The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Some Personal Thoughts

Recently I had a day where I burned out on anger.  Oh  yes, when it comes to public affairs I’ve been angry for years, though I think rage is the more applicable word.  I don’t think this rage was misplaced, and I still get spasms of it.

The reason for the rage is simple enough: we’re killing and making a lot of people suffer who don’t need to with our political policies, economic policies just being a subset of politics.  The financial collapse was forseen by many, myself included and we told the powers that be what to do to avoid it.  The rise of economic inequality, which is correlated with pretty much every bad thing you can imagine, from heart attacks to infant mortality to bad performance in school and crime (read the Spirit Level if you need this proved in tedious detail), has been going on since the mid 70s at the latest, and was clearly visible by the mid eighties.  It was, and is a clear policy choice.  It was chosen in response to a real problem, the end of cheap oil and the rise of the oilarchy rich, but it was a choice, there were other ways of dealing with the problem available.  First the Brits, then the Americans, then the Canadians and then various other nations chose the policy option which would lead to increased inequality.  This was combined with a concerted assault on civil liberties, in this case I believe starting in America with the War on Drugs.  Society became more totalitarian, whatever the trappings, and less free, not just in government, but in every part of our lives.  I find the way we treat our children today, with virtually no freedom, particularly odious (no your precious children are not in more danger than children in the 60s and 70s who were allowed to run free).  Police in schools are routine now, we imprison people in stunningly cruel prisons for minor crimes and so on.  Visiting Britain was like visiting a starter project for Orwell’s 1984, with CCTV cameras everywhere.

Our response to the financial crisis, a totally optional crisis which was based almost entirely on fraud, was to make the poor and the middle class pay through austerity, while bailing out the rich with trillions and trillions of dollars.  We gutted property rights completely so that banks could easily foreclose on homeowners and four years in, the economy, for ordinary people, has never recovered.  We are now in a depression, and if it’s not yet a Great Depression, it’s bad enough.  Now when I say pay, I mean suffer.  People died, wives and children were beaten, people became homeless, lost their jobs, their health and their self respect because of a completely optional crisis and the criminals who caused the crisis were not just let off, they were rewarded with a huge bailout.

This was done in a bipartisan manner, but it could not have happened in the form it did without Obama.  To give just one example, TARP was going to not pass the House.  Nancy Pelosi was going to let it fail if the Republicans wouldn’t vote for it in equal proportion to Democrats.  This is a fact, I was following it closely at the time as it was my job to do so.  Calls were running between a 100:1 to 1200:1 against TARP.  Obama got down and dirty and twisted arms, and I do mean twisted.  Serious threats were made.  TARP would not have passed without Obama.  This policy of bailing out criminals who caused death and suffering continued throughout Obama’s reign.

Meanwhile there is the drone program.  The drone program is not the worst thing Obama has ever done, not even close.  What it is is completely unnecessary and counterproductive evil.  Bombing weddings and funerals and killing innocent civilians, including women and children, is not making America safe, it is doing the exact opposite.  The next great terrorist attack on the US, and there will be one, will be done by someone outraged by the wanton murder of the drone program.

We could go on and on, the point is simple enough.  Evil has been done, and it is unnecessary evil. There were other options, I’ve written of them many times, and I’m not going to bother going over it again.  Obama and Dems in Congress could have instituted different policies if that’s what they wanted to do.  They didn’t.  Bush and his Congress could have if they wanted to, they didn’t.  Clinton, well, you get the idea.

Ok then, enough about politicians.  They are what they are, and with the amount of money they stand to earn in their post-political career from carrying financial interests water it would take significant incentives to change their actions.  Those incentives would be primarily social, and I believe they could be applied if Americans, or Brits, or Canadians really wanted to, but that’s neither here nor there, and not the subject of this post.

The people who sadden me are left-wingers who carried Obama’s water, who I know know better.  I know they know his record.  I know they know where this is all leading.  I know because I was a professional blogger for years.  I’ve met these people in person, I have corresponded with them, and I have talked to many of them.  I have worked with many of them.

They know what Obama is, and they lied about him.

I know of only one rule of writing, which is that you tell the truth as  you know it.  I may be wrong, I may be full of shit (many people think so), but I tell the truth as I know it at the time I write to my readers.

What I have seen, from many lefties, bloggers and non-bloggers, is that they have become compromised.  One needs the Supreme Court to stay as it is for his career, another works for a union think tank, and the policy is to carry Obama’s water, so he carries their water.  Another got the words on gay rights he wanted, so he carries Obama’s water as he did in 2008, acting as Obama’s outlet for rumors they couldn’t plant in the media directly.  A few are honest sellouts, admitting why they are carrying the water, others aren’t.  Some make the lesser evil argument honestly, most don’t.

And what I realized one sad day is that most of them are limited.  I am a left winger, and what academic training I have is in sociology.  I believe that people are, largely, a product of their environment.  If we want better people, we need a better environment.  To blame the poor as a group for their own travails is stupid, if they had richer parents, they would have different outcomes and be different people  The same is true of the rich, the middle class, and so on.  They are products of their environment, and most people are little more than that. Nothing is more pathetic than people acclaiming their identity through the TV shows they consume, the branded clothes they wear and so on.  They are simply choosing from a menu created by others.  They are limited people, products of their environment, claiming they are something more.

I thought many of my ex-colleagues were more.  I really did.  I believed that they had some ability to stand outside society, even a little bit, and see it for what it was, and that in that detachment they could find honesty and an ability to see the world beyond the lens of their own place and their own needs.  Upton Sinclair’s comment, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” is the perfect description of a limited person, intellectually and morally.  If we cannot see beyond our own self-interest, or beyond our own need to feel good about ourselves, then we will never seen the world with anything even approaching clarity.  If we cannot separate our interests from the interests of other people and from the interests of society, we are not fit to play any role in running society or commenting on it.

The error, in the end, was mine, I realize.  I thought certain people were more than a product of their environment, more than a base need to do whatever it took to pay their bills and believe themselves still good people while doing so.  I was wrong.  The number is far fewer than I thought.  Far, far fewer.

The consequence of a debased class of influentials, which is what we are talking about, is a debased understanding of the world.  The more incorrect peoples understanding of the world, the more they will make incorrect decisions about what to do, and the more they do that the worse off they, and society, will be.  When even people who know Obama’s record lie for him, when even people who understand the glide path that America is on pretend Obama is going to fix that, Americans live in a world of delusion.  Of course they don’t make correct decisions, they are getting constant incorrect information.  This isn’t just about what used to be called the MSM, this about the alternatives, the people who are the outliers.

I was part of political blogging when it was new, and a big deal, and intellectually exciting.  When bloggers thought that their job was to tell truth both to power and to the masses.  That world is gone, and the people who remain, with a few exceptions, no longer do that, no longer even believe in doing that.

Some will say this is a very self-congratulatory post, and that I’m patting myself on the back as truth teller, and oh, there are so few of us.  Whatever.  This is the world I see, and it is a world I lived in, worked in, was a senior member of.  And this is not about self-congratulation, it is about sadness.  I am saddened at the way people I knew, people I had respect for, have debased themselves for so very, very little.

If society is to function again for the benefit of all a lot of things need to be done.  One of them is to fix the world of influentials, of whom bloggers are very minor members.  To be an influential should be to be an intellectual, and to be an intellectual is to be able to stand outside ones own society, to see it through the dual eyes of an outsider and a member, then report the truth of what one sees.

One must be, then, more than product of one’s circumstances, more than a function of one’s personal interests.

Perhaps there is no place for such people in society today, perhaps the audience doesn’t want those people.  But I don’t believe that, because I personally never had any problem generating traffic.  The problem is that at a certain point, in blogging, traffic stopped paying, because the amount advertisers paid to the content creators on the web dropped through the floor, in large part because Google figured out how be the middle man and take almost all the money.  So if you want to make money online you either need to exploit your contributors (not pay most of them) or you need to sell out.

But I’ve moved away from my main point.  People respond to incentives like Pavlov’s dogs.  If you want to be more than a dog, you have to train yourself to overcome your conditioning.  It’s hard, and you won’t be able to do it all the time (and if you did, you’d be thrown in an insane asylum or be so non functional in society you’d be ostracized), but it is what is required to be an honest, useful influential.  But knowing and believing something is only one part of it, you must then tell it.

A lot more people are going to suffer and die due to policies which are evil.  Part of what makes that happen are the people who know better and lie, part of that is due to the people who convince themselves that evil is necessary because it is in their interests.  They are not the most responsible, no.  But they are responsible.

And I really did think better of so many of them.

Become more than your background, more than a function of the incentives placed in front of you.  See the evil you yourself do, your society does, and stop needing to feel good about yourself.

Stop being someone else’s dog.

Previous

On Flanders Field

Next

Some Words on the Republican Party

125 Comments

  1. BlizzardOfOz

    Well, I really just want to say that I hope you continue to write, despite the frustration and apparent futility. There really are vanishingly few who are writing from a place of deep moral conviction; and of those, again few who can attain this level of insight (“to see through the dual eyes of an outsider and a member”).

    They are simply choosing from a menu created by others.

