This anti-TSA protester coming straight outta Waco!
On Saturday June 4, a dozen or so anti-TSA protesters marched on the Texas State Capitol, demanding that state legislators and Governor Rick Perry stand up to the federal government and pass a bill that would allow cops to arrest and imprison TSA screeners.
As readers of The eXiled know, Mark Ames and I have thoroughly exposed America’s anti-TSA “movement” as a rightwing union-busting PR campaign designed to prevent TSA workers from unionizing, pushed by an alliance of Koch-funded libertarians, warmongering neocons, notorious DC union-busting front-groups and rabid Christian homophobes. Well, the anti-TSA movement in Texas pretty much fits the bill…
Saturday’s rally was organized by a pro-police-state/anti-fluoridation libertarian group called Texans for Accountable Government, along with a whole bunch of far-right authoritarian Christian activists. And as you can see from the picture above, some of them look like they were bussed in straight from some Branch Davidian compound.
Does the TSA make you mad as McManus?
Take the guy being interviewed in the video above. He might look like you and me, but it turns out Adam McManus is a crusading Christian talk radio host, who describes himself as an “articulate champion of the traditional Christian values that have made this country great” and brags that he was a 40-year-old virgin until he got married five years ago, after finally deciding that he “no longer wanted to burn with passion” (and wrote a painful 40,000-word online book about how he met and fell in love with his wife, who presumably deflowered McManus and stole his innocence).
But McManus is not just a repressed freak. Turns out he’s also a really big fan of freedom and liberty, which is why he hates the TSA so much!
Although McManus, like all the anti-TSA crowd, is kind of selective about his civil liberties concerns: In 2005, McManus mailed out a bunch of action alerts promoting news stories that described Guantanamo as a paradise of freedom, where prisoners are lavished with first-world luxuries like Twix candy bars and subscriptions to “Martha Stewart Living”—things they could never have experienced back home.
But that’s not all. On his website, he clearly positions himself as a pro-police state, homophobic anti-abortion activist, who wants to force other people to act in accordance with Biblical law.
Here’s McManus on the “gay problem“:
“I’ve been accused of being ‘homophobic’. But I’m not afraid of homosexuals, I’m afraid for homosexuals. The average age of death for a homosexual male with AIDS is 39. And the average age of death for a homosexual male without AIDS is only 42. It seems like the compassionate approach would be to challenge the person to stop participating in unnatural deviant behaviors that lead to his own premature death.”
Here’s McManus on curbing state power:
“When it comes to capital punishment, I’m pro-choice. The inmate can choose the electric chair, the gas chamber or a lethal injection.”
McManus on the nanny state:
“There’s one thing the government can never dole out: self-respect. That can only come with hard work, integrity and personal responsibility.”
Yes, sir! Every moral fiber in Adam McManus’ flabby body screams in agony at even the slightest hint of a government handout! No wonder he’s so proud of his younger brother, John McManus, who’s spent the last decade working in D.C. as a lobbyist-shill for the pharmaceutical industry. On the website of his lobbying firm, The McManus Group, little brother McManus brags that while working for Republican Congressman Bill Thomas, he helped engineer the half trillion dollar federal welfare program for the pharmaceutical industry, otherwise known as the “Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.”
Yup, that’s the anti-TSA, pro-liberty Tea Party crowd for you.
But Christian free-market extremists like McManus weren’t just rallying outside the capitol building, they were also the ones inside, writing and pushing the anti-TSA legislation.
Take David Simpson, the freshman senator who introduced the anti-TSA HR 1937 bill. Not only does Simpson own a lumber business, he is also the proprietor of his own Christian publishing company, which prints titles like “We Must Obey God: The Biblical Doctrine of Conscientious Disobedience to Human Authority with Special Reference to Operation Rescue,” a book that puts “[r]ighteous disobedience to civil and other authorities in biblical perspective” and explains why God wants you to bully and harass women, and take away their reproductive rights.
While Simpson is a political rookie, he has been getting plenty of support from Texas’ far-right Christian political establishment. His chief of staff, Kathi Seay, comes with serious Koch pedigree and has been a longtime fixture in Texas’ anti-abortion movement. She previously served as a staffer and spokeswoman for Texas Rep. Frank “Look at the Fetus” Corte and has been a longtime member of a rightwing youth training outfit called Torch of Freedom Foundation, where she sits on the board of directors, along with Morton Blackwell, founder of Koch-controlled Leadership Institute (which teaches young rightwingers how to prevent people from voting and churns out rightwing operatives like James O’Keefe, of ACORN pimp fame).
Then there’s Dan Patrick, the Texas state senator listed as the sponsor of Simpson’s anti-TSA bill. Turns out puffy-faced Patrick, whose forehead looks like it’s been treated with Juvéderm, is also a hardcore Christian radio host and author. He wrote a book called “The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: A Personal Challenge to Read the Bible” that was so bad, even illiterate believers gave it bad reviews on Amazon:
1.0 out of 5 stars Sceptical, July 28, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: The Second Most Important Book You Will Ever Read: A Personal Challenge to Read the Bible (Hardcover)
I think it is good to read about religion but I’m not so sure about this book’s author’s intentions. Da n patrick has always been prety arragant and now we hear him shamelessly self promote his book day after day after day after day on his radio. It just seems like he is out to make money, not converts.
Arrogant or not, Patrick is a big supporter of civil liberties and the Constitution, including the First Amendment, which he demonstrated by launching boycotts against newspapers and media outlets that he thought had a pinko bias.
