So…how has the Stop the Iraq War thing been going, HTML? Has Obama come up trumps yet?

Again, you’re proving yourself to be a liar or functionally illiterate. I already posted and then reposted my statement that I am anti-war and anti-racist, and I will not trade one to secure victory on the other. While that means not trading anti-racism for success in the anti-war movement (even assuming that they could be at loggerheads, which is only the case if one wants it to be), it also means not trading being anti-war for anti-racism.

yes Marty Peretz qualifies. He allowed Sully to turn TNR into Charles Murray’s personal blurb factory. He’s the one who’s bashed Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for decades. He’s the guy who told the readers of the WSJ at the eve of the Lamont-Lieberman primary — in barely disguised code — that a vote for Lamont meant that black folks would be picking their pockets.

So TNR’s editor doesn’t have a good record on anti-racism. I never expected them to. It still doesn’t address that what they have written about in their article, and scanned in for perusal, represents the published opinions of Ron Paul. Even ghostwriters only write what they’re told to write and do not step outside their purview unless they wanted to be fired.

But even Marty Peretz doesn’t want to nuke Harlem. OTOH, he’s right there with the bastards who want to nuke Mecca.

So I shouldn’t listen to anyone from his magazine when they do what journalists should have been doing all this time—tracking down those back issues in university and historical archives—because Peretz is a bastard when it comes to foreign policy. Well, that makes all the sense I would have expected from you.

Arabs, particularly Palistinians, are subhuman to him. But since all that’s overseas, and doesn’t have anything to do with Jena 6 or retard miltia members in Montana, you don’t care about it.

Right, I was just in Rafah with the ISM for the tourism.

Such concerns are an anti-war “white thing.” Who gives a shit about thousands killed, we’re talking about racists who discriminate here in America!

Again, earth to clueless liberal: the fact that I am criticizing the liberal anti-war movement for being so overloaded with white people has to do with their habit of taking white liberalism as the normative perspective, and refusing to address the concerns of people of color in any way, rather as you’re doing here. It has nothing to with the anti-war position being a “white thing”. Read again my statements regarding Carl Webb above, then hit yourself in the head with a sturdy hardwood plank, then go back and reread it. Hit yourself in the head, and repeat until cognition is achieved.

As for Chris Clarke, fuck off. Who else are you gonna quote to me? Zuzu? Ilyka? They know what I think and I know what they think. Stop trying to “educate” me; I’ve already had it out with them. Clarke and I had a detente but as far as the other two you whined about on the Pandagon thread: I think they are insane.

Actually I also quoted Sylvia to you, so you could answer your question for yourself, if you were inclined to start reading for comprehension.

Here’s the issue: I’m not gonna be smeared, or allow my friends to be smeared.

Whoop-de-do.

You and your ilk *live* to smear people as racists/sexists/fatphobes/homophobes/hispanophobes so you can feel morally superior.

Oh yes, that’s what we’re all about. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with correcting the same poisonous dynamics that we see a thousand times over in our real lives. Because of course our lives are unreal when they come into conflict with the Big White Liberal Feel-Good Factory, since the Big White Liberal Feel-Good Factory just produces nothing but good vibes for people of all colours, sexes, orientations, etc. So when one of us claims to be hurt by the noxious byproducts of the Big White Liberal Feel-Good Factory, it’s obvious that we’re just lying in order to sanctimoniously bum your magnanimous high.

P.S. Find a support group to help you over the sammich thing. If you have not yet mentally adjusted yourself to the fact that people treated you as if you hadn’t just stepped out of the Summa Theologiae and didn’t have to treat the subject of weight as if it were a moral failing, then you clearly have problems which cannot be addressed by me alone.

Well, fuck you, infinity squared. I’m not a wingnut or any of those things.

No, you just play one on the internets.

But oh oh, says the Stalinists, you are excluding us by sending out flying monkeys when we call you racist and put you on the same moral plane as some goddamn Bell Curve-reading troglodyte! How mean of you!

Clue to the residually clueless: I’m still not a Stalinist.

Further clue to the residually clueless: if something you do or say is called racist, it doesn’t mean that you’re automatically being put on the moral plane as “some goddamn Bell Curve-reading troglodyte”. In fact, to phrase it that way demonstrates the habit of white liberals who fancy themselves above racism, but don’t want to question white privilege, of defining themselves in opposition to the conscious racists of the “bad old days” or from the “bad old parties”.