    Thank you – if Westerners were one tenth as individualistic as advertised, they would see that, for a free person, the range of the possible comes from within. Those to whom the range of the possible is dictated by external authorities, are called slaves.

    I am saddened at the way people I knew, people I had respect for, have debased themselves for so very, very little.

    Precisely; what they give up is more than everything, it is without measure: the joy of knowing the truth, of being free; the pride in discovering something new that benefits all of humanity. There are simple human truths, but not simple; they’ve been hard won by history’s martyrs. Those and the infinite potential contained in them, all thrown away, and for what? Of course even all the world’s wealth is not worth that, but to trade it for pennies: tragic cowardice.

    The simple, primal truths are buried deep in our society; it’s always a joy to be reminded of them, even knowing they will not be heeded.

    Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
    As, to behold desert a beggar born,
    And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
    And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
    And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
    And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
    And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
    And strength by limping sway disabled,
    And art made tongue-tied by authority,
    And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
    And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
    And captive good attending captain ill:
    Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
    Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

  2. I got the wake-up call during the 2008 primary. After Edwards dropped out, I looked dispassionately at the two candidates left and concluded that the more progressive (though not nearly progressive enough, to me) was Hillary Clinton.

    For daring to expose Obama’s conservatism, who was my senator for an instant before he ran for president, I was called a bitter knitter dry pussy vagina voter racist, and banned from quite a few websites. The commenters who were allowed to remain sounded exactly like the Bushbots of 2000, who were the reason I got involved in internet commentary in the first place.

    I finally realized that truth and objectivity aren’t any more welcome in the so-called progressive community than in right-wing crazy world.

    I really don’t know what to do about it.

    Carolyn Kay
    MakeThemAccountable.com

  3. Celsius 233

    Ian; yes!

  4. Chopra: Reinventing the brain is closer than you think

    (CNN) If genes and a fixed structure of brain cells told the whole story, it would remain a total mystery why a cave dweller after the last Ice Age should have just the right complement of neurons to discover gravity or write a symphony. Now we realize that the human brain is far from fixed, at any level.

    New brain cells are being formed throughout life; trillions of connections between neurons are developed; and the genetic activity inside each neuron is dynamic, responding to every experience and every stimulus from the outside world.

    Human beings reinvent the brain as we go along, day by day. It’s not a matter of eons. In short, the brain is a verb, not a noun. It is reshaped by thoughts, memories, desire and experience.

    Because it is dynamic, fluid and ever-renewing, the brain is much more malleable than anyone ever imagined.

    Read more:
    http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/09/health/reinventing-brain-chopra/index.html

    Carolyn Kay
    MakeThemAccountable.com

  5. BDBlue

    Thanks for this, Ian. I, too, hope you continue writing. I’m down to reading probably half a dozen websites regularly and it’s because I can’t stand the propaganda/dishonesty on the rest.

    I also walk around in a rage – or at least only a few prods away from one. I’m trying to be better about at least not just going off on people since a lot of the ones closest to me don’t deserve it (the one who do, I’m never really around). It’s also the least best way to convince anyone. Oddly – or not – I seem to keep my cool the best around conservatives and libertarians, people who would not normally be my ideological allies. But then they’re the ones who seem most likely to agree that the banks suck, our politicians (of both parties) are going to rob us on Social Security and Medicare, etc. When I try to talk issues with Democrats, mostly what I get are defense of Democrats and not any real discussion of issues. The right-ist people I know seem to have no desire to defend Republicans, which I take to be an interesting and possibly positive sign.

    Personally, I’m a coward since I’ve pretty much given up blogging (not that many people read me anyway). Too much risk – and for me too much to lose – in writing the truth. Although maybe it says how far I think we’ve fallen when I see risk in simply pointing out the bloody obvious in a post that almost nobody would read anyway – that things are going to get very bad and none of the elite have any desire to change that. The only thing I will give myself is that at least I just shut up instead of telling lies.

  6. BDBlue

    Also, on a personal note, I’ve got to stop my re-play through of Fallout 3. It has not been helping my general outlook or mood.

  7. fly

    I kind of wish you’d named names when you got to the part about compromized bloggers.

  8. BDBlue

    I’m not sure the names matter, fly. Many of the ones who would not be named by Ian are just as guilty. It would only focus on the examples given instead of the larger issue. And, really, I don’t think one needs names to know from Ian who is compromised (either because of external issues or internal ones). All one needs to do is read the blogs. Other than Greenwald and some of the econo-bloggers (Yves Smith, for example), I can’t think of a major blogger who doesn’t lie, albeit sometimes to themselves, too, and not just their readers.

  9. Criminal Minds: Use of Neuroscience as a Defense Skyrockets

    (U.S. News & World Report) Criminal defense lawyers are increasingly using brain scans and other neurological evidence to defend their clients, according to a new study… [S]ome scientists believe they can explain—if not predict—criminal activity based on brain scans. The advances have led more lawyers, especially upon appeal, to try to explain their clients’ mental makeup as the reason for their criminal behavior.

    http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2012/11/09/criminal-minds-use-of-neuroscience-as-a-defense-skyrockets.html

    Carolyn Kay
    MakeThemAccountable.com

  10. 1 In 5 U.S. Adults Had Mental Illness Last Year: Report
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/mental-illness-united-states_n_1216575.html

    When that many people have trouble living in a society, doesn’t it mean that there’s something wrong with the society?

    Carolyn Kay
    MakeThemAccountable.com

  11. Increase Seen in US Suicide Rate Since Recession

    (New York Times) The rate of suicide in the United States rose sharply during the first few years since the start of the recession, a new analysis has found.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/health/us-suicide-rate-rose-during-recession-study-finds.html

    Carolyn Kay
    MakeThemAccountable.com

  12. Mark Gisleson

    I’ve never written to say thank you, but thank you. When I was one of those bloggers (C list, maybe D) I would aggregate up to 60 links a day, all on the ongoing outrages. I think I linked to just about everything you wrote.

    I quit blogging after ten years because I wasn’t as good as you, and 4-500 readers a day for a nonpaying gig just wasn’t working for me. But we still need to get this information out and I’m thinking about a novel. That’s the advantage the left has over the right. We have the talent to spread out and reach people by myriad means: movies, plays, novels, poems, paintings, cartoons, music and other art forms yet to be created (but when they are, they’ll be thunk up by us, not them).

    But in the meantime I do like my truth straight up, and you are a great source for unvarnished facts.

  13. bob mcmanus

    You know I’m always around, well, til I’m not.

    They just have too much fun and confirmation kicking the right to look at themselves very closely.

  14. Were there not cruel and destructive policies before the mid-1970s? I think you’re a bit younger than this bird, but I am old enough to remember ‘nam. And before ‘nam, the Korea and the origins of the Cold Wars. And before that…

    The left did not create evil. Nor is the left a religious order.

    I think you are proposing that the left go Galt. But how would that help? We are not Rand’s wonderworking industrialists. The world will not stop if we stop participating.

    And, yes, there are many cruel and destructive policies. There have been all my life. And, no, I didn’t vote for Obama this year. But I am also very glad that Mitt Romney did not end up in charge.

    This was an election about identity. There is hope in this: that Americans voted for women’s rights, against racism, against homophobia, against religious oppression. Anger, in the end, is a result of frustrated expectations. Do you expect to end all political evil in your lifetime? Is that a reasonable expectation?

  15. Ian Welsh

    I am not suggesting the left do anything in this post.

  16. BlizzardOfOz

    @The Raven,

    Looking at your blog, you seem like exactly the kind of writer the post is about. Did you read it? I’m not surprised that your reaction is a defensive one. Your blog is straight Democrat apologia.

  17. GetReal

    @ Raven, you are a big dummy because you equate gay rights and women’s rights as improving economic equality and ending our extremist right wing foreign policy. Idiots make that unbelievable connection. Sorry Raven, but you are an idiot. And you are an idiot if you think the ship will be righted before it’s too late.

    The permafrost is already melting, and once Keystone XL is approved, you will have condemned 1 billion people to die.

    Obama and his neoliberal twat supporters have NO clue on how to fix the economy that they’ve gotten us into. NONE. You are a bunch of fucking morons who can’t understand elementary concepts of economics like moral hazard or the dangers of hidden risk in any complex system. You motherfuckers have fun fixing up the shit that you created.

  18. Hairhead

    When I graduated high school, I was socially feral; undiagnosed Asperger’s/high functioning Autism/whatever had left me with straight A’s and zero social abilities. This provided me with the outsider’s perspective, which I have found over the years to largely unwelcome. I still occasionally have conversations like this:

    PERSON: (gushing) I just love my iPhone! You should get one!
    ME: But I don’t need one.
    PERSON: How can you not need one? You can download programs, phone from anywhere, take pictures, and so on.
    ME: It’s a slave bracelet. If I had one, my boss could contact me anytime, day or night, weekday or weekend, and make me work. I have other things to do with my life.
    PERSON: But, but . . that’s just the way things ARE!
    ME: Not for me. My job has these (x) hours. If I’m wanted to work past these hours, I insist on getting paid, and paid well.
    PERSON: There’s no way my boss would stand still for that!
    ME: Then you’ve got a shitty, exploitive boss, and a bad work environment.
    PERSON: . . . . . (usually a hostile response) . . . .

