The WikiLeaks News: Egypt On The Move And A Debate.
Roots of the Egyptian Revolutionary Moment
Ezzeldin: Egyptian uprising is the product of years of worker's strikes and student protests - now inspired by the Tunisian people January 29, 2011
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Mohammed Ezzeldin: The Egyptian people trust the army over the police, but Mubarak is still commander-in-chief January 29, 2011
With Egypt In Chaos, a new WikiLeaks cable threatens to stir unrest in Libya. The Daily Beast’s Philip Shenon reports on the bad behavior and lavish parties fueling Muammar Qaddafi's new PR problem. Plus, Full Coverage Of The Egypt Uprising.
Posted by Robert Lipsyte at 9:01am, January 30, 2011.
If you are still passionately following football or, worse, allowing your kid to play, you may just be an old-fashioned imperialist running dog. Not that all football fans are bloodthirsty hounds feeding off the crippled hindquarters of the dying animal of empire. Some are in a vain search for a crucible of manhood that no longer exists. Others are in pursuit of a ticket out of a dead-end life.
Whatever your reason, this is the Super Bowl to watch, even if you are among those who have made an effort to disregard the game since high school jocks shouldered you in the halls.
This is the Big One. Maybe the Last Big One. Never before have so many loose strands of an unraveling empire come together in a single event accessible to those who mourn or cheer America.
Let’s start with the conceit that this game is the only super thing we have left. Super power, super economy, super you-name-it… gone. You can beat the Bushes for that, but we’re all out of super -- except for the Super Bowl. That celebration of an all-American $9 billion industry (estimated because the National Football League has never opened its books), not to mention millions more in subsidiary and dependent businesses, offers us a national holiday that has arguably superseded Thanksgiving (thanks for what?) and Christmas (electronic excess and obsolescence).
Even little Everytrader has a shot here. Without insider connections, you undoubtedly have a far better shot at winning a football wager than gambling in the stock market.
The Big Four
Here are the four biggest reasons to watch this Super Bowl.
1. It’s Not Soccer
American exceptionalism is alive and thriving on Super Bowl Sunday. National Football League franchises are overwhelmingly owned, managed, and manned by American citizens. Neither immigration nor foreign capital has made a perceptible dent in the game. And you and I have proudly subsidized all this. American taxpayers have built many NFL stadiums. Most American universities, with their government grants, have sports schools attached; those multi-million-dollar athletic departments (despite claims, they are rarely profitable) train the players and one of academia’s latest revenue-producing innovations -- sports management departments -- train the front-office personnel.
American football is barely played outside the country. Call it a failure of colonialism (as baseball and basketball might), but it’s really a tribute to good old-fashioned protectionism. Those other major sports, even ice hockey, are increasingly being taken over by Latin American, Asian, or Eastern European guest workers. Pro football remains a native game.
The “futbol” that most of the rest of the world plays is a game that American male athletes and sports fans have never found compelling. Why? What’s not to like? The so-called “beautiful game” is exactly that, and the past several generations of American school-age girls and boys were lucky to have recreational soccer programs. But there was no room on the sports “shelf” for a game so poorly suited to commercial TV interruption and American domination.
(It’s not as if soccer is in any way effete. Its fans are famously thuggish. In fact, currently, the nationalistic Russian mobs who roam cities beating up people who do not look Slavic have taken to calling themselves “Soccer fans.”)
2. No Dogs Were Harmed in the Making of It
The controversy over allowing Michael Vick back into the select company of other NFL felons -- reportedly about one-fifth of the playing population -- faded after the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback showed contrition, spoke to schoolchildren, proved to be one of the most electrifying performers in the in the game,and then lost early in the play-offs, avoiding the embarrassment of PETA demonstrating at the Super Bowl.
At 30, Vick was clearly better than he had been before his 21-month imprisonment. He had added a previously missing work ethic and level of concentration. One wonders if the sharpening of Vick’s focus had to do with losing what might have been his primary outlet for sadism and violence: the brutal world of training fighting dogs and then killing the losers in often unspeakably cruel ways.
There is no question that violence stirs fan blood. Football players know this; they have been remarkably hostile to attempts to soften the mayhem, especially those ringing helmet-to-helmet shots, an offspring of the modern technique learned in PeeWee leagues of “putting a hat on him” (which means tackling headfirst rather than the more traditional style of wrapping one’s arms around the ball carrier’s legs and dragging him down).
Most pro football players seem to be on the side of the hats. A more careful game won’t be football anymore, they say. It won’t be the American game -- even for some of the doctors watching who treat the “epidemic of concussions blazing through schoolboy football.”
