Peter Van Buren: Freedom’s Just Another Word

Here’s what’s left of democracy in America.

We had an election, and the candidate favored by Washington, media, and many business elites did not win. Here’s what happened next.

  • CIA unambiguously but without documentation or evidence presented says, via anonymous leaks, that Russia interceded in the election to help elect Donald Trump.
  • Democratic Congresspeople, alongside several media outlets, have called for investigations into whether or not Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the election. That would be an impeachable offense, a criminal offense, treason.
  • The underlying message is that the Russians believe Trump as president will so favor them (for some reason) that they risk war, or a cyber version of war, to see him in power. Trump’s legitimacy is now undermined, and his every action toward the Soviet Union Russia will be tainted.
  • Meanwhile, Jill Stein, as proxy for Hillary Clinton, raised $7 million over a long weekend after claiming the vote count in three key states was wrong and/or the counting machines (not connected to the web) were hacked and cannot be trusted. A recount could have sent Clinton to the White House.
  • Clinton supporters continue to try and get the Electoral College to do something it has never done in some 220 years, select a candidate who did not win the most electoral votes.
  • Hillary Clinton has re-emerged, making speeches and public appearances, concurrent with all of the above.
  • Democrats as a group continue to insist winning the popular vote entitles Clinton to… something.
  • Clinton supporters earlier claimed the FBI interceded in the election to defeat Clinton.
  • Candidate Clinton claimed during a debate the now president-elect is a stooge working on behalf of Putin, literal treason.

This is banana republic crap, people, that looks to negate the votes of some 62 million Americans. We no longer believe in our own system. When the candidate many people did not support wins, the response is to seek to negate the democratic process, via accusations that make McCarthy in the 1950s look like a sad amateur.

What we have are anonymous voices at an intelligence agency supposedly dedicated to foreign intel saying the Russians helped elect our next president. That says the process is flawed and cannot be trusted, and that Trump will owe a debt to the Russians and can’t be trusted. It will keep alive the idea that Clinton should have won if not for this meddling and undermine for his term the legitimacy of Trump. Via the classification process, the CIA will only need to make public the snippets of info that support its contention.

This is an attempted coup as sure as it would be if there were tanks on the White House lawn. The CIA might as well have tried to shoot Trump during his next trip to Dallas.

To date, all of these accusations have been based on anonymous sources and leaks. The president of the United States remains silent.

America, our goose is cooked. You worry about an autocracy? It doesn’t have to be in one man. It can be via an Agency.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.

21 thoughts on “Peter Van Buren: Freedom’s Just Another Word”

  1. Well, the “many people” number is 53% of the votes cast. It would be “only” 52% of the other Sock Puppet, Ms Clinton, had “won” Neither side can actually claim a victory and instead we’ll have a great deal of dissent for either one of the wannabee Emperor or Empress. Good dissent. The Tea Party had a high old time protesting real health care, their protests were organized and funded by the Insurance and Banking Lobbies. So their Corporate Masters got some (More of) Corporate Welfare at everybody else’s expense.

    I don’t see Mr Trump doing anything to stop the wars because they’re corporate welfare and he’s the ultimate Welfare Queen. And if the Recount does fall to Hillary, we won’t have won anything but we aren’t any more or less the losers in the transaction.

    1. Er, the history of democracy is the history of forcing the hand of the sovereign by rival elites.

      Power devolved from the Royals to nobles then freemen via power concessions to a legislature. Its never been purely about what The People want, save that distant history when The People were essential stakeholders in their tribe and clan based warbands and a high degree of direct consensus was needed.

      Democracy today is not entirely a sham insofar as governing legitimacy requires elite factions to win some popular stamp of approval. This is a very recent social victory marking the true end of backwards medieval societies.

      Democracy is a group decision making process; its not simply who gets the most votes unless the system says so, and the American democratic system never said that at the national level. While not truly proportional representation, it was state-based representation.

      All Americans lose if Trump loses the EC, because rejecting state-based voting requires a Constitutional amendment The People have not yet signed onto.

      The Electoral College is regulated at the State level, and by formal State law and established informal precedent, no states allow Elector independence and electors affirm the EC victory. The EC by original intent, has always been to second-guess a national popular vote. Hilary never came close to a state-based victory, and her popular margin is still insignificant compared to the total number of votes cast. Popularly, neither candidate had a meaningful victory, but there is no minimum vote requirement.

