1. category
  2. Transhuman News

Page 342«..1020..341342343344..350360..»

Category Archives: Transhuman News

Cannes 2022: 10 movies to watch out for in this years festival – The Guardian

Posted: May 17, 2022 at 7:03 pm

Elvis

Baz Luhrmann brings his trademark truckload of spangly glamour and sugar-rush showbiz to the story of Elvis Presley with Austin Butler as the King and Tom Hanks as his manipulative manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa returns to Cannes for a special screening of his new documentary, based on the book by WG Sebald about the horror of aerial bombardment during the second world war a subject with a special resonance today.

Cannes regular David Cronenberg returns with his own long-gestating script, about a future world in which people have to adapt to transhumanism. Evolution accelerates, bodies sprout new organs and human identities are in a state of flux.

Michelle Williams is the regular leading player for film-maker Kelly Reichardt, and she returns as Lizzie, a sculptor whose life is about to be turned upside down by a new show. Other stars include Andr 3000, Judd Hirsch and Amanda Plummer.

European cinema icon Claire Denis brings a movie with a hint of Peter Weirs The Year of Living Dangerously and her own keynote theme of colonial agony: Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn star as a journalist and businessman in 1980s Nicaragua.

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda has made his first Korean language film, with Korean star Song Kang-ho, an intense emotional drama, based on a real case, about the baby boxes in which people can leave unwanted newborns.

Transgressive passion is the foundation of this movie from Mia Hansen-Lve, with La Seydoux as Sandra, a single mum with a young daughter, trying to find care for her elderly father, and embarking on an intense affair with an old friend.

A frisson of League-of-Gentlemen unease in a creepy English country village where all the men (played by Rory Kinnear) have a weird resemblance to each other: Jessie Buckley stars in this scary movie from Alex Garland.

Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyska takes on the story of the British silent twins. Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance star as identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons who spoke to no one but each other, wrote outsider art novels and were eventually sent to Broadmoor for arson and theft.

Virginie Efira stars in Alice Winocours drama as a woman caught up in a terrorist attack in a Paris bistro. Some months later, stricken with PTSD and amnesia, and plagued with fragmented memories, she makes a determined attempt to reconstruct her past.

Read the rest here:
Cannes 2022: 10 movies to watch out for in this years festival - The Guardian

Posted in Transhumanist | Comments Off on Cannes 2022: 10 movies to watch out for in this years festival – The Guardian

On the Gnostic Ironies of Poets Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe – Literary Hub

Posted: at 7:03 pm

The word Gnostic has long shadowed the careers of Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe, two renowned elders of American poetry who each published an important new work last year. Mackeys three-volume box set Double Trio, the latest installment of the two intertwined serial poems that he has been writing for nearly forty years, and Howes memoirManimal Woe, a poignant prose-poetic elegy for her father, invite a closer look at this strange spiritual affinity.

For almost two millennia the Gnostics have suffered the reputation of teaching a dreary and dualistic religious doctrine in comparison with the hopeful, world-affirming beliefs of the early Christians with whom they vied for disciples on the southeastern fringes of the Roman Empire. First- and second-century Gnostic heresiarchs like Simon Magus, Valentinus, and Basilides notoriously proclaimed that the material universe is inherently evil, the flawed creation not of God but of a lesser deity who through pride, malice, or ineptitude fashioned the world into a prison for the human spirit.

Our only hope for salvation came not through gracethe true God, they believed, is infinitely remote from and utterly indifferent to the worldbut through secret teachings and initiation into gnosis, an intuitive and self-actualizing knowledge which penetrates and dispels the oppressive illusions of the world, thus liberating human spirits from the inert heaviness of matter.

Although the Gnostic sects had largely disappeared by the 4th century, the 20th-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Hans Jonas argued that Gnostic strains endure in any number of modern philosophies, political ideologies, and works of art. Gnostic has since become a catchall for varying shades of existential suspicion and magical thinking. There is a recent trend among conservative Christian polemicists, for example, to attack as Gnostic everything they abhor about the modern worldfrom gender and critical race theories to Silicon Valley transhumanism. But even within the overwhelmingly secular and progressive milieu of contemporary American poetry, to be pegged a Gnostic is something of a liability.

We are living through a period of unquestionable political urgency, when poets increasingly dedicate their writing to collective projects of activism or allyship. Gnosticism, many suspect, is inherently individualistic, otherworldly, and apolitical, encouraging an apocalyptic detachment from the wars and commotions of history, in effect allegorizing them away as contingent symbols of a primordial flaw laced into the fabric of reality. Salvation, for the Gnostics, wasfromhistory, notinhistory. In stark contrast, most contemporary poets express their political agency in straightforwardly materialist terms, despite the hallowed precedent of the revolutionary William Blake, who availed the mythological imagination of the ancient sects, and the efforts of self-described New Gnostics, who seek to define a visionary and religiously attuned experimental poetry for our time.

Few readers familiar with either Nathaniel Mackey or Fanny Howe, however, would question their left-wing political bona fides. Longtime favorites of the indie poetry crowd, both Mackey, seventy-four, and Howe, eighty-one, have in recent years been recognized as among the most important authors of their generation, as evidenced by respectiveNew Yorkerprofiles and significant honors, including Mackeys National Book Award and Bollingen Prize, Howes Lenore Marshall and Griffin Prizes, and a Ruth Lilly Prize apiece.

Many new readers are therefore currently encountering inDouble TrioandManimal Woetwo distinct apotheoses of two vast catalogs (Mackey has published nearly twenty books and Howe close to fifty) of some of the most challenging and imaginative political poetry written since the 1970s, especially as it pertains to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the material conditions of Black life in America, preoccupations Mackey, Black, and Howe, white, share. Where Mackey and Howe diverge from the received wisdom is in their refusal to see Gnostic ambivalence and political commitment as mutually opposed. Collective political action, their new books suggest, must be shaped, guided, and channeled with a healthy sense of cosmic irony.

*

Double Triopresents the latest, and thus far the longest, episode in what Nathaniel Mackey calls his long song: the cross-cultural epic, comprising the two serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu (each the others understudy, as Mackey once put it) that he has been publishing incrementally since his 1985 debut,Eroding Witness.

Double Triois a pun. The title refers literally to the fact that each of the tomes three volumesTej Bet,Sos Notice, andNerve Churchcontains twice as many installments as each of its three antecedents,Splay Anthem(2006),Nod House(2011), andBlue Fasa(2016). But double trio also pays homage to the avant-garde saxophonist Glenn Spearmans group of the early nineties, which paired two jazz trios in free improvisations meant to elicit sui generis collaborations between instruments and bold new interchanges of musical ideas. Individually exploratory and centrifugal, each of the players nevertheless contributes to a vision (or, really, anaudition) of genuine collectivity, however transitory, however only partially enacted.