Not surprisingly, Dan Patrick is also part of a conservative think tank that’s been supported by Koch Industries, among other corporations. Yep, he’s just the kind of freedom fighter the oligarchy needs. And it’s clear from the way he describes himself on his website that Senator Patrick knows that he been done doin’ good by his masters:
Dan Patrick is considered by many as the most conservative member of the Texas Senate. In just his first term, he has become a leading conservative voice in Texas and in the Texas legislature. In a recent Austin political news magazine ranking the most influential Republicans in Texas, Senator Patrick was listed at #3, just two spots behind Governor Rick Perry and the only member of the Texas Senate to be named in the top 20.
Senator Patrick has accomplished more in his first term than some legislators accomplish in a career. He passed legislation placing “In God We Trust” permanently in the Texas Senate Chamber and passed the Senate bill to place “Under God” in the state pledge. Senator Patrick passed the largest tax cut of any legislator in the country in 2009 – a $172 million cut to business taxes for small business.
Governor Rick Perry just convened a special secession of the Texas legislature to take another stab at passing the anti-TSA bill. Meanwhile, Kochites in Utah and New Hampshire are following Texas’ lead…But it doesn’t matter where the anti-TSA gather next or what Glenn Greenwald of the libertarian Cato Institute might tell you, the fight against TSA screeners is not about civil liberties. It is about attacking labor and pimping privatization. The rightwingers and Christian homophones leading the fight are not so much concerned with being “groped” at the gate, as they are about being groped by unionized workers. Getting their asses felt up by minimum-wage grunts working for private security firms is just fine by them–and apparently fine by Jesus, too. This is what their fight against the TSA is all about, and it fits in with the larger attack by free-market extremists on government-run security. It’s all about busting up the 43,000 TSA workers before they can form a union, which they’re voting on right now.
Take George Koch-Mason University-educated “economist” Edward Stringham, who recently wrote a paper singing the praises of David Lipscomb, a 19th-century biblical anarchist who preached that Christians should not participate in civil government. Turns out that Stringham not only advocates for privatizing the TSA, he also goes around giving Koch-sponsored talks on the benefits of privatizing the entire process of law and order—yeah, the whole thing. Here’s an email announcing one of his pro-private-security propaganda talks at a college in Denver:
From: Padilla Alexandre
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 3:46 PM
To: XXXXXX
Subject: Save the Date: EEF Lecture Series: Do We Need Government?: Private Law & Private Enforcement Speaker: Edward P. Stringham, Monday, March 25th, 11:00 am- 12:15 pm TIVOLI 320sDear students,
I am pleased to announce that the next Exploring Economic Freedom Lecture Series talk will take place on Monday April 25th, 2011 from 11:00 to 12:15 pm in Tivoli 320s. Our speaker for this event is Dr. Edward P. Stringham from Fayetteville State University. His talk is entitled: “Do We Need Government? Private Law & Private Enforcement” Economist Edward Stringham will ask whether law enforcement must be provided by government. He will talk about how private law enforcement is extremely common in the United States and the world, and discuss ways in which private law enforcement is an attractive alternative to government law enforcement.
This talk is generously sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Pizzas and sodas will be available for free for attendees. I have included below a short biography of Dr. Stringham.
Please let me know if you have questions.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Alexandre Padilla
Associate Professor of Economics & Interim Director
Honors ProgramMetropolitan State College of Denver
You can’t deny that for the Kochs and their ultra-rightwing billionaire buddies, “private law enforcement is an attractive alternative to government law enforcement.” The fact is that while it’s not hard to get unionized rightwing white cops to beat up on blacks, Mexicans and junkies, it’s not so easy to get them to go against their own kind. And there’s always a chance, no matter how slim, that union cops will turn on the oligarchy. A private mercenary force is so much more efficient:
Yasha Levine is an editor of The eXiled. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com. Check out other Koch takedowns here: The eXiled vs. The Kochs.
Want to know more? Then read our anti-TSA expose:
Really?
This is the year that the Republican right-wing, backed by corporate sponsors like the billionaire Koch brothers, have declared all-out war on public sector unions. It’s the culmination of a decades-long crusade against organized labor, which has only hit the national radar screen in recent months. The showdown in Wisconsin between Scott Walker and the unions has changed all that: suddenly, Americans had their eyes opened up to just how ruthlessly and cynically the Republican right was ready to fight to destroy public sector unions because they see it as a way to cripple the Democratic Party by killing off a major source of funding, as well as political muscle and votes.
If there’s some good to come out of the right-wing’s war on Wisconsin and other state employees, it’s that we now have a better insight into the Republican playbook against public sector unions, which boils down to this: 1) Manufacture a fake budget crisis in order to frighten the state’s residents; 2) PR the false-crisis hard enough until it breaks out of the right-wing/libertarian pipeline and into the mainstream media; 3) Blame the fake crisis on a fake villain — “greedy” state employee unions — thereby pitting the public against state workers. That way, when Republicans pass new laws destroying teachers and firefighters unions, they’ll come off as heroes defending the public from greedy unions, rather than as sleazy mercenaries carrying out their corporate sponsors’ dirty work.