I’ve pointed that out before elsewhere: “[This] implicitly denies that any racism exists save for conscious racism. “That’s not what I meant!” is another way of saying that you’re not a conscious racist; not an Archie Bunker, “Bull” Connor, or a Bedford Forrest. However, the most pernicious form of racism is systemic racism, and that kind of racism produces privileged people who, especially if they fancy themselves anti-racist but don’t want to confront privilege, define themselves in opposition to the explicit racists of the “bad old days”. The first step to overcoming privilege, therefore, has to be the realization that implicit and unintentional racist acts and statements are always a possibility, even from oneself.”

How mean of you! Yeah, well, that’s what you get.

Of course, I deserve nothing less than utter condemnation for daring to suggest that you are anything other than a spotless ally. You are truly one of the Blessed and the man who mocks the sainted Blessed deserves to find the Inquisition pounding down his door.

At this point, the words “Get over yourself” are vastly insufficient.

And even Clarke admitted as much, but then you can’t be bothered to read through that thread — no doubt, it takes too much time away from your library studies.

Yes, you’re right that I cannot be bothered to read a thread which has not been specifically cited when I haven’t been provided with even the most rudimentary information about it save that Chris Clarke participated in it, especially when the person making claims about it is someone I already regard, from this past interaction, as an outright liar.

So whatever. I’ll return to this topic in a future post, but you’re on notice that if you call me any species of racist just because I *know* that by a simple and irrefutable utilitarian calculus — which Amanda agreed with, in case you didn’t fucking notice — that stopping the war is more important than *any other concern* (including militia members and racists among Ron Paul’s supporters) because more lives are directly at stake, then I’ll ban you — and you can sit and stew, because in case you couldn’t tell, you fucking idiot, you’re the troll here.

Irrefutable? If it’s irrefutable, then why didn’t you respond to what I said about it?

Jesus Fucking Christ on an Upside-Down Pogo Stick, it’s not so hard to organize an anti-war march or protest or petition that you have to perform this kind of triage! I doubt very much if you’d be doing anything other than that in any case. But no, it must be so hard to be anti-war that you don’t have the mental effort to devote to anything else, and indeed being anti-war is so hard that you have to push off the responsibility of it to your politicians, while you go and have a lie down owing to the inherent difficulty of being a centrist-to-center-left liberal.

I have been arrested and convicted for my part in direct actions to protest the war. We also organized marches, rallies, and speakers/films against the war. As a part of that organization, I also helped run our local Food Not Bombs, volunteered at a local independent radical library/community space, assisted local organizations in May Day marches for immigrant rights, worked our community garden, did prisoner solidarity support, helped to clean up Greensburg, KS, assisted the striking Goodyear workers in Topeka, and organized several benefit concerts for various groups, including one to benefit prisoners trapped within the system by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. All while working and getting my master’s degree.

I am not sympathetic to the idea that one is so swamped on just one issue that not only do you have to concentrate all your forces on it, you also have to relieve yourself of the burden of being so anti-war by getting a white supremacist politician to shoulder some of that burden. Give me a fucking break.

Fascinating that a blog which has claimed to value itself on free expression so much that few besides persistent spammers are banned would break that self-imposed rule, not for someone on the right, but for someone to the left of one of blog owners. I guess it really does more than I could to demonstrate the truth of Zuky’s comment that “[w]hen you get right down to it, the unrecognized political reality is that most white liberals have more in common with white conservatives — social cues, family ties, cognitive biases, cultural backdrops, etc. — than they do with people of color. I’m calling this tangle of contradictions the white liberal conundrum.”

No big deal when the real danger is a few nutbags who published an obscure newsletter under an Congressman’s name.

As my own research and the research written up in TNR demonstrates, if you want to make the “few nutbags” argument, you have to accept that they were a) writing over a consistent basis for over a decade b) that they were often writing in the first person, as Ron Paul (e.g. “Carol and I….”), and c) that Ron Paul didn’t bother to look at what was being written under his name, and often under his persona, until it was brought up during a political campaign in 2001.

In short, you have expect us to throw our support behind a blazingly obvious fucking idiot. That’s going to be the saviour of the anti-war movement.

Give me a break.

But even Marty Peretz doesn’t want to nuke Harlem. OTOH, he’s right there with the bastards who want to nuke Mecca. Arabs, particularly Palistinians, are subhuman to him. But since all that’s overseas, and doesn’t have anything to do with Jena 6 or retard miltia members in Montana, you don’t care about it. Such concerns are an anti-war “white thing.” Who gives a shit about thousands killed, we’re talking about racists who discriminate here in America!

