The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Benjamin Cole]

5 minutes ago, Matthew Koch said:

WOW!!! MSNBC is doing their best to not cover the Hunter Lap Top censorship by Twitter, lmfao, So much for Notable Events, Weather and Sports when Bill Gates controls your narrative. 

https://www.youtube.com/@msnbc/videos

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/msm-journos-have-meltdown-over-taibbi-twitter-biden-bombshell

Worth reading. Glenn Greenwald's summation. 

[W. Niederhut]

36 minutes ago, John Cotter said:

Thanks for the mention, William. The Irish have a love/hate relationship with U2. It’s partly begrudgery.

The stereotypical view of Americans is that they love winners and hence abhor begrudgers. It’s implicit in the “American Dream”, as is the myth of the undeserving poor. I doubt if that’s true of all Americans, because no less than any other nation, I’m sure they’re intelligent enough to see the American Dream for the scam it is.

I remember reading somewhere that when ABBA first became successful, Swedish radio stations wouldn’t play their music, such was the extent of the begrudgery towards them. That backfired, because it caused more Swedes to buy ABBA records in order to hear them.

It’s “uncool” to say so, especially in Ireland, but I don’t consider begrudgery as necessarily a bad thing. I’ve mentioned before St Thomas Aquinas and other Church Fathers viewing wealth as theft because, given the world’s finite resources, when someone gets more than their fair share, others get less. Mahatma Gandhi said more or less the same thing. He also said poverty was the worst form of violence.

Our winner-worshipping anthropocentric ideology not only destroys poor people’s lives; it’s destroying the biosphere on which we all depend for our existence. Capitalist corporations are constitutionally required to ignore such “externalities” for the sake of profit.

What’s all that got to do with U2, you might ask. As I see it, U2 are very much of a piece with that ideology. That’s fair enough. Such is the nature of pop/commercial music. The problem I have with U2 is Bono’s incessant high-profile politically “correct” posturing. It belies the fact that U2 are part of the global problems we need to fix, not the solution.

Specifically, regarding the U2 song, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”, which refers to the 1972 Bloody Sunday incident in Derry when British troops shot and killed 13 unarmed civil rights protesters. Inevitably, the atrocity resulted in increased support for the IRA.

It’s instructive to bear in mind that John Lennon and Yoko Ono had released another song titled “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in 1972, ten years before U2 wrote theirs. Unlike U2, Lennon and Ono didn’t pull their punches (Lennon was one of the three Beatles who had Irish ancestry):

You anglo pigs and scotties

Sent to colonise the North

You wave your bloody Union Jacks

And you know what it's worth

How dare you hold to ransom

A people proud and free

Keep Ireland for the Irish

Put the English back to sea.

Lennon didn’t sit on the fence. He identified the root cause of the problem – British imperialism in Northern Ireland – and condemned it unequivocally.

Compare and contrast the lines in the U2 song – “This song is not a rebel song … I won’t heed the battle call…” The U2 song is essentially about motherhood and apple pie aimed at the U2’s most important market, the Anglo-American one. Effectively, U2 used the Bloody Sunday atrocity to sell records, which in my view, is also an atrocity.

That epitomises Bono’s modus operandi. Nonetheless, I do think U2’s Unforgettable Fire album is quite brilliant, and I particularly like a song that Bono co-wrote and sang with the folk group Clannad which displays Bono’s powerfully expressive singing voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty2V7yRPbCc

John,

     It's true that U2 has been commercially successful, but I'm puzzled by your perspective on their philanthropic work relating to international AIDs relief and debt relief for Africa and the Third World.  They were also early advocates for ending South African apartheid.  And they are inherently critical of fascism and the U.S. military-industrial complex.  God bless them.  In this crazy country we have military jet fly overs at football games!

     With their music, U2 has also championed Kennedy-esque causes in the U.S. like the Civil Rights movement-- not universally popular with white guys in the U.S., as we have seen in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement.  Their song, Pride-- In the Name of Love, (from the marvelous Unforgettable Fire album) has become a stadium rock tribute to Martin Luther King.  When Love Comes to Town, recorded with B.B. King during the Rattle and Hum tour, is another erstwhile Civil Rights anthem.

     As for the sectarian violence in Ireland, my impression is that Bono and the band were mainly interested in helping to end the carnage. Bono, himself, narrowly missed being killed in a Dublin bomb attack when he was a teenager, as he describes in his memoir.  

