David Frum is a liberal whisperer

Liberals. Progressives. David Frum is not your friend. David Frum is not reasonable or balanced or "one of the good ones." The Atlantic has some really great articles from time. David Frum has not written any of them.

He was George Bush's speechwriter and wrote the famous "Axis of Evil" speech that essentially set in stone who our enemies will be for the 21st century. We have been checking them off the list one by one (Iraq, Libya, Syria.) This list ends with Iran of course - cited by many as the ultimate goal in the middle east. Many don't know that they had attempted to bury the hatchet and offered help to us after 9/11. We ignored them until this speech when our response was loud and clear.

Frum is one of the powerhouse Neocons. Neoconservatism is specifically a style of foreign policy. It is marked by two main features - the use of noble rationale for wars, and the need to always have a countervailing force somewhere in the world to function as an ideological foil to our noble republic. (Communism, then terrorism, now maybe Russia again?) Essentially it rejected the Kissinger style foreign policy of openly backing fascists and death squads, opting for a friendlier face on our equally deadly foreign wars. This is how "spreading democracy" and "humanitarian intervention" became popular concepts (that somehow always end in massive body counts of innocents.)

He posted a short essay yesterday about Trump firing Comey which at first glance reads as perfectly reasonable. We have a despot in power who is trampling all over Washington in service of his own obviously self-serving agenda. Fine. However if you know Frum's history his own agenda comes through quite clear. He uses the phrase "hacking the election" which even the most ardent proponents of investigating Russian ties agree is a meaningless phrase meant to confuse and rile and up (how does one "hack" an election?) He also flat out says that every employee of the US government is now working for Russia since Russia/Putin is pulling the strings of the highest office of the land.

I hope that sounds paranoid and too far to most readers. These are the same tricks these people have used since the 70s. It always ends with a war or two, millions dead, countries destabilized for decades to come and every stated goal completely failed. And yet every one of these twats still has a job. I suppose the billion dollar defense contracts that result from threat escalation, which compound by orders of magnitude once a hot war is achieved, are sorta the point. Reminder we are still absolutely at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama mostly pulled out and the media reported on it in a way that allowed us to cathartically feel like those traumatic and useless meat grinder wars were over, but they are still officially going on. I do not need to tell you how bad those two regions are now (they cannot be called countries anymore.)

We can investigate if Trump's campaign had ties with Russian diplomats and if they negotiated things illegally. Fine. Frankly it isn't an issue at the top of my list but certainly we should get to the truth. But when you see anyone who is connected with Team B or the neocon movement, be skeptical. They see major world powers like Russia and China as great white whales. A cause to shore up support for American hegemony at home and take over markets only dreamed of by American giants of capital. Normal people see literally millions of dead bodies before the inevitable deployment of nuclear warheads, after which our favorite sci-fi movies become reality. That is bad. The people are psychos. We are good and sensible. Go to an anti-war rally. Spout off to your friends. Oppose institutional violence from within the heart of Empire. Get the FBI to tap your phones. Be fucking cool. It will be worth it.