    Repeat any number of times with politics, economics, etc. I always use facts and measurements whenever possible in my arguments, and that pisses people off more. It all comes down to measuring final effects.

    For instance, if economic/social/political system in 1968 meant that a single wage-earner could have a non-working spouse, a private residence, healthcare, children, and send those children through higher education, then that generally means a whole lot of good was produced for interior participants in that system. If we change it to eliminate many barriers of racism and sexism and rampant exploitation of outsiders (eg workers in poor countries), why should we get rid of the good outcomes at the same time?

    If we want to get rid of terrorism, why murder innocent men, women, and children (eg by drones), which only increases exponentially the number of people who want to kill us? Right now, the results are many dead innocent people and greater danger of terrorism. Why?

  19. Blizzard, see:
    http://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2010/12/obama-and-left.html
    http://adviceunasked.blogspot.com/2010/01/democratic-party-analysis.html

    I don’t think I’m making any excuses for the Democrats or progressives at all.

    Ian, if you do not wish leftists to think or act in other ways than they have, why are you raging?

  20. GetReal

    You idiot neoliberals keep tinkering with details like curtains and wall hangings, when the entire goddamn foundation is rotting! LOLOLOL! Jesus FUCKING CHRIST.

  21. GetReal, why should gays and women give up their rights to further your agenda? And why do you sound so happy that the metaphoric ship will go down?

    Besides, it’s not like gays and women giving up their rights is going to help.

    I’m an energy researcher. If you want to help come over here and start bailing.

  22. Elizabeth

    Ian, thank you for your column today. An article in my local paper reported that the rate of domestic violence in the Bay Area has skyrocketed. Numerous people quoted in the article could not explain this rise, which is somewhat puzzling. As a psychotherapist intern, I’ve no doubt that a major factor is our economic policies. Massive unemployment, underemployment, the ongoing foreclosure crisis, anxiety about losing one’s job, medical emergencies which further crush people financially, all play a huge role in this. Most domestic violence is directed toward women. It is ironic that Barack Obama, the great president who holds women’s rights so dearly, is the prime architect of these policies.

  23. Ian Welsh

    I said this post says nothing about what they should do other than be honest to themselves and tell the truth, which they aren’t.

    In fact, when one part of the left sells out the rest for their particular interests they are doing harm. Happens frequently. That I’ve said in other posts.

    Please don’t say things like people are happy to predict disaster. Heard it too many times, and it’s bullshit.

  24. @Raven: How many men/women sign up to die in wars overseas so that women can have abortions? I know that they aren’t actully dying to preserve freedom, but that’s why they sign up. All this yammer about “social policy” amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

  25. Miniwheat

    The economics of the Internet have been pretty much gonzo right from its promotion to “information superhighway” around 1993. It succeeded mostly because it provided an end-run around the ludicrously inflated fee schedules used by commercial X.25 services like Tymnet and DATAPAC (The starting rate for running a host on the latter was CDN$2500/mo IIRC); and because UUCP mail was free, while X.400 generally cost somewhat under a dollar per message, which represented a markup of more than 10000% even then.

    The absence of real micropayment options beyond a few American multinationals (the most successful run by a grade-A far-right nutcase) gives powerful sponsors and ad syndicates every bit as much of a chokehold over the new media as the old, even though the physical logistics of electronic publishing are clearly phenomonaly more favorable to independent authors than ink-and-paper media.

    The current network addressing scheme makes pay-by-distance impossible, which introduces many distortions and makes it hard for a mid-sized site to function without a CDN, and impossible for readers to finance a site via reversed charges.

  26. Become more than your background, more than a function of the incentives placed in front of you. See the evil you yourself do, your society does, and stop needing to feel good about yourself.

    Stop being someone else’s dog.

    Grats on getting through anger. I look forward to the depression and acceptance post after all this bargaining.

  27. Dakota de Sinope

    @Hairhead,

    I similarly share an outsider’s perspective, but I’ve ridden some different paths.

    For probably the majority of us who do have jobs, the bosses are shitty and exploitative, and the work environment is miserable.

    And the majority of us don’t have jobs at all — in many cases with minimal or altogether non-existence support.

    For a lot of people, conforming to abusive expectations is liable to be or become a matter of bare survival.

  28. Jeff Wegerson

    Dwolla is free under $10 and a flat $0.25 cents for any amount over.

    I ran a very minor blog for a while. I tried to attract left-side Democrats and third partyistas so I could enlighten along the lines of voting third party when the polling clearly indicated it was safe. I let the site run itself so it wasn’t too much work for me. I never had talented writers to attract a decent audience. But yeah, the site paid for itself and then some from advertising. For a while anyway. Then the audience dried up and the ad money quit arriving. Still there’s $2000 in the paypal account.

    I imagine that the most likely future is the public radio direction of hitting up readers on occasion.

    As long as you keep writing, Ian, I’ll keep reading. And, I’d send you money right now especially if it were easy enough. I know that was not the purpose of this post. Just sayin’.

    Right now I’m waiting on some community owned social media site to go viral and connect us in a manner where we can act concertedly. Something along the lines of Adhocracy and Liquid Democracy I would imagine.

    Well waiting on that and the ravages of climate change. Whatever.

  29. Greg T

    Fine commentary, Ian. Unfortunately, all too true. I recall the heady days back after Bush’s criminal invasion of Iraq when the netroots exploded in popularity and its potential to effect political change seemed limitless. There was the Dean candidacy and, thanks in no small part to online activism, the sanctimonious, pernicious Joseph I Lieberman was bounced from the Democratic Party. Since 2008, however, we realize that very little has changed. Those sites once at the cutting edge of change-making are now staunch defenders of the status quo. Despite his obvious conservatism, most lefty political bloggers have lined up behind President Obama. They do this knowing full well he does not align with their agenda. In fact, he wants the opposite. Candidate Obama had TARP passed against the wishes of his constituency and the population. Candidate Obama refused to write down mortgage debt, despite overtures from Hank Paulson offering to do it. President Obama pissed off a large segment of the left by negotiating away key elements of health care reform; the public option and drug importation . What does it take before people get the message? If your candidate works against your interest, you reject the candidate, you don’t drink the juice then point to how terrible the other political party is.

    You are spot on correct. There is no political force in this country pushing to avoid disaster. Because of that, disaster will come. Those who think they are immune have another thing coming. I wish it weren’t the case, but so it is. Anyway, keep doing your thing. Even if few of us are listening, there are a few of us. We appreciate your work.

  30. Ian, I don’t know what to say in response to this other than, again, thank you for writing, and for giving people like me a reason to think we aren’t the only sane one in the asylum. I get angry too, rageful even (though my parents have provided me with plenty of training on suppressing emotions) so I certainly think I can begin to understand how you feel.

    There are, indeed, a lot of people out there who decide how to behave and think based on what their “betters” say, and that is a shame–although if the tide turns, and I think it could, that means they will be confused and scattered when their nodes of authority start to fall. Who are these compromised bloggers? It’s not too hard to figure out, I don’t think.

    The tide could turn. Who knows? Obama seems bound and determined to cut vital social programs, and right now, which would reveal his true intentions to many people. And hurricane Sandy could start to lift the veil about climate change. Yes it’s sad that we need disasters (manmade and natural) to show us what to do, but as Churchill said “you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing when all else has failed.”

    Meander, meander. Anyway, thanks again.

  31. Dakota de Sinope

    I don’t make predictions — I just try to estimate probabilities. To me, too, it seems that there is basically “no political force in this country pushing to avoid disaster.”

    I do not know for sure that “disaster,” on the scale that is suggested here, “will come” — even if nobody does anything.

    But my gut instinct is that the odds are surely higher than those in Russian roulette, and much of the time I’m feeling that we’re kind of right on the Mississippi Gulf coast with Katrina less than a day out.

    Maybe if any kind of plausibly adequate political force were to form, it wouldn’t be “of the left” at all, not essentially.

    In my experience, most people are just out there living their everyday lives, and a substantial portion of them are not and never have been much in the way of “political” — and often don’t even know many of the labels people with reading habits like ours take for granted and seem hardly able to think or speak without.

    Maybe what is needed is to start with a small group of committed, intellectually curious, truth-telling concerned humans inclusive of individuals of all labels (and those of none).

    In a review of “The Silver Anniversary of the ‘Keating Five’ Meeting,” Bill Black discusses “a large number of important lessons that would have allowed us to avoid future crises.” The very first thing he says is:

    “First, we were apolitical as regulators. I worked closely in the same regional office with my three regulatory colleagues for years, but I do not know their political affiliation (if any). We went after the S&L frauds and their political cronies regardless of party.”

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/bill-black-the-silver-anniversary-of-the-keating-five-meeting-citizens-uniteds-precursor.html

    This sense many of us have of impending disaster is informed, it seems, by certain sets of brute facts. What I really would like to see is the careful cultivation of a group that includes at least a couple members from every major political stripe, plus some relatively apolitical types whose concern has been aroused by one thing or another, devoted to an open hearing of the basic features of where we are and where we seem to be headed, and then, in a careful and deliberate fashion, begin figuring out how a different outcome might be possible, and what the steps would be to begin to effect it.