Republicans have used this playbook before, of course, it’s just that Wisconsin finally made us all too aware. Perhaps the most obvious example — and the least understood — is from last November, when the same basic strategy was used to wage war against the TSA’s 55,000 employees, who have been locked in a savage decade-long battle to gain the same collective bargaining rights that employees of all other federal agencies enjoy. Unlike in Wisconsin, the Republican right succeeded in burying the story about the TSA employees’ struggle for collective bargaining rights underneath a sophisticated, well-PR’d campaign demonizing TSA screeners as modern-day Gestapo agents, rapists and child molesters.
But lost in all the media hysteria vilifying the TSA was the appalling story of labor abuse against the agency’s screeners, a consequence of Republican anti-union policies. If anyone is wondering why collective bargaining rights are so important to public sector workers, look no further than the TSA, whose employees suffer the lowest morale and highest attrition rates of any federal agency, year after year. Complaints and lawsuits abound, accusing TSA management of rampant sexual harassment, racism, bullying, wrongful termination and abuse of power. If that didn’t make working in the TSA difficult enough, the recent campaign demonizing TSA agents as modern-day Gestapo-agents turned them into the most hated of all federal employees; passengers, encouraged by incendiary PR, hurled abuses in TSA screeners’ faces, and in a few cases even physically attacked screeners.
Last November, we published an article in The Nation questioning the media-driven anti-TSA campaign, which we argued smelled of AstroTurf. For one thing, it made little sense that an issue like TSA pat-downs, offensive as they were, could dominate headlines for two straight weeks at a time when America was suffering from unprecedented corruption, lawless evictions of homeowners, unheard-of inequality, and wars that barely make news.
Sure enough, we uncovered numerous Koch-linked libertarian activists spearheading the campaign to demonize TSA screeners, DC lobbyists specializing in fake-grassroots campaigns setting up “Opt Out” websites while posing as regular Joes, and sleazy Republican hacks who had shown little interest in protecting civil liberties suddenly getting their ACLU on over the TSA’s intrusive pat-downs and “porn scans.” Progressives were understandably drawn into the anti-TSA campaign and hysteria, as the PR campaign cleverly framed it not as a union-bashing operation, but rather, as a purely civil liberties issue.
The anti-TSA campaign was at its media-hysteria peak in the weeks after the Republican election sweep, spurred on by last year’s hero, John Tyner, who refused a pat-down, telling TSA agents, “You touch my junk and I’m going to have you arrested.” Tyner disappeared from the scene after he apologized on his blog, and admitted that he didn’t tell the whole story and had actively tried to erase it.
Read the rest here…
Read more: christian, koch, kochs, propaganda, tsa, Yasha Levine, Class War For Idiots, Koch Whores, Libertards
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52 Comments
Add your own1. doctor_doctor_doctor | June 8th, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Damn Levine you ROCK! But don’t tell the suckpuppet foreman who lords over us non-unionized sockpuppet peons in the basement of New Media Strategies. If he found out I praised The eXiled, I’d get 3 lashes and 1 month on bread and water rations. But hey, that’s better than getting felt up by the airport goon force cuz it makes Yasha the Jew, who is not Israeli, think they’re gonna keep getting away with it. Damn dirty Jews! Always scheming to feel up on our fine Dixieland women!
Man, and Levine, that was an awesome smearing technique you pulled on the guy with his brother’s web bio. Bam! Ames gets away with that type-o shit, too! You guys, unlike me, got class—and talent! If wish I could be your’s and Ames’ privatized libertard slave. I’m easy to take care of. You can keep me in a cage, just as long as you change the hay and let me scoop out all my feces once a week. You can pimp me out to rich dudes. That’s where I really shine!
2. Anarchy Wolf | June 8th, 2011 at 7:42 pm
Damn Christ lovers.
3. Anti-TSA | June 8th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
I agree with you but on the other hand I despise the TSA and how they always are doing the most insanely fucking retarded things to passengers. Their stubborn insistence on continuing the most inane and assinine of policies actually makes me root against them all.
Also, I’m not a Koch-sucker but just someone who is employed as freemarket freelance troll by AEI and wishes airport security was like Israel’s, the land of airport security milk and honey, where if you’re a darkie or a lefty, they throw you in a room and give you a cavity search.
4. WTF | June 9th, 2011 at 2:31 am
Does it take being a New Media Strategies Libertard to defend freemarket right wing fascist fundy Christian who want to overturn the Bill of Rights these days and turn America into Biblical Republic?
Come on. The California Highway Patrol is an obvious violation of a citizen’s right to free movement and freedom from search without a probable cause and a warrant.
I’m a sockpuppet liberal and I get it. Why do you need troll like me resort to defending the fringe to make our point?
5. rossiya | June 9th, 2011 at 6:44 am
These christopaths are so self-contradictory I don’t even know where to begin. I can’t poke holes in them because they’re already nothing but a sponge of oxymorons. WTF is a libertarian police state? WTF is a republic combined with christianity? Rome was a republic but for the last 300 years, when it became an xtian democracy and collapsed. Either you’re for aristocracy/monarchy/skyfairy or you’re for a republic with individual rights. No middle ground. Xtians are counterreformationists who want a return to their glory days of the flat-earth pre-enlightenment black death dark age. BTW the movie “Black Death” rocks and I highly recommend it to all freethinkers as a microcosmic metaphor of ongoing events.
6. Strelnikov | June 9th, 2011 at 7:52 am
This whole thing puts me into a bind: I hate rightwingers, but I also hate the motherfucking hassle of the TSA.