As for Chris Clarke, fuck off. Who else are you gonna quote to me? Zuzu? Ilyka? They know what I think and I know what they think. Stop trying to “educate” me; I’ve already had it out with them. Clarke and I had a detente but as far as the other two you whined about on the Pandagon thread: I think they are insane.

Here’s the issue: I’m not gonna be smeared, or allow my friends to be smeared. You and your ilk *live* to smear people as racists/sexists/fatphobes/homophobes/hispanophobes so you can feel morally superior. Well, fuck you, infinity squared. I’m not a wingnut or any of those things. But oh oh, says the Stalinists, you are excluding us by sending out flying monkeys when we call you racist and put you on the same moral plane as some goddamn Bell Curve-reading troglodyte! How mean of you! Yeah, well, that’s what you get. And even Clarke admitted as much, but then you can’t be bothered to read through that thread — no doubt, it takes too much time away from your library studies.

So whatever. I’ll return to this topic in a future post, but you’re on notice that if you call me any species of racist just because I *know* that by a simple and irrefutable utilitarian calculus — which Amanda agreed with, in case you didn’t fucking notice — that stopping the war is more important than *any other concern* (including militia members and racists among Ron Paul’s supporters) because more lives are directly at stake, then I’ll ban you — and you can sit and stew, because in case you couldn’t tell, you fucking idiot, you’re the troll here.

Yes and no. I didn’t pick up any copy of TNR because I already knew it was an organ for the DLC. I find Democratic politics boring, but even worse when it comes from those DLC-blowing shills.

Again, if that’s all you have, then you have no argument to make on the issue of Ron Paul’s racism, you just want to misdirect through argumenta ad hominem.

But then willful blindness to ‘mainstream’ pundits who want to kill thousands of wogs is not big deal — as you argued, it’s a merely ‘white’ concern.

The fact that you got this out of my statement that the anti-war movement is “white, white, white” just brings home again how clueless you are. The reason the liberal anti-war movement, or the liberal anything, is “white, white, white” is because it assumes that white people’s views are normative, and it doesn’t take intersectionality seriously.

No big deal when the real danger is a few nutbags who published an obscure newsletter under an Congressman’s name.

No, actually the danger in Ron Paul’s run comes in the possibility of having a white supremacist in office, due to the ongoing support of white supremacists, and the possibility that clueless libs like yourself will establish a precedent for previously openly white supremacist candidates to slip by as long as they say stuff that sounds good to the white members in the anti-war crowd.

You’re still an idiot when it comes to moral triage, all right.

You’re an idiot if you think triage is necessary.

I can’t wait til your beloved Guiliani steals the election.

My beloved? Man, you certainly are off-course here. Plus ça change….

Then you’ll get to say when the bombings of Iran and Syria commence —

You mean like they’ll commence when Hillary wins the presidency because you were too busy stumping for a white supremacist whose candidacy couldn’t be saved with all the money in the world? You seem to be forgetting that in this election there are Democratic candidates who have attacked Bush’s foreign policy from the right.

“shut up, white d00ds with your guilt-infected handwringing over dead wogs, the *real* issue is the Jena 6!

Of course anti-racists wouldn’t be using a term like “wogs” except ironically. It’s also instructive to note, at this point in your farrago of lies, that the only time I mentioned the Jena Six case was that I thought that Sadly, No’s past blogging about it, about which most of your fellow liberal bloggers were silent, meant that SN! would be open to this kind of self-criticism. By continuing to bring up the subject derisively, you just demonstrate again that white liberals are actually fucking worthless except as props for holding up signs; something an orange traffic cone could do just as well.

— and anyone who disagrees is on the first step to becoming David Horowitz!!”

Again, I didn’t say you were on your way to becoming David Horowitz at all, let alone because you disagreed with me. I said actually that you reminded me of Andrew Anthony, more than David Horowitz, and I think any future political shift of yours would be more like Anthony’s than Horowitz’s, simply because you’re not a Maoist right now.

Horowitz wanted to be authoritarian, but he was unintellectual and unrooted by any thorough analysis arising out of Maoism which would make the process of deconversion a process of rethinking, rather than emotional readjustment. The only thing you share in common with Horowitz is that you too do not think and you too have no rooted political positions which inform positions on policy across a range of issues. In fact, you regard political positions which inform policy positions across a range of issues inherently suspect. That, however, is the same thing as Anthony. Anthony was never as far-left as Horowitz and his deconversion, therefore, has not brought him as far right as, say, the BNP, and it’s Andrew Anthony whom I find you most resemble.