     Honestly, my main interest in U2's music during the past 40 years has been musical, but I have also appreciated Bono's lyricism and use of the Psalms.  The man is a sincere Christian, in the best sense of the word-- someone who cares about humanity and social justice.   Liberal Christians are a vanishing species.  I consider myself one of them.

     Reading Surrender, I learned that Bono, the Edge, and Larry Mullen actually pray together before every concert that their music may be useful to humanity!

     It's also damned good stuff.

     

Edited December 4, 2022 by W. Niederhut

[John Cotter]

40 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

     It's true that U2 has been commercially successful, but I'm puzzled by your perspective on their philanthropic work relating to international AIDs relief and debt relief for Africa and the Third World.  They were also early advocates for ending South African apartheid.  And they are inherently critical of fascism and the U.S. military-industrial complex.  God bless them.  In this crazy country we have military jet fly overs at football games!

     With their music, U2 has also championed Kennedy-esque causes in the U.S. like the Civil Rights movement-- not universally popular with white guys in the U.S., as we have seen in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement.  Their song, Pride-- In the Name of Love, (from the marvelous Unforgettable Fire album) has become a stadium rock tribute to Martin Luther King.  When Love Comes to Town, recorded with B.B. King during the Rattle and Hum tour, is another erstwhile Civil Rights anthem.

     As for the sectarian violence in Ireland, my impression is that Bono and the band were mainly interested in helping to end the carnage. Bono, himself, narrowly missed being killed in a Dublin bomb attack when he was a teenager, as he describes in his memoir.  

     Honestly, my main interest in U2's music during the past 40 years has been musical, but I have also appreciated Bono's lyricism and use of the Psalms.  The man is a sincere Christian, in the best sense of the word-- someone who cares about humanity and social justice.   Liberal Christians are a vanishing species.  I consider myself one of them.

     Reading Surrender, I learned that Bono, the Edge, and Larry Mullen actually pray together before every concert that their music may be useful to humanity!

     It's also damned good stuff.

     

William,

You say you’re puzzled by my perspective, but you haven’t identified any flaw in my reasoning.

You have a problem there that you might want to resolve.

[W. Niederhut]

12 minutes ago, John Cotter said:

William,

You say you’re puzzled by my perspective, but you haven’t identified any flaw in my reasoning.

You have a problem there that you might want to resolve.

John,

     I was referring to your argument that, "U2 is part of the problem we need to fix," presumably because they have been commercially successful, and commercial wealth causes of poverty.

     But doesn't that imply that commercial wealth is a zero sum game?  Adam Smith disagreed.

     Also, isn't Bono's advocacy of debt relief for Third World nations part of the solution for world poverty?

     Wasn't his advocacy of peace part of the solution for Ireland?

     From what I know about America, U2's criticism of our military-industrial complex, latent racism, and nascent fascism is part of the solution.  It's what Americans need to hear in stadiums in the age of Trump and the military jet flyovers at football games.

[Matt Allison]

6 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

So, if we "terminate" the Constitution, who's goin to be doin all this declarin stuff?

Tell you what. We'll get back to you on that.

The man is a blithering idiot.

 

He's about to be indicted and he knows it. That's why he's losing his mind so rapidly.

[Matt Allison]

Glenn Greenwald has been flipping out the past 12 hours because he also misread "The Twitter Files" and thought they were going to be a bombshell rather than the nothing-burger they ended up being.

Why is MAGA world so obsessed with Twitter pics of Hunter Biden's hog being taken down? It's really creepy and disturbing, and still not going to win them any elections...

[Matt Allison]

The "Twitter Files" turned out to be such a spectacular fail that MAGAs are now saying it was actually a conspiracy to make Elon Musk look bad lol

 

[Matthew Koch]

10 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

The "Twitter Files" turned out to be such a spectacular fail that MAGAs are now saying it was actually a conspiracy to make Elon Musk look bad lol

 

 

[Ron Bulman]

4 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

     It's true that U2 has been commercially successful, but I'm puzzled by your perspective on their philanthropic work relating to international AIDs relief and debt relief for Africa and the Third World.  They were also early advocates for ending South African apartheid.  And they are inherently critical of fascism and the U.S. military-industrial complex.  God bless them.  In this crazy country we have military jet fly overs at football games!

     With their music, U2 has also championed Kennedy-esque causes in the U.S. like the Civil Rights movement-- not universally popular with white guys in the U.S., as we have seen in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement.  Their song, Pride-- In the Name of Love, (from the marvelous Unforgettable Fire album) has become a stadium rock tribute to Martin Luther King.  When Love Comes to Town, recorded with B.B. King during the Rattle and Hum tour, is another erstwhile Civil Rights anthem.

