Friday 19th of April 2024
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

for a civil society...

horizons

Donald Trump in Scotland: Golf, picnic protests, and blaming Obama for Russian election meddling…

Two days before a high-stakes summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has played golf and tweeted from one of his namesake resorts, blaming his predecessor for Russian election meddling and lashing out at the free press from foreign soil.

Aides had said the US President would spend the weekend preparing to meet Mr Putin in Helsinki, but Mr Trump's tweets showed other topics were on his mind.

"I have arrived in Scotland and will be at Trump Turnberry for two days of meetings, calls and hopefully, some golf — my primary form of exercise!" he tweeted, referencing his seaside golf resort.

"The weather is beautiful, and this place is incredible! Tomorrow I go to Helsinki for a Monday meeting with Vladimir Putin."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-15/donald-trump-scotland-golf-protests-obama-russian-election/9995492

——————————————

Citizenship and Civil Society is a book by Thomas Janoski. It is a detailed long academic work and by the end of it, we can only hope that someone has placed pretty curtains to hide the brick wall in front of our vantage point — our little fishbowl.

His conclusion is far reaching:

… Rather than practice exclusionary immigration policies, industrialized nations need to share money and expertise with poorer nations so that people will not be forced to become economic and political refugees…

That’s why we bombed the shit out of them instead…

… From this beginning, American citizens could construct their own value-laden communities through citizenship rights and obligations.

Well said. In an ideal world, this would trail-blaze the new 23rd century. Presently, we’re still at war on things, and muffing it up as well… and let’s not mention global warming. Ah... if only no one would lie...

There are a lot of obstacles in this quest of the “perfect’ social group, the least of them are that we, humans, are by and large religious, deceitful and idiotic. And then there are women… Sorry, bear with me. This is important:

There is no more dynamic social figure in modern history than the Citizen… member and motor… of those who liberated themselves from dependence and eprivation — villeins and subjects, colonial dependents, minority of many kinds, women…

This was written by Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf (1974, page 673) as quoted by Thomas Janoski… Ralf wrote a few books about our fishbowl:

Dahrendorf was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician. A class conflict theorist, Dahrendorf was a leading expert on explaining and analyzing class divisions in modern society, and is regarded as "one of the most influential thinkers of his generation."[1] Dahrendorf wrote multiple [I hate this word: it should be many or several] articles and books, his most notable being Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) and Essays in the Theory of Society (1968)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralf_Dahrendorf


So, we have to pick and choose our social constructs in which rights and obligations are competing for our attention, while we're trying to rob the banks to make a buck and our neighbour steals our carrots. 

The blurb for Janoski’s book tells us:... liberal countries rely on social openess and consequently must have a lower level of rights and obligations because citizens do not want their resources given to people freely moving in and out of their boundaries. 

Hum… How selfish. Not really, but this is quite important in regard to refugees and the way we treat them like lepers in this fair country called Australia… 

And in these “improving” constructs, we keep moving the goal posts as to always favour the rich over the poor bastards “who have no-one else to blame but themselves for not being greed savvy”… And let’s not mention global warming, nor The Donald — nor the way America is the master of deceit, so much so that it deceives itself about its own self-importance, creating havoc around the world. 

At least Janoski’s book is dedicated to "bring full citizenship to persons of all mental abilities” (Down Syndrome included)...

Lets hope Putin’s “liberal” Russia can see us through for a bit longer after this encounter of wits. While conflict theorists take the opposite view of functionalists, functionalists believe that society is oscillating very slightly, if not static — conflict theorists say that every society at every point is subject to process of change. I could not say it better myself.

Thus there is "dissension and conflict at every point in the social system" and "many societal elements as contributing to disintegration and change”. The confict theorists believe order comes from coercion (the stick and promises...) from those at the top. They believe that power is an important factor in social order and that both conflict theory and consensus theory are necessary because they reflect the two parts of society. 

And here I was, gently thinking that there were a zillion parts in our social constructs, made of everyone with a point of view. But these two parts are the generalisation of the “neoconservatives” — the greedies — versus the “left” which in modern day is a middle-right — the less greedy — in which conflict it is not a sin to make cash at the expense of others. It’s just a matter of how much cash.