To become a band like that, to reconstrue individual identity and agency through ensemblic doubling and self-parsing, to collectively improvise a we, is the dream of the Gnostic sojourners who travel through Mackeys long song (Anuncio and Anuncia, Huff, Sophia, Itamar, Brother B and Sister C, Mr. and Mrs. P, Netsanet and Eleanoir, to name only a few) by boat, car, bus, train, airplane, and spaceship, passing through mapped localities (Los Angeles, Troy, Addis Ababa, Costa Brava) as well as allegorically limned regions unique to the Mackey mythos (Lone Coast, Low Forest, Crater, Dread Lakes, Lake Pred), on their way to an outmost destination they never quite reach, never more than a would-be band.

What prevents the migrating they from becoming an arrived-at we is Nub Mackeys word for that which prototypically dislocates, uncouples, decapitates. Nub is a Gnostic principle of severance endemic to being, but one that reveals itself in contingent historical incarnations, most recently in the United Slave States of Nub, the reassertion over the past decade of Americas old and new nature of violent deracination and exclusion.

This passage appears in a poem that alludes to the police murder of Eric Garner in 2014. Other poems inDouble Trio, written between the summer of 2012 and the summer of 2018, reference the murders of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling, the mass shootings in Charleston, Dallas, Sutherland Springs, and Parkland, as well as the background noise of the troubled second term of the Obama administration, the 2016 presidential campaign, and the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Mackey mockingly portrays Trump as a kind of chthonic monster or archonone of the malevolent rulers of the planetary spheres in Gnostic cosmologywho lives beneath a field of comb-over haystacks and whom, like Scylla and Charybdis, the would-be band of black Odysseans must perilously navigate.

As these events sequentially unfold, the mood among Mackeys would-be band becomes increasingly nonplussed, angry, desperate, defiant, determined, resigned, hopefulunresolvedly all of these at once.

There is something undeniably fatalistic about Mackeys treatment of white supremacy and Black suffering. The unique tragedy of Eric Garners murder is, if not diminished, then certainly put in perspective by the ineluctability of historical recurrence. Black subjugation is extrapolated into something like a metaphysical constant. This is perhaps surprising, given that Mackey has written ambivalently in the past about a similar instinct in the Vietnam War poetry of Robert Duncan, the most unapologetically Gnostic writer of the 20th century, to cosmologize the American war machine, to treat such violence as part of the hidden order of things, and thus avoid taking a decisive moral position. Duncans poetic stance of oracular detachment famously cost him his friendship with Denise Levertov (a Roman Catholic convert, interestingly) who believed that the poet had a public responsibility to pursue concrete political measures against the war and used her own writing of the period to bear witness to American atrocities against the Vietnamese.

For Mackey, however, the question for the poet is not primarily between taking a stand and standing back. His characters act, they blow, even when they cant breathe. But just as the pleading final words of Eric Garner were repurposed into a powerful rallying cry for a new generation of civil-rights activism, Mackey suggests that the inescapable and, in some real sense, eternalfact of the violent severance of Black breath must be somehow dialectically incorporated into the sound of its perseverance.

This core conviction has shaped the mythopoetic and formal design of Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu from their inception. Mackey has discussed at length the importance to his project of the cosmogonic mythoi of the Dogon people of Mali, specifically their belief that doubleness, not individuality, is the true estate of human being. The human tendency to be born singular indicates an ontological prematurity. The Dogon song of the Andoumboulou, which recounts the story of humanitys originary loss of twinness, echoes Gnostic teaching. In funeral rites, the song is sung in a rasping, abraded, torn voice that, in Mackeys view, timbrally conveys the sense that we are born torn asunder from ourselves. The individual, in other words, is intrinsically dividual. The I is always already Nubbed.

In this way, Mackey turns on its head the conventional privileging and universalization of white over Black experience. It is actually the psychic uprootedness innate to diasporic identities, and not the self-assured Cartesian ego, that best characterizes the human lot. Mackeys critical writings have long protested the pressure historically imposed on Black writers to adopt a transparently and accessibly declamatory style, which a white literary establishment patronizingly presumes is necessary and sufficient for Black writers to tell their stories or, in todays parlance, speak their truth. He calls our attention to the possible duplicity whereby a poet might speak of political dispossession, but within an epistemological framework or model of lyric subjectivity that falsely presupposes self-possession.

Identity, for Mackey, is honestly expressible only as an Insofar-I: an I more subjunctive than securely subjective, one that acknowledges that self-presence is an illusion and that cognitive dissonance is the norm for one natally torn in half. In true Gnostic fashion, however, Mackey suggests that by accepting the truth of this we take the first step toward liberation.

Here, Mackey riffs on the linguistic peculiarities of Rastafarian Dread Talk in order to reveal how the cosmological and historical severance of the I and I makes possible degrees of self-detachment, and thus both irony as well as ecstasy (literally displacement from ones proper place), that better enable us to see how we might recover the we. The I, for example, can imaginatively project its own double or whatsayer, who at once gainsays the I (so what?) and goads it on (what next?). The religious and political ramifications are what Mackey calls, after Duke Ellington, blutopic: a model of communal life that does not try to suppress the blue and bass notes, the nonsense and dissonance (or nonsonance in Mackeys idiolect) at the bottom of everything, but learns how to make of them the doubled instruments of ongoingness. Babble be our boon, Mackey writes, such were the dictates of seeming defeat, fugitivitys / rigor.

*

If Mackey has largely embraced his Gnostic reputation, Fanny Howe has sometimes demurred. A well-known convert to Roman Catholicism, Howe stated in a 2004 interview that although she had passed through a Gnostic stage, it soon felt evil to have that view of being. She objected to the way the Gnostics understood gnosis to be the privilege of an elect few, the rest of us pitiably wallowing in illusion. Her writing shows perhaps clearer fidelity to Franciscan incarnational theology and the preferential option for the poor. And yet, there is a seditious, heterodox streak to Howes Catholicism. Gnosticism continues to function in her writing as something of a check against the possible excesses of Christian eschatological hope.

The beatitudes famously promise heavenly restitution for the wretched of the earth, tempting many Christians throughout history to see worldly dispossession at most as a transitory injustice and even in some cases as an ordained stage in Gods plan. But Howe Gnostically refuses to justify the persistence of suffering as providence. Like Mackey, she is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, inManimal Woe, the mystery of repetition.

I wanted to know why, she explains in the books coda, when slavery formally ended, it went on, both internationally and especially in the American courts, as scapegoating. Racial segregation and voter suppression, hatred of the poor and red-baiting, warmongering and xenophobiaHowe sees the present-day reappearance of the malevolent forces that assailed and obsessed her youth, negatively shaping her dawning political conscience in the late 1950s, as evidence that

there is something built into our national system, self-destruction, that goes round and round; repetition without progress; evolution of disagreements. So it goes, stopping at the same stations, having the same scuffles with the same people, scratching down the same punishments and laws only to create a population of government-haters, money-makers, angry nationalists with power, and the rest wage-slaves.