Full disclosure: I tried to become a TSA monkey when the agency started, but I was beaten by five jillion ex-Navy/ex-Marine “retirees” who had weapons training and mid-level security clearences, even though most of them looked like 12 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag.
I’ve just come to an ephiphany: I hate the TSA and the rightwingers equally; but if it came down to which group I would stick into Siberian gulags for life, the rightwingers win that, hands down.
Oh and Mr. Anti-TSA troll, your argument has a huge flaw; by being anti-melanin count and anti-Left, Israeli security opens itself up to attack by Russian deathsquads or suicide bombing by white supremacists posing as boring tourists or dorky businessmen. But then Israel is shot though with such flaws if you examine it closely.
7. spark | June 9th, 2011 at 9:51 am
That McManus dork is proof positive of one of my most longstanding theories:
If men could obtain oral sex easily on demand with no hassles or repercussions of any kind be they legal, moral, medical or anything else, all strife and conflict would quickly cease, and the heavens would part to usher in the Millenium.
8. Jack | June 9th, 2011 at 9:52 am
The girl with the funny hat in the heading picture looks like she needs sex real bad.
9. Bobby | June 9th, 2011 at 11:11 am
I love exiled, and I am neither a Christian or a Koch stooge. I still don’t like a minimum wage John Wayne grabbing my dick at the airport, unless he’s a privatized John. Then please, grab on, lover boy! That’s why I defend the involvement of kooks and stand by rabid homophobes! Woo-hoo!
10. Sean Strange | June 9th, 2011 at 11:30 am
Yawn. More bash the working class white conservative Christians as extremist lackeys for the Koch brothers, Waco crazies, homophobes and, presumably, hillbilly racist neo-Nazis. You guys really need to get some new material, because those dogs don’t really hunt any more.
Normally I would side with you guys on a lot of these issues, but since you relentlessly attack my people and seek power over them, I feel compelled to take a stand for all my fellows on the Christian-only Spaceship Dixieland. All you Exiled guys are doing here is confirming the worst stereotypes of “cosmopolitan leftist culture-destroyers”, if you get my drift.
I say this as someone who loves and admires the great American Jewish culture that produced some of my biggest heroes like Lee, Kirby, Sagan and Feynman, but you also seem to have a really abrasive, power-mongering streak that really rubs much of the world the wrong way.
I sincerely apologize for the apparent anti-Semitism, but since you have declared war on certain cultures, I think it’s only fair that your culture be criticized in turn.
Finally, please note that I am a committed anti-nihilist who engages in trolling as a form of personal jihad. Have a nice day.
11. Anarchy Wolf | June 9th, 2011 at 1:28 pm
@8, goddamn right.
12. Joel | June 9th, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Exiled online: “Hey look at us! We’re brilliant because we can tie anyone we want to the Kochs”
Y’know just because there are SOME unsavory characters who are anti-TSA certainly doesn’t mean ALL anti-TSAers are Koch/evangelical types. Nope they rest are just dupes volunteering their time to advance rightwing agenda. Because that’s just the type they are!
Yet again Exiled shows us all how terrible extremist-Marxian propaganda thinly veiled as actual reporting can be!
Thanks guys!
Next time why don’t you do a little bit of studying..if you look up the LIBERTARIAN FORUM you can read/search and see that the Koch brothers were OUTED A LONG TIME AGO by REAL LIBERTARIANS.
Sorry guys, you were beaten to the punch…
Oh, and why are you afraid to respond to the comments posted on here? Don’t you believe in a community where suckers like me should be held by the hand and caressed, maybe even rocked back and forth? Why do you discriminate against people like me? Please, ANSWER ME!
13. Joel | June 9th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Wow, nice one, brah! So this website actually improves people’s comments? For free? Duuuuuuude! Tnx! That’s community service right there man!
14. Buck | June 9th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Damn, I’ve heard strawman arguments before, but I’ve never heard a libertard use the work “strawman” in a comment before. Well done to me!
15. Joel | June 9th, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Hey my mom is currently out, first she’s gotta stop by the social security office to pick up her check and then go to a small government/anti-TSA Tea Party meeting, but when she comes back can you guys improve her comments, too?
16. brian | June 9th, 2011 at 6:28 pm
good help is getting harder to find
Published on Sunday, June 5, 2011 by CommonDreams.org The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths
by David Schwartz
The great writer Kurt Vonnegut titled his final book A Man without a Country. He was the man; the country was the United States of America. Vonnegut felt that his country had disappeared right under his – and the Constitution’s – feet, through what he called “the sleaziest, low-comedy Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” He was talking about the Bush administration. Were Vonnegut still alive in the post-Bush era, he would not have felt that his country had returned.
How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths. (The term nowadays is anti-social personality disorder.) These are terms for people who are smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences. They are not guided by a sense of right or wrong. They seem to be unaffected by the feelings of others, including feelings of distress caused by their actions. Straying from a decent way of treating people, or violating ethical codes causes no anxiety, the anxiety which is what causes the rest of us to moderate our more greedy impulses. If most children feel anxiety when they are pilfering the forbidden cookie jar, psychopaths feel just fine. They can devour the cookies, shatter the jar as evidence and stuff it in the trash can. When accused, they can argue with apparent sincerity that the cookie jar has been missing for at least a week. There suffer no remorse, no guilt, no shame. They are free to do anything, no matter how harmful.