3. But No Chicks
The title of Mariah Burton Nelson’s 1994 book, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, seems ever more prescient. The so-called feminization of America (really the slow movement toward equality) is reflected in most sports, many boardrooms, and the military. Resistance is stiff, from human resources violations to rape. Conservatives keen over the suffering of the average male. It’s tough when you suddenly have to compete against an expanding talent pool that includes women who are better than you. Mr. Average Mediocre can no longer count on his members-only credential to keep him in the game. Unless, of course, the game is football.
Football is the last estrogen-free zone. No wonder high school and college teams have such bloated rosters. (College teams routinely “dress” 85 men, compared to a pro team’s 53.) This gives more boys the chance to imagine themselves in the testosterone club, even if many of them hardly ever get into a game. Later, as jock alums, they will donate to alma mater and speak reverently of how old coach taught them to be men -- or at least not women.
Yes, there are girls playing in some youth and high school games, even in college, mostly as kickers. But the freakishness of it is still the story. The NFL is so relentlessly misogynistic that off-field incidents like those involving Brett Favre when he was a Jet and Super Bowl-bound Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger tend to be dismissed as boys-will-be-boys antics.
Unfortunately, there’s a certain logic to this: since they began playing the game, they’ve been told they can be real men, not girls, not sissies -- if they submit to Coach, play hard, and play in pain. In return, their perks and entitlements will be those of conquering warriors.
4. The Faux Volunteer Army
If football really is the bread and circuses of this dying empire, the injuries suffered by the gladiators (disproportionately African-American) make the game more real, more urgent. And their willingness to take the risks absolves us from blame. After all, they volunteered. They really want to play this game, the media reminds us. These aggressive, competitive men have an intrinsic need to prove themselves to themselves, each other, and us. And where else, the media asks us, would they make so much money and find so much acclaim?
At Goldman Sachs? The Mayo Clinic? Skadden, Arps? No, no, these sturdy lads are often from the underclass and they have leveraged their skill and dedication into some college studies and a job in football. That many of these gladiators, clearly smart enough to absorb complicated game plans, feel that football is their only shot seems to be an indictment of American opportunity. What about all those high school and college football players who put all their chips in their hat and still didn’t make it to the pros?
Maybe some of them joined the National Guard.
It’s here, of course, that the entire metaphor may go offsides for you. Or at least become uncomfortable. Football -- Army? Gladiators -- mercenaries? What about all the strong young men and, increasingly, women who feel that their only shot at getting an education and a meaningful life is joining the military during wartime?
The author and journalist Richard Reeves made the connection neatly when he wrote: “We have a volunteer army, the National Football League with guns, and we are the spectators.”
As spectators we rarely see the young people die in either volunteer legion. Restrictions during the Bush years on journalists filming combat deaths or even showing returning caskets kept the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at a comfortable remove until they became distant and routine. Old news. Maybe even a little boring for people without loved ones on active duty.
On NFL broadcasts, players with broken bones and torn tissues are quickly carted off lest their teammates lose heart. For those of us watching on TV, the collisions seem almost like cartoon hits. How can those players just pop back up? Is it the pride, the adrenaline, that allows them to pretend they are made of steel? Of course, the real damage, the dementia brought on by head trauma, is years, even decades, away.
It’s hard to believe how recently the concussion discussion began in earnest, as if players hadn’t been hit in the head for more than a century. It was launched several years ago by the revelation that former pro football players were being diagnosed with dementia, and even dying from suspected long-term brain trauma, at disproportionate rates for their age. It was helped along by a number of workers’ compensation cases and the superb reporting of Alan Schwarz of the New York Times.
The concussion discussion has replaced steroids as the NFL health topic, although the issues are joined: larger players seem to be at greater risk for early death, and bulking up via steroids probably contributes to harder hits. The discussion has also raised the question of whether parents should allow their children to play the game -- years of small, unreported traumas to the head can’t be good for developing brains. It even occasioned a rare but telling ESPN column on abolition.
Lest you consider this enough piling on the all-American game, labor troubles loom with a lock-out possible in March. Because the main issue is money -- the teams want to share less revenue (currently 60%) with the players -- the media tends to characterize the conflict as “billionaires versus millionaires.” Actually, most owners are rich from other businesses and would not have been allowed into the NFL unless they were financially secure, while few players survive more than about three years in the league. The owners also want to increase production (adding two games to the regular season) without taking more responsibility for health-care costs.
If any of this sounds depressingly like real life, how could you not watch what might be the last Super Bowl, the endgame of empire, the two-minute warning before America finally beats itself?
Robert Lipsyte, the Jock Culture correspondent for Tomdispatch.com, is author of a forthcoming memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter (May, Ecco-HarperCollins). To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast video interview in which Lipsyte discusses what makes football all-American
Up until World War II, progressives were the same as fascists, but dropped the term due to public outcry. Aside from killing millions of Jews, Hitler had extremely liberal political policies and highly regulatory government agencies (such as universal healthcare).