She wonders whether this bad infinity is actually innate to law itself. Life is the enemy of the law, she writes. Law struggles to prevent something new from living.

This sentiment echoes the idiosyncratic Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinop, a 2nd-century Christian heretic about whom Howe wrote sympathetically in her remarkable 2003 essay collection, The Wedding Dress. Marcion saw an irreconcilable difference between the legalistic, jealous, and genocidal God depicted in the Old Testament and the transcendent God whom Jesus in the Gospels called Father. Marcion concluded, by way of an extreme interpretation of Saint Pauls theology, that Jesus came not to fulfill but overthrow the law. Christ was an emissary, he claimed, not of Yahweh, the Demiurge and taskmaster of this broken world, but of a God whom we have never known. The alien father of the Gnostics, Howe elaborates, may have left a little imprint here on earth, but he doesnt seem to care in the way the interfering God of the Torah did. Evil is powerful because it makes itself known very viscerally; it cares, the way the torturer cares. The true God, she reflects, would paradoxically express compassion through disinterestedness and absence, wanting us to know and bravely accept that we are abandoned in the world.

These same Marcionite instincts return inManimal Woewhen Howe attempts to come to terms with the life and legacy of her late father. Mark DeWolfe Howe was a blue-blooded descendent of Ancient Boston and mad slave-traders as well as a prominent Harvard legal scholar, civil-rights activist, and firm believer that US common law could be an effective instrument, in his own words, for advancing the personal freedoms and human dignities of the American people, even if he was fully conscious of its failure historically to live up to that promise.

Howe plumbs her fathers archives, excerpting his letters, legal opinions, and lectures, often at length, searching for wisdom that might avail us in our current political predicament, but also struggling with his core convictions. The 1967 Civil Rights Act takes on especial symbolic resonance in the book, having been passed in the same year that her father died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack. Howes disillusionment with the failures of this specific law to ensure lasting justice for Black Americans is wrapped up emotionally with her acknowledgment that her father represented precisely the kind of privileged white liberal whose time has now passed and whose death created the painful conditions of Howes maturation and emancipation, the freedom to forge her own path. The Law seems to limit our abilities, Howe writes. This is at once a profoundly Gnostic discovery and, in the context of memorializing her father, an expression of grief.

In one of the most moving sections of the book, Howe composes a series of hypothetical letters in reply to her father, filling him in on the most significant events of her life since his passing. She shows herself to be conscious of the ways that the mystery of repetition has been at work in her own experiences and travails. She discerns fateful significance, for example, in the fact that she met and married the Black civil-rights activist Carl Senna just a year after her fathers death. Howe had three children with Senna before their divorce in the mid-seventies. She raised her mixed-race family, alone and impoverished, in sharply segregated Boston and its environs, finding community among other nomadic single mothers.

This is a period of her life that Howe has frequently written about, repeatedly combing her memories for clues about the deeper structures that have determined her life. Motherhood and childhood, Howe wrote inThe Wedding Dress, are distinct but overlapping existential horizons both characterized by bewilderment. Bewilderment is the natural condition of those left behind in the heros journey; mothers and children shadow the heros courage, discipline, conquest, and fame by sustaining positions of weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude; their paths are digressive and recursive, spiral rather than ascensional. Bewilderment circumnavigates, she writes, believing that at the center of errant and circular movement is the empty but ultimate referent.

InManimal Woe, Howe intimates that the nil point of the turning world is the vacancy left by the Fathers abscondment; the death of Mark De Wolfe Howe and the desertion of Carl Senna represent a lapse in paternal authority writ large. The Father is over and will never be saved, Howe insists. The Father is over like the Sabbath and the swamis. They noticed that laws are fears, and fears fade away. That law stays, the law of change. Again, for Howe this is an ecstatic, emancipatory discovery tinged with sorrow. How can you tell hysterical laughter from sobbing? Howe asks in the next breath, adding, That which is over is everywhere.

She retraces walks through Mount Auburn Cemetery, recalls lunches shared at Howard Johnsons, and imaginatively revives old conversations with her father about the incompatibility between liberty and equality, not as nostalgic and delusional exercises meant to resurrect what is irrecoverable, but as a Gnostic discipline of intuition and attention, watchful for patterns and predispositions in her own biography, in preparation for the next go-around. Premonition is the only way out of the trap of quantum history, Howe writes. To sense the face of yourself coming and to change your course before it does! What is finished must be repeatedly and creatively worked through to release a future into the air.

If this is a private spiritual discovery, it is also a political one. Even as repetition without progress has dulled us into the manimals we are today, pushing, bitching, lying, insinuating, measuring, bullying, and demanding pay for the labors of others, Howe suggests that just such a creative recapitulation, centripetally motored by an absence where the axis used to be, is needed to counteract it.

Recapitulation is backward thinking, like the composition of a poem or song. You look across a finished thing in order to understand it. You have to go over it again, but include your presence this time. You are now part of the thing you are going over. You cant ever escape this problem of being where you are as a negative presence.

*

When Howe subjects, through endless recapitulations, her own memories to this negative presence and Mackey harangues his own utterances with whatsay, they demonstrate a distinctively Gnostic restlessness, which the Christian theologian David Bentley Hart has recently described as a nagging apprehension that what we take to be real life or the real world is really only a kind of machine, altogether empty of spiritual life, devised to hold us captive and separate us from the truth.

Although such suspicions can so easily slide into paranoia and total despair, Hart insists that the Gnostics unyielding refusal to grant the history of this world a determinative or probative ultimacy proves enduringly wise. Neither Mackeys nor Howes poetry ever stops dreaming up possible political futures, but their thrumming bass notes of Gnostic disquiet remind us that we are prey to idols and illusions if we believe that history is anything other than a nightmare.

_______________________________________________________________

This essay was published in Issue 112 of Image under the title Gnostic Ironies: New Poetry by Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe

View original post here:
On the Gnostic Ironies of Poets Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe - Literary Hub

Posted in Transhumanist | Comments Off on On the Gnostic Ironies of Poets Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe – Literary Hub

In New Hampshire, Libertarians, Budget Cuts, And A Small Town Battle To Save Public Education – Forbes

Posted: at 6:55 pm

Where are they headed next?

There were no signs that the Croydon town meeting in March would be unusual.

