The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Benjamin Cole]

5 hours ago, Jake Hammond said:

 Great, I think I'll leave you guys to it then and concentrate on the JFK Assassination and open minded discussion . 

For my part, I welcome all points of view. I do not think anyone has a monopoly on truth or insights. 

Edited November 27, 2021 by Benjamin Cole
typo

[Ron Bulman]

12 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Jake,

    In reality, there has been a dramatic rightward shift in the American political spectrum during the past 40 years.

    Democratic centrists today are, essentially, analogous to Eisenhower Republicans of the 1950s.  As an example, Eisenhower pushed spending on infrastructure, (e.g., the Interstate highway system) and believed that unnecessary military spending undermined funding for socially beneficial expenditures on education.  And top income tax rates under Eisenhower were 90%!

    Simultaneously, the Koch-owned GOP today is pushing policies associated with the extreme right wing of the Republican Party of the 1950s-- including Fred Koch's John Birchers.  The Kochs have always aimed at rolling back the New Deal, including Social Security, along with abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.

    It's somewhat surprising that so few people seem to realize that Paul Ryan and the Koch-controlled GOP "Tea Party" House actually passed two budget bills after 2010 which would have abolished Medicare, converting it into Ryan's "Voucher Care" program for future beneficiaries!

     Another obvious example of the modern rightward shift in the American political spectrum is the fact that the GOP today has been adamantly opposed to environmental protection, whereas Richard Nixon presided over the establishment of the EPA.

     The false equivalence/both sider-ist rhetoric nowadays equating essential Republican and Democratic domestic policies is not only inaccurate, but toxic.  There are dramatic, important differences between the policy positions of the Koch-owned (Trump) GOP and the Democratic Party on matters pertaining to tax policy, healthcare, education, infrastructure, environmental protection, and climate change mitigation.

     If you're interested in this subject, you should read Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean's landmark history of the modern Koch GOP, Democracy in Chains.

W, your a psychiatrist, you know jake is bating you.  Why do you take it?  Just to spit the lure out in his face?

[Jake Hammond]

I wasn't baiting anyone I was testing the water to see if you guys are open on this thread, but you're not. I wasn't aware that a political venting / anti Trump thread had been started since I was last on and hence my original post . Having read  'into the Nightmare' I'm very aware of a Josephs political leaning so it was to be expected I guess. Which is all absolutely fine, I'm happy for you honestly. 

 The issue I have is that you claim to be open to discussion and not an echo chamber, which I 've seen no evidence of. I'm English and not part of either US party, I just like the truth and objective conversation. So I'll stick to JFK and let you guys alone to espouse liberal rhetoric. 

[W. Niederhut]

8 hours ago, Jake Hammond said:

I wasn't baiting anyone I was testing the water to see if you guys are open on this thread, but you're not. I wasn't aware that a political venting / anti Trump thread had been started since I was last on and hence my original post . Having read  'into the Nightmare' I'm very aware of a Josephs political leaning so it was to be expected I guess. Which is all absolutely fine, I'm happy for you honestly. 

 The issue I have is that you claim to be open to discussion and not an echo chamber, which I 've seen no evidence of. I'm English and not part of either US party, I just like the truth and objective conversation. So I'll stick to JFK and let you guys alone to espouse liberal rhetoric. 

Jake,

What I posted (above) about the "rightward shift" in the American political spectrum during the past forty years is not rhetoric.  It's history.  (And I didn't even mention the rightward shift of the Republican Party on voting rights.  You may recall that the GOP largely supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965!)

And, BTW, this forum is the opposite of an "echo chamber."  The members here are generally well read and quite knowledgeable about history and current events.  Nor do we always agree.  In fact, we have some interesting, lively disagreements about history and current events.

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by W. Niederhut

[Jake Hammond]

I've just skim read through the last 25 pages and its much worse than I initially thought. 

 - Rittenhouse is an evil right wing racist vigilante murderer of poor innocent black freedom fighters. 

 - Trump ( not been president for a while now guys) is the devil and the route of all non Utopianness

 - Get more boosters otherwise !!!   

-  He crossed state lines !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 Rinse and repeat. 

 Not a single comment I could find countered anything anyone said. Its fine, just stop pretending . I won't comment on this thread again. Like I said initially I didn't realise there was a non JFK thread on here now and when I saw the comments I was surprised. If that's the way it is that's OK. I came back on here because I've settled in a new place and have a little time to indulge by bad habit of JFK Assassination research and was looking to put a line under the ' Rambler' issue in my own mind. Hence why I started that thread. A thread where all are welcome and all views will be considered and appreciated. 