      The point of democracy is to ensure all voices count. Its not undemocratic if a larger state population is handicapped against a smaller state pop, if the intent is to give a potential minority population a more meaningful voice nationally.

      Normally an EC win translates into a pop win as well, but the urban-rural polarization of America means that this wasn’t possible. The system worked insofar as state voices have primacy; a handful of populous coastal states could not carry the election against the majority of interior states.

      Democracy today is a system where swords are replaced with ballots. Rejecting election results moves towards a return to the sword. This is very serious.

      The rejection of the electoral process is a Big Deal. It took hundreds of years to convince elites and their minions not to resort to actual armed force. That’s unraveling before our eyes, as van Buren describes, not unlike a banana republic, which don’t get (and never were intended to get) democracy.

      People who sit out elections are not keeping their hands clean; not participating functionally becomes a vote for the winner and being drafted into that regime, however it comes about.

      This includes the tyranny of anarchy, should the system collapse, and the costs that come with that as well.

      1. Sir, I am under neither legal nor more importantly Morally constraint to consider the failed-at-birth “Expressed Original Consent” of dictatorial perverts such as Jefferson and Washington to form my political opinions. The EC was established to protect the “property rights” of people who claimed ownership of human beings who were kidnapped into perpetual slavery. Tom Jefferson wasn’t an exception to the norm among slaveholders, the entire institution has a built-in privilege of sexual exploitation which in a more civilized context would be called rape. And if you feel that involuntary compelled labor and denial of liberty is a dead issue, we had in Colorado in the election a Ballot Initiative to legalize it. A month ago in case you’re wondering.

        The Hypocritical “founding fathers” disallowed 99% of the people in the US during the first election, 43,782 votes out of 4 million inhabitants. One of the ‘founders’, John Adams, wrote that they wished to institute a governance of Law and not men.
        He also signed into law a statute against “sedition” of which I gather you believe I’m committing along with all other resistance workers in the US.

        The president-select has, in a “newspaper” he partly owns, allowed without dissent or even comment to publish stories which claim he will “destroy” his enemies, enemies being defined as anyone who speaks against him or his policies. That’s very much like dictatorship. That the Duopoly essentially shoved all dissenting parties to one side, effectively controlling the election to one or another of two candidates who work for the same party. Calling the two factions of that party Democratic and Republican doesn’t really hide the fact that they’re one entity. Such an entity being the sole governance of any political unit is the first factor in the definition of Fascism. Facilitated by the EC.

        To say it was the Original Intent of any group isn’t valid. They stated in the Declaration a mirror of their personal opinion, and their perversion of slavery. The Property Rights mentioned included Human Beings who were deprived of any representation, what’s that catch line the Tea Party chants at their Hate Rallies, No Taxation Without Representation, right?
        And many of the people who use the term Libertarian agree with them on several issues. One being that liberty belongs only to white people and even then only the wealthiest. Like Trump and Clinton.
        The slaves and Native Americans and women and people without property weren’t represented Then nor Now. Although the slaves and other disenfranchised groups were counted in the calculations of the EC. The slaves a 3/5th of a person apiece. No representation, but taxed privately by their rich-bitch owners. Taxed first by being denied any liberty, even to the point that they were not permitted to learn to read. Under pain of death. The “domestic insurrections” Jefferson wrote into the Declaration were slaves liberated by the British.
        The “savage Indians” the British were accused of turning on the colonies, the US had treaties with some tribes and so did the British. The main difference was the British left their families in England instead of using them as Human Shields.

        Pure racism and shameful hypocrisy.
        I personally am not going to consider the pronouncements of dead men, governing from beyond the grave, who spoke and wrote such magnificent and swelling words about equality and freedom and denied the basics of those concepts to most of the population.

        Except as a contrarian role, you know, my own personal reactionary beliefs.

        As for Trump “destroying” anybody who doesn’t bow down to his rule, we’ll see about that. I realize the pronouncements and threats are owned or at least filtered by his lunatic fanatic followers, or so everybody says. But The Donald has a long record of suing anybody who dares speak against his Royal Majesty. Why isn’t he suing the Klan and others who keep loudly shrieking that he represents them? That’s quite a personal anomaly on his part.