     As for the sectarian violence in Ireland, my impression is that Bono and the band were mainly interested in helping to end the carnage. Bono, himself, narrowly missed being killed in a Dublin bomb attack when he was a teenager, as he describes in his memoir.  

     Honestly, my main interest in U2's music during the past 40 years has been musical, but I have also appreciated Bono's lyricism and use of the Psalms.  The man is a sincere Christian, in the best sense of the word-- someone who cares about humanity and social justice.   Liberal Christians are a vanishing species.  I consider myself one of them.

     Reading Surrender, I learned that Bono, the Edge, and Larry Mullen actually pray together before every concert that their music may be useful to humanity!

     It's also damned good stuff.

     

I don't want to corrupt legitimate discussion about U2's politics or universal value.  But I hadn't heard this one in a while.  Since it came up.  When Love came to Dallas, they shot it.

 

[Matthew Koch]

4 hours ago, John Cotter said:

Thanks for the mention, William. The Irish have a love/hate relationship with U2. It’s partly begrudgery.

The stereotypical view of Americans is that they love winners and hence abhor begrudgers. It’s implicit in the “American Dream”, as is the myth of the undeserving poor. I doubt if that’s true of all Americans, because no less than any other nation, I’m sure they’re intelligent enough to see the American Dream for the scam it is.

I remember reading somewhere that when ABBA first became successful, Swedish radio stations wouldn’t play their music, such was the extent of the begrudgery towards them. That backfired, because it caused more Swedes to buy ABBA records in order to hear them.

It’s “uncool” to say so, especially in Ireland, but I don’t consider begrudgery as necessarily a bad thing. I’ve mentioned before St Thomas Aquinas and other Church Fathers viewing wealth as theft because, given the world’s finite resources, when someone gets more than their fair share, others get less. Mahatma Gandhi said more or less the same thing. He also said poverty was the worst form of violence.

Our winner-worshipping anthropocentric ideology not only destroys poor people’s lives; it’s destroying the biosphere on which we all depend for our existence. Capitalist corporations are constitutionally required to ignore such “externalities” for the sake of profit.

What’s all that got to do with U2, you might ask. As I see it, U2 are very much of a piece with that ideology. That’s fair enough. Such is the nature of pop/commercial music. The problem I have with U2 is Bono’s incessant high-profile politically “correct” posturing. It belies the fact that U2 are part of the global problems we need to fix, not the solution.

Specifically, regarding the U2 song, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”, which refers to the 1972 Bloody Sunday incident in Derry when British troops shot and killed 13 unarmed civil rights protesters. Inevitably, the atrocity resulted in increased support for the IRA.

It’s instructive to bear in mind that John Lennon and Yoko Ono had released another song titled “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in 1972, ten years before U2 wrote theirs. Unlike U2, Lennon and Ono didn’t pull their punches (Lennon was one of the three Beatles who had Irish ancestry):

You anglo pigs and scotties

Sent to colonise the North

You wave your bloody Union Jacks

And you know what it's worth

How dare you hold to ransom

A people proud and free

Keep Ireland for the Irish

Put the English back to sea.

Lennon didn’t sit on the fence. He identified the root cause of the problem – British imperialism in Northern Ireland – and condemned it unequivocally.

Compare and contrast the lines in the U2 song – “This song is not a rebel song … I won’t heed the battle call…” The U2 song is essentially about motherhood and apple pie aimed at the U2’s most important market, the Anglo-American one. Effectively, U2 used the Bloody Sunday atrocity to sell records, which in my view, is also an atrocity.

That epitomises Bono’s modus operandi. Nonetheless, I do think U2’s Unforgettable Fire album is quite brilliant, and I particularly like a song that Bono co-wrote and sang with the folk group Clannad which displays Bono’s powerfully expressive singing voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty2V7yRPbCc

U2 has some good music.. but, they rival Jimmy Buffet for biggest sellouts ever. Bono has gotten in trouble for having a charity that spends more on parties for rich people than it actually donates. 

Edited December 4, 2022 by Matthew Koch

[Guest]

4 hours ago, John Cotter said:

The stereotypical view of Americans is that they love winners and hence abhor begrudgers. It’s implicit in the “American Dream”, as is the myth of the undeserving poor. I doubt if that’s true of all Americans, because no less than any other nation, I’m sure they’re intelligent enough to see the American Dream for the scam it is.