starving artist

I suppose because of the horrifying and tragic fire in Oakland there has been a lot of conversation about DIY spaces and the need for living environments for artists and "creative people." While important, I rarely see the conversation get extrapolated to the broader need for affordable housing for the poor and working class. Even when the issue gets mentioned it is about how the rent prices and lack of housing affect the "creative types." There is no self-awareness in this strange distinction - the very focus on the concept of "artist" as a way of framing the conversation performs the function separating all "creative types" from any sort of poor underclass, rather then emphasize solidarity with the larger swath of society that faces the same economic turmoil. "I have no money and no place to live either, but since I am an artist, my needs are more immediate." There is something distinctly white/suburban/middle-class about this assumption - and indeed such a distinction is a way to maintain one's place within a class hierarchy while simultaneously rejecting it.  Further contributing to this strange lack of self-awareness is the presumption that the people who self identify as "artists" or "creative" are the only ones who create art in actual practice, but some of the most talented and creative people I know have "regular jobs" and live "regular lives." A lot of the talk about "DIY Spaces" seems to me an attempt at justification of crossing class lines in the face of bourgeois values while never actually challenging said values.  "No dad, I'm not homeless!  It's a DIY space!"  
Saying all that, those that know me know how much I value the arts and the people who devote their lives to them. However I would just like to inject a little context into the situation. I understand that the conversation here is about subculture and in a way, subversion. The benefit of DIY spaces as I see it is that they seem to fuse the "third-space" with the home and foment all sorts of fruitful inspiration and collaboration. I am looking for a deeper examination of the structural elements that create such a dearth of dignified, safe and sustainable living spaces (and thereby the impetus to create one's own, wonderful as the result may be) and how it affects an entire class of people, of which most artists are a part... and then of course how do we fix these problems, specifically?

Liking Obama is not the damn point

So Chelsea Manning was commuted by Obama's administration today. Wow I am so happy about that. She was a political prisoner who was given 35 years under the espionage act for leaking documents to wikileaks, but now she will get out in May after serving 7 years. I will give credit to Obama and his administration for this but also point out that this is why it is so important to put pressure on our politicians, even if we like them. There has been a sustained campaign to free Manning before Obama left office.

I harp on this a lot to anyone who will listen. So many of my peers are complete Obama apologists to the point of fact denial and I feel that is dangerous. I get it. Obama is a the kind of man you want to root for - dignified, elegant, graceful and truly a once in a generation talent. He and his family symbolize a lot of great things in our country. But we should not get that confused with the fact that he has been in the most powerful position in the world and his day to day dealings affected the lives and deaths of thousands across the world. On the subject of the day, this administration has been more ruthless towards whistleblowers than any other in American history. Far worse than Bush. Manning's treatment in prison was absolutely brutal, bordering on torture. When the prevailing attitude of people on the left-ish side of the spectrum is to either make excuses for or ignore the darker aspects of Obama's policy, he and the larger apparatus of the state are able to get away with so much more. The point that I will never stop pushing is that there is a reason to be more critical and more idealistic than seems reasonable towards our own leaders. We are the most powerful nation on earth so perhaps we have a responsibility to not always assume good intentions on the part of our leaders just because we happened to have voted for them or like them. We identify way too much with our elected officials and we really demand too little from them. Who knows. Maybe I should just give up trying to persuade people around me. It seems like what I am saying is obvious though.

So why bother with this when Trump is about to take power and things will get so much scarier? I fear a sort of selective amnesia will take hold and people will view the Trump administration as an apocalyptic era existing in a vacuum of history, and fondly remember the past as a simpler time, rather than being able to soberly track the progression of US policy over the past few decades. We tend to see everything as good guys vs bad guys with one side blaming the other and I am already hearing childishly simplistic readings of world events (not that those are new, and my own understanding of the world is pretty limited.) Trump can easily push us into war with Russia, China or Iran but if we collectively forget that the US has been posturing and militarily choking out these major world powers under both DNC and GOP administrations for decades then we will never have the analytical tools to understand, critique and eventually change these things. The wealth gap has widened to an insane degree. Our carceral state has become a behemoth. Our education system is in shambles. Corporate and special interests are able to buy influence from US politicians in a brazenly open way. Police violence/brutality shows no sign of slowing down. These things didn't happen because of Trump. They may get worse under him, as they got worse under Obama, and under Bush, and under Clinton. Let's look at the structural causes that brought them into place and then figure out what major, bold and lofty changes we need to implement.

The world is losing its mind.

