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Sunday 6 November 2016

Bound to Happen

Its being bound to happen doesn't preclude its being linked by meaning devoid of clear cause & effect, a categorical connection as reason for the eventual meet. As a matter of fact, it doesn't matter if it's the eventuality or the meaning that determines the occurrence,  it's both meaningful and eventual either way.


I'm not trying to have things both ways, but rather show how in a very important, meaningful case, distinctions are an illusion. The language supports this idea: What does it mean to be bound to something? Well, it does restrict itself to the condition of the time, denoting a steadfast tie to something physically, ideologically, emotionally, etc., which as anyone knows from experience, can be unbound with aid of a tool or by way of an altered perspective or a change of heart.

But the connotation of the metaphor as it relates to the probability of future events seems more, well, bound. Highly likely, at any rate, and, as we head off further into the future with the thing in question still not having happened, then more-so, unless it was never bound to begin with.


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Accusations of an insistence of unreasonable moral purity and/or race, gender, and class privilege are another way that people who have never not voted for the Democratic presidential nominee make intentionally smug false assumptions about a quite large number of people, who are neither middle class, nor do they insist upon moral purity. I can assume the accusers are of a class who absolve themselves of their cognitive dissonance by projecting guilt privilege onto others they take for themselves. I can assume this with the aid of demographic studies on the subject but also because of the tropes they use in their arguments.


the Middle class
A study as recent as the last general election cycle indicated that a growing number of people believe they are middle class when they fall well below that standard. This indicates that, one, they do not identify with the lower class and, two, they think that when their Democratic representative or candidate for office boosts belief in the necessity of a strong middle class, that they are the constituency being spoken to, and they extend that assumption to anyone they think, falsely, is like themselves. This displays a couple of things:

1) Democratic politicians are alone in their vocal insistence of a strong middle class as central to an economy that benefits everyone. In short, higher educated Democratic voters believe in trickle-down economics as long as it begins with them.

2) Those who accuse others of holding to some unrealistically pure political position from a position of privilege are themselves in most cases operating from an even more privileged position. For this reason, they usually absolve themselves of the suffering caused by their identity politics by blaming others for not doing the same.


Signal Boosting Landmarks
When in the rare instance not focused on the identity of "the others", present political identitarians are keen to cite the “signature piece of legislation” that the current president is hanging his hat on as a challenge to deny that more people having health insurance is a good thing.

On the other hand, what is not highlighted is his policy of extrajudicial execution of people only suspected of the terror they're executed for, sometimes less than that, and the ever increasing value of the sign-off on the sale of weapons to regimes our “intelligence” says fund the terrorism the Pentagon claims to be in a war against. These things are written off as centrist policy from which there is no escape. Now that's a privilege they can get behind!

One can get into a lot of counter-parsing as it relates to the Affordable Care Act, suffice it to say, not by a longshot is there across the board affordable insurance or care, making at least two words in ACA misnomers: it's neither affordable, nor care, but it sure is an act. The current reform and the coming increase of the mandate penalty is proof that they are not interested in bringing the price down. Keeping pace with insurers’ increased rates ensures that more will pay the increased premiums, thereby not discouraging the gouging that lauders of the legislation pretend to be outraged about.

You could ask someone making the purity argument what their deductible is, or whether or not they are aware of how much the penalty for the next enrollment has increased, but it is not relevant, because they, by their own standards, consider themselves privileged under the ACA, and to absolve themselves of privilege while accusing others of the same, they are apt to focus on cherry-picked data that indicates millions of people they like to assume are less privileged than themselves are now benefiting, where before they were not — resolved to pretend opposition to the ACA is akin to wanting to deny people health insurance, which is disingenuous.

To take another example, the ACA includes a requirement that a person cannot be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. But focusing on this aspect denies the detail regarding the quality & expense of the coverage they receive under various circumstances. A pre-existing condition is often something someone has been living with already without the benefit of medical care. That the ACA means for a substantial number of these either buying plans with a prohibitive deductible or paying a penalty for not participating is dismissed as either fiction, or something that will be fixed later.

The problem is, later has come, and the penalty increase acts as default cover for the industry that is bilking its customers. Not only did those who pushed the ACA not consider universal coverage, not only did they pull a bait & switch in talking points, with the intention not to back a plan “without a robust public option”, but they derided those who predicted the industry’s doing what they are now doing as purists who were “letting perfect be the enemy of the good”.

The fact that there is no real opposition and that people vote out of the desperation for a Supreme Court pick or tax rates, or fear that their Social Security is going to be taken away is tantamount to being threatened by both parties. The general tone from Democrats in this regard is embodied in a paraphrase of the President's former Chief of Staff. Basically, "Fuck you, retards. Who you gonna vote for?"

Reg
arding Social Security, by the way: Its privatization was one of Bush's unkept promises. That his successor could get away with floating cuts only shows what is negotiable and what is not in terms of having this duopoly remain the only game in town. They both campaign on fear.


Through their approach and attitude, I sense that I might not be as privileged as many throwing around the "privileged enough to vote for whoever you want" argument. Nevertheless, I do not deny my privilege.

I am privileged not to be someone who racist cops see as a “super predator” who needs “to be brought to heel.” Is this more centrist language?

I do not deny my privilege as it relates to my not being a person who has landed on a weekly kill-list, or live in the collateral vicinity of someone who does. 

I cannot deny the privilege to be governed by the perpetrators, who completely circumvent their Congress by invading Libya, instead of being a citizen of Libya. It seems they learned from their predecessor not to stage votes for authorization of use of force.

I am privileged not to be beneficiary of Clinton Foundation largess as in Haiti, or Hillary's Honduran policy.

I do not deny the privilege of not being someone who revealed the nefarious misdeeds of members of either the US government, intel agencies, or military and landed in prison for doing so.

I do not deny the privilege of not being one of the record number of deportees under the current presidential administration.

I do not deny the privilege that I can sit here in relative freedom and type about how the US continues to fund oppressive regimes to the tune of multiple billions while those regimes commit war crimes and no one gives a crap because a billionaire slumlord was elevated to the position of GOP nominee with finagling influence by the party organization and candidate he is running against, not to mention what they did to their primary opponent.

I am privileged not to live in an area where my land is being taken for environmental destruction. But my, and all of our privilege in these categories will end eventually. Just bound to happen.

If purity means not using an alleged strongest vote against a sexist, racist demagogue to absolve myself of the atrocities committed by the current presidential administration — not only a continuance of the last presidential administration, but a brazen broken promise of its campaign where “a restoration of the rule of law” was the order of the day — whether under the auspices of the "centrism" of the war on terror or at the behest of robber barons who are not just too big to jail but occupy positions in politics, then purity seems like the ethical and logical plea.

I think there are minimal standards involved here that do not begin & end with 20 million more people with substandard insurance and an American woman's right to choose. These are not a reasonable trade-off for those of America's allies and foes who enjoy none of them precisely because of American policy and action. If you think that it is, that is your privilege, not mine. 

Accepting this dangerous quadrennial game of chicken where politicians are hardly, if ever accountable to the electorate has led us here. I cannot vote to keep that going. The threat is not disappearing. Make no mistake. Hill's gonna win, and they'll be four more years of oligarchs getting everything they want while pretending they're getting screwed, and Congress creatures going after her administration for the wrong reasons. She's already got a built-in excuse for everything that goes wrong, and for every wrong she does.