        1. (Reply attempt #7 total revision)

          Is this a roundabout way of saying you want President Hilary without actually saying you want President Hilary? You could have saved a lot of effort by simply admitting being a Hilary supporter.

          That is the likely end result of a Trump coup, President Hilary. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein combined were electoral non-entities.

          Functionally, there were only two contenders, Trump and Clinton.

          There is no minimum voter participation requirement validating elections. There is no opt-out-of-governance option for non-voters; they just voted by absence for the winner. The election was fought by stat-based electoral college precinct, not by national popular vote.

          A little disingenuous to hide that inevitable material outcome behind liberal libertarian rhetoric.

          1. It is exactly as you said, there are only two candidates, and we must choose between the two even though they are both different faces on the same Establishment Beast, alle sieg heil am der beast….

            It’s a rigged electorate and a rigged election just like the ones imposed on Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, with or without the machine gun toting thugs lurking in and around the polls to make sure nobody would vote for a Ba’ath or Taliban candidate and of course all Ba’ath and Taliban voters were disenfranchised at the start.

            By the way those Gun-toting thugs were US and British Soldiers, publicly subsidized, and even the ones who had Regular Army credentials were acting as mercenaries for the Corporate Overlords, the ones who chose the candidates WE are allowed to elect.

            I do math, a lot, autistic you know,…but since 6% approximately of the Popular vote were for neither, there should be at least 1% (non-Corporate Fascist) of the EC vote and that’s a very conservative estimate particularly in the three states of the recount. And there’s not one of the so-called “independent” and non-partisan Electors going to a Green candidate with a heavy recent history of support in the three states. Or the other 47 states and the various conquered territories.

            Recounts are legitimate and any candidate can request one. It’s really appeasement to keep us peasants in line, but it is legitimate. Well within the boundaries of the law, even if it is a new excuse for the two-candidate single-party to lie to us and make it sound good.

            Either way the resistance is in place.

            And the resistance has a good chance of winning, in the long term. No matter which of the Wonder Twins gets selected. My God is my witness, they even look like brother and sister. They both have investments in the “owners” of lands domestic and foreign which were taken at Government Subsidized Military Gun-point Actions, like, for instance, every square inch of the current U.S. territory. Real Estate, Mineral Extraction, all of it on blood-stained stolen land.

            The standoff at Standing Rock isn’t over yet, Hillary and Obama just put off any decision until he at least is out of office. It’s a really good metaphor for the entire nation. And Trump made a big gesture of divesting his shares in the DAPL. Maybe it’s because he intends to call off the National Guard mercenaries and go with the Regular Army mercenaries to finish off the New Wounded Knee or Little Ouachita massacre.

            It would be very convenient if he (or Hillary) doesn’t have a conflict of interest when it happens, assuming the public attention is drawn away. The resistance is not going to let that happen. Wounded Knee and the other fascist massacres didn’t have any witnesses beside the parties involved.

            Neither of the two faces of the Single-party “democracy” have actually done a god-damn thing to finally allow us as in Natives and us as in everybody else in America to have the full citizenship and actual equality enjoyed by Elitists like Hillary or Trump. They were born rich and born to privilege. Neither of them actually did any work with their own hands, ever, and both have spent the past 4 decades crusading against Workers Rights.

            But both say they represent the workers. Both LIE.

          2. Autism may help explain, but not excuse your bubble of fragmented logic and wrong facts. Repeating failed arguments long debunked is a hypocrisy far from flattering claims of ‘resistance’ to tyranny.

            All Americans legally have the rights of ‘privileged white male landowners’ now, Trump is demonstrably not a racist, and the real resistance is trying to avoid a breakdown into governmental anarchy thanks to extremist neocon/neoliberal/CIA gamesmanship. The resistance to doing stupid stuff does not have a great record of success, but its far more powerful than whatever you’re calling resistance.

            Your original argument that the Constitution is invalid because it was written by racist dead white men, is nonsense. However dubious the original spirit of Constitutional provisions, essential basics – particularly the Bill of Rights – were very universal in wording. Under rule of law, written words of law are legally binding, not unwritten intent and spirit. Regardless of unwritten intent and common ignorance, what is lawful is that which has been established by legal precedent and ongoing agreeable exercise of law as it has been lawfully written. The inevitable logical momentum of the Bill of Rights resulted in the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments, as well as statutory civil rights and reversed unconstitutional Supreme Court judgements.

