liberals

Trump’s Foreign Policy ‘Missteps’ Are Destructive to Diplomacy. Good!

Posted on by Sassy Sourstein

I’m not ready to stop gloating about the loss of Hillary Clinton yet. When Trump is inaugurated I’ll turn the knives on his administration — for now, it’s still the Obama-Clinton administration and I’m still focusing on these cretins.

Liberals don’t even know there’s a forest, forget seeing it for the trees. This week in Facebook includes people horrified that Trump would even acknowledge the government of Taiwan, let alone congratulate its new president! This will enrage China, our largest trading partner! They even brought out the specter of WWIII, which they laughed at when it was said it would be Clinton who would start it. Thing is Clinton was going to start it by following through on a promise to bomb Russian troops in Syria. All Trump did was talk to the leader of a country that the United States arms and is sworn to protect — from China. And hey, China knows this. If these morons think China is just concerned with being “dishonored” *gong sound, deep bow* they’re not just racist, they’re also so stupid as to be dangerous. Give felons back their vote and disenfranchise these criminals of common sense.

These same “pragmatic” types will nonetheless spend their time shitting on the legacy of Fidel Castro who despite lifting millions out of extreme poverty, did terrible things to innocent people that objectively pale in comparison to anything the US has done to its own minorities, but forget that. It’s about the morality — but just in that case.

That’s not all Trump “fucked up” on the foreign policy front. In less than a week he praised the “dictator” of Kazakhstan, said he’d — horrors!! — like to visit Pakistan, “a terrific country,” and treated the British Prime Minister as if she were the leader of any other of the world’s countries. That last “disaster” involved him calling Theresa May only after calling NINE probably non-white leaders.

Anything that makes US diplomats “aghast” is fabulous by me. These slimebags deserve much worse for what they’ve done to the world’s people. They’re the ones who keep every country softened up for the plunder and just in case any objections arise, war. As I said in 2014

“Diplomacy” is what Washington calls its imperial scheming and the left falls for it. Diplomacy is cold war, and it often enough leads to hot war. It is not a peace-making endeavor. It is not a good thing to encourage. It is good to disrupt it, as Chelsea Manning — whose birthday is today! — did. Thanks to her, we know so much about the nasty, petty, vindictive, stupid, lying, thieving, murderous shit our hallowed diplomats do every day in subjugated nations around the globe. These are rich, powerful, high-born criminals that have served time in the upper echelons of our own evil government and its largest parastate corporations. They’re scum, and their work is the devil’s. The only real question is, why do these countries allow it?

I’m not interested in whether or not Trump knows that what he’s doing is destructive to the diplomatic system. It’s irrelevant. I know that the outcome must be good if these enemies of all good people are upset by it. That tells me all I need to know. Diplomacy as a tool of empire predates the birth of Donald Trump and unfortunately will outlive him. If he can put a few dents, intentionally or not, in these fuckers’ Mercedes well I’ll fucking take it.

UPDATE

Trump tweeted that the new Air Force One planes being built by Boeing were too expensive and should be canceled. When the markets opened this morning the Boeing stock took a dive! Can you think of a more deserving corporation to take such a hit? I’m loving the Trump presidency and it hasn’t even started.

The True Terror of a Trump Presidency

Posted on by Sassy Sourstein

We are literally negative dozens of days into the Trump administration and people are blaming everything from arrests to pipelines on him. Yes, he’s appointing all sorts of — in the liberal parlance currently in fashion — “dumpster fires” to his cabinet, probably, and for some of us life will get marginally worse and for others of us marginally better. That’s usually how a change in president and party at the same time goes. As it goes for citizens of the empire, so it goes for the rest of the non-US-aligned world but usually to far more horrific results.

In my last post I had a lot of fun saying I hoped Vladimir Putin literally changed the votes in the recent election so that the putrid Hillary Clinton would lose. Of course, he didn’t. He probably didn’t truly even exert much more influence than RT America, the Russian state-owned news channel targeted to the US audience, ever did. It’s likely negligible.

In recent days Facebook has been alight in outrage over “fake news.” To an extent, I agreed, because I thought they meant bullshit like “meme” propagators who over-distill complex issues into typically very stupid, factually incorrect gotchas. Think “Being Conservative” or “Occupy Democrats” Facebook groups. But while this was the original thrust in some quarters, I was wrong. There are segments of the commentariat calling for broad sections of the web to be censured as literal Russian propaganda.