  32. Mary Mac

    I frequented a lefty blog for years. They still do some good but the founder hardly ever shows up anymore. There are very good writers and the reporting is top notch. I have lost my will to write or even comment often. I became overwhelmed with information I could do nothing with. And there was a wave of crazy and contentious commenters who took over for about a year. They have been banned now. The whole affair feels pedestrian and weak. But then, that is how I feel generally, too. It is the lack of hope and the draining of energy over time that is one of the big problems. The world is depressed.

  33. viajera

    People respond to incentives like Pavlov’s dogs. If you want to be more than a dog, you have to train yourself to overcome your conditioning.

    As one of the last people to comment before you closed comments the other day, I want to tiptoe back into this debate.

    I’m still seeing a complete lack of mention of women, or issues that directly, viscerally impact women, right now. In the real world. Not in abstract theorizing. Women make up 51% of the population, and we made up 53% of the electorate in this election. As much as many politicos on both/all sides of the aisle(s) like to insist that we’re a “special interest”, we’re not. We’re the majority.

    We have a Republican Party platform that calls for a complete ban on abortion with no exceptions. We have Republican idiots calling for contraception bans, and claiming that rape is a gift from God. This isn’t just talk to me or other women. What happens if I – as a woman who just turned 40, an age where complications become far more common – get an ectopic pregnancy and need an abortion? What happens if my young cousin is raped? What happens if my best friend is in an abusive marriage and needs contraception she can hide from her abuser? That shit is real for us!

    I agree with 90%+ of what you say. I don’t like most of Obama’s policies. I certainly don’t carry his water. I would much rather vote for a real progressive. But there were no real progressives on the national ballot. A Green presidency is a child’s fantasy, as much as I would wish otherwise, so that’s not a viable alternative given our 2-party system.

    But my question for you is this: what else were we supposed to do? Vote for Romney?!?? That’s not just “overcoming conditioning”, that’s a potential death sentence for women of reproductive age. Calling us Pavlov’s dogs for voting for our very lives and ability to control our own bodies is, frankly, insulting.

    I’ve followed you for about a year now and read much of your work, but I still don’t see what options or solutions that individuals can do right now to bring about the changes we all want. It’s not that I’m doing nothing. I’m a professor and doing my best to instill progressive values in my students. I’m trying to educate friends and family members. I’m making plans to move off the grid as soon as possible. Heck, I’m even moving to Canada in a couple months. But from where I sit, there’s a long road between here and the progressive future I want to see as much as you do, and no one vote in this election was going to get us there. Certainly not a vote for Romney!

  34. Raven:

    GetReal, why should gays and women give up their rights to further your agenda? And why do you sound so happy that the metaphoric ship will go down?

    Besides, it’s not like gays and women giving up their rights is going to help.

    I’m an energy researcher. If you want to help come over here and start bailing.

    My realization (rather late and blind of me; see the other thread) that Ian *apparently* mostly agrees with the contingent of his readers who think that the “squishy” issues really are squishy and a distraction from the “real” issues puts OPs like these…in a rather different light.

    Ian seems to think that that part of the left has sold out the “economic” left, so to speak, but I don’t see it that way at all. It’s a once-bitten twice-shy scenario, at worst.

    In any case, a very large chunk of the American population has come to think that social progress has come at their expense, and that fact basically defines all possibilities within the electoral system.

  35. Mary Mac

    viajera,

    Thank you. I agree with all you have said. I don’t like Obama at all but saving abortion and birth control was paramount in my view. Who knows where Romney would have taken the women of this country. How can I not vote against a man who believes he has the right to decide if his wife goes to heaven? Weird question for me to ask since I don’t believe in heaven.

  36. BDBlue

    Voting for Obama didn’t save abortion or birth control. Obama is hostile to both and has set both back (more than Bush, for the record). Unlike Bush, Obama made the Hyde amendment permanent and broader, hurting poor women. He also used DC women’s access to abortion as a chit to get through his budget deal and, at one point, suggested cutting federal funding for birth control (something the GOP had not asked for). The Dems also made the “strategic” choice on birth control (and other women’s health issues) to not include coverage in the healthcare statute, which would ensure that women would be protected. To avoid the political “controversy”, they instead did it by rule making, which of course, can be undone by the next President. And, let’s not forget, Obama overruled FDA scientists and denying over-the-counter emergency birth control to 12-year-old rape victims because of his role “as a father”, one of the most sexist things I can remember a president saying in recent years.

    These are not the actions of anyone who is interested in protecting women. They are the actions of someone who sees women’s rights as bargaining chits and routinely cashes them in. And women will be among those most hurt by the Social Security and Medicare cuts their great defender has planned. And I won’t even go into how few women actually have access to abortion and how Roe v. Wade is really just about upper middle class women at this point.

    None of which means anyone should’ve necessarily voted for Romney (although Bush did less damage than Obama has done on abortion, even if his words were worse). It’s just that it’s tough to take the embrace of Obama and the Dems as being good for women or as protecting women just because they’re smart enough not to say nice things about rapists.

    Also, call me cynical, but I don’t think anyone who thinks he has the power to detain me indefinitely or execute me without trial can really be counted on to defend my right to bodily autonomy. It’s pretty clear, he doesn’t think any of us has that.

  37. BlizzardOfOz

    @viajera’s I like your comments, because they’re provocative on questions that are genuinely challenging to a “for the people” political coalition that lots of us here would like to see.

    You sound like you’re not sold by Mary Macs of the world — to support an evil man and his compromised political coalition because you think he’ll protect your rights, narrowly defined. I commend you for that, and acknowledge that it’s insufficient (if necessary) to say: just don’t support Obama.

    I would suggest that the solutions you seek are not a mystery. But what they are is counter-intuitive to the Orwellian bubble that most Americans live in. And there’s room for concerns like the ones you raise in a broad anti-oligarchy coalition. The key is to approach your platform from the stance of universal justice; from the stance of what’s universally just and true. Anyone who fails to take a universal approach — who focuses on some demographic segment’s rights — is an unwitting tool aiding the oligarchs’ tactic of divide and conquer.

    And we have the advantage of our history’s successful models of leadership and resistance. Start by putting down the glass of Kool Aid that the Democrats handed you.

  38. BlizzardOfOz

    @Mary Mac I kind of addressed you obliquely in my other comment, but I just wanted to respond directly. If you want to vote for an evil man who believes in nothing, and a party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the thoroughly evil DC-Wall Street axis — based on what you perceive as your self interest — then that’s completely within your rights.

    But own the consequences of signing on to a leadership that has a track record of being actively hostile to justice: they’ll sell you out the second it’s convenient. They’ve done it already; they’ll do it again. And when it happens, not many people will weep for you, because you’ve already — pre-emptively — sold out those who have far less power and privilege than yourself, and in a worse way.

  39. Mary Mac

    BlizzardOfOz

    “You sound like you’re not sold by Mary Macs of the world — to support an evil man and his compromised political coalition because you think he’ll protect your rights, narrowly defined.”

    Let me put it another way. I would be dying right now if Romney had his way. Now, Obama may not care but politically he had to maintain a system that handed me a diagnosis of cervical cancer so early that it was curable. I am on medi-cal in California. I was going to be taken off of the breast cancer coverage because I no longer was at risk. So, I had all of the tests I could think of that medi-cal would cover before it ran out. A pap smear showed that I had cancer. I was very, very lucky. I have a 97% cure rate. If this had happened a few months later and Romney had won, I wouldn’t have been able to get that pap smear. I would be a fucking dead woman. So, you tell me who I should have voted for.

  40. Mary Mac

    Blizzard of Oz,

    Want to see how I feel about Obama go to these two diaries written a long time ago in politcal terms.
    http://my.firedoglake.com/marymccurnin/2010/09/08/warning-signs-of-abuse-of-political-power/
    http://my.firedoglake.com/marymccurnin/2011/07/31/my-work-here-is-done/

  41. Ian Welsh

    There are two roads here:

    one: the Republican ones leads to place A by route A
    two: the Democratic one leads to place A by route B

    Practical access to abortion is already lost in about half the US. If you do not live in a solid blue state, or if you are not at least upper middle class, you do not have that access in practical terms. There are now TWO clinics which do complicated late term abortions in ALL of the United States. TWO. Tiller’s family shut down his clinic. They won that battle. There is NO big influx of new doctors willing to do abortions, because the life is hell, they make your family’s life hell and people don’t feel the sense of mission about it. The key doctors providing late term abortions are OLD, like Tiller was.

    The opponent to Mourdock opposes abortion except in the case of incest or rape. Yes, that’s better than opposing all abortion, but it isn’t much better.

    What I would have had you do, if you didn’t live in one of about 6 swing states is not vote for Obama. I would have had you vote for a third party candidate. Even so called hard core left-wingers in states like New York, which Obama wasn’t going to lose short of the apocalypse did not do that. Your VOTE did not matter in a non swing state, BUT if a third party gets 5% they get federal matching funds. That’s a start, and millions of dollars.

    The social conservative right is HEAVILY funded by the oligarchs. Heavily. If you want their power broken, you must break the power of the oligarchs. Furthermore, every time the government cuts SS and Medicare and foodstamps and Medicaid and so on they drive people into the arms of the churches, who are effectively the other social services.