            That is why the rule of law is more important than the rule of men, because powerful men (and women) are capricious, biased, and prone to err against reason unless disciplined to law compelling them to be at least civil.

            The real resistance, as it was from day one, is rejection of the ills of the Old World tyrants and their authoritarian minions. While inconsistently enforced, again, all Americans technically have rights equal to and perhaps beyond, the original white men of privilege and property who wrote the U.S. Constitution.

            Few want America to be ruled by a bunch of lawless emo snowflakes; most want their Constitutional Rights and Freedoms respected as inalienable and independent of possessing capricious political favour,.

            The point of the 9/11 necon-neoliberal Deep State coup was to revoke that universality of right and quasi-suspend the Constitution, revoking civil rights advances. TheDeep Statists apparently want those rights to become privileges again, where even the richest of men bend knee to the whims of princeling lackeys and flunkeys of the Sovereign. As billionaire Trump seems to be finding out personally.

            The Deep State probably also understands some of its elements are unconstitutional and the Political Question Doctrine loophole could be closed to hang them good.

            Second, Trump is on record as not being racist. In Trump’s first excursion into Presidential politics, Ross Perot’s Reform Party in 2000, Trump quit, specifically citing Reform party admittance of noted racist David Duke. So David Duke has an axe to grind with Trump, and no better weapon than to claim he supports Trump.

            Scott Alexander wrote a powerful blog entry regarding baseless ‘crying wolf’ over Trump. Look it up. In the meantime very powerful mainstream media commentators accuse Trump of being racist, but Trump is not suing them any more than the far less dangerous Klansmen. It seems Trump will respect freedom of speech rather than drop money on an endless string of pointless defamation lawsuits, few of which would pay for themselves.

            Informed POCs probably find it interesting that Trump is given the ‘uppity POC’ treatment by powerful whites and Hilary liberals appear to embody today’s too-fashionable polite racism.

            Trump has ignored Standing Rock; for now there is nothing he can do that would stick. A CIA coup against him is probably more concerning just at the moment.

            Maybe its all theatre, but then, JFK was theatre too. Trump fights in the open though, so unlike Kennedy its a lot harder to be jumped by the shadows. Everyone knows if anything happens to Trump, the CIA unambiguously takes the fall.

          3. “There is no minimum voter participation requirement validating elections. There is no opt-out-of-governance option for non-voters; they just voted by absence for the winner.”

            Correct, the existing system doesn’t call for its own validation by a minimum voter participation requirement.

            On the other hand IF there’s even a POSSIBILITY of any government being legitimate, that possibility rests on the consent of the governed. More than half of Americans either declined, or were not allowed to, give such consent by voting in general. Nearly 80% declined to give such consent to either Trump or Clinton in particular.

            There were multiple contenders. Your opinion of whether or not they were “functional” is irrelevant.

          4. Consent of the governed implies acceptance of the system, not the personalities of an election. Consent comes in many forms.

            Voter non-participation doesn’t indicate anything about what the non-voters are consenting too. Maybe they’re protesting the system, or maybe they decided to stay home and watch TV in total apathy unaware it was election day.

            I’m assuming they’re consenting to go along with whomever wins, because unless they actually move out of the country, that’s all their electoral non-action will materially – functionally – amount to; support for the winner and consent to being ruled by the system.

            Some non-voters could revolt violently, but its far harder to cast bullets than ballots. So if they’re not voting even in protest, they’re probably not going to start shooting either.

            Some non-voters could Occupy somewhere and be totally economically non-productive for four years, which too many Americans already do as under-reported denizens of out-of-the-way tent cities. The homeless don’t seem to want to move to someplace more prominent, like the Fed building, asking for helicopter money. The non-voters appear similarly disinclined to greater symbolic action.

            Of course, the wannabe ‘freeman on the land’ non-voter could join the grey or even black market underground economy of gangs and secret societies and false prophets of ‘resistance’ and get by playing the faux rebellion game as parasites of the white economy of law-abiding taxpayers crumbling about them.

            This last solution, the underground ‘resistance’ generally, involves profiteering from a system of decay as surely as any crooked government contractor cheating the public purse. It means corruption and mal-governance now works for them and becomes a kind of backhanded consent insofar as actually overthrowing the government would remove the righteous pretext for profitable illicit activity.

