La guerra sucia de la dirección del Partido Demócrata contra Bernie Sanders y Donald Trump

Los cerca de 20.000 correos electrónicos de la dirección del Partido Demócrata de Estados Unidos publicados por WikiLeaks revelan la guerra sucia del Comité Nacional Demócrata no ya contra Donald Trump sinó contra su correligionario Bernie Sanders.

Acordaron utilizar las creencias religiosas de Bernie Sanders contra él

Los emails de WikiLeaks muestran la hostilidad y el desprecio de la dirección del Partido Demócrata hacia Sanders, según Associated Press

The emails include several stinging denunciations of Sanders and his organization before and after the DNC briefly shut off his campaign's access to the party's key list of likely Democratic voters.

The DNC temporarily curtailed Sanders' access to the list in December 2015 because the organization accused the insurgent campaign of illegally tapping into confidential voter information compiled by the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign briefly sued the DNC but the party reached an accord with Sanders and the suit was dropped in April.

The emails show that after the furor over the voter records was resolved, hostility simmered from top DNC officials over the Sanders campaign.

In mid-May emails with Miranda, his deputy, Mark Paustenbach, questioned whether the DNC should use the voter record furor to raise doubts about the Sanders campaign.

"Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess," Paustenbach wrote. Miranda spurned the idea, although he agreed with Paustenbach's take: "True, but the Chair has been advised not to engage. So we'll have to leave it alone."

The same month, in another email to DNC officials, another official identified only as "Marshall" said of Sanders: "Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps."

Otros emails muestran la guerra sucia contra Trump, como la falsificación de anuncios clasificados:

#DNCLeaks: plot to smear @realDonaldTrump by planting fake ads for hot women in Craigslist https://t.co/pePOdxjWDE

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 22 de julio de 2016

El surgimiento de un nacionalismo negro en EEUU

THE WASHINGTON POST.- The People’s New Black Panther Party and the Washitaw Nation have vastly different ideologies and no direct ties to each other, but they are part of a broad landscape of black nationalist groups playing a role in America’s violent summer 2016.

“There are a few big groups and a lot of little ones, and they are growing in an echo chamber where all they hear is ‘anger, anger, anger, anger, anger,’ ” said J.J. MacNab, an author and George Washington University researcher who specializes in extremism.

Some of these groups espouse extremist, anti-government views, and their numbers jumped from 113 groups in 2014 to 180 last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism.

Ryan Lenz, an SPLC analyst, said that increase has partly been a response to a rise in white supremacist and white nationalist activity amid the racially charged environment of past two years, including the 2016 presidential campaign. For example, SPLC figures show that the number of Ku Klux Klan chapters increased from 72 in 2014 to 190 last year.

There is tremendous racial tension in this political environment,” Lenz said. “The idea of an ‘us-versus-them’ ideology is being pushed very heavily no matter what political camp you are from.”

Analysts said it was impossible to determine exactly how many people are involved in black nationalist groups. But officials at both the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, which also tracks extremism, said the numbers were probably in the hundreds at most. A former FBI official who supervised domestic terrorism cases in recent years also said, “We are talking dozens of people.”

Most of the black nationalist groups have formed in response to a perception that U.S. society is deeply racist against black people. How they organize themselves and what they actually do to achieve those goals varies greatly.

Some simply seem to exist as online forums for expressing rage, often against police. One group Johnson had “liked” on Facebook was the African American Defense League, which has a photo of an arsenal of guns as its profile picture.

Even though the group has more than 1,000 likes on Facebook, Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, called it “one guy with a Facebook page” and limited influence.

Following the shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., the Anti-Defamation League said the site featured a photo of Wilson with this notation: “When you find Dar¬ren Wil¬son you know what to do! Who-ever finds him knows what must be done! Take every¬thing that he took from Mike Brown.”

