. In substance, Trump is approximately equal to Biden—and vice versa. (As a matter of form, I will admit that Trump is much more amusing.)

This relates to what I intended to post in P&S earlier. Your whole reality-TV “election” is a dialectic between the followers of Lenin (D), who scream that Kerensky (R) is a right-wing extremist, and the followers of Kerensky, who scream that the extremist butcher Lenin has betrayed the revolution. The whole circus show would be merely a cheap comedy—if America were not a nuclear-armed rogue terrorist state, which also has had the whole world’s economy by the throat ever since the Nixon Shock, if not earlier.

Quote from: nutildah on October 02, 2020, 11:23:47 PM

Meh. You're talking about the original Antifa which was only in existence for about 2 years. They have technically been defunct since 1933. Modern day Antifa (as it pertains to the US) is not directly tied to any communist party, [...] Not many people in the US or anywhere for that matter identify themselves as communists anymore, or even socialists.

To cut a tedious argument against your habit of arguing from conceited ignorance, let us test your stated principle empirically. Why don’t I change my nickname to “Sturmabteilung”, and my avatar to this:

Surely, you will be the first to say that that it has nothing to do with Adolf Hitler! The original NSDAP, including the SA, has been defunct since 1945; and “not many people... identify themselves as [National-Socialists] anymore”.

Indeed, most of the people using Nazi symbols today have much less connection to Hitler than Antifa actually does to Communism. I always find it remarkable that in 1930s Germany, the ilk of Anglin and r0ach would have been arrested as asocial and sent a labour camp to be made useful. They come off as badly as if, by analogy, a Jew were to read Der Stürmer as a positive guide to Jewishness. My first intended WO post, never published, was actually begun as a reply to the aforesaid entomonymous cretin; therein, I described a conversation I once with an old Jew about the worst humiliation to Hitler being entomoid neo-Nazis. But that is another subject.

Quote from: nutildah on October 02, 2020, 11:23:47 PM

[—snip palaver that deserves a Pulitzer Prize...

Quote from: nutildah on Today at 12:19:01 AM

...for it is more effective apologism than Walter Duranty—]

Quote from: cAPSLOCK on Today at 12:13:21 AM

Of course people are not going to identify with the failed political ideology responsible for more deaths than any other in the history of the world.

But one of the things the left is fucking good at? Rebranding.

Indeed, they rebranded so well that you suppose that Communism “failed”. No, it did not fail: It conquered the world.

Perpend the juxtaposition that in substance, America is today the most International-Communist country in the world, just as J. P. Morgan, et al. intended—and Red China is the most Global-Capitalist country in the world, with masses of proletarian wage-slaves ruled from the stock exchanges by giant global-international corporations. It is no accident that Marx’s Bible is titled Capital.

The reason why “the left” so excels at “rebranding” is that Communism is not an ideology. The ideological component is only idiot-bait: A disposable tool, to manipulate other disposable tools. At the highest level, the leaders have no ideology at all; they are only pragmatic. They have no attachment to the espoused ideology which happens to be most convenient on any particular day—nor, of course, to the name “Communism”. I still use the name “Communism” because a word is needed, and I do not chase after Communist-forced changes in language. “Communism” concisely identifies the practical doctrine of world revolution by mass subversion that is still being run on a foundation systematized by Karl Marx, although it was not really invented by him.

Quote from: Hueristic on Today at 12:50:08 AM

When I was a conservative it meant fiscally conservative and now it means socially (religiously) conservative.

The right has been hijacked.

In America, before the rise of the 1970s Christian-televangelist New Right (which hijacked quite a few things), “conservatism” meant some concept of Constitutional ordered liberty, with respect for long-existing social institutions. Obviously, the “liberty” part includes not having a Marxist government steal your money.

In Europe, before people became too Americanized, “conservatism” meant a respect for social class (not Marxist-American “socioeconomic class”), and monarchy and/or aristocracy.

Anywhere else, it means, by definition, conserving the existing order of things.

No “conservatism” can exist without cultural traditions; for otherwise, there is no foundation for anything else to conserve. Fiscal policy does not exist in a vacuum: To the contrary, it is only a secondary effect of the ordering of a society. The worldview that holds economics as primary is actually Marxist, and is designed to dissolve a society to the point that Marxism can take over.