Psychopaths can be very tricky to recognize. As psychiatrist Dr. Hervey Cleckly wrote in his classic The Mask of Sanity in 1941, psychopaths are not technically insane. They don’t have a psychosis, like schizophrenia. They are experts in appearing normal. They can act the role of a caring, concerned executive, even though they actually do not seem to experience such feelings. If they hurt somebody, they don’t modify their behavior.
The United States corporate and government spheres have become, Vonnegut suggested, a perfect habitat for psychopaths. What has allowed so many psychopaths to rise so high in corporations, and then government, he wrote,
“is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich!”
In a country in which much of human culture has been rendered into machines for the manufacture of money, psychopaths are the ideal leaders. They are very focused. They are outcome oriented. They are frequently charming, and usually very bright and able. They can lay off thousands of people, or deny people health care, or have them waterboarded, and it does not disturb their sleep. They can be impressively confident. Psychopaths can be dynamic leaders of enterprises, but are handicapped by their lack of feelings for relationships. They may be accomplished captains of industry, or senators, or surgeons, but their families are frequently abused and miserable. Most psychotherapists have seen the wives or husband or children of such accomplished people.
Since psychopaths are usually very smart, they can be quite competent at impersonating regular human beings in positions of power. Since they don’t care how their actions affect people, they can rise to great height in enterprises dealing with power and money. They can manufacture bombs or run hospitals. Whatever the undertaking, it is all the same to them. It’s just business.
The economic system that remains after the destruction of American local cultures has created an excellent employment picture for psychopaths. But the opportunities open to them are now so vast that there is apparently now an actual labor shortage. At least that is the only explanation I can find for the rise of a cadre of psychopathic leaders who resemble the usual type in all ways but one: they’re simply not that smart. One has only to look at right-wing not-so-Christian fundamentalists to see the peculiar emergence of a second-string of psychopaths.
The US has been endowed with abundant resources, and there have always been a more than sufficient supply of psychopaths of the first intellectual grade to supply corporate suites and their subsidiary, the Congress. Why is there now a downgrade to the dumb ones, like the lowering of standards for military recruits to deal with a shortage of cannon fodder?
It is no secret that the Koch brothers and others of the super-rich seem to have undertaken a final push to consolidate control through the conversion of a marginally democratic to an essentially fascist state; extreme right-wing, authoritarian, and demagogic. This kind of government is ideal for control of a populace by the moneyed elite. To carry this out requires the employment of many ‘kept’ politicians to excite and misdirect scared and angry – and ignorant – voters. Lest the citizenry realize who stole their money and storm their castles with torches, the rapacious elite need politicians who will carry out the work of re-directing anger at teachers, or labor unions, or the poor. I can only conclude that the people who now own the country couldn’t find any first-rate psychopaths to carry out their work. Or maybe the smart ones were all occupied. So they had to go to second-stringers, people who could actually believe what they were told to say.
We are a country who has become second-best, even in the quality of our psychopaths
17. JJ | June 9th, 2011 at 6:55 pm
So I take it you are pro TSA as long as they are unionized? By the same argument, if I was a paid troll and a complete fucking moron, I might respond with something as patently stupid as, “Oo, oh I suppose you would have supported the Gestapo as long as they were unionized.” Wow, did that nail you or what! Do you see how that logic works? You are now a Nazi. You’re worse than a Nazi! If you support unionized TSA, you are responsible for every person ever mass-murdered in all the history of mankind, plus any aliens who might have been massacred on the planet Klandethu.
nanu-nanu!
libertardius
18. Sean Strange | June 9th, 2011 at 8:17 pm
Brian, very good post. You’re absolutely right, the way modern societies are set up like giant machines, with impersonal transactions conducted across thousands of miles and governments and corporations exerting control over communities they’re not connected to, it’s pretty hard to keep the smart sociopaths from taking over. All the normal human values we developed for life in small tribes have become impediments to success in modern civilization. So the wealthiest and most powerful people now are basically mutants. Since this trait is undoubtedly partially genetic, these sociopathic elites might literally be a breed apart.
This is OK news to me since I’m a smart sociopath, but I’m not sure how normal people can curb these elites’ power without rolling back civilization to much simpler times. A lot of people are trying to re-localize into self-sufficient communities for this reason, to basically opt out and starve the beast, which is the worst nightmare of the power accumulators. The last time such a thing happened on a large scale it was called the Dark Ages, but this is largely propaganda. Most European peasants were probably happy to see the Roman Empire go down, just as many Americans and people everywhere will be happy when Washington, Wall Street, the Pentagon, Madison Avenue and Hollywood are in ruins. Which is exactly where things are headed: “Dark Ages II” — except it won’t really be so dark, just different.
19. justaguy | June 9th, 2011 at 10:07 pm
AS A FAN OF THE EXILE, I BEG YOU…
Please can you stop making fun of Glenn Greenwald… he is an amazing writer taking on super-important issues better than almost anyone else right.
If I paid you guys would that help you stop bashing him?
:S
20. super390 | June 9th, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Sean, I disagree. The goal of the pro-inequality psychopaths is to offer a return to the “good old days” of feudalism and race and religion based casteism in exchange for removing all restrictions on economic inequality. Hitler, after all, made a similar offer after doing all he could to make democracy into a nightmare.
And the Dark Ages did suck. Basically everything was privatized. Central government had collapsed, so barbarian tribes and Roman landlords alike divided up the land between them and offered the peasants protection from total anarchy. In exchange, that is, for the partial anarchy that your landlord was now also your judge, jury and executioner, and really, really wanted to rape your daughter.
