Bruce Dixon: a Relentless Warrior for Socioeconomic Justice
Censorship by Leftists More Damaging Than That by Rightists?

Ok, It's Time to Get Off My Pity-Full Ass and Get Back to Work

Meanwhile Let Us Admit Our Conditioned Hatred of Government Is an
Insurmountable Barrier to Saving Ourselves from Extinction

QUITE SIMPLY, NO people who have been taught by their extended individual and collective experience to regard government and bureaucracy and bureaucrats and politicians with near-universal hatred,  contempt and infinite (yet utterly rational)  distrust -- precisely as we the people have been taught by the bipartisan malevolence of of Neoliberalism -- can ever  achieve anything even remotely resembling the socialism essential to rescue our species from extinction and save our Mother Earth from reduction to a bug planet.

Why? Because in the minds of the vast moronic majority,  socialism has come to mean naught but "Big Government" -- which is precisely what we in the so-called "United States" are taught to fear and despise even more than the (already-well-underway) Final Extinction.

And given the anti-intellectual ignorance maliciously inflicted on us by all financially accessible schools (whether public or private) and sustained by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine  -- which perhaps we should call the MaiMePropMach (pronounced "Maim Me Prop Mash") -- there is absolutely no way this intentionally suicidal preconditioning can ever be overcome. Indeed our masters are already hurling us under the proverbial bus.

Yes, we must keep fighting. But we must evolve strategy and tactics based on recognition we are far more powerless than even the abandoned, heroic-but-doomed anti-Nazi defenders of Fortress Brest -- for the monstrous and unspeakably horrific truth is there is no political leader, organization,  nation or people left on this wounded and dying planet with sufficient power, influence and will to rescue us from Neoliberal Capitalism and its coterie of fascist fanatics.

Nor can we continue hiding beneath our deluded fantasy of someday magically receiving justice for the innumerable atrocities already inflicted on us by our morally imbecilic, sadistically gleeful overlords in what is already the most murderously unjust global tyranny in our species' entire approximately 250,000-year history. 

There is no true justice -- none whatsoever -- under Neoliberal Capitalism, nor will there ever be.  

*****

EMPHATICALLY RECOMMENDED READING: an emotionally downsized  form of the news reporting that characterized the old Dispatches (because even I who lived most of my adult life in intimate embrace with the day's news can no longer endure  being beaten over the head daily with the fact we're doomed); also, note all save one of these heads are self-explanatory; hence, with that exception, the lack of routine descriptive comment: 

“You Can’t Trust the Government”: Flint Residents Speak Out on Newark Water Crisis

 

A Bunch of CEOs Want to Fix Capitalism. You Can’t Fix Anything Built on Slavery.

 

Offering Choice But Delivering Tyranny: the Corporate Capture of Agriculture

 

The 1619 Project and the Far-Right Fear of History

 

The Pseudo Debate Over Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide

 

The Racist Right Has Been Searching For Trump All Along

 

March for Our Lives Unveils Sweeping Gun Reform Agenda: 'The Time Is Now'

Badly misleading head should read, "March for Our Lives Demands Total Forcible Disarmament" -- for which see the original  MFOL document,  here.  See also my comment on the initial report's comment thread

 

*****

EARLIER RECOMMENDED READING: selections I tagged for a planned posting was delayed by my latest CHF-related illness, another bout with cellulitis, this time a severely infected foot. Nevertheless I feel these essays and reports remain relevant:   

In the Face of Climate Collapse, We Need the Wisdom of Elders
But instead all U.S. governments, local, state or federal, inflict the various forms of psychological warfare and slow-motion genocide by which our Capitalists masters suppress and eradicate our individual and collective memory. 

What Would Happen If All Ice On Earth Melted?
A presentation that despite its reluctance to blame patriarchal  humans for destroying  our Mother Earth is nevertheless an accurate briefing on the ultimate consequences of terminal climate change. 

The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future
How our Capitalist overlords attack from all directions, with their Republican vassals  openly joining hands with the Sturmabteilung, thereby encouraging the equally Capitalist Democratic [sic] Party's forcible disarmament fanatics to escalate their campaign to leave us defenseless against the burgeoning ChristoNazi militias.

Welcome to Ayn Rand's America  (How Rand, whose Fountainhead is a celebration of a murder's moral imbecility and whose Atlas Shrugged is essentially a hero-worshiping fictionalization of Mein Kampf, became the leading U.S. "philosopher." 

We Must End Neoliberalism, Or Neoliberalism Will End Us
By far the best (and most succinctly knife-edged) essay on the cancer of Neoliberalism I have yet encountered.

A Night at the Garden
A terrifying seven-minute glimpse of the United States' ChristoNazi future as foretold by the United States' Original Nazi past.