So, in their hands they hold a list of this Lying Press, and on it is basically every good Left site, some libertarian sites, and a smattering of Nazi sites. Now they’re not explicitly saying it’s all the same but… well, they’ll leave the same reader/voter they consider to have been easily duped by Russian agents to decide that. The same people who would hit “Share” on a probably pretty good MTV clip about why “reverse-racism” isn’t a thing are now equating Black Agenda Report with Daily Stormer. I’m not exaggerating. And amusingly, they seem to be real mad about a website called HangTheBankers. Huh. Wonder why.

This jingo scum must know that the United States government and its many MANY intelligence agencies run all manner of news and “information” outlets, both openly and secretly and the gray areas between. But you don’t have to go far or analyze too deeply to realize, as Arthur Silber did today, that, well — what in the fuck is Voice of America if not propaganda aimed at the enemies of Washington?

Here’s the danger, the real in-your-face in-practice Actually Existing Fascism. Not some swastikas drawn by people who…. well, sure seem to have been paid to inflate hate-crime statistics. But US liberals, those nasty little fucks who think they’re the very end of philosophical history despite adhering to no discernibly coherent set of moral rules, all the while claiming to oppose fascism simultaneously propagate anti-Russian (you absolutely can read “Soviet” in there) allegations in the form of the silencing of critics. See, where these snakes will slither their scaly way out of any Serious talk of fascism is that they’re not calling on the government to ban these websites. Why, they’d never! That would violate their Voltairian notions of absolute free-speech rights. No, they simply want a market-based, voluntary rejection/ nullification/ dealgorithmization/ disappearance — in the active sense, as in, when they made people disappear in US-backed South American dirty wars — of every news site that ever criticized Hillary Clinton. Yup.

This includes Wikileaks, naturally, even though Silber noted in his recent piece

I assume it must be distant history since it appears that everyone, and most particularly those who mercilessly attacked Wikileaks several years ago, has failed to grasp that the views of Wikileaks have been reversed in this latest episode. We can therefore conclude with full confidence that neither the liberals nor the conservatives hold their positions vis-a-vis Wikileaks on the basis of any kind of principle. How old-fashioned and quaint such a concern would be. Can a principle fix your broken leg? No. Will a principle buy you dinner? Of course not. Will a principle help the candidate you prefer get elected? No siree.

The List also more disturbingly for me includes Antiwar.com, where I worked for ten years and still consider my former coworkers dear friends. Before there even was a Trump on the horizon, before there was even a fucking Dubya in the running, there was Antiwar.com opposing the war in the Balkans. Yes, that venerable website has been spitting at all the wars and other murderous thieving intrigues perpetrated by this Death State since, potentially, some of the interns who cobbled together The List were even fucking born. But it was itself born to oppose the Clintons, and for that it is verboten.

On a lighter note, please enjoy this spoof of The List by roasty, who makes his own list of Fed-paid actual fake-news sites to “watch out” for. He plucks from the original perhaps the most telling line: “Support them by subscribing, if you can!”

I always thought the goofy 80s movie about a Soviet invasion of the US, Red Dawn, appealed more to Republican types but it looks these days like it may be saved more on the liberal’s Netflix queue. That, and wide-open McCarthyism. The most threatening part of a Trump presidency may not be the man himself, but the newly, nakedly revealed fascism of his opposition. If they can’t be the Left, then nobody can.

UPDATE:

tldr version

Diplomacy Is Shit, The President Is Evil, The Left Is Trash

Posted on by Sassy Sourstein

Today, Obama announced a mild normalization of relations with the Cuban state. That means a US embassy may open in Havana and you’ll be able to bring a few more trinkets back from Cuba legally. The travel ban will NOT be loosened for tourism. Caps on remittances by family members will be raised. The US will “review” the presence of Cuba on its list of state terror sponsors.

I’m not going to comment on the Revolution itself. As a Floridian I’m biased for several reasons, and that includes my anarchism. All I’ll say is that while condemning certain tactics, I understand them through the prism of imperialism. Fortunately, this doesn’t matter for what I’m pointing out.

The reality of what happened today, broken into individual facts, is less exciting than the joyful (or angry) explosions we’ve witnessed in the media. The White House released for the world a detailed explanation of its reasons for this diplomatic outreach. If you can see past the think-tanky democratization bullshit you’ll see a vicious plan to complete the domination of Cuba, probably ending in its total recolonization by financial capital.

Among the openly described plans are

1) a ramping up of rhetoric showing the Cuban government as a rights violator
2) making the Cuban government work toward US goals
3) “empowering” the Cuban people, code for continuing to directly undermine the Cuban state
4) injecting more US currency and finance into the Cuban economy
5) opening the Cuban market to more US goods
6) increasing propaganda penetration by allowing private import of telecom materials

This is more like a declaration of war.