The weather was bad; not bad enough to really intimidate New Hampshire drivers, though other towns had canceled their meetings. Amanda Brown attended the town meeting about Croydons schools, expecting nothing special; her husband, who had attended the earlier town meeting, did not attend with her. When Ian Underwood, town selectman and husband of school board chair Jody Underwood, made his surprise motion, Brown texted her husband that he had better get over there right away. But by the time he arrived, it was too late. By a vote of 20-14, the meeting had cut the school budget from $1.7 million to $800,000.

The Free State Meets The Granite State

The Underwoods are part of the Free State Project, founded in 2001 with the intent of moving 20,000 Libertarians to New Hampshire with the hope that they might have an outsized influence on the small-population, liberty-loving state. Free Staters have been successful in landing elected offices in New Hampshire, even at the state level (most elected offices in the state are unpaid).

The Underwoods came to Croydon in 2007. Before moving, Jody had worked for the Educational Testing Service, and before that a researcher for NASA and Carnegie Mellon University. Ian was a "planetary scientist and artificial intelligence researchers for NASA," a certified hypnotist, a "fourth generation wing chun sifu," as well as director of the Ask Dr. Math program.

In New Hampshire, Free Staters find many sympathetic politicians. After Frank Edelblut dropped out of the governors race in favor of Chris Sununu, Sununu offered the homeschooling businessman the post of education commissioner. The Underwoods testified at his 2017 confirmation hearing.

Free Staters oppose most taxation. The small town of Grafton, just up the road from Croydon, has cut spending in the town dramatically (read Matthew Hongoltz-Hetlings A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear for a full picture). Two years ago, Croydons three selectmen (including Ian Underwood) made a surprise motion to fire the towns only policeman and dissolve the department. At that meeting, the twenty-year veteran was told to turn in his uniform and equipment, so in a fine show of Yankee spirit, he stripped down to briefs, boots, and hat and walked home.

Croydons tiny population (801 as of 2020) includes 80 students; the school system maintains a local K-4 school and an innovative, hard-won school choice system which pays full tuition for students to attend whatever school the family selects. Many choose the neighboring public school systems. But those costs are far in excess of Croydons slashed budget, which was based on $10,ooo per student.

Nationally, Libertarians are often vocal supporters of school choice, but the Free Staters have largely moved beyond that position. In a Libertarian Institute podcast, Free State board member Jeremy Kaufman explained that school choice and vouchers are just "a stepping stone towards reducing or eliminating state involvement in schools."

Jody Underwood has written that vouchers are only a stepping stone, while Ian Underwood has referred to school budgets as ransom and (in a post entitled Your house is my ATM), extortion.

Proposed Solutions

Two days after the budget-slicing meeting, over 100 mostly-angry Croydon residents attended a school board meeting. Accusations were thrown about. Jody Underwood insisted that she had no idea her husband was going to make such a proposal, a claim that locals say she later retracted.

Board member Aaron McKeon said that a failure to adapt to the new budget just represented a failure of imagination. The message on that Monday was that the new budget was a legally done deal.

Families with students in grades 5-12 had few options. The solution that was repeatedly floated was the use of microschools, particularly Prenda, a company that just last year won $6 million in pandemic relief money from the state of New Hampshire. The company was founded by Kelly Smith, a physicist who started Code Clubs of Arizona; he launched his first Prenda pod in 2018 with seven neighborhood kids. Prenda has since picked up some major funding from VELA Education Fund, a new Koch-Walton initiative.

Microschools are set up with small pods of students, whose education is delivered via computer. Pods do not require teachers, but depend on an adult guide. Microschools in this model are not public education, but the outsourcing of public education to a private company.

The prospect of giving up schools for pods did not excite many of the Croydon parents. And other taxpayers in the town werent happy, either.

The Real Fight Begins

Among the alarmed taxpayers were folks with long time roots in Croydon. Amanda Brown has lived there for 20 years, having married into a family that had been in Croydon for generations. Hope Damon has lived there 36 years, raising two daughters. They were among the many interconnected Croydon folks who were now sparked into action. The Free Staters were about to find out what the wide web of small town connections can do.

When a mistake is made, says Damon, there ought to be a way to rectify it. Tapping a network that included an education lawyer and connections all the way to state Attorney Generals office, the group found that there wasan obscure law that allowed taxpayers to petition for a special meeting to undo the new budget.

The petition had 150 signatures in two days. The special meeting was scheduled for May 7. In order to act, the meeting would require at least half of the towns 565 voters, and so the battle shifted toward driving turnout.

Brown says, We spent every second we could afford on this. They went door to door. They held two calling events. They wrote letters to the editor. They enlisted assistance from surrounding communities, including teachers, administrators and boards of nearby districts.

Jody Underwood reportedly said the board had legal advice to not advertise the special meeting. Meanwhile, Ian Underwood was blogging increasingly angry posts: parents dont understand how children learn, the special meeting was actually not legal, the school district wanted to take money by force, and a piece in which he argues that majorities in a democracy are a big problem.

We Stand Up For Croydon Students formed to back the budget restoration; soon, another group calling itself We Stand Up For Croydon Students and Taxpayers appeared, causing confusion.

The pro-budget cuts group sent out a mailer that argued that microschools would be fine (small class sizes, limited screen time) and that there would be Better education. Lower taxes. Repeatedly, the plea was to stay home. If you like the budget you have, you can keep it. Just stay home on May 7. If fewer than 283 registered voters attend the special meeting, no vote can be taken.

Dozens of Croyden residents registered to vote. Cathy Peshke, a Croydon freedom fighter and veteran of many school budget debates, resigned her post as a voting official when the state said that the new voters would not change the 283 requirement. The budget cutters, she told residents, were the silent majority in this fight. Somebody stuffed pro-budget cut materials in peoples mailboxes.

Ive been exhausted and distracted, says Brown. April was a long month, but then May arrived. And a lot can change between March and May.

The Special Meeting

379 voters showed up.

Outside, there were tables set up by both We Stand Up For Croydon Students and We Stand Up For Croydon Students and Taxpayers; only one was doing much business.

Independent journalist Jennifer Berkshire traveled from Massachusetts to attend the meeting. She found people piling in, with lots of media and residents of all ages. She anticipated tension. I really was expecting a kind of face off. Moderator Bruce Jasper opened the meeting with his own story and, she says, you could feel people kind of exhaling.

The room was packed and, Berkshire says, it became evident early on that everyone there was supportive. Damon says that supporters anticipated that someone might propose a compromise amendment, restoring only part of the original budget. It didnt happen.

There was no wrangling, no points of order, no real debate. One board member tried to plug the microschools and budget cuts. Says Berkshire, The people in the audience did not appreciate his presentation, and they did not respond to it as gracefully as they might have, and encouraged him to wrap it up.

Berkshire found herself sitting next to Jody Underwood, who was agitated. During the We Stand Up For Croydon Students advocacy for a restored budget, she blurted out lies.

