— source joemohrtoons.com | Aug 11, 2021
Tag: Liberalism
Georgian college faculty protest over absence of mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates
College faculty at over a dozen campuses in Georgia started a week-long, daily protest yesterday to demonstrate opposition against the University System of Georgia’s (USG) COVID-19 policies, which are forcing professors, adjuncts and graduate students to lecture in-person and to teach in schools that have no masks or vaccine mandates. The protest in Georgia is an expression of burgeoning anger nationwide over the return to in-person instruction as the Delta variant of the virus is fueling a rise in deaths and hospitalizations. The protests this week in Georgia follow a string of demonstrations that have sprung up in recent days among educators against the back-to-school campaign being promoted in K-12 and higher education, leading to scores of youth dying or becoming severely ill.
— source wsws.org | 13 Sep 2021
Progressives Remember Allende’s Chile
As people reflect on the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, progressives drew attention to another horrifying event less well-known in the U.S. but referred to elsewhere as “the other 9/11”: the bombing of Chile’s presidential palace on September 11, 1973 by the nation’s armed forces during a right-wing coup supported by Washington and other capitalist regimes.
Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, died during the assault on La Moneda in Santiago, which brought to power Gen. Augusto Pinochet, whose brutal military junta imposed neoliberalism through deadly force, torture, and the “disappearance” of thousands of leftists. Despite its awareness of Pinochet’s human rights abuses, including his execution of political opponents, the U.S. continued to support the pro-market dictator during his bloody, 17-year-long reign.
“On this day in 1973, Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government was overthrown in a military coup led by the U.S.-backed fascist Augusto Pinochet,” Progressive International, a global coalition of social justice groups fighting for a more egalitarian and sustainable world, said Saturday on social media.
— source commondreams.org | Kenny Stancil | Sep 11, 2021
Why Aren’t Libertarians Protesting the Freedom-Busting Texas Abortion Law
It was a bad week for freedom in America. With Texas banning most abortions and empowering self-appointed vigilantes to stop women from exercising their right to reproductive healthcare, and the Supreme Court letting it stand, you’d think freedom-loving libertarians would be out in full force protesting.
After all, libertarians describe themselves as principled foes of state coercion and passionate defenders of individual liberty. While they may give different weight to principles of individual liberty, self-determination, and so on, libertarians claim to be highly skeptical of government intrusion into our lives. Wikipedia informs us that most generally agree that sperms, eggs, and fetuses are not persons with rights.
In his 1982 book, “The Ethics of Liberty,” libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that “the proper groundwork for analysis of abortion is in every man’s absolute right of self-ownership. This implies immediately that every woman has the absolute right to her own body, that she has absolute dominion over her body and everything in it. This includes
— source ineteconomics.org | Lynn Parramore | Sep 10, 2021
Texas School District Cancels Classes After 2 Teachers Die of COVID-19
In Arizona, more than 1,000 healthcare workers have signed an open letter to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, pleading with them to mandate masks in K-12 schools. This week, schools in and around Phoenix reported 227 active outbreaks, with nearly 1,700 students and 450 school employees infected.
In Central Texas, the Connally Independent School District near Waco has canceled classes after two teachers died of COVID-19 in the same week. Sixth-grade social studies teacher Natalia Chansler was just 41 years old. She died Saturday just days after her colleague, 59-year-old Andy McCormick, succumbed to the disease. Their school does not require that students or teachers wear masks.
— source democracynow.org | Sep 02, 2021
UK ministers not wearing masks in Commons
Cabinet ministers have been accused of undermining Covid advice and putting MPs’ and parliamentary staff’s safety at risk by declining to wear masks, as they packed the Commons chamber full to debate Afghanistan’s takeover by the Taliban. Ministers lifted the mandatory requirement for masks to be worn in most places on 19 July, instead allowing people to make their own decisions about whether and where to use them. When Boris Johnson opened the debate about the collapse of the Afghan government he was without a mask, as were most of the other ministers sitting on the front green bench. All the Labour frontbenchers, including the party leader, Keir Starmer, and his deputy, Angela Rayner, wore masks.
Anti-Vaccine, Anti-Mask Protesters in L.A. Attacked Even Journalists
In U.S. COVID cases top 37 million. On Saturday, one person was stabbed — at least, perhaps two — two journalists were attacked, while covering an anti-vaccine, anti-mask protest outside Los Angeles City Hall. The protest was attended by members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups.
KPCC Radio reporter Frank Stoltze was assaulted while doing an interview. He had his glasses ripped off, was repeatedly kicked. He said nothing like this had ever happened in his 30 years of reporting.
Huffington Post is reporting a Southern California mortgage broker named Tony Moon was videotaped attacking the independent journalist Tina-Desiree Berg. Moon was also seen screaming, “Unmask them all!” The Huffington Post reports Moon was also in Washington on January 6 during the insurrection at the Capitol.
— source democracynow.org | Aug 20, 2021
“Unmask her” – libertarians in US
The Liberal Contempt for Martin Luther King’s Final Year
The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes — including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive — are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life.
You could call it evasion by omission.
The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata.
The pattern is positively Orwellian. King explicitly condemned what he called “the madness of militarism.” And by any reasonable standard, that madness can be diagnosed as pervading U.S. foreign policy in 2021. But today, almost all politicians and mainstream media commentators act as though King never said such things, or if he did then those
— source scheerpost.com | Jeff Cohen | Apr 4, 2021
Liberalism’s Last Legs?
By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
– TS Eliot
Liberals may be surrounded at all sides but it has done little to shut them up. From the ramparts, a gaggle of gargoyles, their expressions at once haughty, ludicrous and insane, unload their protestations: we are still right, it’s the world that has gone wrong!
There is little doubt that these liberals, in a post-Iraq War, ’08, Brexit and Trump world, are besieged. Online, a hefty portion of what passes for political discourse is directed at attacking the “new” centrists. It is genuinely bewildering, however, how anyone could’ve made it through Iraq, ’08, Brexit and Trump and remained a liberal. Iraq
— source counterpunch.org | Luke O’Brien | May 7, 2021