Actually, the real two parts are the agressors (rulers) and the submitted (us). And please, don’t mention global warming...

US - GW

a self-important man...

rubens

 

This image was created then, before Trump got the gig, by Gus leonisky under the fake name of TI Ministries...

being swindled...

Above, I wrote:

The blurb for Janoski’s book tells us:... liberal countries rely on social openness and consequently must have a lower level of rights and obligations because citizens do not want their resources given to people freely moving in and out of their boundaries. 


By now you should be aware that this is not true. Liberal countries rely on SPYING ON THEIR CITIZENS, possibly far more than non-liberal countries that use "enticements" to make sure their people comply to the system. This is why the exposure of the spying devices by Snowden and Assange are important, yet as these devices are exposed, new laws are devised by so-called "liberal" governments to screw the population (and journalists — including the ABC) — under various excuses, such as "fighting terrorism". What the so-called "liberal" government really hate is that the people might awake to the fact they are being swindled by the rich...

the liberal anti-fascist fascists...

So it appears Antifa has scared Trump’s army of emboldened Nazis back into their hidey holes, or at least that’s the spin the Resistance is putting on the deeply weird events of last Sunday. In case you missed it, what happened was, thousands of “anti-fascist” protestors converged on the streets of the nation’s capitol to deny a platform to (or just beat the snot out of) twenty or thirty racist idiots who were trying to assemble in Lafayette Square and stand around shouting racist slogans at each other.

The organizer of this idiotic fiasco (i.e., the racist fiasco, not the protest thereof) was the same attention-seeking, racist idiot that had organized the original “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville in 2017. During that weekend, as I’m sure you’ll recall, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman, numerous other people were assaulted, and a few hundred racists in polo shirts and khakis marched around with tikki torches hollering neo-Nazi gibberish in an attempt to launch some sort of race war, or protest the removal of a statue, or something.

Last Sunday was a bit less dramatic. Basically, these twenty or thirty racists were escorted by hundreds of riot police and Secret Service to Lafayette Square, where they found themselves surrounded by thousands of protesters, many of whom intended to stomp their guts out. This must have been a bit unsettling, because the racists reportedly fled their own “rally” before they had even had the chance to holler any Nazi gibberish at each other. This was extremely disappointing for the militant “anti-fascist” contingent, which had been counting on another balls-out street fight.

According to The New York Times, a group of frustrated militant types tried to burn a Confederate flag, but it wouldn’t catch fire, so they were forced to rip it apart with their hands and jump up and down on it. Other militant “anti-fascists” threw anti-Nazi eggs at the cops, presumably as a form of “preventative self-defense,” or just to ensure that Breitbart had some video to paint them as “terrorists” with. The not-quite-so-militant “anti-fascist” contingent, most of whom never even caught a glimpse of the “emboldened” Nazis they had come to resist, apparently dispersed without incident.

The corporate media and the rest of the Resistance had been flogging this event for months. That infamous photo of the tikki torch Nazis had been repeatedly reprinted all summer long. Features on Kessler, the organizer, whose activities seem to have been mostly funded by his grandmother, with whom he had also been living, had been published in major international broadsheets. The coverage peaked going into the weekend. On Saturday, he was featured on National Public Radio, where he shared his views on “racial intelligence.” Go ahead, google him, and marvel at the amount of free publicity bestowed on this geek.

And it wasn’t just the corporate media. No, the militant “anti-fascist” left had also been also promoting this so-called “rally” as the Return of the Revenge of the Bride of Charlottesville. Affinity groups had been activated. “Anti-fascist” posters had been printed. Militant Twitter hashtags created. Snappy “anti-fascist” slogans, like “It takes a bullet to bash the fash,” and “Drive out Trump/Pence fascist regime,” had been applied to signs and banners. By Sunday morning, social media was buzzing with thousands of tweets and posts by people hoping to “punch a Nazi.” Antifa was obviously looking forward to some hardcore “preventative self-defense” … all they needed were a few hundred Nazis.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/08/19/where-have-all-the-nazis-gone/

 

Read from top.