Happy Stalinism!

Thank you! And a very Happy Fascism! to you too—since we’re ending our posts with positions actually antithetical to the ones held by the other poster.

In short, you’re throwing out the genuine progressives. As Chris Clarke noted at the pingbacked blog post above from ProblemChylde, “the people who insisted on the One Most Important Cause To The Excusion of Your Subjective Petty Issues were called either ‘liberals’ or ‘Trotskyists.’”

I hesitate in saying that you should read the pingbacked article, even though it’s fantastic, because if you read it and responded, and your responses there were equivalent to the mindless shit-slinging you did here, then you’d be the equivalent of a troll, and I don’t like directing trolls to blogs I find important. I’d rather they just sit here and stew.

So I’ll quote a very juicy bit here:

You know what? White progressivism is hobby-oriented. It centers on detachment and symbolism — no body shaking, ground moving shit. Just shit like t-shirts. And what white folks consider radical is leaving the house, hitting the pavement. Because when I look at things like this…

We all have our obsessions, our bugbears, our pet causes. And we should be careful not to assume that they always pertain to whatever question’s at hand. Doubly, we ought to avoid over-specialization, over-investment, and above all avoid the tendency to make a Unified Field Theory (incorporating our obsession to the point of ludicrous aggrandizement) and apply it to everything monomaniacally.

… it’s like he’s describing people who play too many video games. Not people’s LIVES, not as if it’s tied up with your own life or is relevant to your worldview. It’s bearing the onus of a worthy cause upon your back, without looking that cause in its eyes or really even touching it. Just finding a clever, cute Awareness Backpack for it.

Okay, you know ze famous “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” thing for having white folks question band-aids as tools of oppression and shit. Well, okay. Many white progressives do unpack that knapsack. But then, they do a quick quick inventory and then REPACK the knapsack.

They don’t sit to investigate the contents and how they work.

They don’t look for the source of what’s inside the sack.

They don’t leave the backpack off or experiment with other ways to carry things.

They just look inside, say, “Oh hey, never thought I had one of those,” and maybe dust it off a little like a hobbyist. And then put it RIGHT BACK INSIDE THE KNAPSACK. Only now since they’ve emptied it once, it’s no longer invisible. Other people who haven’t unpacked their sacks notice them more and deride them. But nevertheless, to them, at that point, they’re done.

Not that I think you’re going to actually unpack that invisible knapsack, since the entire dynamic you helped set up here and encourage is actively opposed to genuine self-criticism and dialogue. Instead, it establishes a very narrow parameter for acceptable discourse, which is enforced by the hosts and their legions of flying monkeys. Come to a point of slight disagreement, as Chris Clarke did? It’s the flying monkey bombardment!

And it effects the quality of thinking all over this blog. I remember one of the commentators remarking how bizarre it was that Ilyka Damen wasn’t hand in arm with Twisty Faster, which evinced an enormous degree of cluelessness about how transphobic Twisty actually is. The irony here is that you mock her here without realizing that her cultlike attachment to radfem positions is the mirror image to your attachment to the anti-Iraq war cause (I will not say anti-war cause, because I’ve never seen any evidence that you were opposed to the war in Afghanistan). Both of them cause you to make and/or support gratuitously offensive positions/people/statements and drive off people who genuinely believe in intersectionality.

But then willful blindness to ‘mainstream’ pundits who want to kill thousands of wogs is not big deal — as you argued, it’s a merely ‘white’ concern. No big deal when the real danger is a few nutbags who published an obscure newsletter under an Congressman’s name.

You’re still an idiot when it comes to moral triage, all right. I can’t wait til your beloved Guiliani steals the election. Then you’ll get to say when the bombings of Iran and Syria commence — “shut up, white d00ds with your guilt-infected handwringing over dead wogs, the *real* issue is the Jena 6! — and anyone who disagrees is on the first step to becoming David Horowitz!!”

Happy Stalinism!

And whether Kirchik is only attacking Paul because he is an anti-interventionist, that cannot be the whole of your refutation without being an argumentum ad hominem, which is, albeit, a mode of argument in which you are particularly practiced. Unfortunately, when it comes to anything else, you’ve still got nothing.

Nez’s Definition of Terms, Chapter 1

HTML, I never expected you to change your opinion about what you said, and indeed strengthening your opinion is exactly what I predicted before diving into this. However, I thought at least you’d be open to listening to what I had to say. I see that was wrong in about a dozen different ways.