[Kirk Gallaway]

On 11/26/2021 at 6:00 AM, Jake Hammond said:

As long as people are happy to admit to being raging leftists or Evangelical puritans I can't see an issue. I am pretty ' right wing' by English standards but the is more to do with objectivity and truth rather than and political standing , also I feel the shift to the left in general over the last 20 years makes people who still hold fast to the truth more ' right wing by default. The same would be true of course in a shift to the right only in reverse. 

Jake: I am pretty ' right wing' by English standards but the is more to do with objectivity and truth rather than and political standing ,

What an arrogant, pretentious statement coming from someone first introducing himself.. Jake establishes himself as the sole pursuer of "objectivity and truth" that transcends all "political standing".

Jake: also I feel the shift to the left in general over the last 20 years makes people who still hold fast to the truth more ' right wing by default.

Then W. just takes this "shift to the left  argument" apart piece by piece, on a 40 year scale talking about the gradual eroding of the middle class which initially started under Reagan. Jake at least then admits he knows next to nothing about policy shifts in the U.S. (though most posters  from other countries here  often think they do know , largely from projecting issues they feel strongly about from their home country) and is really just another "cultural warrior" with  some feelings of being culturally dispossessed. 

If I can find any truth in what Jake seems to be alluding to. It's that the Democrat messaging is often too policy oriented. Of course, Democrats would say what could be more important?

At one point in our lives in America, the Republicans were also issue oriented, and represented sensible government and fiscal restraint. Unfortunately now, largely because of social media, it's become a party where a group of corporate, and just as globalist as the corporate Democrats, political hacks are harnessing the anger of the disenfranchised from policies that they themselves undertook  to disenfranchise them of 40 years ago! They represent a constituency  that they will talk forever out of both sides of their mouths to hold on to, to stem the defection from their crumbling party. They're an ideal constituency because they are a lot people, apparently  like Jake, who will require them to make no substantial policy changes, but just be there, like Trump to air their cultural grievances.

Edited November 27, 2021 by Kirk Gallaway

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, Kirk Gallaway said:

Jake: I am pretty ' right wing' by English standards but the is more to do with objectivity and truth rather than and political standing ,

What an arrogant, pretentious statement coming from someone first introducing himself.. Jake establishes himself as the sole pursuer of "objectivity and truth" that transcends all "political standing".

Jake: also I feel the shift to the left in general over the last 20 years makes people who still hold fast to the truth more ' right wing by default.

Then W. just takes this "shift to the left  argument" apart piece by piece, on a 40 year scale talking about the gradual eroding of the middle class which initially started under Reagan. Jake at least then admits he knows next to nothing about policy shifts in the U.S. (though most posters  from other countries here  often think they do know , largely from projecting issues they feel strongly about from their home country) and is really just another "cultural warrior" with  some feelings of being culturally dispossessed. 

If I can find any truth in what Jake seems to be alluding to. It's that the Democrat messaging is often too policy oriented. Of course, Democrats would say what could be more important?

At one point in our lives in America, the Republicans were also issue oriented, and represented sensible government and fiscal restraint. Unfortunately now, largely because of social media, it's become a party where a group of corporate, and just as globalist as the corporate Democrats, political hacks are harnessing the anger of the disenfranchised from policies that they themselves undertook  to disenfranchise them of 40 years ago! They represent a constituency  that they will talk forever out of both sides of their mouths to hold on to, to stem the defection from their crumbling party. They're an ideal constituency because they are a lot people, apparently  like Jake, who will require them to make no substantial policy changes, but just be there, like Trump to air their cultural grievances.

Spot on, Kirk.

I would add that Jake's description of our recent forum discussion of the Rittenhouse case is also inaccurate.

My recollection is that Bob Ness gave a very clear summary of why Rittenhouse was acquitted.   I agreed with Bob's legal analysis, but simply mentioned the larger social problem of right wing vigilantes with guns on America's streets (and even in our Capitol buildings!)

Perhaps some people, including Jake, believe this kind of vigilantism is acceptable, but I wonder how Jake would feel if there were teen vigilantes with AR-15s murdering Labor Party supporters on the streets of merry old England... 🤥

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by W. Niederhut

[Benjamin Cole]

FBI And Other Agencies Paid Informants $548 Million In Recent Years With Many Committing Authorized Crimes

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi-and-other-agencies-paid-informants-548-million-in-recent-years-with-many-committing-authorized-crimes/?sh=41eaffcff4dd

 

Whatever you ideologies, biases, or tribes...just take M$M narratives with grain of salt. 