In the end, the Free Stater campaign to keep people home had been effective only with their own allies. The budget was restored to its original full condition by a vote of 377-2.

The Lessons

In the end, the debate in Croydon was not about school choice or about quality education, both of which the town already had. As the re-vote came down to the wire, the argument was literally about democracy itself.

The budget cutters were explicitly trying to keep people from voting, arguing against registering more voters, and insisting that the original vote on a surprise motion by 34 of the towns 585 voters was good enough. This was a fight about dismantling a piece of democratic government.

Budget cut advocates had claimed to be the silent majority, but the actual majority turned out to be taxpayers who support public education and are willing to fund it.

People in Croydon had not paid close attention to their new Free State neighbors. Theyre paying attention now; petitions are circulating to remove two school board members (a move that New Hampshire law doesnt actually allow for). Said Damon, They come in acting nice, people trust them, and they turn out to have goals other than what you thought.

Amanda Brown says, I do not think this fight is over. But people are finally aware.

Asked how they got to this point, Hope Damon says, Apathy. Taking for granted that the status quo would be maintained or that somebody had it covered. Free Staters have gained so many elected positions by virtue of being unopposed.

That may change. We won the battle, not the war, says Damon. Were not going away.

Original post:
In New Hampshire, Libertarians, Budget Cuts, And A Small Town Battle To Save Public Education - Forbes

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on In New Hampshire, Libertarians, Budget Cuts, And A Small Town Battle To Save Public Education – Forbes

A new era at TheWeek.com and a goodbye – The Week

Posted: at 6:55 pm

The value and future of the liberal public square has come under intense debate. Ours is a time in which the ACLU wrings its hands over the risks of free speech; self-described small-government conservatives seek to sic the state on Big Tech; and everyone is increasingly unsure if those people should really be allowed to say that. Our national discourse is all mucked up with fear, fury, malicious irony, piously feigned ignorance, and a steady, all-directional flow of bad faith.

I have long been honored to write at TheWeek.com because it is an exception to that rule. We have tried not perfectly, but sincerely and consistently to wade out of that muck. We have deliberately cultivated real ideological difference and collegiality, increasingly rare qualities in American media aiming at general, national consumption.

Where other sites have an open political alignment or de facto third rails, The Week has intentionally sought to publish voices with real disagreement about grave matters. We have prized sharp and conscientious argument. We have clung to the ideal of the liberal public square while it gathered ever more enemies. We have maintained an internal culture that errs on the side of respect and treating serious matters seriously.

"The Weekpublished paleocons likeMichael Brendan Doughertyand leftists likeRyan Cooper, libertarians likeShikha Dalmiaand centrists likeDamon Linker, all distinctive writers and thinkers who tended to avoid being siloed within the political dispensations with which they identified and who prided themselves on refusing to 'think with the church' as it were," as longtime columnist Noah Millman recently wrote. "You can find people like them at other opinion pages, but they'd be the exception to a rule where most opinion columns cluster around the predilections of the publication's core readership. It was genuinely special to be part of an enterprise that strove for something different."

Indeed it was. I came to The Week in 2014 as a freelance news writer. Particularly with a Democratic administration, the editors wanted a balance of viewpoints on the news team. They were searching for someone who would hit left as well as right, and, as a libertarian, I was happy to hit at anyone in government. I joined giddy at my good luck in being selected to write for a site that published so many people I respected.

From there I went on to become weekend editor, contributing editor, deputy editor, and acting editor-in-chief. I've done work I've enjoyed in each of those roles, but it's the opinion writing of which I'm proudest, aided by generous editors who let me pursue my interests galas, medieval analogies, not going to space, destroying the suburbs however odd they might be.

Here at The Week, I researched twin pregnancies and postpartum injuries, tracked the making of a misinformation meme, reported a discrepancy in CDC data, chronicled the evolution of the American right, jumped on the QAnon beat early, explored the reality of martial law, parsed libertinism and libertarianism, refused to endorse a presidential candidate, tallied "day one" promises, pondered yard signs in states blue and purple, meditated on violence, interrogated my own history of quoting the Founding Fathers, committed to the necessity of good character, and began writing on topics around media, mind, and epistemology that would later form the basis of my second book (out this fall please pre-order!).

But now that era has come to an end. TheWeek.com is moving in a new direction in how it handles in-depth analysis and opinion look for a note with more details on the occasion of our official launch of that approach June 1 and it's time for me to move on.

Readers, thanks for hearing me out this once more, and do keep in touch. Cheers to The Week that was.

Read the original post:
A new era at TheWeek.com and a goodbye - The Week

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on A new era at TheWeek.com and a goodbye – The Week

Indiana Democrats, Libertarians join together for town hall series ahead of November election – WFYI

Posted: at 6:55 pm

From left, Democratic candidate Destiny Wells and Libertarian candidates James Sceniak and Jeff Maurer participated in the launch of the town hall series in Greenfield.

Indiana Democratic and Libertarian candidates are working together to hold a series of town halls across the state.

The events, organized by the state Democratic Party, invite Hoosiers to ask questions of the candidates ahead of this falls elections.

Democratic Secretary of State candidate Destiny Wells said the town halls are a response to what she calls the divisiveness in politics over the last few years.

We need to be responsible and show Hoosiers that politicians and candidates can work together and play together in the sandbox, Wells said.

Join the conversation and sign up for the Indiana Two-Way. Text "Indiana" to 73224. Your comments and questions in response to our weekly text help us find the answers you need on statewide issues.

Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate James Sceniak said the town halls are vital to hear directly from voters.

I believe that any office we hold is a public servant office," Sceniak. "And if were not hearing from the public, were not doing our job.

And Libertarian Secretary of State candidate Jeff Maurer said the town halls are about the fundamentals of the democratic process.

And so, no matter what party, what brand, what philosophy, what ideology you have, we have to work together as Hoosiers and as neighbors to figure out what we want for our communities, Maurer said.

Indiana Republicans were invited to participate but chose not to.

Contact reporter Brandon atbsmith@ipbs.orgor follow him on Twitter at@brandonjsmith5.

Visit link:
Indiana Democrats, Libertarians join together for town hall series ahead of November election - WFYI

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on Indiana Democrats, Libertarians join together for town hall series ahead of November election – WFYI

As Kendrick Lamar releases new album Mr Morale, revisiting the reflections of social disquietude in rapper’s music-Opinion News – Firstpost

Posted: at 6:55 pm

As the world throughsocial media and otherwiserapidly loses its decency while rejecting the idea of the other, Lamar is forcing you to face your own hypocrisy that masquerades as different versions of libertarianism today.