The foundation of fascism in part came from the progressive movement especially economically. The racism is better termed as Hitlerism because national socialism and fascism is a system. Antisemitism etc is the Hitlerism part. Its both known to be the third way.They are all very hostile to individualism, especially in the field of economics. Fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. Hence private property is in name only. Do not confuse classical liberalism with what passes as "liberalism" today. I will illustrate:
H.G. Wells was of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the inspiration for Huxley's Brave New World). Wells didn't coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become "liberal fascists" and "enlightened Nazis," he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932.
This is why the fake liberals of today call themselves "liberal". They hijacked the word after progressive was tainted with Hitler, Eugenics, population control, economic fascism, etc.
“The “progressives” who today masquerade as “liberals” may rant against “fascism”; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism.” said classical liberal Ludwig von Mises 1940
In a laudatory review of Roosevelt's 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism."
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fasci…
Roots of fascism in America:
http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hi…
Some quotes to illustrate the obvious point.
"Fascism has taken up an attitude of complete opposition to the doctrines of Liberalism, both in the political field and in the field of economics". --Benito Mussolini
Fascism is about bringing all within the State, nothing without the state. Its statism/collectivism. Also known as the religion of the state which is obvously similar to that of progressivism.
“Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.” - Benito Mussolini
Are modern liberals "economic liberals". NO .
Economic freedom goes hand and hand with individual freedom. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler were against "classical liberalism". Some call that conservative (not neoconservative) or libertarian today.
"Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism." (Source: Time Magazine; Jaunuary 2, 1939.)
As you can see, private property under fascism, like pure socialism, is controlled by the State for "the greater good" or the "public.
The foundation of fascism in part came from the progressive movement especially economically. The racism is better termed as Hitlerism because national socialism and fascism is a system. Antisemitism etc is the Hitlerism part. Its both known to be the third way.They are all very hostile to individualism, especially in the field of economics. Fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. Hence private property is in name only. Do not confuse classical liberalism with what passes as "liberalism" today. I will illustrate:
H.G. Wells was of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the inspiration for Huxley's Brave New World). Wells didn't coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become "liberal fascists" and "enlightened Nazis," he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932.
This is why the fake liberals of today call themselves "liberal". They hijacked the word after progressive was tainted with Hitler, Eugenics, population control, economic fascism, etc.
“The “progressives” who today masquerade as “liberals” may rant against “fascism”; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism.” said classical liberal Ludwig von Mises 1940
In a laudatory review of Roosevelt's 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism."
Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fasci…
Roots of fascism in America:
http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hi…
Some quotes to illustrate the obvious point.
"Fascism has taken up an attitude of complete opposition to the doctrines of Liberalism, both in the political field and in the field of economics". --Benito Mussolini
Fascism is about bringing all within the State, nothing without the state. Its statism/collectivism. Also known as the religion of the state which is obvously similar to that of progressivism.
“Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.” - Benito Mussolini
Are modern liberals "economic liberals". NO .
Economic freedom goes hand and hand with individual freedom. Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler were against "classical liberalism". Some call that conservative (not neoconservative) or libertarian today.
"Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany's bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food- stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism." (Source: Time Magazine; Jaunuary 2, 1939.)
As you can see, private property under fascism, like pure socialism, is controlled by the State for "the greater good" or the "public.
Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.,a forensic psychiatrist, explains the madness of liberalism in his new book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. You can read an excerpt below, and read more at his website libertymind.com.
Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating.
The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.
What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character.
None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism.
In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”
The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship.
Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.
It should be apparent by now that these social policies and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage. The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error.
Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.
As is the case in all personality disturbance, defects of this type represent serious failures in development processes. The nature of these failures is detailed below. Among their consequences are the liberal mind’s relentless efforts to misrepresent human nature and to deny certain indispensable requirements for human relating. In his efforts to construct a grand collectivist utopia—to live what Jacques Barzun has called “the unconditioned life” in which “everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways”—the radical liberal attempts to actualize in the real world an idealized fiction that will mitigate all hardship and heal all wounds. (Barzun 2000).
He acts out this fiction, essentially a Marxist morality play, in various theaters of human relatedness, most often on the world’s economic, social and political stages. But the play repeatedly folds. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, the radical liberal’s attempts to create a brave new socialist world have invariably failed. At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century his attempts continue to fail in the stagnant economies, moral decay and social turmoil now widespread in Europe.
An increasingly bankrupt welfare society is putting the U.S. on track for the same fate if liberalism is not cured there. Because the liberal agenda’s principles violate the rules of ordered liberty, his most determined efforts to realize its visionary fantasies must inevitably fall short. Yet, despite all the evidence against it, the modern liberal mind believes his agenda is good social science. It is, in fact, bad science fiction. He persists in this agenda despite its madness.
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