This, in fact, is the degrading way most humans have lived since the invention of private landowning. The landlords are given a monopoly on the provision of essential military services, the church becomes the biggest landlord, and the landlords and church get to enforce their own law. So instead of having less law, the poor Dark Ages peasant lived under competing noble, royal and clerical law systems, all tied together at the top by blood relations, whereas the peasants were divvied up between their lords as their only rightful representatives.
This was exactly the blueprint of the Catholic Falangist movement that Franco implemented in Spain. Mussolini was also a fan, to say nothing of the Pope.
It was never a good system in any land. Edgar Snow wrote about the Chinese version of it in the 1930s when he marched with Mao. It’s what El Salvador’s death squads were defending, though for the moment the death squads are on the run down South.
So let’s not get nostalgic for feudalism. There are plenty of genuine models for primitive liberty that got snuffed out.
21. super390 | June 9th, 2011 at 10:17 pm
And by the way, the deeper message of the anti-TSA narrative may simply be that we real Americans don’t need to be patted down when we can solve the terrorist problem by forcing Moslems to wear Crescents on their clothes and beating and imprisoning them whenever we feel like it.
Thus implying that it’s never terrorism when a Christian conservative commits political violence.
22. H Khariq | June 10th, 2011 at 12:44 am
Some of those christian chicks are hot, the men all look gay tho
23. Paul Spencer | June 10th, 2011 at 4:36 am
Screw the TSA! I’m 100% behind the Kochs,and the Christians on this one. The TSA doesn’t need a union because the TSA shouldn’t exist.
24. Sean Strange | June 10th, 2011 at 10:49 am
The anti-TSA narrative is part of a larger traditionalist narrative which argues that the multiculturalist project of modern America is an insane utopian idea that is doomed to failure. It’s pretty difficult to persuade many of us that modern America is in any way better off than it was back when we had a more confident and unified culture. Look at the images from the Beijing Olympics if you’ve forgotten what a confident monoculture looks like, and realize that the Han Chinese are going to be top dogs in the world soon. This model clearly works!
America has obviously experienced severe cultural decline across the spectrum, but to blame this on right-wing Christians and oligarchs alone seems ludicrous when it has been the Left which has been so busy trying to deconstruct and re-engineer America for the past 50 years. All I can say is, maybe this project sounded good on paper, but complex reality and human nature have once again foiled the utopian schemes of the social engineers.
(Please note that I am not on the payroll of the Koch brothers, though that could change at any moment.)
25. Sean Strange | June 10th, 2011 at 11:33 am
Please note that I am merely manipulating symbols on a computer, and nothing I am saying here has any intrinsic meaning to me. However, at the end of the day I’m afraid we all must choose sides on a tribal or racial basis, because that’s the one aspect of ourselves which can’t be willed away. I’m not particularly happy about this, but given that tribalism is hard-coded into our brains and humans always seek power over each other on that basis, I have no choice but to play the game the same way or risk enslavement. I hope everyone of my tribe has this level of understanding and acts accordingly, or you, me and our children will suffer unnecessarily.
This is the simple truth of our species; if you don’t like it, google “transhumanism” and look for ways to modify humans biologically, because otherwise you’re just going to get more of the same old primate dramas forever.
26. The Carthaginian | June 10th, 2011 at 12:31 pm
Oh, wow, guys!
We can’t possibly let a guy like Sean Strange go – a lunatic racist transhumanist, who admires Lee and Kirby and thinks the dementia-suffering, paranoid Alan Moore is a genius with spot-on predictions.
Basically, he’s a physically grotesque comic book guy troglodyte racist – if he’d been born in the 1960s he’d be a big time Randroid thanks to Steve Ditko. A real life Ignatius Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces, mixed with heaping helpings of antiscientific racism.
Like Ignatius Reilly, I can imagine him bemoaning the lack of intellectual sophistication in Yogi Bear.
And this is the guy that doesn’t think your story is valid! Why? Not because of Yasha Levine’s content or research, but because he’s insufficiently polite and respectful when it comes to his white Dixie superiors.
By the way, there’s zero proof anything like the Singularity is coming.
This isn’t up for debate. Debating a point of view that hilarious, farfetched and laughable debases debate.
Although I know you’ll have tons of fun in the future boning your cyborg robo-girlfriend.
27. Qadaffi's Bitch | June 10th, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Was Jesus ever forced to imbibe flouride? Was He ever groped at the gate to Golgotha? Did He have to buy an overpriced cowboy work shirt from the Koch’s Matador Cattle Company? Would He have had to undergo the indignity of testifying before HUAC, or ask for Sarah P’s autograph, or join with Mother Theresa and Bishop Dez to two-step the Tutu Trot?
Of course not.
He would have smitten them fuckers in their tracks, turned them into pillars of congealed anal lube, then passed the whole thing off with a saviorly “Tha’s all, folks!”
Tha’s all, folks!
28. darthfader | June 10th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
For Gary, Gates today on Libya in his farewell address:
“‘The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the U.S., once more, to make up the difference,’ he said.”
We are so fucked.