From the JFKA, the Gulf of Tonkin, to 9/11, to Russiagate, to I/6. 

 

[W. Niederhut]

13 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Whatever you ideologies, biases, or tribes...just take M$M narratives with grain of salt. 

From the JFKA, the Gulf of Tonkin, to 9/11, to Russiagate, to I/6. 

 

Ben,

    IMO, you're overgeneralizing here by positing some equivalence between genuine Deep State black ops and Trump's Russiagate and 1/6 scandals.  To date, all of the evidence in Russiagate and 1/6 points to Donald Trump, notwithstanding the M$M propaganda minimizing Trump's documented ties to Russia and the 1/6 attack on Congress.

    Also, you never answered my old question about how the 1/6 attack on Congress could have conceivably benefited anyone but Trump, himself.  Cui bono?

 

[Matt Allison]

Folks- despite Ben's attempts to tell you otherwise, people don't get jobs at the paragons of American journalism (NYT, WaPo, CBS, NBC, ABC) by being hacks and fake journalists.

If they did, they would have hired Glenn Greenwald a long time ago.

Whatever your opinion of them, I can assure you that you can trust them, along with the BBC and FT, much more than Russia Today.

[Paul Brancato]

18 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

FBI And Other Agencies Paid Informants $548 Million In Recent Years With Many Committing Authorized Crimes

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/11/18/fbi-and-other-agencies-paid-informants-548-million-in-recent-years-with-many-committing-authorized-crimes/?sh=41eaffcff4dd

 

Whatever you ideologies, biases, or tribes...just take M$M narratives with grain of salt. 

From the JFKA, the Gulf of Tonkin, to 9/11, to Russiagate, to I/6. 

 

I think this is worth a deeper discussion. Clearly informers are not provocateurs. But the line gets crossed, as this article suggests, and we should all be concerned with provocateurs. DEA informants who commit crimes - old news, not usually good news. Informers embedded into political groups who then become active promoters of illegal acts by those groups - a large and important subject. The most extreme examples I can think of lie at the heart of the Strategy of Tension. Maybe the fascist infiltrators into the Red Brigades were working for private not government groups, but that’s a thin line. In a few of the most dramatic cases such as Fontana or Bologna the crimes themselves were committed by infiltrators who, with the preplanned complicity of major media and elected government, blamed the bombings on the Red Brigades, whose dedicated left wing membership had nothing to do with those acts or the planning thereof. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot FBI informants infiltrated a Moslem group tied to the Blind Sheik and then led them down a terrorist path which they participated in. Or go way back, closely examine the life of Paul, a Roman agent who infiltrated the activists around Rabbi Jesus and then after Jesus’s Roman death proceeded to ‘convert’ on the road to Damascus and proceed to divide the Jewish followers of Jesus. That’s a long tale. 
Back to recent events - the woman who grabbed the microphone out of Bernie Sanders hand at a Black Lives Matter event in Seattle during the 2016 election campaign for president, an act that confused and outraged me enough to cause me to look more closely, turned out to be the daughter of Tea Party activists. Was she an informant inside Black Lives Matter? I can tell you that this moment in time made me doubt that organization, even though I am firmly on their side. A few years later black clad Antifa rioters created mayhem and destroyed property in Berkeley while people were protesting UCB’s decision to allow a racist far right speaker a podium on campus. Result - people think anti racist protestors are violent anarchists. Over the past several years many such incidents occurred. Long before right wingers started calling Antifa a government infiltration, I came to the conclusion that they were in part a creation of those seeking to discredit progressives.  I have yet to see a trial exposing the work of infiltrators into any left wing protest groups. Funny thing - well meaning organizers on the left seem unprepared and/or unwilling to look more closely at those people who commit violence in their names, and cops and courts fail to hold them accountable. 
Flash forward to recent events that Ben posts about, articles showing that courts are now looking at infiltrations of right wing groups by government agencies. It looks likely to me that some of this is true, a twist on the age old infiltrations of the left wing. Hoover himself forbade his agents to join the John Birch Society, but not so the CPA Communists. I have family knowledge of this, so I have no doubts about Hoover’s agenda. 
So the question I will pose here is where the heck is the so-called Liberal media when acts are committed by infiltrators into progressive or left wing movements? Why is it that the Right wing media can take up the cause when their protest movements are infiltrated?
How much proof do we need that mainstream media lies as a matter of course? Aren’t we all here on this forum partly because we know in our bones this is true? Look at the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (Ben - share how you felt about that. Did you see this as a looming disaster, something which the intervening years has shown us to be true, regardless of our positions at the time)? Did our media lie? Surely, and massive global protests did not stop Bush and his cronies. In fact the MSM made fun of the protests by focusing their cameras on the Bay Area kooks protesting literally everything in costume. Protest movements on the left are an endangered species thanks to their ineffectiveness. Recent protesters  in London by climate activists are labeled tools of Big Oil, who are seeking to control the environmental movement by funding these radicals. Greta Thunberg is a tool of her parents. 
Ben - if you want or need respect for your anti-government POV, address the history of infiltration and other forms of marginalization of progressive movements. 
 

