NBC will be airing an interview with Trump tomorrow. How do we determine the right proportions of stimulant & tranquilizer to get through it?

Fortune magazine announced Apple is first company worth over $800 billion. Thanks to sweatshop & child labor.

Making the case for not talking through your hat

White Helmet with injured child Idlib Oct 2015 :Khalil Ashawi:Reuters: May 9 2017

Before my life was affected by the suicide of a beloved brother, I held the ignorant belief that suicide was an act of aggression against survivors. Don’t know where I got that. Probably the same place we get all our ignorant beliefs. Out of thin air. Getting up close & personal with suicide taught me to not hold dear to notions about things I actually know nothing about.

But that was also brought home to me earlier, in the early 90s when I was researching an article on the media hysteria about ‘narco-terrorist’ youth gangs in the Black community. I was just finishing up the article after 6 months of research & wanted to make an assertion but could not recall the source. The temptation was to rely on memory but I consider that an intolerable bad habit so I had to go back to the library for hours searching out the source to verify the information.

It was in searching for that source that it became apparent how the demonizing of Black youth & the violence against them rested on flouting the Bill of Rights in the Black community. That seemed a really powerful, essential element to explaining the so-called War on Drugs which was really a war on Black youth. If I hadn’t been a stickler about not talking through my hat, I would never have understood that.

I’m not relating this to show what a scrupulous researcher I am or to suggest that at no time ever do I express ignorance or prejudice but because it may seem I am too hard on those who I call reluctant Assadists. They don’t agree with Assad’s gulags & carpet bombing of civilians but they think he’s the lesser evil over those “Wahhabi/Salafi head-chopping jihadi terrorists” & they don’t know anything about the popular revolution against Assad. Mostly, they tend to rely on elitist journals & writers that have gone full monty Assadist & promote this hateful rubbish.

You could ask what makes Scully think she knows more than hotshots like Tariq Ali, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch, et al. What the hell are her credentials? It is not because I am a more scrupulous researcher than they are. Though I certainly am in every way. It isn’t that I’m a political activist, engaged in struggle, & most of them have never been or haven’t been for decades. It isn’t that I know all about Syrian history & political culture. I don’t, though I know more than they do or at least acknowledge that I don’t know.

My point is not that you should believe me over those hotshots but that you should not hold fast to views you have not investigated. Be skeptical, agnostic, even wary until you have done your homework or if you haven’t time to do it.

Maybe my skeptical eye is because that Black ‘narco-terrorist’ gang thing was so deceptive & effective in justifying war against Black youth & resonates with that “Wahhabi/Salafi head-chopping jihadi terrorist” crap. (I’m not denying the existence of terrorist groups like ISIS but the depiction of the revolution against Assad as comprised of such politics.) Maybe it’s because feminists were ridiculed in the 1960s as man-hating lesbians & spinsters too ugly to get a man. Maybe it’s the decades of demonizing Palestinians as terrorists & years of justifying wars by vilifying Muslims.

Maybe you think it’s Assad, Duterte, Hussain, Gaddafi, Trump, who are being demonized. Maybe you think national sovereignty is more important than human & democratic rights. Maybe you think it’s all about regime change & revolution in Syria doesn’t exist. Maybe we don’t measure what’s important in the same way. Maybe that’s the problem & investigation really won’t change that because the sources we use won’t be the same. In that case, I leave you to the propagandists & haters.

Photo is White Helmet with injured child, Idlib in October 2015. This is how I see the Syrian revolution against Assad’s dictatorship. Maybe you look at this man & see one of those “jihadi” guys with a prop. That would make you a full monty Assadist, not a reluctant one.

(Photo by Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)

Several more months of Trump & the entire US government will be a shambles. With US troops deployed in so many wars overseas, Putin can march the Russian army into DC & take right over.

Ivanka & Jared will be officiating the chaos; Trump will be medicated & golfing at Mar-A-Lago. Libertarians will reign supreme; Fox News & RT will broadcast from the White House. The socialists will still have their heads stuck up their ass.

American dystopia.

Trump’s firing of FBI director Comey may mean he’s taking out the imaginary deep state before they pull their soft coup against him. What do you think?

Over 15 years of war crimes & bombing the hell out of Afghanistan & the US is losing to the Taliban. So Trump is deploying more troops.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? Breathtaking criminality.

Assadism has made political equivocation an art form (a degenerated art form)

Injured kids in field hospital Douma, Syria after Syrian airstrikes (Mohammed Badra:EPA) May 9 2017

If there’s one thing Assadism has popularized in politics, it’s equivocation: lost souls who feel torn between dictatorship & head-choppers. Lost souls but not malignant, they just don’t want to lose their friends who support dictatorship & carpet bombing so they try to play both sides of the street. See how that can create confusion?

Equivocation isn’t the same as saying honestly “Syria’s kinda complicated. I don’t get it & don’t have the time to study it.” Equivocation is a case of not knowing your ass from your elbow because you haven’t given serious study to the issue but still want to look smart or it’s cowardice & fear of being shoved off the bandwagon.

Equivocation is more curable if you recognize the Syrian revolution which Assadists all deny ever happened; if you follow Syrian citizen journalists reporting from civilian bombing zones; if you read sources other than Russian & Syrian propaganda.

The only thing that makes equivocationitis incurable is allowing fear of being isolated & vilified to control your politics. That’s a big one, a whopper of a fear. But put it in perspective by imagining how it feels to be a working person in Syria, part of the revolution against Assad’s dictatorship, vilified as head-choppers, denounced as “Wahhabi/Salafi whack-jobs,” getting bombed & gassed with no antiwar response & more concern for empty airport hangars, watching your loved ones & neighbors bombed to death, being isolated for years under barbarous military siege without an international groundswell of outrage & opposition.

If after putting it in perspective you still can’t cure equivocationitis, some suggest calling 911. My suggestion is to stuff a sock in it & own up to being an Assadist.

Photo is children being treated in a field hospital in Douma, Syria for injuries sustained in a Syrian airstrike on April 4, 2017. Talk to them about your angst.

(Photo by Mohammed Badra/EPA)