Kendrick Lamar performs during the Pepsi Halftime Show during the NFL Super Bowl 56 football game, Sunday, Feb. 13, 2022, in Inglewood, California | Cooper Neill/AP

In #TheMusicThatMadeUs, senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri chronicles the impact that musicians and their art have on our lives, how they mould the industry by rewriting its rules and how they shape us into the people we become: their greatest legacies

The whole point of this column has been to document artists or bands whose contributions to music have been so significant that theyve created genres, or subgenres, and even altered the course of music history. There are few who create a mould that inspired generations to find their voice. There are fewer who take that mould and use it as the basis for something truly extraordinary. Dr Dres protg and the only Pulitzer-winning popular artist in the worldKendrick Lamar is one of them.

With his latest album around the corner Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, nows as good a time as any to look at the legacy that Lamar inherited from the pantheon that includes Notorious BIG, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg et al, and how he has given it his inimitable stamp of originality; thus, creating a space for himself with the masters of the craft within just 11 years of his debut album.

While it may seem an overkill to talk about a widely written-about prolific album, Lamars importance in the Indian soundscape rests in the raw timelessness of his ground-breaking album To Pimp a Butterfly. Given that the focus of the album was beyond the wokeness one associates with millennials and instead hammers home points on discrimination, race, Black culture and the value of human life, it is all too relatable in our sociocultural contexts of casteism and anti-secularism, where dignity is a word that finds place in our Constitution but not in our everyday lives.

Kendrick Lamar has reveals the cover artwork for his new album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.

Lamars album was considered rather politically-charged when it came out in 2015, wherein the piece of work is said to have rewritten the idea of existentialism within the world of hip-hop. It isnt just the haunting nature of the lyrics that rankles; its the fact that the lyrics represent a microcosm of trauma which plays out in so many marginalised communities around the world. Politically sidelined or hunted for the votebank, you can replace Americas Black community with the Muslims in India and the essence of To Pimp a Butterfly really shakes you to the core.

Lamar has championed in various albumsspecifically this onethe magnitude of mental health issues by highlighting the struggles of anxiety, isolation, depression, and the spirit of survival in the face of it all.

While he may not be a rare musician to touch upon such topics in his songs, Lamar stands out in his ability to blend in jazz, soul, and even rock, into the mainstream hip-hop sound, thus creating music that not just provokes social disquietude but also pushes the limits of seemingly disparate genres. In essence, Lamar widened his audience not by changing the music but changing their expectation of him.

To Pimp a Butterfly is in many ways a most comprehensive, yet concise (only 1 hour 20 minutes-long) anthology of Black culture that balances the systemic racism and the daunting idea of simply being Black with the traditional richness that lords over jazz, soul and the blues. If it comforted the community by way of relating to their daily sufferings, then it also brought out the beauty of their artistic lineage because pain always finds its way to the arts.

Lamar has built up to this moment by taking his greatest influences from Tupac, Notorious BIG, Eminen, Jay-Z and more, emulating their best components while finding a truly unique voice, sound and personality in the midst of it all. He is the perfect amalgamation of hip-hop ancestry and the best catalyst to take it to a newer generation of musicians and listeners. He sings about ideas that resonate with all of us around the world and even when we risk a hagiography of his genius, we know that even the exaggeration is sometimes warranted.

That said, he has been known to publicly back dubious characters like R Kelly and XXXtentacion against Spotifys new policy to police music of convicted abusers, and his unabashed love for Michael Jackson includes a ludicrous denial of the Prince of Pops sexual abuse accusations. So for all that we laud Lamar, there is a part of him that begs careful consideration for we the listeners need not necessarily suffer from the kind of idol worship that he does.

Despite all that, Lamar is extensively praised for the genius that his music is and what it represents; a sociocultural alchemy that urges you to be true to your most humane side. As the world throughsocial media and otherwiserapidly loses its decency while rejecting the idea of the other, Lamar is forcing you to face your own hypocrisy that masquerades as different versions of libertarianism today.

Senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri has spent a good part of two decades chronicling the arts, culture and lifestyles.

Read all theLatest News,Trending News,Cricket News,Bollywood News,India NewsandEntertainment Newshere. Follow us onFacebook,TwitterandInstagram.

Go here to see the original:
As Kendrick Lamar releases new album Mr Morale, revisiting the reflections of social disquietude in rapper's music-Opinion News - Firstpost

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on As Kendrick Lamar releases new album Mr Morale, revisiting the reflections of social disquietude in rapper’s music-Opinion News – Firstpost

Abortion: Let’s look at the arguments pro and con – The Citizen.com

Posted: at 6:55 pm

The primary way pro-choicers argue for abortion is through emotional sloganeering because their side of the debate cannot stand up to rigorous analysis or logic. But, simplistic and manipulative though it may be, it has worked well enough for the past 50 years and as a result, I guess they can take perverse pride in the deaths of 60 million unborn babies over that time.

One of the typical lines you hear from them is this: If you dont like abortion, dont have one. This appeals to peoples inherent libertarianism and the live and let live ethos that is an important notion in our national makeup.

But, I doubt the average pro-choicer would be as liberal (in the true sense of that word) when it comes to guns. An average gun owner may also say, If you dont like guns, dont get one. But, the average pro-choicer tends to be anti-gun as well and would say in response, But your right to have a gun can result in an innocent person getting shot.

Fair enough. Our constitutional right to bear arms does come with some risk, but we as a society have been willing to bear that risk in return for the liberties and protections we enjoy through gun ownership. Plus, as mentioned above, gun ownership is a right explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

As was clear even in Roe v. Wade, no such right was explicit in our founding document, so the justices used very lazy, weak legal argumentation to claim that it was somehow implicit in the also non-enumerated right to privacy. A house of cards built on sand, if there ever was one.

And this is why Roe must go. Not because it made abortion legal in all 50 states, which I think a bad thing, but because it set a precedent for the Supreme Court to use bad law to achieve certain cultural ends. That is not the job of the court and fundamentally undermines its legitimacy and authority.

But getting back to my imaginary friend who claims the problem of abortion just goes away if I, as a pro-lifer, avoid having one or paying for one.

Well, just as that pro-choicer no doubt agonizes over the plight of various marginalized groups in our country who are supposedly harmed by systemic racism or unjust laws, I too am concerned about the most marginalized of all humans, the unborn. I feel an obligation to defend the weakest and most vulnerable of people not only from persecution or unfair treatment, but from the denial of the most basic right of all, the right to life.

We as a nation decided we could not abide a similarly unjust situation when it came to slavery. Slave owners and those who supported that evil institution would and did say, If you dont like slavery, dont have a slave. But the better lights in our nation rightly pointed out the terrible injustice of that condition and would not stand by idly as their fellow human beings were treated like property, beaten and even killed at the whim of their owners.

Just the same, we who are against abortion are not motivated by controlling womens bodies or denying people reproductive healthcare. No. We are FOR protecting the very life of the human being in a mothers womb, for protecting his/her rights and well-being.