Russian acts of subversion have really become secondary to the way the narrative is being used for a wide variety of aims. (As I keep saying I could see Russians doing the DNC hack - Russia has plenty of motive and means and it really wouldn't surprise me.) These aims include exculpating the democratic party of any responsibility for the mess we are in, attacking the left and discrediting anyone who shines a light on American human rights abuses, ramping up militarism and threat escalation and thereby guaranteeing massive contracts for weapons manufacturers and private security, and of course putting the incoming administration into a catch-22 as far as relations with Russia and any proxy conflicts in the coming years (any attempt at diplomacy and we get to say they are a victim of Russian influence, which will push Trump into a warlike stance with the other major nuclear power on the planet. I will repeat that - a large faction of our countries elite, led by the democrats, are guiding DONALD TRUMP into a position where use of nuclear weapons will become a real potentiality.) So the Russia hysteria is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen - in my lifetime I have never seen the deep state so openly try and shape public opinion with so much cooperation from the public.

Some context: understand that as long as Russia is considered a threat, the NATO nations are lucrative markets for Raytheon, Lockheed etc. Now take into account the revolving door between these weapons companies and the intelligence/military sectors. Lastly how much influence the companies have on the major media outlets through advertising dollars, investment as well as a mutual self interest (times of war mean built-in markets.) These three different sectors certainly seem to have a shared set of goals. With this in account, I'm sorry but I am getting some serious bullshit vibes from at least some of what I'm reading/hearing in the news. There has been a significant buildup of troops in the NATO states in the last few months, of course matched by equal buildups on the Russian border. Does this not seem like a dangerous game?

And it drives me up the wall that I'm suddenly the weird one for saying this. When did the CIA become the good guys? The CIA is one of the most blood-soaked and duplicitous organizations in modern history, but even without any value judgement we should remember that they lie for a living because they are spies and that is what spies do. They also get things wrong all the time. WMDs. The NSA really lost credibility in recent years and the FBI has ALWAYS crushed political resistance as a matter of priority so this sudden insistence that any "discrediting" of Hillary Clinton by the left is a product of Russian agents is perhaps the most reactionary stance I have ever seen liberals get behind. ESPECIALLY since the media outlets that actually did influence the election are Brietbart, Infowars and other extreme right publications.

The truth, I fear, is that that the democrats are willing to posture and warmonger towards the only other world power that could reduce our entire homeland to ashes not because it discredits Trump (I mean that is part of it and perhaps the only silver lining in all this) but because even that is preferable towards considering any sort of social democratic platform. The idea of placing the well-being of the working class above the interests of big business is simply off the table at this point. There was a while when many of us hoped that they would do some real soul-searching (like the GOP post 2012) and realize that the DNC's chronic entrenchment into neo-liberal hegemony has backed them into a corner from which they are really unable to offer anything to their voters of any substance without an utter break of rank (and at a cost of funding as well.) I think all of us thought they would be able to keep a facade up for another 10 years but the Trump election has really pulled away the pretense and exposed the world to the fact that their impotence in fighting the cold and brutal policies of the GOP is not strictly the fault of those evil Republicans. I don't think the DNC see fighting mass-privatization, de-regulation and austerity as their job at all. They are now simply the ones to soften the edges of such policies and then give them a much more friendly face.

What bothers me is that I can't talk about this with other people without them asking me why I am so supportive of Russia. Let me be clear if not a little callous: I don't really give a shit about Russia, at least politically. Putin has done a lot of bad things and their country has a lot of problems and they bombed a lot of innocent people and they hack and subvert many other countries and each of these statements apply to the US as well. I do not want the US to be attacked in any way by any other world power. I am strictly interested in how those in the media and the ruling class at large are using this whole story for their own ends. We have been trained to see all conflicts in the world stage as the good guys vs the bad guys and it really impedes any sophisticated understanding of complex political struggles. It is however a very beneficial tool for those in power and they have no doubt worked tirelessly to create such conditions in our mass psyche. Any anti-war position can be conflated with support of the enemy. Jeremy Corbin was recently called a "Russian collaborator" for opposing the NATO escalation. So I am asking for some healthy skepticism and willful self-education on this issue.