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By pariahs, I'm referring to the Islamic other; US politics, like most countries, have a long history of using some vague ill-defined and overblown threat to justify a more repressive set of policies. Unlike previously, these people have more traction with US voters because they've done something in the US. Instead of being a phantom, they're more 'real' and so more durable and more amenable to being a justification for some bad shit.
By failure to stop human rights abuses, I'm saying that regardless of who has failed - the media/supreme court/congress/people, it doesn't really matter. They've happened and continue to happen, indicating a failure of really quite important counterbalances to actually do anything at all about a quite dreadful state of affairs.
As for language, I wasn't positing a golden age back in the day, merely saying that from where we are know, you notice an astonishing vacuity and vapidity of US political discourse. Fights seem to take place over the most inconsequential points of linguistic definition whilst the bigger picture never gets a look in. The normalisation of this weird hybrid of martial language and management textbook shite looks pretty entrenched with no-one seemingly able to challenge this and find a new way of talking about things.
― The Boyler, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 20:33 (seventeen years ago) link
eight years pass...
Has anti-fascism lost its urgency in the eight years since this was published? I grew up with World War II veterans for relatives. My own father was a WWII buff. "Don't be a fascist" was a big thing in my family. Might seem quaint to a younger generation? My own mother was a big proponent of "never forget". Yet on the Internet, I encounter many people -especially younger people - for whom it is more like "never even considered it". Even with a black man in the White House, I think it's important to "never forget".
― Fake Sam's Club Membership (I M Losted), Tuesday, 7 July 2015 16:54 (eight years ago) link
eight years pass...
'people should be able to understand complex ideas', muses the man who discovered for the first time only months that neoliberalism is a political ideology and not just a slur leftists attach to people they don't like