A similar group, the Black Riders Liberation Party, which calls for armed revolution against racism in America, has a Facebook page with more than 9,600 likes. It is run by a man who calls himself General T.A.C.O. — short for “Taking All Capitalists Out” — who calls police “pigs.”

Earlier this month, the group posted on its Facebook page in response to police killings in Louisiana and Minnesota: “It’s on in 2016! R.I.P. to Alton Sterling in La and Philando Castile in Minnesota! We need recruits everywhere! Arm yourself of Harm yourself!”

Segal said those smaller groups “orbit around” the New Black Panther Party, a black militant separatist group started in Dallas in 1989, but don’t directly coordinate their efforts with them.

Other groups are larger and more formally organized, holding meetings and attending rallies, often wearing the classic militant uniform of black clothes and a black beret. In some cases, they carry weapons.

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¿Qué fue de Pertur?

“Han transcurrido 40 años desde la desaparición de Eduardo Moreno Bergaretxe, Pertur, y seguimos sin conocer su paradero. El esclarecimiento de su secuestro y desaparición sigue siendo una tarea pendiente que no debe obviarse”, señala Martin Auzmendi, compañero de militancia de Pertur, hermano de su pareja, Lourdes, y representante de la familia en la causa. Auzmendi se une al llamamiento de la familia para que “los que sepan algo sobre su paradero lo hagan saber” en el aniversario de aquel 23 de julio de 1976 en que desapareció el que fue líder de ETA político-militar (pm) y promotor de su desdoblamiento en un partido, que derivó en Euskadiko Ezkerra y concurrió en las primeras elecciones democráticas de 1977.

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Pooper, un Uber para recoger la caca de tu perro

THE WASHINGTON POST.- What do you get when you combine a population too busy to look up from its smartphones, a “one-tap economy” and 78 million pet dogs?

You get Pooper, an app that summons someone to scoop your pooch’s waste off the sidewalk or neighbor’s lawn.

Perhaps you have enough time to own a dog, feed a dog and take it on walks, but you are just too darn busy to reach down to pick up its poop. You are Pooper’s target customer.

The app, which began being marketed this week despite not being up and running yet, is supposed to work pretty much like Uber. Once your dog does its job, you open the app, pinpoint the excrement on a digital map and order a scoop. You are then free to leave; a scooper — the driver in the Uber analogy — comes to do the clean up.

That is, of course, if Pooper is real and not some sort of ironic commentary on dog obsession and the sharing economy. Its quirky video ad and motto — “Your dog’s poop in someone else’s hands” — have left some reporters skeptical. That’s prompted the people behind the app to issue a statement saying they’re fine with the doubts: All the better for spreading the word and attracting more investors.

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De cómo la dominanción sexual influye en la política

QUILLETTE.- This may sound like a Freudian way of thinking, but being that sex is such an important part of evolution, its influence on personal and political behavior should not be discounted. Indeed, research suggests that sexual strategies may be driving much of politics and religion.25 26 If so, the link between sexual pleasure and political dominance may be more direct in fascism than in any other political movement. Political movements, including fascism, may harness dominance as a means to non-sexual political and moral ends, from the acquisition of resources and territory to the redress of nationalistic and racial grievances. But fascism’s reliance on dominance over other political tactics may be partly explained by the sexually rewarding undertones of dominant political action, especially for men.

Humans can formulate long-term goals and plan drawn-out courses of action to reach them.27 Therefore, it is possible for dominance-based political movements motivated by sexual pleasure to emerge. Such movements may be further developed and made more sophisticated by ideological, bureaucratic, and fashionable accoutrements, and may spread within and across generations as sexually dominant individuals are drawn to their appeal. Fascism may be one such political movement, though it is probably not the only one. Any movement whose long-term political strategy is marked by dominance may be driven, in part, by sex.