    I would also have you tell the truth. Obama has done huge amounts of evil: even on Choice he was bad, signing an executive order banning the use of federal funds for abortions, and overriding the FDA on Plan B to keep it from going OTC.

    Ordinary people think that Obama is much more left wing than he is. Why? Because people keep lying for him, including the left wing influentials. Don’t lie. Tell the truth. If you want to vote for Obama due to lesser evil, then fine, make that argument: he’s scum, but he’s very slightly better scum than the other guy. I have some respect for that road, because it is at least honest. That’s not what I was seeing from most people.

    And you DID not have to vote for Obama in most states. You simply did not, even by lesser evil standards.

    Democrats might also stop choosing the right most candidate in every single primary cycle. Gore was the rightmost, Kerry was the rightmost and yes, Obama was the rightmost.

    Poverty is a profound lack of freedom. Those who have never lived in poverty without a security blanket (parents they can run to, or whatever) don’t really understand that. The late Oldman once told me of a girl who needed an abortion, and no one would pay for it, drive her to the only clinic (she was poor, see, and there was no public transit). He wound up doing it. That was long before Romney, or Obama. That girl only had abortion rights because he helped her, and no one else was going to. A lot of women don’t have someone who will do that for them and they don’t personally have the money that makes their rights real (in the same way that even the theoretical right to a trial isn’t real for poor people.)

    Poverty, bone deep nasty poverty. I spent a lot of my childhood in the third world. I know people who lived in Russia in the 90s. I have been, personally, poor. I have personally seen people in the middle of starving to death.

    It’s not fucking pretty, and it can happen here. And all of that before we even get into civil liberties.

    Break the power of the oligarchs and a lot of your other issues will be easy to solve. Fail to break them and you’ll have the rights they want you to have, no more, and live in fear and poverty.

    This does not mean that social issues are unimportant, it does mean that dead people don’t have any rights, and neither do peons stuck in jobs that don’t pay enough to live in anything but a tenement with 4 people per room. People who are affluent, otoh, can stand up for their rights.

    Men who have jobs, and especially good jobs, also don’t beat their wives nearly as often. And that’s an issue I personally care about as much as abortion. I think a lot of women probably agree.

  42. jcapan

    Excellent post Ian. Especially liked this:

    “… Americans live in a world of delusion. Of course they don’t make correct decisions, they are getting constant incorrect information. This isn’t just about what used to be called the MSM, this about the alternatives, the people who are the outliers.”

    The party, its operatives, and the corporate media have always generated repellent black-propaganda. But of course American liberals were somewhat wise to this, which is why coopting the netroots was such a tremendous coup. Nothing better disguises lies than having respected folks disseminate them. And you have a willing “reality-based” audience poised to embrace denial—who wants to see things clearly when it’s so fucking terrifying. Such folks, lower down the pecking order, can be excused for passing along misinformation of their own.

    I’d guess Ian doesn’t care if you voted or for whom as long as you did so without blinders. If you agree with him that twin apocalypses are coming your way, you can kind of get why the little victories don’t sound so important, right? Gays can join the military and murder along with their hetero bunkmates. Women can preserve a few fragile rights as we plummet towards totalitarian dystopia. The sense of urgency is that none of these battles are negating or postponing in any significant way the dark matter waiting to consume us.

    The only person to ever give me any hope when confronting challenges we face is Howard Zinn. From his Coming Revolt of the Guards:

    To do all that, in the complex conditions of control in the United States, would require combining the energy of all previous movements in American history-of labor insurgents, black rebels, Native Americans, women, young people-along with the new energy of an angry middle class. People would need to begin to transform their immediate environments-the workplace, the family, the school, the community-by a series of struggles against absentee authority, to give control of these places to the people who live and work there.
    These struggles would involve all the tactics used at various times in the past by people’s movements: demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience; strikes and boycotts and general strikes; direct action to redistribute wealth, to reconstruct institutions, to revamp relationships; creating-in music, literature, drama, all the arts, and all the areas of work and play in everyday life-a new culture of sharing, of respect, a new joy in the collaboration of people to help themselves and one another.
    There would be many defeats. But when such a movement took hold in hundreds of thousands of places all over the country it would be impossible to suppress, because the very guards the system depends on to crush such a movement would be among the rebels. It would be a new kind of revolution, the only kind that could happen, I believe, in a country like the United States. It would take enormous energy, sacrifice, commitment, patience. But because it would be a process over time, starting without delay, there would be the immediate satisfactions that people have always found in the affectionate ties of groups striving together for a common goal.

  43. Ian Welsh

    Obamacare is going to save certain specific people’s lives. Obama’s policies also hurt other people. It’s ok to vote one’s interests, just be clear that you are voting your personal interests and that other people are being hurt by the same person who is helping you.

    For the young, Obamacare is just another generational transfer of wealth. It forces them to buy really bad insurance they basically can’t use except for catastrophic care. It won’t control costs, isn’t sustainable, and it comes at the cost of a Supreme Court decision which allows Medicaid to be cut by state governors any time they want, meaning that the poorest people are going to pay for the lives of predominantly older people.

    Nonetheless, it will do some good.

    But if you live in California, your vote for Obama was never going to be the margin of victory, so you didn’t, in fact, need to vote for him in order to save your life.

  44. Mary Mac

    “But if you live in California, your vote for Obama was never going to be the margin of victory, so you didn’t, in fact, need to vote for him in order to save your life.”

    But what about the other women in other states who needed pap smears? It is not just about me and my own personal health issues. This is huge. I understand the need to stand against Obama. I also understand the need to get health care to as many as is possible. Where do you draw the line? If you don’t vote and the worst choice wins- people die. If you vote for a shit head like Obama and less people die in the short run are you still guilty of murder because of drones strikes, etc?

  45. jcapan

    What’s the lyric, “anger is a gift.”

    And Ian, you could follow Sherman Alexie’s example. When described by Time magazine to be “septic with unappeasable anger,” he put it on a T-shirt and wore it about.

  46. Ian Welsh

    Mary, Obama was going to take California no matter what you voted. So you could have voted for someone else – Jill Stein, say, or voted downballot and written in Mickey Mouse for Pres. People in other states would get those pap smears, or not get them, irrespective of your vote. I don’t like the lesser evil argument, but I do get it. What I am saying is that in many states, California and New York amongst them, that argument doesn’t apply. There is zero chance that Obama wouldn’t carry those states.

  47. Mary Mac

    “But if you live in California, your vote for Obama was never going to be the margin of victory, so you didn’t, in fact, need to vote for him in order to save your life.”

    Are you saying I should not have voted? Or have voted for Roseanne Barr? I thought of it actually. Should I have moved to Illinois where we all knew that Obama would win and my vote wouldn’t have counted.? Or should I have gone to live in Louisiana where my voted would not have counted cause the idiots there are going full tilt nuts for the repugs? What is the fucking answer?

  48. Mary Mac

    I worked really hard to defeat Dan Lungren and for Ami Bera to win. And it worked. Or I think it worked. Will Ami Bera be purchased in the same way that Obama was? Will Bera be compromised just like my vote for Obama was?

  49. Ian Welsh

    I don’t know him well enough to say Mary. Most do, but some don’t. Sometimes you can tell, but many times the only way to know is to put them to the test. They are offered everything, and the only price is their integrity, or, if you’re old fashioned, their soul. It seems like a small thing, and the social pressure is IMMENSE.

  50. Mary Mac

    Thanks Ian. I have to admit to be very frustrated.

  51. Mary Mac

    It is sort of like do you want Bush running FEMA or Obama. (spoiler alert: I am from New Orleans) The third party choice is unrealistic. They have no power. How much did Stein win? .5%? Or is this about waiting for decades for a third party to come to power?

    We are so fucked.

  52. BlizzardOfOz

    @Mary Mac

    It is sort of like do you want Bush running FEMA or Obama.

    I don’t understand why you seemingly can’t digest even Ian’s minimalist point about voting third-party in the “safe” electoral college states. The whole interaction reminds me of this Simpsons clip, with the outback bartender who literally cannot process words referring to a beverage other than beer.

  53. Mandos, oh, excellent point. It is a very old conflict on the left, and is especially marked with feminists. Women activists were for at least a century told to wait on economic reforms. Similarly blacks. It is true that the CPUSA was for a time the only major non-religious anti-racist organization; it’s also true that blacks were told to wait on the Revolution.

    I think that economic justice is connected with social justice, and it may be that women’s liberation and the end of the system of segregation in the USA furthered the cause of economic justice. Identity issues trump economics in political allegiances.

    Ian, I live in a safe Democratic state and I made a protest vote for the Green Presidential candidate. I did not make that vote for the Green gubernatorial candidate because that election was balanced on a knife edge, and the immediate consequences of a victory for Tea Party Republican Rob McKenna would have been dire. That vote was not a comfortable thing. One has to hope that one either loses or wins big; the in between could put our political enemies in power. This is the general problem of third-party votes in the USA; there is no way for a third party to gain ground without allowing its enemies to gain ground, and that ground usually is hard to retake.

    It has become clear to me that we need reforms that allow for multiple parties if our republic is to survive.

    The centrists (Obama’s faction of the Democrats) are slower than the radical right (Republicans). There is time to change course. With the radical right in charge, we’d lose so much ground so fast that it would be a generation to regain it, if it were to be regained at all.