Yes, the woman who is pregnant unintentionally will face a difficult path forward, but no amount of difficulty could ever justify killing the baby as a moral, valid solution to the problem.

So, no, I cannot just avoid the problem of abortion by avoiding being involved in one. I must try and defend the most innocent lives as a human being, an American, a father, and a friend. To do any less would be to shirk my duty and allow the strong to dominate the weak in the most terrible way possible. That is not the kind of world or country I want to live in.

Trey Hoffman

Peachtree City, Ga.

See original here:
Abortion: Let's look at the arguments pro and con - The Citizen.com

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on Abortion: Let’s look at the arguments pro and con – The Citizen.com

Election 2022: Who’s on the Ballot? – Georgetowner

Posted: at 6:55 pm

Its voting season in the District. Heres what you need to know.

This years city-wide general election will be November 8. Contests will be for the mayors office, six D.C. Council seats, and for the first time a chance to pick a new D.C. Attorney General, as Karl A. Racine (D) the citys first elected AG is not running for a third term. The D.C. Council Chair position will also be on the ballot in addition to the D.C. Delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives and the citys shadow representative to the U.S. Senate.

The District will hold a party primary on June 21 to determine finalists on the November general election ballots. Given how heavily Democratic the nations capital is, the results of the Democratic Party primary tend to be decisive in the November elections.

According to the D.C. Board of Elections (DCBOE), primaries are held only for partisan offices (such as Delegate to the House, Mayor, Councilmember, and Senator and Representative). Therefore, only the following recognized parties will be holding primaries on June 21: Democratic, Republican, D.C. Statehood Green, and Libertarian. In the District only voters registered with one of these parties may vote in their partys [primary] election.

DELEGATE TO THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES FROM THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Wendy Hope Dealer Hamilton, Eleanor H. Norton and Kelly Mikel Williams

Republican Party: Nelson F. Rimensnyder

MAYOR OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: James Butler, Muriel E. Bowser, Trayon Washington DC White and Robert White

Republican Party: Stacia R. Hall

CHAIRMAN OF THE COUNCIL OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Erin Palmer and Phil Mendelson

Republican Party: Nate Derenge

AT-LARGE MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Lisa Gore, Nate Fleming, Anita Bonds and Dexter Williams

Republican Party: Giuseppe Niosi

ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Democratic Party: Brian Schwalb, Ryan L. Jones and Bruce V. Spiva

LOCAL PARTY OFFICES DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA DEMOCRATIC STATE COMMITTEE

NATIONAL COMMITTEEMAN: Kevin B. Chavous

NATIONAL COMMITTEEWOMAN: Denise L. Reed

AT-LARGE COMMITTEEMAN: Charles E. Wilson, James S. Bubar, Dave Donaldson, Keith Hasan-Towery, James J. Sydnor, Matt LaFortune and John Green

AT-LARGE COMMITTEEWOMAN: Monica L. Roach, Linda L. Gray, Dionna Maria Lewis, Patricia Pat Elwood, Andria Thomas, Maria Patricia Corrales and Chioma J. Iwuoha

WARD TWO COMMITTEEMAN: John Fanning and Brian Romanowski

WARD TWO COMMITTEEWOMAN: Janice Ferebee and Meg Roggensack

All other positions on Republican Party ballots are write-ins. There are only write-ins on ballots for the DC Statehood Green Party and the Libertarian Party.

Beginning on May 16, voter ballots will be sent to all registered D.C. voters giving citizens a chance to vote by mail. Ballot drop boxes may be used beginning May 27. Early voting in D.C. runs from June 10 through June 19. On June 21 Primary Election Day polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m.

Registration is required to vote in the District. However, the DCBOE must receive your Voter Registration at least 21 days prior to Election Day. So, the deadline to register for this years party primaries is: Tuesday, May 31. However, if you miss the deadline, the DCBOE website says, Same-Day Registration is available at Vote Centers during the Early Voting period [June 10 through 19] and on Election Day.

According to the Washington Post, a voter registration application swearing or affirming voting qualifications and a valid proof of residence is required. D.C. residents who are U.S. citizens ages 16 and older can register to vote online, or in person at the DCBOE office (1015 Half St. SE, Suite 750, Washington, D.C. 20003) or any voter registration agency, by mail, email or fax. Residents can call (202) 347-2648 for more information.

A list of answers to Frequently Asked Questions from the D.C. Board of Elections can be found here. Voting sites and locations can be found here.

Stay tuned for Election 2022 campaign profiles, updates and news in upcoming newsletters and our June print issue. For our recent exclusive interview with D.C. mayoral candidate Robert C. White, Jr. (D), see here.

Read more here:
Election 2022: Who's on the Ballot? - Georgetowner

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on Election 2022: Who’s on the Ballot? – Georgetowner

Why are liberals trying to water down the racist views of the Buffalo gunman? – Washington Examiner

Posted: at 6:55 pm

A madman who describes himself as an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist went on a racist shooting spree in Buffalo over the weekend. He cited radical views and conspiracies he absorbed from the internet to explain his turn to mass murder.

My question: Why are so many in the legacy media and the Democratic Party intent on watering down the insane things this shooter believed?

The most likely answer is that the media want to blur any distinction between the shooters evil and insane views on one hand versus the typical Republican views that the media and Democrats dislike on the other.

I wish all JEWS to HELL! the shooter wrote. Go back to hell where you came from DEMON!

He went further and laid out the case that white people are being replaced. The White race is dying out, that blacks are disproportionately killing Whites, that the average black takes $700,000 from tax-payers in their lifetime, and that the jews and elite were behind this.

Writing about white people, he commented, We are doomed by low birth rates and high rates of immigration. He attacked libertarianism as largely pioneered by Jews.

Later, he offered a different, more pedestrian critique of mass immigration, attacking conservatives for supporting anything to decrease the labor cost of production and line their pockets with the profits.

His political vision, Green nationalism, calls for population curbs: "There is no Green future with never ending population growth, he wrote, adding that the ideal green world cannot exist in a world of 100 billion, 50 billion, or even 10 billion people.

The dominant media narrative does not focus on the shooters atheism, isolationism, environmentalism, population-control demands, or hatred of Fox News. For most of the media, it is too much mental labor to tie those beliefs to his obvious white supremacist and antisemitic views.

So instead, they settle on an easy, lazy story: The shooter was motivated by the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This isnt false it's just that it's a tiny part of the shooters foul melange of radical and bigoted views.

Its a tidy story because the killer's choice of targets was pretty directly attributable to the whole idea of white people being "replaced." In this, he was much like the antisemitic shooter at Pittsburghs Tree of Life synagogue who was very explicit about his insane beliefs. Attacking a Jewish charity called HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), that gunman had posted online that HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people. I cant sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. He believed that Jews were importing foreigners who would wipe out his people.

