Afraid of their own amygdalas

Wingnut fear is the mind-killer:

That one ideological camp is so consumed with fear also has a lot to do with why conservatives and liberals share so little common ground. Progressives tend to greet these narratives with facts and reason, but as Chris Mooney notes, when your amygdala is activated, it takes over and utterly dominates the brain structures dedicated to reason. Then the “fight-or-flight” response takes precedence over critical thinking.

Workers didn't suddenly get lazy just because the banks burned down the economy

Rewards in the American economy do not come from effort or from deserving them. Money begets money, now more than it has at any time since the 1920s. Our aristocracy is just as entrenched as that of Europe in the 19th century, except that ours doesn't give itself the titles of nobility. Instead, they call themselves job creators even though most of them aren't. They call themselves entrepreneurs, even though most of them aren't. They call themselves capitalists, even though most of them are oligopolists instead.

But they have enough spare cash to buy media and politicians. The propagandist and Republican lies are incredible to anyone with a working bullshit detector - unfortunately, not nearly enough Americans to make a reliable majority.

Not called the authorities for nothing

I had thought of collecting the videos of police violence against the Occupy movement. Joshua Holland at AlterNet beat me to it. Beat. Ha.

There are sobering lessons to learn here:

• The police choose violence to enforce order.
• The police serve power, not the citizens.
• The police don't give a shit about Constitutional rights, only about authority.
• The police handle teabaggers much more gently than they handle Occupiers. Teabaggers can carry firearms without being beaten. Unthreatening Occupiers get attacked for their resolute non-violence.
• The police are trying to provoke a violent response from protesters - and sometimes they succeed.
• Power is restrained by ever-present video, not fully but often. A few cops are too stupid to realize their actions are going to wind up on YouTube. The rest mill around, unsure what to do.
• The big media, who should be all over these videos because they're vivid TV, mostly aren't playing them and will never play them in the sort of heavy-handed rotation Fox uses when it can illustrate one of its spin points. (You can bet they'll loop - out of context - any protester violence).
• Of course, we already knew that big media serve their corporate masters.
• Net neutrality is essential to showing the world what's true. A corporate-controlled Internet would be a censored Internet - hey, those crummy little videos use too much of their precious bandwidth.

Can you imagine how different the Vietnam War protests would have been with guerrilla video? Or the coal country union wars?