But then, that’s what diplomacy is. “Diplomacy” is what Washington calls its imperial scheming and the left falls for it. Diplomacy is cold war, and it often enough leads to hot war. It is not a peace-making endeavor. It is not a good thing to encourage. It is good to disrupt it, as Chelsea Manning — whose birthday is today! — did. Thanks to her, we know so much about the nasty, petty, vindictive, stupid, lying, thieving, murderous shit our hallowed diplomats do every day in subjugated nations around the globe. These are rich, powerful, high-born criminals that have served time in the upper echelons of our own evil government and its largest parastate corporations. They’re scum, and their work is the devil’s. The only real question is, why do these countries allow it?

In the absence of these parasites on the world’s good faith, the US has in Cuba had to resort to bizarre (failed) assassination plots and other idiotic schemes. Key to these schemes is the USAID program, ostensibly an honest organization meant to aid the world’s people, but in truth a subterfuge aimed at kneecapping all attempts at self-determination that do not line up with US foreign policy goals. Cuba, possessing a government ideologically aware of the empire’s goals, has been hip to this bullshit from the beginning. They even imprisoned scamster Alan Gross, released today as part of the deal (which also saw the release of three of the Cuban Five). Gross is a USAID contractor who was cynically using the extant Cuban Jewish community as a shield for his service to US policy. Just look at this spook’s life. As we know, Ukraine wasn’t as savvy.

USAID has also rolled out a fake Cuban Twitter, tried to infiltrate Cuba’s hop hop scene, and perhaps most disgustingly — like Pakistan vaccination scheme-level disgusting — held fake HIV-prevention seminars. That’s just a short list courtesy of the Moon of Alabama blog, which has an amusing warning:

But should indeed a U.S. embassy return to Havana that job will fall again to the CIA. Cuba should be very worried about that. The only reason why the U.S. government has never fallen to a CIA coup is the lack of a U.S. embassy in Washington DC.

It’s well-accepted that US embassies are basically just CIA offices. Nothing good can come of one of these in Havana. We only have to look to Libya to see what can happen when relations are “normalized.”

At this point I can just assume the grizzled Cuban old guard is throwing its hands up at the inevitability of their loss to the juggernaut. I tuned in to see Raúl Castro speak for about 20 seconds and just in that one moment, watched him praise both Obama and the Pope. I don’t know who to roll my leftier-than-thou eyes at — Castro, or emoji-fist-raisers in my Twitter timeline lionizing him in that moment. These liberals dressed as radicals let their masks slip a bit today. Medea Benjamin, CodePink’s milquetoast maven of minivan dissent, has always wanted to love Obama, and now, for just a moment, she can have a day to unabashedly do just that.

It wasn’t just Benjamin praising the drone president and whooping it up for cigars and rum. Look at this fucking dingbat:

But liberals gonna liberal right? Well let’s reach a tiny bit further “left”:

wait there’s more

(hypocrisy!)

(Obama finally wins out!)

The twin whitebros of the libpocalypse are just the ones laughed at in my timeline, I’m sure there are even better out there.

But none of this is as dumb as this, retweeted by Glenn Greenwald, below, which, no.

A few hundred thousand Cuban exiles in a throwaway city, as Miami was in the 1960s, do not directly influence a multigenerational policy. They’re a great public excuse for one, and for political reasons it’s great propaganda. But the empire has its own reasons for making a communist island just 90 miles from its southernmost territories, especially one run by anti-imperialists, appear to be an innate economic basketcase. That’s what a crushingly near-total blockade can do. In exactly the same way, Israel is useful to the empire as a giant spaceship of white capitalism in a typically resistant Middle East. It has very little to do with Jewish power over Washington, oh my god.

The embargo was never total, but even that slack was for propaganda purposes. Connected US agribusinesses, for example, have been privileged enough to make millions trading staple foods to the Cuban government. Thanks to the US, Cubans can eat! Those farmers and possibly many more stand to get even richer in the near term from this thaw. Scahill and Blumenthal probably aren’t wrong to point out that, down the road at least, the hordes are coming.

Imagine, the venerable emoprogs of America praising POTUS for this sham “opening” amid the terrifying threats of that White House statement. All this from the bombingest country on earth. The regime that tortures prisoners (in Cuba!) and spies en masse. An empire that has spent the last century or more systematically binding the peoples of the world to its political and financial will.

Fuck it. Bust out the mint; let’s make mojitos!

————

for lulz