    Not long before the election, I wrote to a number of Democratic friends, “The Republican party is now as misogynistic as it has been in 100 years. […] The Democratic party, while not a bastion of feminism, is not that.”

    You are of course right that “The social conservative right is HEAVILY funded by the oligarchs.” The Patriarchy, as radical feminists call it, is at least that real.

    “Ordinary people think that Obama is much more left wing than he is. Why? Because people keep lying for him, including the left wing influentials.” And also because the right says he is. There was no widely-credible contrary voice, which is another way of saying that the mass media are centrist.

    We also need media reform, if our republic is to survive.

    I agree entirely that “Poverty is a profound lack of freedom.” I do not, however, see that breaking the oligarchs is the only way to proceed. Indeed, I am not even sure it is possible. That has been a goal of the radical left for centuries, and there has been little progress towards it and many failures on the way. It is seldom the case that breaking any political faction has the desired effect. So I think it best to seek other approaches.

    I differ with you in a number of respects, but it seems to me that we are much more on the same side than not, and I hope you agree.

  54. Mary Mac

    I do understand. I think the overall effect is not the same. My vote doesn’t technically count. The impact of my vote in support of other citizens does count. Other women in New York state and/or Mississippi with urgent problems are supported by my vote against Romney and for their rights. Obama is a horrible person but not as threatening (quite) as Romney. The immediate problem of Romney was more important than the long term problem of Obama.

  55. @Mary Mac: Abortion and contraception are wonderful. I’m all in favor of them. I hope all women enjoy them while they are in prison camps as a result of police suppression of public gatherings or are imprisoned when they try to deny police permission to search their homes and cars because the the new military government says that the law of the land gives police unlimited power. The right to an abortion and to use contraception might be a little less attractive when they are the only rights you have left because they were the only things that mattered when you voted.

  56. To give just one example, TARP was going to not pass the House.

    It failed in the House on Sept. 29, 2008.

    (Ian edit: and then it passed, because Obama twisted arms. Strange comment.)

  57. The people who sadden me are left-wingers who carried Obama’s water, who I know know better. I know they know his record. I know they know where this is all leading. I know because I was a professional blogger for years. I’ve met these people in person, I have corresponded with them, and I have talked to many of them. I have worked with many of them.

    They know what Obama is, and they lied about him.

    If you are unwilling to name these people, then you shouldn’t have made this statement.

  58. Bruce Wilder

    I tell people that “thinking” is social, and politics is a society, thinking aloud. Your individual intentions or wishes are never going to be realized; democratic politics is frustrating that way; it is a team sport. But, the one thing you can do, as an individual to improve things, is to try sincerely to tell the truth. There’s a purity to that, and truth forces its way into the conversation, into the political dialectic — not so much to convince others (truth is, unfortunately, rarely a good persuader), but to prevent your self from being fooled and subverted. My father’s father was a professional hustler and petty crook; my father was a policeman. My father was fascinated by corruption, was a whistleblower early in his career. My father liked to say that it is very hard to cheat an honest man.

    I see all these short-circuits people do to their own thinking, particularly on the left, just to avoid facing the reality that they are powerless. Powerless, and, as Ian says, responsible.

    The “lesser evil” argument, thirty or forty years ago, used to be said sardonically. In this election, it was presented shrilly. The difference between Obama and Romney was supposed to redeem Obama, I guess, and, more than that, to prevent a full realization of just how powerless everyone, but the oligarchy and its minions, now is. That powerlessness is an important truth. Obama was re-elected on the strength of people’s willingness to avoid confronting that truth squarely.

    I think most Americans are acutely aware of the decline of the country — people outside the elite, any elite, feel it more acutely than the elites, including the “influentials”, who shepherd our approved left-liberal discourse. It is hard to mistake declining wages, or high unemployment, or the disappearance or rapid decline of familiar institutions. But, that decline is not a part of the experience of many of our elite “influentials”, not in the way it is for the majority of the American people. It is hard to articulate what you don’t experience, hard to explain it, hard to know what to do about it, harder still to know that you are powerless in the face of it, powerless to do much more than try to tell the truth.

    Political argument is a conversation, a dialogue, a dialectic, a debate, pitched by teams. Among the most effective tactics in a debate is to misunderstand your opponent in ways that make her repeat and reiterate and simplify her arguments. Another is to “agree”, in ways that misstate your opponents assumptions and assertions, offering common ground, where there is none. Silence and Stupid are also powerful tactics. Without a disciplined committment to finding the truth and telling the truth, one’s vulnerability to these tactics double. And, that committment has to include a willingness to admit one’s own powerlessness, the likelihood of losing, because all of these tactics — Misunderstanding, Agreement on Common Ground, Silence and refusal to engage, and Stupid — all of these and many more — depend directly for their effectiveness on the sincere advocate’s reluctance to admit powerlessness, ignorance, and isolation on an issue. Telling the truth is painful and costly, and conservatives and cynics will use the reluctance engage in painful confrontations against the sincere advocate of any cause.

    It has been common in the wake of the election result to project a weakened, declining Republican Party, but I think the Democratic Party is heading toward a crackup. The failure of left “influentials” to supply an articulate explanation and analysis of the country’s widely and acutely felt decline has left much of the country even more incoherent ideologically than usual. The left “influentials” have made it abundantly clear than they want to be rolled, and they will be.

  59. Ian Welsh

    Not the time yet to name names, in my opinion. I assume that some of the examples I gave were obvious to people who actually follow the blogosphere. Still, I have some sympathy for the argument that I should name names. If I bother, it will likely not happen in a post like this, but in a specific post which takes down another blogger’s specific post, much as I went after Kevin Drum for his deceptive post “explaining” the Greek crisis, and Digby for quoting it.

    Friends of mine travel the US extensively, talk to ordinary people a ton. Anecdotally, what they are telling me is that ordinary people, including small business owners, still think the economy is awful.

  60. kj1313

    Wedge issues are used as distractions as they rob us blind.

  61. Thank you. It is reassuring to know there are people who really do know what is happening, what is going on and can share the intense sadness. I found you on nakedcapitalism.com – the only site I seem to read these days. I hope you continue.

  62. Bernard

    yes, we are truly Fucked. and deeply so. the Blacks i work with think Obama is doing the best he can due to the hatred of the Whites. the Whites think Obama is exactly what Rush is saying. and neither look outside their comfort zone. no one looks below the surface. it is so crazy making to listen when these people talk about how “evil” the other side is.

    the gradual eliminationist behavior of the two sides against the middle is what i have been seeing for years. this has been so successful and so damn gradual. this gradual build/accumulation has been going on for years.

    that snowball going down the mountainside, taking more and more and more of our “rights” and the money/freedom/hope that went with those rights. the Angst

    i guess that is what i notice most. the gradual accumulation of power, money and idiocy in the fight. and the specious “look there” diversionary tactics that work. why women have let men take away their rights, year after year, drip after drip after drip. the constant attack.

    Ian, you are so right in the prospect of what awaits us. other than a grand crash, most Americans are too “focused on the ME,ME,ME” aspects of what they see. that we are all in this together is no longer relevant or perceiveable.

    and we don’t have an underground economy like Russians did, from what i gather about the USSR, to even begin to fall back on. that is it, mostly, we have no alternatives and this fact is used by most to keep on keeping on with what we have. What else can we do? mentality. we are screwed, we can see it subliminally and are fighting like all get out to avoid this reality.

    so the reality is we have fallen back into the ignominy of fear, tearing out at those around us and those different from us, out of a lack of knowing what else to do. easier to control a misdirected person than a quiet reflective thinking one.

    the caged animal, bewildered and bereft of hope. pacing up and down the wires of the cage, the endless sense of being “stuck.” god how i hated to see the panthers in the zoo. that constant back and forth. got to get out appearance. the destruction of society in such a gradual pace to a point where the snowballing momentum is on its’ own now.

    Ian, please keep on posting.

  63. I want to add my thank you to the others for the first class analysis and the clear writing style that you have. I was drawn to electoral politics in 2003 by a speech by a Southern Senator in which he said “It is the time to reward work over wealth”. And it was not just that exciting and simple way of expressing why inequality was the number one priority of a people, but he had a list of ways to make it work. I used to say in 2008, that Obama was a shiny brochure and Edwards had the User’s( or Repair) Manual. (Previously my only foray into electoral politics was to be in a satirical revue in NYC in 1984 that started out as a fund raiser for women candidates and ended up in a 6 month run with great reviews by the NY Times and VV. But that’s another story. I mention it because another commenter mentioned other ways to get the alternatives out there. Vast Left has his cartoon which is very effective.)