            Haters gotta hate and crooks gotta be crooked, but the law-abiding patriots who love their country will try to make America great again.

          5. “Voter non-participation doesn’t indicate anything about what the non-voters are consenting too. ”

            Obviously.

            What it DOES indicate is that they are not, through the instrumentality of voting, consenting to anything.

          6. That’s only one interpretation. Non-voters could just as easily not care who wins and will consent to any result. If they register but don’t show up, or don’t register at all… are they rejecting the candidates? The system? Are they really protesting or just apathetic or what? It doesn’t matter in terms of legal outcome.

            Party partisans hate independents; there is no incentive to quantify let alone give legal meaning to non-participation. Partisans would be thrilled if every independent non-partisan stayed home and not make trouble by potentially voting against their horse.

            At least voting for a protest candidate or ‘none of the above’ would indicate a rejection of the other candidates. ‘None of the above’ according to the Wiki is only available in Nevada (as None of These Candidates). This suggests not voting at all with no penalty is part of the system, therefore not voting is supporting the system. Stupid as that sounds, if you want to make your non-vote matter, you actually have to go out there and make sure non-participation legally matters via voting reform movements.

            Not voting at all is left totally ambiguous in discernible intent. Functionally its support for the winner as the winner certainly wasn’t opposed in any way by non-voters.

            I fully understand what you are trying to say, and maybe I’m having trouble explaining my answer. The American electoral system appears rigged to ignore a non-confidence vote-by-abstention in itself or its candidates, and flip a ‘negative vote’ towards the answer it wants – consent – whether non-voting dissenters mean for that to happen or not.

            The only way anyone knows your particular abstention is an attempt at responsible protest and statement of non-confidence, is because you said so. No-one makes a big deal about the fact that neither Hilary or Trump has a majority of eligible voters because only those who actually voted really count legally matter.

          7. “Non-voters could just as easily not care who wins and will consent to any result.”

            Sure, they could.

            But if they weren’t ASKED (those under 18, convicted felons in some states, etc.), they can’t plausibly be said to have consented.

            And if they WERE asked and didn’t answer, they can’t plausibly be said to have consented either. No answer is no answer, not “yes.”

            You’re correct that there’s no way to discern the intent of the non-voter unless he or she specifically discloses that intent.

            You’re also correct that the fact that only about 1 in 5 Americans voted for each of the two major candidates is irrelevant in a legal sense.

            I’m not trying to address the legalities here. All I’m saying is that IF governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed (as the Declaration of Independence has it), THEN whether or not the governed have consented is relevant to judging a government’s legitimacy. 80% of Americans did not consent to be governed by Donald Trump. 80% of Americans did not consent to be governed by Hillary Clinton. More than half of Americans did not, at least formally, consent to be governed by any possible winner of this election.

          8. Governments are dens of skilled liars who can weaponize the half-truth against the truth and half-reason against reason and you won’t even notice you’ve holding half a bag of bum goods in buying into the ‘non-voter dissent’ fallacy.

            American voting laws essentially state, in so many words and absence of words, “American citizens have the right to not vote and remain electorally silent for reasons and motivations that may remain their own. The reasons and motivations why American non-voters remain electorally silent shall remain their own and have no further legal or official impact on the electoral process.”

            The United States has categorically rejected compulsory voting. Not voting is a consensual right.

            Consenting to exercise the right not to vote is in no way effective dissent but becomes a form of consent.

            Didn’t register? Its your right not to bother. Didn’t vote after registering? Its your right not to vote. Didn’t support any candidate let alone the winner? So what, you didn’t do anything to legally foil the winner either and you will consent to live under the results regardless.

            Someone who forgot to vote or even register to vote, is negligent, not dissenting but any non-voter dead weight adds momentum to a system that says the winner is now the representative of his supporters, his opponents supporters, and everyone else who consents to be an American citizen. Trump’s your President, and if its any consolation, he’s morally obligated to consider your concerns in the interests of post-electoral reconciliation before doing whatever he thinks is best.

            No partisan really cares if no-one votes against their candidate. No partisan cares if the best minds suited for dissent lack sufficient numbers to demand better platforms and greater accountability because they thought not doing anything was meaningful dissent.