Biological accounts of personal and political life are on the rise, which is an inevitable and necessary trend. If we are to promote non-destructive political movements over harmful ones, we have to acknowledge the evolutionary and physiological roots of our behavior. However speculative, I believe that the preceding account of the sexual underpinnings of fascism deservers further scrutiny.

It is not easy to recognize the signs of a rising authoritarian movement, but focusing on how central dominance and sexuality are to individuals within a movement may help us to avoid its destructive and sadistic outcomes. This neglected approach is all the more pressing amid the rising shadows of right-wing and Islamic authoritarianism. We need not paint dominant or submissive sexual behavior as wrong or unnatural, however. Consenting adults should be free to engage in whatever sexual activities they find pleasurable. The problem is making sure that fascism does not escape the bedroom. | Gregory Gorelik

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¿Pueden globalistas y nacionalistas convivir en paz?

The upshot of all this is that the answer to the question we began with—What on Earth is going on?—cannot be found just by looking at the nationalists and pointing to their economic conditions and the racism that some of them do indeed display. One must first look at the globalists, and at how their changing values may drive many of their fellow citizens to support right-wing political leaders. In particular, globalists often support high levels of immigration and reductions in national sovereignty; they tend to see transnational entities such as the European Union as being morally superior to nation-states; and they vilify the nationalists and their patriotism as “racism pure and simple.” These actions press the “normative threat” button in the minds of those who are predisposed to authoritarianism, and these actions can drive status quo conservatives to join authoritarians in fighting back against the globalists and their universalistic projects.

If this argument is correct, then it leads to a clear set of policy prescriptions for globalists. First and foremost: Think carefully about the way your country handles immigration and try to manage it in a way that is less likely to provoke an authoritarian reaction. Pay attention to three key variables: the percentage of foreign-born residents at any given time, the degree of moral difference of each incoming group, and the degree of assimilation being achieved by each group’s children.

Legal immigration from morally different cultures is not problematic even with low levels of assimilation if the numbers are kept low; small ethnic enclaves are not a normative threat to any sizable body politic. Moderate levels of immigration by morally different ethnic groups are fine, too, as long as the immigrants are seen as successfully assimilating to the host culture. When immigrants seem eager to embrace the language, values, and customs of their new land, it affirms nationalists’ sense of pride that their nation is good, valuable, and attractive to foreigners. But whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many status quo conservatives to support it.

Stenner ends The Authoritarian Dynamic with some specific and constructive advice:

[A]ll the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness…. Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and nonassimilation.

If Stenner is correct, then her work has profound implications, not just for America, which was the focus of her book, but perhaps even more so for Europe. Donald Tusk, the current president of the European Council, recently gave a speech to a conclave of center-right Christian Democratic leaders (who, as members of the educated elite, are still generally globalists). Painfully aware of the new authoritarian supremacy in his native Poland, he chastised himself and his colleagues for pushing a “utopia of Europe without nation-states.” This, he said, has caused the recent Euroskeptic backlash: “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that ordinary people, the citizens of Europe, do not share our Euro-enthusiasm.”

Democracy requires letting ordinary citizens speak. The majority spoke in Britain on June 23, and majorities of similar mien may soon make themselves heard in other European countries, and possibly in the United States in November. The year 2016 will likely be remembered as a major turning point in the trajectory of Western democracies. Those who truly want to understand what is happening should carefully consider the complex interplay of globalization, immigration, and changing values.

If the story I have told here is correct, then the globalists could easily speak, act, and legislate in ways that drain passions and votes away from nationalist parties, but this would require some deep rethinking about the value of national identities and cohesive moral communities. It would require abandoning the multicultural approach to immigration and embracing assimilation.

The great question for Western nations after 2016 may be this: How do we reap the gains of global cooperation in trade, culture, education, human rights, and environmental protection while respecting—rather than diluting or crushing—the world’s many local, national, and other “parochial” identities, each with its own traditions and moral order? In what kind of world can globalists and nationalists live together in peace? | JONATHAN HAIDT

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