    I don’t want to get into a discussion about Edwards, Hilary or Obama. Electoral politics is not where it’s at for me. More like Occupy feeds me. I just wanted to provide some context. It is interesting to watch people’s journeys. Some people just run in place. They like the status quo and the status that comes with it sometimes not to mention the cold hard cash. Other people continue to sharpen their messages as they receive new information. I went from buying every possible “left” publications after the coup in 2000, to cancelling all of them. I was a “casual” political person who read “The Nation”, “Mother Jones”, NY Review of Books, Harper’s, In These Times, and on and on. Then on to internet sites. But the pickings got awful slim as I discovered that they were not “left” but Democrat. I was discouraged after this awful election was finally over and filled with dread. But in the last few days things seem to be perking up. Ian started writing again. Naked Capitalism, Vast Left, Greenwald, Corrente, Counterpunch, Real News,and Cornel West and Tavis Smiley’s smackdown on Democracy Now are pushing back. http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/9/tavis_smiley_cornel_west_on_the

    “I think you are a top notch writer and I know a few so keep it coming, ” I selfishly cajoled.
    The Archdruid is also fun and I am enjoying his futuristic stories over at http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

  64. Bolo

    @Ian:
    Just wanted to give my thanks as well. I’ve done the “anger burnout” thing before and it’s not fun. I’ve seriously toyed with just turning my back on all but two or three blogs, just to let my mind rest. I live and work in the DC beltway, so the American bubble is alive and active here. My fellow government employees were ecstatic to vote for Obama, despite the fact that he wants to cut agency budgets as part of his grand bargain. See, he’s “playing the long game” and is “on our side” and “we have to make sacrifices” and… ugh.

    Since you mention friends who travel to America and talk about the economy, I can add an anecdote or two:

    1) In DC and the beltway, the economy is still going strong because the government hasn’t made significant spending cuts. We just bought a house this past summer in a neighborhood where prices are moving upward very quickly.

    2) Of the dozen or so people I’ve kept in touch with from grad school (’08 – ’10, out in Arizona), half have found jobs in DC, with the remaining ones either still unemployed, deciding to stay in school longer, or maybe finding one or two jobs elsewhere in the country.

    3) My day job has me in contact with middle and upper management environmental and engineering people in almost all the major electronics and IT product selling companies active in the US. Several of them are laying off people now. Most of the others are just not hiring. They are cost cutting aggressively, to the point where desktop and laptop manufacturers are outsourcing testing, product assembly, and possibly even product design functions. Not so sure on that last one, but I’ve had some interesting conversations in the last month that point in that direction.

    There are so few sources of truth and honesty out there, so I really appreciate what you do here Ian.

  65. madisolation

    Thank you, Ian. I identify with so few bloggers these days and haven’t for a long time. Matt Stoller, Chris Hedges, Yves Smith, and Glenn Greenwald I read. There may be a couple of others, but they don’t come to mind right now. I think Hedges wrote a good column this morning, full of sharp words and healthy anger. As it happened, he addressed the people who emphasized gender equality or a woman’s right to choose to justify their votes and wrote that moral fragmentation is moral capitulation:
    “The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman’s right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous evil. This moral fragmentation—using an isolated act of justice to define one’s self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state—is moral and political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become. ”
    http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/once_again_–_death_of_the_liberal_class_20121112/
    It seems to me that you talked about teachers accepting a deal that cut food stamps a while back, Ian. It’s the same thing. It’s always the same thing.
    Obama and his elitist friends hold liberals in contempt, as they smile and toy with them:
    “Would you sell out a relative for a scrap of bread?”

  66. Ian, thank you. Your essays and analyses are invaluable for me as I struggle with the rage, anger, sadness and at times depression which seems inevitable in seeking and expressing the truths of our times, political and otherwise. The affirmation that not only am I not alone, but that others such as yourself express the dissonant realities much more clearly and eloquently than I can possibly manage.

    The discussion here is also wonderful.

  67. … To be an influential should be to be an intellectual, and to be an intellectual is to be able to stand outside ones own society, to see it through the dual eyes of an outsider and a member, then report the truth of what one sees.

    One must be, then, more than product of one’s circumstances, more than a function of one’s personal interests.

    I only pull this quote out because is it mirrors a thinking session I was having yesterday about mitigating the limits of one’s own (unavoidable) perception (and self-interest) bubble when thinking about reality-at-large. The “dual-eyes” sentence is roughly what I came away with…

    But the main reason I’m commenting on this thread, two posts back (I’m just catching up on this micro-burst of posts and threads that have appeared here!), is to echo the positive sentiments of others as regards your (powerless and responsible) contribution to a somewhat underground but profoundly necessary conversation.

    We try to keep on keepin’ on…

  68. …two posts back…

    Oops, guess I’m current after all. Some heavy reading in the threads tripped me up! 🙂

  69. Mike

    I know these feelings very well. My politics lies far further right than the author but the complete absence of thought distresses me. Most of my friends are aggressively on the left and I’m finding it hard to maintain any respect – not because of different beliefs but because of a scary lack of willingness to look at what is actually happening.

    In Los Angeles where I live the LA teachers union fought tooth and nail to stop a law that allowed the LA school district to fire teachers with credible evidence of fiddling with kids or selling drugs to their students (yes selling drugs to other members of the community would not have been a fireable offense). I said that I thought that the law was a good idea and got roundly attacked. I had to justify why I thought that pedophiles not teaching kids was a sound idea! Even more astonishingly no one saw it my way and in fact everyone seemed to feel sorry for me for the views I hold.

    The tribalism people operate with is scary.

  70. Michael M Thomas

    This is really quite wonderful. Right on the money, no pun intended. I have voted for Obama twice: 2008, because I was fooled, and last week, because Romney is every shallow, lying investment banker I have known in the course of fifty years on and around Wall Street, twenty years actually in the business, thirty writing about it. But since November 21, 2008, when the transition team announced that the incoming administration’s economics cadres would be headed by Summers and Geithner, I knew that some kind of fix was in and my outlook became unwaveringly bleak.

  71. Ian, I can identify with your anger and rage. I first became interested in the causes of the financial crisis right after 2008. I was especially interested in Goldman Sachs as that name came up over and over again in the news. I made some comments on the GS666 blog and then contributed (almost) daily to posting information on the dark side of Goldman Sachs. There was no dearth of ugly information available, I can tell you.

    I was sure that by now the CEO and CFO would be prosecuted under Sarbanes-Oxley but now I know that that will never happen. I despise having a front row seat watching what is going to happen as the frauds are continually rewarded, as the rich get so rich that they eventually will own the whole world and as all the other terrors you mentioned in your post devolve.

    I know that posting some ugly action that Goldman has done almost every day is not going to solve anything and if I weren’t so old I would be out there with a placard or beating pots and pans. It is terrible to witness the slow-motion rotting of our democracy from the top down in our two countries (and the UK).

    I was satisfied to see that you included Canada in your list of countries which are slowly disintegrating. Even Canadians don’t seem to notice that we have a dictatorial Prime Minister who received only 40% of the popular vote but who rules as though he were monarchical material! (Imagine His impertinence in telling us We are all conservatives now. Not on your sweet bippy will that ever be true of me!)

    Thank you for your expressions of rage that we all share. We appreciate your courage and honesty.

  72. FJA

    Refreshing column. Shortly after 2008 I stopped blogging and mostly stopped commenting. Emerging from lurker status to thank you for letting us know we are not the only ones.

    A young-ish coworker (30) who voted Obama told me he was excited about the re-election because “now, hopefully, the president can pass Obamacare.”

    How could I have responded?

    I think Obama was a perfect storm of one who could break racial barriers, who emerged just after Bush, at a time media fragmented itself into many self-reinforcing spheres/bubbles.

  73. Hugh

    I think many progressives experience periods of weariness. The rich and their elites continue their slow relentless demolition of our societies. Our voices are heard by few. Many of our colleagues sold out along the way. And it was a toss up which was more discouraging, that they sold out or that they sold out so cheaply.

    We should not have had to explain again in 2012 why it was so wrong and self-defeating to support Obama and the Democrats when we had already done this in 2008, even more true today that we have 4 years of his corporatist, pro-war, pro-rich, anti-99% record to look at. How many times do we have to say there never will be a viable third party alternative to the Democrats and Republicans as long as progressives wait for someone else to start voting for it? And the Supreme Court has always been a false issue. Democrats could have blocked the nominations of all of the reactionary Justices going back to Scalia by filibustering them. People forget that Thomas won confirmation in a Democratically-controlled Senate through Democratic votes. They forget that while Republicans were free to get diehard conservatives on the Court, Obama did not choose liberals or progressives for the Court, but business friendly center-right Justices like Sotomayor and Kagan. They forget that Obama gave his blessing to the Hyde Amendment in an Executive Order.

    Elections are all about winning now. Things have gotten so twisted around that progressives put forward the argument themselves that they must vote for anti-progressives, like Obama, to prevent the virtually indistinguishable anti-progressive Romney from winning. It should not matter where you live. If Obama and the Democrats don’t represent your views, don’t vote for them. If they had wanted your votes, they could have spent some of the last 4 years fighting for and delivering on your issues. How is a progressive any different, let alone better, than a winger Republican if both vote for candidates who do not represent them and will work against their interests? How can progressives criticize Obama for pre-compromising progressive positions into oblivion when they have pre-compromised those same positions into nothingness by voting for him?

    What is disheartening is not that we have debunked all of this over and over again, but that we still must do this even with other progressives. I for one am done with the Establishment liberals and career progressives. I am not waiting around for them to see the light. They have no interest in the light. They are just trying to figure out the best angle for themselves. Screw them. But that said, I have no intention of giving up the fight. It is going to be a very long fight, and things are going to get a lot worse before we cannot mobilize and organize to make them better. It is stupid beyond words and criminally wasteful of people’s lives in the extreme, but then that is precisely why I am fighting and will continue to fight against it.