            No mechanism of cause-effect exists to support the belief not-voting is meaningful dissent. ‘Consent of the governed’ is an ideal with no discernible enforcement mechanism [edit] save the existing consent mechanisms.

            Someone who deliberately refuses to vote, has been fooled into conceding his or her voice to partisan abusers of the electoral system who don’t want too many thinking independent voters in the system questioning their horse.

            As a result, few Americans are motivated to make their vote count, or perceive the need to improve the quality of their vote through reforms to representation (such as ranked choice voting and proportional representation) and accountability (by improving measures against voter fraud).

            The fact that Van Buren is writing about a CIA attempt to overthrow an electoral outcome, is clear evidence of the value of voting over not voting at all. The Trumpian revolt got a reaction no amount of non-voting could ever achieve.

            Jill Stein’s astonishingly clever recount gambit also supports the importance of voting, cleverly verifying Trumps win (140 more votes in Wisconsin) and before being shut down, confirming suspicions of Democratic rigging.

            Hilary’s Michigan stronghold of Detroit was exposed for having more votes cast than district voters. Its possible this ‘purely accidental’ irregularity is very common in Hilary strongholds and perhaps Hilary really didn’t win the popular vote after all, but unfortunately one district isn’t a comprehensive sampling of the Hilary vote.

            By focusing on Trump states, Stein guaranteed alt-left Hilarites would pay for the recount. Jill Stein is amazing and deserves a (carefully monitored) place on Team Trump. With proper mentoring and support she could be invaluable in making America great again.

            All of this discussion is possible because people voted, as opposed to the cricket chorus accompanying concern for what non-voters want or think.

  2. This is a coup. Killary is one cockroach who just won’t die. I didn’t vote for Trump. I voted for Stein (A mistake I won’t repeat). I also don’t believe in the Electoral College. But this isn’t about right or left. It’s about right or wrong. And it is wrong for one woman to have this much power over the media and the state even after she lost in a system that she never failed to support until it failed to provide her a victory. This is no different than that sham they pulled in Brazil against Dilma. This is bullshit and no American should stand for it.

    1. There’s no victory in it. My thought, convoluted that must seem, is that the coup stars neither Hillary nor Trump. The establishment is usually not that damn sloppy they would have two extremely heinous and repugnant candidates. One coup scenario is that either of them, facing a mountain of really pissed off people, would attempt to strong-arm the opposition and fail, then some person “Knight in Shining Armor and riding a white charger” steps in to resolve the mess. Enough people give the untried beast power over the reigning beast, whichever that one is.

      I’m not forgetting that Hillary, as a New York prosecutor, and Giuliani in the same scenario, let Mr Trump bounce on all charges. And there are plenty. That opens a door that both were being as ugly as they could be, which is “exceptionally ugly” , two weeks old road-kill ugly. It puts the f in fugly. Like either one was really playing to lose.

      The outcome is just too pat. I’m autistic, I find myself explaining some of my thoughts by mentioning it. Often. I get compared to Rain Man which I never watched or read the book. Patterns … But some patterns just don’t jibe.

      A pattern that wacked out is a red flag. Both wings of the same bird in collusion, and a third party with absolutely no constituted authority, yeah, that would be a coup. What would seal the plot would be either a massive attack, which has been done, or a planned and carefully crafted economic collapse. That’s a plausible pattern and the one I’m seeing.

  3. here’s a distractive sign, out of the top 4 headlines on Yahoo news three of them are about a “celebrity” break up (some Real Etate propaganda show about flipping houses) two of the stories and one was about a football player crying about his team-mates after they lost a game. Are they into the playoffs yet? I mean, the entire league, because I could give 3/4 of a fat rat’s ass about any of it. Football and House Flipping are shows. Entertainers, people who draw the attention and oos and awws of the public while every fake recognition of our rights (if you ain’t rich you ain’t got rights, you just get the “left”overs and you get to pay for it as well) is flushed down the facilities.

    Just like the fall of Rome.

  4. “(Reply attempt #6 to reply to BrotherJonah; Antiwar keeps disappearing it.)”

    Antiwar.com’s spam filters interpret a bunch of links in a post as likely spam and hold the comment for moderation.

    I don’t know why I didn’t discover it in spam until just now (I’ve checked the spam folder three times today).