29. Sean Strange | June 10th, 2011 at 11:13 pm
Guys you know I’m just trolling and joking around here in my dark way, sort of like Dolan with his phony War Nerd column. But I will tell you this in all seriousness: it’s not the Christian fundamentalists you need to be worried about, it’s the occultist acolytes of the Left Hand Path who summon demons and harness the forces of darkness who are the real threat to the current order. You think Nazi Germany was about some Austrian loser stirring up the passions of a humiliated nation? Wrong! This is an eternal cosmic war, and Armageddon approaches…
“The rise of Nazism was one of those rare moments in the history of our civilization, when a door was noisily and ostentatiously opened on to something ‘Other.’ What is strange is that people pretend not to have seen or heard anything apart from the sights and sounds inseparable from war and political strife.” – Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians
30. Ryf | June 10th, 2011 at 11:26 pm
I’m glad that we’re in Libya protecting Democracy there! Once we’re done liberating them all the people will hold hands and sing songs and they totally won’t kill each other or oppress minority groups there!
Sure, Gadhaffi was our ally but hey- I’m sure his population will absolutely love us for supporting his removal just like they did with Saddam and Jimmy Carter with the Ayatollah!
31. shlomo | June 11th, 2011 at 12:46 pm
Fuck off you filthy kike. Go join the rest of the jew pigs in that shithole that your imaginary god promised you and that our god said we can have as soon he throws a massive fireball on you jew bastards who always try n take our fine Dixieland women away from us real freedomlovin, christ humpin Christians! You scummy parasite.
32. super390 | June 11th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Mr. Strange –
If tribalism means rednecks fighting and dying for plantation owners who logically must keep them backward and ignorant, then it’s pathetic. Here are several problems with your argument:
1. Rome’s tribalism, unlike America’s, was not based on white skin. Rome honored the Mediterranean civilization it inherited from many races, and its citizenship required only that you swear an oath to its guardian god. It had multiple religions, multiple languages, and a multiplicity of ideas, and it had a longer run on top than America will manage.
2. America was plenty multicultural during its Golden Age – by the standards of the age that preceded it. The catastrophe of 1929 discredited a unified complex of white supremacy, Protestant domination, and capitalist dogmatism. But the new America that would supplant it was the work of several generations of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish and other immigrants, who were denounced as subhuman ghetto trash, genetically inferior and criminal, as they built America’s skyscrapers and factories and labor unions and Marxist parties. They created what we think of as 20th Century America, the incubator where urban replaced rural, Jazz replaced minstrel shows, where entire new art forms arose from cinema to comic strips, often from the hands of Jews and Catholics. All of it despite the insistence of WASPs that this was impossible, that they had made America perfect and that they would enforce its monoculture forever via local censorship boards (!), anti-miscegenation laws, and Prohibition, which was based on the prejudice that Catholic ethnics were drunkards and that thus alcohol was an alien contaminant on our culture. (When that failed, we made the “black” drug the new scapegoat and outlawed marijuana in 1936.)
3. China was very much a monoculture when it was cheated, poisoned and raped by Britain during the Opium Wars – what went wrong then? In fact, Peking was more of a monoculture than London, which had a healthy influx of immigrants during that era. Purity of culture that blinds you to the crimes of fatcats does you no good. Unity in outrage required class awareness.
4. 50 years of leftist social engineering? Read this article: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm
and learn about 40 years of right-wing social engineering enthusiastically funded by those seeking tax cuts for themselves.
33. super390 | June 11th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
For an example of an even bigger and more catastrophic right-wing social engineering scheme, read the entirety of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”. Afterwards, consider how many of the monstrous US-sponsored tricks and lies described therein are now being brought home to America.
34. Luke Brooks | June 11th, 2011 at 5:31 pm
lol you trollin
35. One-eyed Jesus weiner | June 12th, 2011 at 11:09 am
Christians should be tied to fenceposts and left to the Summer sun.
36. darthfader | June 12th, 2011 at 1:27 pm
I’m not speaking to Dolan. I’m speaking to Gary.
37. SkinnersHorse | June 13th, 2011 at 4:30 am
Don’t talk about China if you don’t know anything about it.
China is not a monoculture and never has been – hundreds of ethnic and linguistic groups exist within the borders. Even if you’re talking about the time of the opium wars, as 31 is, remember that the emperor was Manchu and the military were a mix of Manchu, Mongol and Han Bannermen. The ruling class were united not by race but a common Confucian ideology and examination system. China endured, as Rome did, because it was not some racist Han dictatorship.
But then I suppose they all look the same…?
38. helplesscase | June 13th, 2011 at 10:55 am
Man, these guys aren’t fascists. I wish they were. They’re something much more loathsome. To quote Dr Dolan, they have “all the faults and none of the virtues of the fascist: malice without frankness; cruelty without courage; pomp without dignity.”
39. Jiang Qing | June 13th, 2011 at 4:04 pm
@30 shlomo . . . Dude! Under all the fluff, what do you really think? As my dear comerade, the Chairman, said every Sunday evening, 拆掉你的内衣你婊子，我将在下周撞击你的屁股
40. Jiang Qing | June 14th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
No tickee, no laundry!
41. Qtk | June 14th, 2011 at 8:58 pm
I have to note that just because the right-wing side of the anti-TSA movement is paid for by a union-busting campaign doesn’t mean that the TSA is actually a force for good. Therefore–and this is where my logic gets really clever–therefore, ergo, we should support the anti-TSA movement and not think at all about the union-busting aspect of it, or what that means for the lives of those 43,000 employees, or think about the way the whole country has been duped. Instead, we should–and I hope you’re still following my logic–we should actually join in the anti-TSA bashing, and we should all allow ourselves to be caught up in the hysteria that compares the TSA to the Gestapo. That makes a lot more sense than getting outraged over the manipulation of the media and democracy by union-busters.
