I used to love this show as a kid. And it taught me Crispus Attucks was the first man to die in the Revolutionary War. Florida: Michael where have you been?
Michael: I was at a protest to get more Black policemen for the Ghetto!
Florida: What happened?
Michael: Oh ...some Black policemen came and broke it up!
"You're slumped in front of a screen, in the same physical situation as a TV watcher, you've just added a typewriter. And you're 'interactive.' What does that mean? It does not mean community. It's catatonic schizophrenia. So blah blah blah, communicate communicate, data data data. It doesn't mean anything more than catatonics babbling and drooling in a mental institution. Why can't we stop? How is it that five years ago there were no cell phones, and now everyone needs a cell phone? You can pick up any book by any half-brained post-Marxist jerkoff and read about how capitalism creates false needs. Yet we allow it to go on."
"Fuck The Children. The world does not need to be made safe for The Children. It needs to be made safe from ponderous dickweeds like you who want to sanitize every goddam thing imaginable for those fucking brats, who - I hate to break it to you - say and do worse on an hourly basis. And thank God for that."
"Law of Modern Warfare #001: When you bomb people for their own good, they never, ever get your point in the way you hope.
Bomb Iran, and you unite the entire nation behind the nationalist strongmen who are just waiting for the moment we hand them the rallying cry. We already helped unseat the moderate President with the whole "Axis of Evil" idiocy. This would be the cherry on the Idiot Cake.
...Rember the Soviet Union. Remember East Germany. Let the bosses rot in corruption, keep selling the kids jeans, cell phones and dreams of financial success until those trends collide. I know it doesn't stoke your need for a Grand Metaphor and Engorging Struggle for Liberty, but it's how we win. For chrissake, I'm only asking that you be as internationally engaging as REAGAN. Could you do that? Please?"
"Dissent. Dissent dissent dissent. Dissent is why people died for you. Dissent is your birthright. Dissent when a Republican is President. Dissent when a Democrat is President. Dissent when your party is out of power, dissent when they are in. Your alliance is to the Constitution, not a party. You are a citizen of a nation of laws, not loyalties.
There is no wrong time for dissent -- good policy or truth is never harmed by having a greater light turned upon it. A war plan that can't survive pointed questions can hardly stand up against cunning enemies.
Remember why treason is the only crime specifically described in the Constitution -- because the Founding Fathers knew that charge would be the first out of the bag when the Powerful became uneasy, and they wanted to make sure it couldn't be abused. The Founding Fathers knew the first ones to call treason are the bastards.
Never, ever forget that.
Dissent dissent dissent. Question, probe, doubt doubt DOUBT until even the leaders you agree with beg forbearance with ragged voices. The ease with which the best men will become if not corrupt with power, far too comfortable with it, is frightening. Our will to dissent, to question, saves both them and us, their souls and our freedom."
"On the first page of its founding manifesto, the massively funded Department of Homeland Security intones, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon."
But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?
One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered."
"But the ideological struggle we are engaged in here in America is not with Islamism, it is with the messianic view that the United States should go out and start wars everywhere 'with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world'. The result of his hubristic imperial view is endless war, domestic economic catastrophe, more terrorism and loss of freedom at home.
Unfortunately for us, many of those who oppose Bush are just as bad on this policy. If the Republicans are replaced by Democrats, we will not see an end to American imperialism. Remember that the Democrats — Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson — labored under the same delusional belief in American world hegemony as does Bush, and many of them still do. We will not live peaceful lives until our own government acts in a peaceful manner. As John Quincy Adams said in 1821:
Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America’s heart, her benedictions and prayers, but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator of her own. "
"I think someone should try to blow up a plane with a piece of ID, just to watch the TSA's mind implode."
"And yet, I get no end of flack for the tofu on my plate. You'd think I were cutting into a heaping pile of fly-infested cow shit for all the raised eyebrows and snide asides I get. A few things:
...What's up with the gender politics over dinner? I don't get my masculinity from my plate, I get it by driving my enemies before me, and hearing the lamentations of their women. Do girls get a lot of shit for eating vegetarian? Or is it just us Y chromosomes who people look at like we're slapping on lilac aftershave?