Edited November 28, 2021 by Paul Brancato
Typo

[Matt Allison]

Paul- how would the "MSM" have known about the misinformation regarding Iraq in 2003?  The contemporaneous intelligence fooled Colin Powell, why would it have been any different for the journalists at the time? 

[Kirk Gallaway]

50 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

Folks- despite Ben's attempts to tell you otherwise, people don't get jobs at the paragons of American journalism (NYT, WaPo, CBS, NBC, ABC) by being hacks and fake journalists.

If they did, they would have hired Glenn Greenwald a long time ago.

Whatever your opinion of them, I can assure you that you can trust them, along with the BBC and FT, much more than Russia Today.

Well put, Matt, and Paul. I think it was one of the better articles Ben has submitted. But I've always thought Ben's takes are monotonously slanted.

As I've said, and supported my argument in another thread. And no one has since made a case against it, that anyone of "the powers that be" or as Jeff put it, "The American Establishment" would have any real cause to fear anything from the JFKAC community, when under no circumstances would anything really change or anyone will be brought to justice.

Ben:For my part, I welcome all points of view. I do not think anyone has a monopoly on truth or insights. 

Well sounds good Ben, but you're always the first to roll out of bed screaming MSM conspiracy, as if in a bad dream.. But of course Ben isn't the only one, it's been going on a long time, but it is ironic  that Ben's  supposedly a  First Amendment advocate but is one of the first people to impugn the motives of anyone who writes an article about a film or others who do the same with a bad review of a song as the work of some greater conspiracy with no real factual basis. Some of it is passed off as sort of collegial fun , as we use to do with Dave Van Pein, which to me was fun, because he was somebody we all had personal experiences with. i don't expect it will stop. But ascribing motives to a huge group of people simply because they disagree with you can degenerate into Fascism.

 

[Matt Allison]

Blaming a mysterious, faceless entity for everything that is evil is the height of intellectual laziness. 

Name some actual, real people, or don't expect to be taken seriously.

[Jeff Carter]

1 hour ago, Matt Allison said:

Folks- despite Ben's attempts to tell you otherwise, people don't get jobs at the paragons of American journalism (NYT, WaPo, CBS, NBC, ABC) by being hacks and fake journalists.

If they did, they would have hired Glenn Greenwald a long time ago.

Whatever your opinion of them, I can assure you that you can trust them, along with the BBC and FT, much more than Russia Today.

Satire, right? Sending up the combination of naïveté and credulity necessary to make blanket assertions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, right?

Just this past week the NY Times has headlined obviously false stories about Uganda’s national airport and local crime rates in NYC. Two weekends ago, basically all of the legacy media in U.S. published mea culpas conceding that all of their breathless reporting re: the Steele dossier was in fact textbook “hack” journalism. In fact, the reporting on Russiagate in general has been one of the worst journalistic performances in recent history, although not as devastatingly consequential as the torrent of fake news which accompanied the WMD lies and attendant invasion of Iraq - which is by far the biggest international crime perpetrated this young century.

Here’s a fun challenge: Within a couple of minutes, without having to think hard, I can easily come up with a dozen false stories published by legacy media  (many of which resulting from planted information pushed by unnamed national security figures to pliant reporters). Can you identify a single fake news story published by RT?

As to Paul’s point, infiltration of leftist/antiwar organizations by government agents is usually downplayed when they are revealed, which is usually in court. During the 2010 G20 meet in Toronto, for example, members of black bloc were allowed to run wild one afternoon resulting in the city virtually coming under martial law. It later turned out the organization was thoroughly infiltrated by police, who were actually forefront in planning the rampage. This of course also happened back in Chicago ’68, when just about all of the most strident and confrontation-minded Yippies showed up as prosecution witnesses during the later trial. While the smarter organizers know that the loudest advocates of violent protest are probably cops, the ensuing paranoia over infiltrators itself is harmful - as histories of New Left, Black Panthers, etc show.