Does this conspiracy theory trickle into the GOP mainstream? Yes. For example, while President Donald Trump in 2018 fanned flames about the migrant caravan heading from Central America to the U.S. border, Trump backer Matt Schlapp went on CNN, mocked the idea that the caravan was spontaneous, and then asked, Who's paying for the caravan? before referring to George Soros as a possible culprit.

This sort of conspiracy-theorizing is common in politics. People assume something they dislike or oppose is part of a grand plan with a mastermind behind it. Both the Left and the Right do it. When it has a racial element, and the Great Replacement theory has a doubly racial element, it becomes more pernicious and lethal. Trump may have brought this foul line of thinking closer to the heart of the GOP, which is one reason the party would have been better off had he lost the general election in 2016.

But the media and the Democrats are going far beyond saying Trump brought the Great Replacement theory closer to the GOP mainstream. They are deliberately watering down what the Buffalo shooter believed in order to make it sound more like regular old right-of-center politics: The manifesto, as the Reporter Times describes it, focuses on the great replacement theory. The theory claims that Democrats favor migrants from the other countries for votes while deliberately outnumbering whites in the U.S.

That Democrats favor greater numbers of immigrants and see an electoral advantage in it is not in any published quotation from the Buffalo shooter nor is it a racist statement or a conspiracy theory. It may be an unfair implication of Democrats motives, but thats typical politics.

Why would the news media try to water down the crazed shooters racist conspiracy theory in order to make it sound kind of normal? Because they want to broaden the definition of the Great Replacement to include as many Republican views as they can. They are explicit about this:

What is GOP Rep. Elise Stefaniks supposed venture into the Great Replacement theory?

Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington, her ads say.

Thats laughably over-the-top political rhetoric, which makes it no different in tone from stuff the average liberal columnist puts out every day. But theres no white genocide talk here no culpable Jews and nothing explicitly racial or ethnic. Theres immigration and electoral politics. Those topics touch on race and ethnicity, but if were going to brand every restrictionist immigration policy as racist, were basically declaring immigration debates off limits, and that just won't work.

Trying to blur the lines between a crazed racists crazed, racist views and a partisan Republicans partisan, restrictionist immigration views is not something you would do if you really cared about battling racism. Lumping mainstream Republican politicking with racist extremism might convince a few lazy journalists to treat all Republicans as racist, but it will also convince a lot of centrists that the "racist" label is meaningless because everyone gets called "racist."

Original post:
Why are liberals trying to water down the racist views of the Buffalo gunman? - Washington Examiner

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on Why are liberals trying to water down the racist views of the Buffalo gunman? – Washington Examiner

The Buffalo shooter was an eco-socialist racist who hated Fox News and Ben Shapiro – Washington Examiner

Posted: at 6:55 pm

The New York man who shot up a Buffalo supermarket Saturday kept no secrets about how and why he planned to murder "as many blacks as possible." From his racist radicalization on the internet due to the coronavirus lockdowns to his specific choice of a black neighborhood with few guns "NY has cucked gun laws," wrote the shooter, who made clear he intended to survive the massacre the Buffalo shooter is no enigma.

Hence, a seemingly concerted effort from the corporate media accusing the Buffalo barbarian of being some sort of Tucker Carlson acolyte would be baffling if it weren't so transparently malicious. In the 180-page document purported to be authored by the shooter, he does not mention Carlson once. The sole explicit mention of Fox News is an infographic demarcating top Fox hosts such as Maria Bartiromo and Greg Gutfeld as Jewish. (Rupert Murdoch is decried as a "Christian Zionist" who may have Jewish ancestry, "although it's never publicly admitted.) Ben Shapiro is mentioned multiple times, including as an example as the "rat" phenotype of Jewish people.

Moreover, the Buffalo shooter is a self-described "ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist" who loathes libertarianism and conservatism in particular.

"Ask yourself, truly, what has modern conservatism managed to conserve?" the shooter wrote. "Not a thing has been conserved other than corporate profits and the ever increasing wealth of the 1% that exploit the people for their own benefit. Conservatism is dead. Thank god. Now let us bury it and move on to something of worth."

Hell, the shooter admits that he's a socialist, "depending on the definition."

"Worker ownership of the means of production?" he writes. "It depends on who those workers are, their intentions, who currently owns the means of production, their intentions and who currently owns the state, and their intentions."

The diatribe implies "those workers" better be white gentiles who worship Mother Earth. Here, crucially, is the shooter on his homicidal obsession with environmentalism.

"Green nationalism is the only true nationalism," he wrote. "There is no conservatism without nature, there is no nationalism without environmentalism, the natural environment of our lands shaped us just as we shaped it. We were born from our lands and our own culture was molded by these same lands. The protection and preservation of these lands is of the same importance as the protection and preservation of our own ideals and beliefs. For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs. The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization, whilst offering no true solution to either issue. There is no Green future with never ending population growth, the ideal green world cannot exist in a world of 100 billion, 50 billion, or even 10 billion people. Continued immigration into Europe is environmental warfare and ultimately destructive to nature itself. The Europe of the future is not one of concrete and steel, smog and wires but a place of forests, lakes, mountains and meadows. Not a place where English is the de facto language but a place where every European language, belief and tradition is valued. Each nation and each ethnicity was molded by their own environment and if they are to be protected so must their own environments. THERE IS NO TRADITIONALISM WITHOUT ENVIRONMENTALISM."

The shooter's eco-fascism is as inextricable with his white supremacy and antisemitism as it was in Nazi Germany. Contrary to Carlson or any mainstream conservative thought leader, the shooter is functionally anti-natalist, viewing humanity in general as secondary in importance to the planet, and even his choice to murder blacks over Jews is "because [Jews] can be dealt with in time, but the high fertility replacers will destroy us now."

Most importantly, the shooter wasn't radicalized by watching Fox News with family after dinner or listening to Shapiro podcasts in the car to work. The dregs of the internet enraptured him during a government-mandated shutdown of normal social life. By every available statistic, the population at large ran rampant with vices during the isolation of 2020. A few succumbed to outright suicide. Even many of the more disciplined among us descended into drug and alcohol abuse. But for an already broken person like the shooter, his lockdown poison proved just as addictive as any opioid and, for Sunday's victims, far more dangerous.

Read more here:
The Buffalo shooter was an eco-socialist racist who hated Fox News and Ben Shapiro - Washington Examiner

Posted in Libertarianism | Comments Off on The Buffalo shooter was an eco-socialist racist who hated Fox News and Ben Shapiro – Washington Examiner

Page 342«..1020..341342343344..350360..»

  1. category
  2. Transhuman News