So why did I think that you’d strengthen your beliefs? Because you clearly have a whole set of unexamined issues when it comes to race, gender, and other touchy subjects. Therefore there can be no common ground between issues (despite the fact that this war is a racist one) because the scariest thing in the world is the thought of admitting an anti-racist perspective into the subject of the anti-war movement, and having to address what that anti-racist contingent offers up. When such issues are offered up, regardless, you have to stomp them out by 1) not listening 2) misrepresenting the arguments and 3) implying that the people offering up the arguments are worse than you are for not going along with you on ZOMG!!!! TEH WAR (currently) TOTALLY ECLIPSEZ EVRY OTEHR ISSUE EVAR!!!!!1111!ONE

I did not argue that you are cynical and I certainly didn’t argue that you are a sociopath. A sociopath wouldn’t concern themselves with making things fit to their conception of themselves as a Good Person. Instead, they just wouldn’t care. Your politics is centered around a genuine psychological need to think you are a Good Person and striking a balance between that and not addressing issues of hierarchy and dominance which might weaken the tacit liberal assumption that you’re the gatekeeper for deciding where, when and which issues are proper to hold to. I do say, because of your absolute concentration in being a Person of Good Will, you have lost sight of any foundational principles or politics, and you just blow with the wind from one issue to the other until you’ll get tired of that and succumb to a political philosophy where your unexamined prejudices are taken for granted. While liberal Democrats take white het male supremacy for granted, they also pay lip service to marginalized groups, which leads to an uncomfortable degree of contact and often contention. Republicans don’t even bother.

I fully admit that I could be wrong. Young people change their views as they become less naïve, and maybe you’ll end up realizing that you can actually listen to marginalized groups every once in a while. I can give you a tip which will help: when one of them talks in general terms about the tacit assumptions of white male het supremacy, the first natural reaction of OMG ITZ SO NOT ME!!!1111!! is an Automatic Fail, Please Retry. Instead, “It’s not me” should be the end result of sober and searching self-analysis taken after reading and comprehending what they have to say. Otherwise, you’ll get so caught up in your denialism that you’ll never see the forest for the trees.

However, in my frank opinion, I wouldn’t give you more than longshot odds on ever reaching that point. And you’re not my ally (listen up “flawedplan”!) not because you’re intrinsically a bad person, but because if I allied with you, you’d take your tacit assumptions of white het male privilege and start dictating to me what positions to hold and when and where I am allowed to hold them, as you have done in this thread. I get that all the time from liberals who think that affiliation means submission to them and their vision of a shining city. I resist it every time and go my own way, and the anti-war movements that I’ve participated in were far stronger, more interpersonally supportive, more creative, and simply MORE EFFECTIVE than the ones that were institutionally designed to deny the marginalized a voice. In Lawrence, through a combination of direct action and conventional protests, we created a situation where the war machine was directing money away from killing Iraqis to protecting itself and its recruiting centers. In their paranoia, they installed panic buttons, bomb-proof windows, and became the most expensive-to-run recruiting center in the Midwest region. All to keep on getting their eight recruit average per year. How long do you think it’s going to be before some pencil pusher at the Pentagon figures that keeping these places open for eight recruits a year isn’t worth the extra expense? A plurality of both tactics and issues is not only the way to reach more people, it’s also the only effective way of organizing an anti-war movement.

I can see you don’t like my characterization of the (liberal) antiwar movement as “white, white, white”, but whether it angers you or not, that’s what is so. I’ve been trying to explain to you the reasons why this is so. I really couldn’t care less what you personally have to say about Ron Paul. I can’t control it, wouldn’t want to control it, and frankly I don’t even care if you vote for him. All I am telling you is that if you do endorse him as a good candidate for wingnuts, you are betraying people who could have been your allies to no purpose, since the effective chances of Ron Paul ever being in a position to stop the war range all the way from slim to none. If you truly want to understand why PoC are wary of the liberal anti-war movement, you should examine the attitude you took here. If you really don’t care one way or the other, that’s a stand to take as well, but don’t think anyone’s going to be listening when you tell them why they have to adopt your “pet causes”.

Here you go.

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/06/ron-paul-vs-new-world-order.html

No one is interested in your Ron Paul manifesto. We discussed the whole thing at length a few days ago, and trust me, unlike you guys, no one here wants to see him elected. It’s just a question of how he would be useful to progressive politics.