    What I do know is that the next time I find six repetitions of the same post in the spam folder, I’ll treat the poster just like other spammers and bring down the ban hammer. If it didn’t work the first time, why the hell would you expect it to work the sixth time?

    1. With no idea where a post disappears to or why it disappears for certain, there is no way for me to tell if I’m spamming.

      If the mod won’t leave a note or explain anything, then there’s no way to know what’s going on. Forum policy violation? A mod dislikes a particular post? Software quirk? A virus?

      So far, I’ve figured out, don’t link to anything on Antiwar and haven’t been doing so since. Sorry for spamming you, it was not the intent.

      If its in your spam folder, then I got lucky since most people
      spam folders without checking contents. If you consider
      the reply to be of such low quality that its spam, again my apologies.

      The links were pretty good and explained things far better.

      The intent was to impress upon Antiwar that something appeared amiss. I also sent them e-mails, but they don’t appear to have went through.

      The last time this happened, Washingtons Blog was purposely deleting my legit polite on-topic replies amid a running debate criticizing a writer’s promotion of the the fallacious and dangerous patriot meme that citizens and particularly soldiers and cops had the obligation to arrest high government officials for Constitutional crimes. A patently unlawful act that could ruin careers and result in execution for soldiers found guilty of mutiny, and costly civil suits for persons found guilty of false arrest.

      Links had nothing to do with the deletions; linking was allowed on Washingtons Blog at the time and the conversation indicated intentional dishonesty was in play on WB’s part.

      Washingtons Blog is run by a supposed respected peace activist, yet supporting dirty debating tricks like my opponent moving goalposts mid-debate, in addition to disappearing critical rebuttals. It remained critical to oppose any apparent baiting of political violence.

      Heated posts reacting to censorship were allowed to stand expressly to delegitimize my opposition to deceitful advocacy of domestic American coup and revolt – violent outcomes – on American home soil by its own protectors. It looked a lot like a ploy to play agent provocateur with patriots.

      To this day I stand by every post on record or removed from that debate on Washingtons Blog, and being banned from that site is a badge of honour. Its sheer cowardice for a writer to try and induce others to arrest government officials when the writer himself would never personally risk doing any such thing, and sheer irresponsible malfeasance for Washingtons Blog to run interference for such a provocateur.

      So disappearing posts got me a little excited when it happened on Antiwar until I figured out it was just the links.

      Lowering the ban hammer is a serious act and will be taken seriously if believed unjustly lowered. Just so you know where I stand. My post record speaks for itself and Brockland A.T. is public on Disqus.

      1. Brockland,

        Sorry for being snippy.

        Usually a post with one or two links from a poster with a high rep does not trigger our spam filters. If there are lots of links, it will definitely end up in spam.

        You write:

        “If its in your spam folder, then I got lucky since most people spam folders without checking contents.”

        Well, that’s WHY I got snippy. I go through every post in the spam folder, “by hand,” to rescue any that aren’t actually spam. So when someone posts six versions of the same post and they all end up in spam, that’s more work for me.

        The nature of my workday is that I only have time to go through the spam folder once or twice a day — which means that if your comment has been auto-suppressed as spam, it might be as long as a day before I see it and rescue it.

        As you note, your Disqus ID is public. I’m not sure what non-moderators see, but what I am shown is that you have posted a total of 951 comments and that 72 of them have been classified as spam. My assumption, based on your commenting here, is that none of those 72 were actually spam, but that you probably like to include multiple links in your comments and Disqus has a hair spam trigger for links.

        1. Ah, I see the problem. The bulk of the ‘spam’ would have come from Washington’s Blog fights.

          Many commenting forums are not alternative news sites such as Antiwar, but blogs with an agenda to push. Not that being Antiwar isn’t an agenda, but to be an honest news site with a discussion forum implies a higher moral contract with the public.

          My ‘agenda’, such as it is, is to apply critical thinking as honestly yet aggressively as possible and poke holes in arguments with factual or reasoning errors. Resistance invites more poking. This poking sometimes comes out as spam, but repetitive posting is rarely used. Usually iterations of ‘winning’ killshots are disappeared, but the objective on my part is not ‘winning’ but to be constructive and get the facts and reasoning straight.

          The non-partisan approach creates friction on more biased or immature sites, since propaganda narratives by nature rely on twisting or omitting facts and obfuscation of reason to persuade.