• I'm not judging you. If you think I am, you probably just feel bad about eating meat, and should better reconcile yourself to your culinary choices. The percentage of items on my plate that survived through photosynthesis really has no bearing on the morality of steak. "
"I've nearly had to scream at relatives before who kept pushing and pushing the lard-laden gravy on me at Thanksgiving, which is a habit that only started up in response to deciding not to eat of the four-legged mooing members of the planet. I never ate gravy before, because I don't like it. But now my habits are taken as a de facto criticism of anyone who doesn't share them."
"Another benefit of using the proper nomenclature is that doing so tends to linguistically wrongfoot the Islamofascists. Monikers like Islamicists, Militant Islam, militants, Mujahadeen, and jihadis are points of pride to these people. Why are we acceding to their attempts at self-branding? They're islamofascists. Let's attach that powerful word -- fascism -- to its proper recipients and let them explain why they're really something else."
"The term 'Islamofascist' is utterly without meaning, but packed with emotional explosives. It is a propaganda creation worthy Dr. Goebbels, and the latest expression of the big lie technique being used by neocons in Washington's propaganda war against its enemies in the Muslim World.
...Highly conservative and militaristic regimes are not necessarily fascist, says Paxton. True fascism requires relentless aggression abroad and a semi-religious adoration of the regime at home.
...It is grotesque watching the Bush Administration and Tony Blair maintain the ludicrous pretense they are re-fighting World War II. The only similarity between that era and today is the cultivation of fear, war fever and racist-religious hate by US neoconservatives and America’s religious far right, which is now boiling with hatred for anything Muslim.
Under the guise of fighting a "third world war" against "Islamic fascism," America’s far right is infecting its own nation with the harbingers of WWII totalitarianism.
...There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism.
The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America’s allies.
"Genuine American fascists are on the run, and part of their survival strategy is to redefine the term 'fascism' so it can't be applied to them any more. Most recently, George W. Bush said: 'This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.'
In fact, the Islamic fundamentalists who apparently perpetrated 9/11 and other crimes in Spain and the United Kingdom are advocating a fundamentalist theocracy, not fascism.
But theocracy - the merging of religion and government - is also on the plate for the new American fascists (just as it was for Hitler, who based the Nazi death cult on a "new Christianity" that would bring "a thousand years of peace"), so they don't want to use that term, either.
While the Republicans promote the term "Islamo-fascism," the rest of the world is pushing back, as the BBC noted in an article by Richard Allen Greene ("Bush's Language Angers US Muslims" - 12 August 2006):
"Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that the term [Islamic fascists] was meaningless.
"'There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,' he said. 'This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs.'"
Their beliefs are, quite simply, that governments of the world should be subservient to religion, a view shared by a small but significant part of today's Republican party. But that is not fascism - the fascists in the US want to exploit the fundamentalist theocrats to achieve their own fascistic goals."
"The words 'fascism,' 'Nazi,' and 'communist' must've focus-grouped really well because we are getting them despite very little overlap with the actual totalitarian theocratic ideology that drives today's acts of terror against the West. Fascism seems especially inapt: Industrialized, anti-communist trade unionism, strong nation-state identification; highly militarized, but not necessarily expansionist. Stop me when the Islamic suicide bomber pops in your head.
...If the Bush administration is looking for word to scare voters into supporting Republicans, or even simply a better, more descriptive term for groups who wage irregular war on the United States, let's turn to another bloody, violent group, the Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, in fact, is in many ways a better template for al Qaida than fascist nation-states.
The Klan was part resistance movement, part terrorist organization, part opposition government, and it excelled at propaganda. It was aggressively Protestant, regional in outlook, built on extended informal, often family, networks, and as Jesse Walker noted last year, at one time included a fair amount of good government, social service-type concerns.
This begins to sound more like Hezbollah or Hamas, except for the Protestant part. And there's more. The Klan enforced Taliban or Wabbahist-like codes against immoral behavior. As Jesse put it, "These Klansmen were more likely to flog you for bootlegging or breaking your marriage vows than for being black or Jewish.""
"A lot of people into the whole Zen thing don't want to take it all the way. They're in love with the idea of becoming one with the Universe, as long as they can exclude the people and things they don't like. But you can't do that. No exclusions allowed. No substitutions. If you want to be one with everything, you need to be prepared for what that really means. I don't think most of us are.
When you find yourself faced with unpleasant authority, you need to question it. That's for sure. But question that authority all the way. This means you must also question your reaction to authority. Question why you chafe against it. That is just as important."