Fear vs. Fear
Chris Hedges' most recent, always eloquent reflections on the now-unavoidable doom -- ecocide and genocide combined -- the Capitalists are deliberately inflicting on our species, on human society and on our Mother Earth.

A Very Old Man for a Wolf
A compelling study of human interaction with those whom, in the absence of H. sapiens sapiens,  might well have become this planet's apex species.

*****

RELEVANT PERSONAL STUFF: obviously I am back online with a new computer, a blessed gift from my two all-time best friends. As to the future of Dispatches, what you see is what you'll get from now on: brief commentary with links to a few reports I regard as relevant beyond their immediate Doomsday messaging -- that is, informative or at least thought-provoking for the (very few) truly committed activists remaining here in the de facto Fourth Reich.    

Meanwhile I who sought to live my life as a journalist and consumed news items with the same enthusiasm I yet eat broiled Eastern Brook Trout or oven-roast Ruffed Grouse now find the news not just unbearably depressing but all too often terrifying in a doomsday sense I had formerly never imagined possible.

But it is what it is.

With the total and effectively eternal ChristoNazi control of the courts,  the regime's ongoing imposition of theocracy on the United States obviously cannot be stopped or even much delayed, and that of course means within a couple of centuries (or more likely far less) our species will be extinct, everything we managed to achieve will thereby be reduced to utter meaninglessness, and our Mother Earth will be reduced back to a bug planet.

We are doomed -- and anyone who believes otherwise is not only an idiot but a perpe-traitor of our destruction.

*****  

PERSONAL BAD NEWS update: Two weeks ago I was diagnosed as "pre-diabetic," which because of my socioeconomic status -- my inability to afford a food budget that (were I to eat only the required low-carbohydrate diet)  would quadruple my monthly food expense from approximately $150 to nearly $600 -- is literally a death sentence.

Such a food expenditure is an absolutely impossible sum even had I no other expenses save rent (just hiked $26 to $515 per month, the biggest one-time rent increase I have ever known, raising the cost of my sardine-can-small apartment to an severely injurious 39.9 percent of my income); atop that, there's my health insurance ($82 per month); prescription and over-the-counter drugs (at least $100 per month); internet and telephone (at least $65 per month).

But even without transport -- buses when I am ambulatory, what are said to be the nation's most expensive taxis when I am not -- those sums already  exceed my monthly income, forcing me to survive by (abusing) what little credit I have been able to retain.  

And let us not forget it was Barack the Betrayer's viciously dishonest food-stamp cuts that slashed my monthly stipend from $130 to the $15 the ChristoNazi Trump/Pence Regime will soon take away simply because our Capitalist masters regard me and everyone of my caste to be what the Original Nazis damned as "unworthy of life."

But what pisses me off the most is that I who assumed I would die a natural death by congestive heart failure am now -- by the genocidal malevolence of our Capitalist overlords -- sentenced to die by poverty-inflicted diabetes merely because I cannot afford the sorts of non-toxic foods that are (now) readily available to (only) the genuinely wealthy aristocrats. 

Ironically, I used to grow just such foods -- for 18 good years,  annual harvests sufficient to feed me delicious organic vegetables until the next summer's crops came in.

Now and for however long I remain alive, I am trapped in a city and stuck for the duration in federally subsidized geriatric housing. But of course I still garden -- with a hand-trowel on a plot 12 feet by 2 feet instead of with a tractor on two meadow-sized plots totaling 8800 square feet -- and in this year of climate change those two 12-foot rows yielded only eight pounds of green beans (this as compared with 15 pounds last year).

Thus -- since there is absolutely no way I will ever be able to afford the funds necessary to eat well enough to avoid the diabetes death sentence -- I am now as I approach age 80 reduced to nothing more than another of Capitalism's ever-expanding infinity of victims.

***** 

LASTLY, THREE MORE recommended stories:

My Childhood Rape and My Life That Might Have Been
Recovering victim's story exemplifies just how on-point Second Wave feminists were with their slogan "the Personal is Political." (See also my own comment-thread acknowledgment of how and why my birthparents emotionally abandoned me three months after my fifth birthday.)  

The Stunning Revival of America's 'Christian Left'
Long-overdue report on the emergent and growing (but undoubtedly too late) Christian opposition to ChristoNazism.

Dogs’ Eyes Have Changed Since Humans Befriended Them
More on the evolutionary hows and whys most of us so love our canine companions.

Until next time (probably next month)...

LB/21 August 2019

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Comments

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William Boardman

trying to reach you. email?

Loren Bliss

Mr. Boardman...I emailed you back this afternoon, but am posting this acknowledgement here as sometimes my emails never reach their addressees (most likely thanks to government surveillance). Hence if it (incorrectly) seems I did not respond, please try again. Thank you.

Mike Vadja

At 80, consider yourself lucky and priviledged even being both poor and pre-diabetic.

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