          Sorry for being insensitive to the workload of mods. Its not reasonable to have to sift through strange links for acceptability – although the links I posted were responsible and academic in nature – and I’ve stopped making links on Antiwar.

  5. OK, so the EC vote went as scheduled, no coup in sight. If there is to be a coup it would probably involve an actual attack, not that lame crap with Trump crying about somebody said something he didn’t like being equivalent to a physical assault. There’s still the very soft, uncharacteristic response to the Nazi/Klan/Skinhead/Pinheads endorsing him. Usually if he feels he’s been “attacked” meaning slandered or libeled or just criticized he actually files lawsuits.

    The real constitutional crisis is still that the Duopoly put up two really repulsive puke-faced punk-ass losers and demanded that we pick between those two and no other. The Recount might shed some light even though it’s really only been in one state, won’t affect the electoral vote or significantly the popular vote.

    Which is what Jill Stein actually said is the reason for the recount. The three states originally slated for it, have a heavy turnout, comparatively, for the Green Party. Out of the final popular count being split 48% Dem 47% Rep and 5% other there should have been, perhaps, some leftover EC delegates. Probably not the 5% nationwide but, you know, at least a few. 1 or 2 percent of Other EC ballots. That would be really logical given the total outcome and the truly repulsive Duopoly vote. And as mentioned, especially in the 3 states, Green party usually scores a bit more than just a couple of percents of the popular vote. But there’s only two parties represented in the EC count. Not a single one solitary unique different-from-the-Duopoly vote. In Texas, say, a “winner takes all” meaning all the EC votes, which is itself constitutionally dicey, sure. In which case, the dicey case, that eliminates any representation for any but the Big Two. And if Original Intent gets to crap all over the issue, the Winner Takes All isn’t what’s written.

    That’s another issue for another election. As to the original sentences about a coup, if there’s a devastating attack on Trump, it will probably be by the StormFront goobers. Not joking, either, I get a verbal blast from time to time and those dorks are really into Conspiracy Theory in the context the phrase has come to describe. The latest, or maybe not, this one has been on the charts for more than a week now, “Fidel Castro Deathbed Confession: I Killed JFK” and how in the hell would somebody be able to source that? Who would he confess it TO… ending a phrase a phrase a preposition with…?

    If the people at his deathbed would be a doctor or two, maybe a priest, maybe family or friends who would be implicated right along with him… So who did he trust with such a “confession”.? But that’s logic, you see. The Stormfront folks over-ride logic with an easy wave of the hand. If the Russians, assuming Communists, were made up as a boogie-man, wouldn’t the Red Scare conspiracy theory come from that direction? But hey, Trump bought them, they’re his. And if he can’t train his monkeys he should at least keep them on a leash. Individual Russians who don’t work for the state, as far as I know, might do a lot of mischief just for the hell of it.

    You’d have to know people from other countries, particularly the former Iron Curtain ones, who would not give three horse-farts about American partisan politics simply because they can’t tell the so called difference between the Dems and Reps. Because there is none. It’s so close a call and since neither actually represents We, The Peasants, and are wholly owned by their Country Club cronies, that comes squarely in line with Fascism.
    Maybe that’s just a subtlety. But yeah, they’re crazy. Looney from Tooney.

    And they’re quick to dish out the “Commie” or “Socialist” as insults, mostly because They, America’s White Right Wing, can’t tell the difference, it’s just a label they put on anybody who disagrees with their top-down cultic crap.

    Why they would jump the Trump chump is that he did do a very low-key bit where he “declined” their endorsement, three days before the election, and some crap about him knowing before that date about their endorsement.

    Meaning he’s lying or stupid. And he’s not famous for being stupid, but is famous for lying any time it suits his goals. That’s the great thing about the EC vote being over, I can focus on only one because the other, well, she’s out of the picture, unless she’s going to be the Snowball to their Napoleon or the Emmanuel Goldstein to their Big Brother.

    Makes it simpler, know what I mean? He’s the Official Face of the two-headed beast. But, you know, the whore-masters might smack Trump down, using the Skinheads as the weapon and blaming it on the Hillary BoogyWoman. Trump could be the Martyr and a more suitable and less controversial corporate lapdog as the puppet president. It’s not like they haven’t had more than two centuries of propping up puppet National Leaders. Domestic as well as foreign.

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