“The enemy of my sockpuppet is merely my enemy’s troll. Nothing more.”
42. Sean Strange | June 14th, 2011 at 10:39 pm
Well you folks go ahead and fight the Right, I don’t give a damn. Me, I’ll be working day and night, with demonic energy and will, using every technique of science, sorcery, technology, mind control, propaganda, art and dirty tricks, to annihilate my enemies on the Left.
Don’t worry, I won’t be going after the Jews this time around. In fact, you can guard the camps when we start rounding up Muslims and other undesirables once World War III kicks off. “Enemy-of-my-enemy…”, so forth.
By the way, allow me to let you in on a little secret, which few dare speak and still fewer believe: politics is just a show, a grand theater stage-managed by esoterically trained illuminates of great power. What is being conjured today behind the scenes in shadowy occult orders will become tomorrow’s political reality. This has been going on since the dawn of civilization, from the Pharaohs to the Catholics, the Freemasons to the Nazis, the Muslim Brotherhood to Skull & Bones, and it’s never had more influence than today. I don’t know much about the Koch brothers or Ayn Rand–that sounds like too much reality for my tastes, whereas I am so clever that I focus on the Dungeons & Dragons aspect of the world, not real people. But from your descriptions they sound like high disciples of the dark arts to me. Meaning they too might be part of my Dungeons & Dragons fantasy.
So if you really want to change the world, you must first master magic — which Aleister Crowley defined as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.” This describes the political process in a nutshell, and explains why behind every great political force there lurks an illuminated order.
Nothing in our world is as it seems. All is smoke and mirrors, “shock and awe”, “hope and change”, created by master illusionists and manipulators of mind. And soon, their perhaps their grandest illusion of all time will be unveiled…Mwah-hah-hah-hah-hah! MWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!!!
43. Jimmy the Hyena | June 15th, 2011 at 2:28 pm
I can’t believe anybody who says that they understand the “system”, (if there could even be said to be one). But the good news is that you don’t have to completely understand the system in order to game the system. Have you ever seduced a woman who you didn’t really understand? If you haven’t go out and try to do it right now, it’s good practice. Being homosexual is probably even better, look how far the Austrian gay boys Hitler and Arnold got in spite of their limitations, but we don’t all have the good luck to be gay. Just being able to see the flaws aren’t enough, you have to find a way to exploit them. Psychopaths do this naturally even when they’re not very intelligent. That’s why homosexual psychopaths have the most power of all, the Hohenzellern, Hapsburge, British royal family, America’s Republican party etc.
44. Cum | June 16th, 2011 at 2:45 am
Alex Jones ate a warm bowl of “The Secret,” washed it down with a glass of feudalism, then shat out your posts.
45. Leig | June 16th, 2011 at 10:42 am
we give you money…and never ask for anything in return, oh lords of exiledonline…rulers of the interwebs who brought us out of tardness…i think all readers of the exiled should give 10% of their income to the exiled cause…
46. Tref | June 16th, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Most people- Americans and international travelers- have nothing but pure propaganda. It has everything to do with “sucking on koch.” The Kochs could easily demonize bakery store owners as they did the TSA.
Face it, the anti-TSA protesters are fucking retards who don’t do shit against terrorism and only suck off Kochs. Fix the Kochs so they won’t be able to use them for their agenda.
47. Leig | June 16th, 2011 at 11:47 pm
I have a new Dolan in front of me…I am content.
48. darthfader | June 17th, 2011 at 11:50 am
Wut happen to my smiley-face? 🙁
49. Timmy | June 17th, 2011 at 8:09 pm
super390,
I think one thing to keep in mind is that
an empire’s power often grows hugely even while the original spirit that birthed it is rotting. I think that is likely the case with Rome and with America. The jazz and southern and eastern european and Jewish immigration may have coincided with an vibrant period for america, but that’s just correlation, not causation. Further, it also coincided with a remarkable rise in crime rates. Was it merely a consequence of urbanization, or a sign of the fracturing of a social compact?
I wouldn’t say jazz and movies have any particular value in and of themselves –
there’s some gems in both but I think it’s pretty clear they were and are indicative of the spirit and sense of community in the USA turning to mush. Can you see Grant or Washington listening to Be-Bop?
As was so well noted by Oscar Wilde; America: the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
50. tt | June 18th, 2011 at 5:02 am
I am a ayn rand libertard koch stooge troll.
I like to sodomize heavy machinery.
(pre-edited it for you Levine, to save you the hazzle.)
[tx! 😉 — Moderator]
51. darthfader | June 19th, 2011 at 11:21 am
Thank you for preserving the substance of my comment anyway 🙁
52. Flatulissimo | June 19th, 2011 at 5:11 pm
“Can you see Grant or Washington listening to Be-Bop?”
Nope, but that’s hardly and argument for either fella. Grant was the right man for the job, but he also said he only knew two songs — “one is ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the other is not” so not like I would hold him up as an exemplar of America at its height of culture. As for Washington, well, I can’t see Django Reinhardt or Louis Armstrong owning slaves or putting down the Whiskey Rebellion, so there’s that. I’d rather live in a country founded by either of them than Washington, if such a thing were possible.
“I wouldn’t say jazz and movies have any particular value in and of themselves”
Proving that just because you can quote Oscar Wilde doesn’t keep you from being an idiot.
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