I think the “myth of the undeserving poor” is largely born out of the thinking of these eugenics societies that American elites had a century or so ago. The poor would be referred to as the “feeble minded”. It was an easy concept to float with the middle class, as it made them feel better about themselves. 
 

I agree, I am sure there are plenty of American’s now that have or are seeing it for the scam that it is. One controversial thing that I might say to put the cat amongst the pigeons is; whilst it is the democrats who are associated with an attachment to compassion, and the Republicans who seem to want to believe in and hang on to the idea of “American exceptionalism”,  I perhaps see more Republican’s who are waking up to some of the scams at play. Its conservatives who are longing for tradition, they are more disagreeable. In contrast; the Democrats have slipped into a collectivist trap, where any wolf of sheep's clothing dressed as compassion or the “greater good”, will be followed unquestioningly. 
 

Some, I suspect will take that as a mischaracterisation or, tell me I don’t live in the US, so I don’t understand. I would say if we take out the green and blue haired crazies from the Dem supporters who dress resentment as caring, and remove the zombie-like following that collects firearms and longs white supremacy amongst the Reps (both groups are a questionable number). By subtracting those groups, you get a much more grounded sample of American’s who don’t figure in the MSM mantra of promoting extremes. Of those two groups left, I think its conservatives are questioning the scams, and its Dems who don’t want to think they are being betrayed at the present time. Its a dangerous concept to vote tribally or to be satisfied as long as your perceived enemy isn’t voted in. The bar should be much higher and attached to what is achieved in office and the bigger picture. 
 

Of course, both sides are mostly responding to their primeval urges from the old, animal part of the brain, they just don’t realise they can be easily controlled by those who can stir emotions that are deeply wired in us. 
 

I haven’t read Bono’s memoirs but, I suspect looking at the American political discourse that he’d feel a bit like the title of this song:

They’ve been a great band. I think I prefer John Lennon’s position, its closer to my own, that there are maniacs running the show amongst the super powers. 
 

 

[W. Niederhut]

15 minutes ago, Matthew Koch said:

U2 has some good music.. but, they rival Jimmy Buffet for biggest sellouts ever. Bono has gotten in trouble for having a charity that spends more on parties for rich people than it actually donates. 

Mathew,

    This is complete garbage, like most of your posts here.  Edge (David Evans) is actually a very talented, original artist.  And I say that as a musician and life long guitarist.  He has had many imitators after 40 years, but few role models.

    Your claims about U2 corruption also sound like bunk to me, based on what I know about Bono and his band.

    What is the source for your latest skullduggery about U2?  Tucker Carlson?

[Guest]

31 minutes ago, Matthew Koch said:

U2 has some good music.. but, they rival Jimmy Buffet for biggest sellouts ever. Bono has gotten in trouble for having a charity that spends more on parties for rich people than it actually donates. 

I do wonder about his conviction to his ideals, too. Being an idealist is a very effective fan recruitment tool but, his (Bono) history of how he pays his taxes and where brings his conviction into question. Obviously, a good accountant would advise you to use tax efficient methods and locations to save millions, and Geldof did similar. 

[Benjamin Cole]

THE HILL

OPINION>JUDICIARY

Censorship by surrogate: Why Musk’s document dump could be a game changer

BY JONATHAN TURLEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 12/03/22 10:30 AM ET

“Handled.” That one word, responding to a 2020 demand to censor a list of Twitter users, speaks volumes about the thousands of documents released by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, on Friday night. As many of us have long suspected, there were back channels between Twitter and the Biden 2020 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to ban critics or remove negative stories. Those seeking to discuss the scandal were simply “handled,” and nothing else had to be said.

Ultimately, the New York Post was suspended from Twitter for reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Twitter even blocked users from sharing the Post’s story by using a tool designed for child pornography. Even Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was suspended for linking to the scandal."

---30---

This seems pretty clear. The Donk-Biden team had a pipeline into Twitter, and they used it. 

That's DC. Hardball. And the media is onboard. 

The 'Phants do similar things.

 

[Matthew Koch]

12 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Mathew,

    This is complete garbage, like most of your posts here.  Edge (David Evans) is actually a very talented, original artist.  And I say that as a musician and life long guitarist.  He has had many imitators after 40 years, but few role models.

    Your claims about U2 corruption also sound like bunk to me, based on what I know about Bono and his band.

    What is the source for your latest skullduggery about U2?  Tucker Carlson?

https://metro.co.uk/2010/09/21/bono-under-fire-over-one-charity-donations-totalling-9-6m-519721/