  74. bob mcmanus

    You are of course right that “The social conservative right is HEAVILY funded by the oligarchs.” The Patriarchy, as radical feminists call it, is at least that real.

    I have been known to contest Identity Politics, but mostly I object to Identities that are imagined as a subaltern in opposition to a Republican Empire. The Empire is not Republican.
    The Patriarchy is real, but part of a system of dominance.

    As far as people to read, besides those mentioned above, there are the leftist blogs like Michael Roberts,, Michael Hudson, Kotsko, Seymour, Proyect who can at least provide different directions. There are the tiqqun and TC communisation publications of a few years back. al Jazeera? Look overseas, Europe, ME, South America, Asia. There is so much available, and they see us better than we see ourselves.

    I just think anyone who wants a clear view probably should move at least his head into exile.
    Think global.

  75. bob mcmanus

    It is going to be a very long fight, and things are going to get a lot worse before we cannot (sic? can) mobilize and organize to make them better.

    I don’t think we have much time. Certainly no 25-50 year plan will survive global warming.

    If Sandy had been two hours North we might have had another global crash. I think the systems (ecological and economic, but not political) are so fragile and the elites so disconnected and complacent that catastrophic unexpected collapse is as likely as not. In this way we are closer to the first quarter of the 20th than the 2nd quarter.

    I think we will go pretty “hot” in the next five years.

  76. Ian Welsh

    Stock wealth has crashed for ordinary people. Absolutely through the floor. Ordinary people are, less and less, rentiers.

  77. Tavis Smiley said that his granddaddy always used to say, “There’s some fights that ain’t worth fighting even if you win. But there are other fights you have to fight even if you lose.”

    The one bright light that I saw from this hideous 18 months was from the Latinos and Latinas. They pushed for something before the election and they aren’t going to sit around like the rest of the coalition. They aren’t partisan. They aren’t in love with politicians. So they will push for economic justice and immigration reform from both parties. And they know how to actually strike.

  78. Morocco Bama

    .

    Wow, most of you are way behind on The Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as The Five Stages of Grief. You’re only at Anger.

    Denial (this isn’t happening to me!)
    Anger (why is this happening to me?)
    Bargaining (I promise I’ll be a better person if…)
    Depression (I don’t care anymore)
    Acceptance (I’m ready for whatever comes)

    I’ve reached acceptance and I am moving towards what will come after….of anything. I now know this can’t continue and won’t continue, and I think that’s a good thing. By “this,” I mean Civilization.

    .

  79. Glen

    How true this is. I didn’t vote for President Obama after being a 30+ year Democratic party voter, I voted for Jill Stein. I will not vote Democratic party for President until the Dems can run a liberal for President. Until then, screw em.

  80. viajera

    @Ian,

    I’m late getting back to this, but wanted to thank you for your thoughtful response.

    I see your points about Obama. He’s certainly not as pro-choice as I would like him to be. The environment is one of my other main issues (and my professional field), and I’m disgusted at the lack of mention of, or action on, climate change. But where I disagree with you is that I’ve given up on the idea of the Green Party having a snowball’s chance in hell at getting 5%, let alone a majority, in my lifetime. I was young and idealistic once and enthusiastically voted Nader back in 2000 (I was in safe California at the time). I bought the line that there were no real differences between the 2 major parties. But the next 8 years disabused me of that notion. Do you really think Gore would have gone into Iraq? I sure as heck don’t think so!

    I’m one of them there “dirty hippie” liberals, and I even grew up in the liberal PNW, but with conservative family from Oklahoma and Texas. I spent years traveling back and forth across the country, often working at military bases in the Midwest and South, and I now live in a small blue bubble in the Deep Red South (shout-out to my fellow New Orleanian, Mary Mac!). I have, and continue to, come into contact with a lot of people from all sorts of backgrounds. Nothing in my experience – short of the few years I spent living in ultra-liberal western Marin County, CA (you can’t get much further left than Bolinas!) – has given me any reason to believe that the Green Party has the slightest chance in the US. People think Obama is a socialist, for Maude’s sake!

    Call me a fatalist. I admit it. But I just don’t see it happening in my lifetime, so I’ve taken a “lesser of two evils” strategy as of late. But I’m open to being convinced otherwise – I’d like to gain some of that hope back – so I keep reading… Thanks.

  81. Grady

    Morocco Bama, if you have/had kids what would you tell them?

  82. Grady

    viajera,

    I disagree in that we’ve seen successive groundswells on the left over the last decade. The Iraq war protests, the huge movements to elect Howard Dean and Barack Obama, in large part grassroots/bottom up movements (however misguided they were about the candidates themselves) and finally OWS, about which Thomas Frank just wrote a depressing obit. None of these bursts of citizen participation have done anything to jolt us off the rails of status-quo-mageddon. But imagine if committed leftists all visibly began breaking with the dem party outright. Occupy, given what’s taken place over the last 4 years should have been a huge F-U to Obama and “both” his parties, and it should have either explicitly supported the greens or started up its own party. That it failed to clearly do all this made it seem vacuous and impotent. That type of movement, with vision, would give a lot of cover to the liberals all over America institutionalized by the two-party prisonhouse.

  83. ks

    ” It’s just that it’s tough to take the embrace of Obama and the Dems as being good for women or as protecting women just because they’re smart enough not to say nice things about rapists.

    Boom.

  84. Compound F

    Dude. Word. As usual.

    Speaking of absentee bloggers, I saw a [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/11/1160263/-Mourning-in-America billmon post] at DK that was decent enough in its intent toward loser rethugs (although wholly unaware of the floods taking out liberals, as well), which reminded me once again that billmon is a financial writer in the meat world who has been conspicuously absent throughout the financial crisis. Yeah, he prolly has a family to support, so there’s that.

    Just noticing, that’s all. billmons omissions are surely less sinful (Dante-wise) than driftglass’s open, “we killed Dillinger!” support for bin Laden’s assassination.

  85. General Washington

    Ian, one item I take exception to.

    I not only live in a swing state, I live in THE swing state (Ohio).

    And I voted for Stein.

    [Actually I strongly leaned Alexander (Socialist), but the federal matching was too intriguing. Even though I consider the Greens to merely be the outlet party for disaffected Democrats, as the Libertarians serve the same purpose for disaffected Republicans.]

    I did so despite the possibilities that Obama might lose the election because there is no difference… and – speaking of being honest – lets be honest about that first.

    There really is no utility in voting for “slightly less awful”. Even in swing states.

  86. As a lifelong proud loudmouthed feminist, who’s put her ass on the line for abortion rights just as it sounds like Mary Mac and viajera have done, I find it infuriating and depressing as hell to hear women focus in on one issue and one issue alone as justification for voting for Obamney.

    But I, too, am tired of listing all the reasons why he and the Dems are not, in fact, the “lesser evil.” Ted Rall demolishes that argument nicely. I’ll let his political cartoon do the talking:

    http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/2012/09/19

  87. Men who have jobs, and especially good jobs, also don’t beat their wives nearly as often. And that’s an issue I personally care about as much as abortion. I think a lot of women probably agree.

    Let me put it this way:

    The idea that these are two separable issues—the income/DV connection and the choice issue—is really quite wrong, to put it mildly.

    I mean, it’s pretty odd that the defender here of old-school second-wave American feminist theorising is a male Canadian Muslim techie living in Europe, but here we are.

    In a nutshell: the connection is that women are a resource in patriarchal society, a consumable. The ratification of the consumable status of women in the modern world is the denial of reproductive autonomy. Insofar as women are consumables, men who are denied access to monetary resources will not surprisingly turn to other forms of, er, consumption. That’s not the conventional way of putting it, but I think that might just fit into the frame of mind around this comment section?

    I know that people here are going to dismiss this as “theory”. But that is why there is no real tradeoff between choice and DV like the one Ian set up in his comment above. What Ian is basically demanding by implication is that women’s groups risk a near-future drastic curtailment of their reproductive autonomy in order to take a chance on his rather, um, interesting theory of how politics would have unfolded if the left had decided to distance itself from Obama in 2009!

    It should not be surprising that Lisa’s fellow women were sufficiently perceptive of the expected value of the strategy not to make this trade-off. I mean, my explanation above fell out of the very mouths of Akin and Mourdock in the whole rape quotes fiasco.

  88. Dandelion

    Social justice is predicated on economic justice. The Civil Rights movement and the second wave feminist movement both took off and gained ground as the economy was expanding and overall inequality was lessening.

    You can’t vote for someone who is furthering economic inequality and expect that any social justice gains will be made or even preserved.

    For example, once Obama cuts social security and Medicare and more elderly are living in poverty (and this will be disproportionately women) who is going to care for them? In most middle class families it will be the women. So middle class women might be happy that Obama nominally preserved Roe v. Wade and also signed the relatively useless Ledbetter bill, so that they can find and pay for an abortion and sue an employer for discrimination on the still very narrow legal grounds permitted. But they won’t be able, in practical terms, to live a fully self determining life or even, possibly, keep a full time job because they’ll be caring for their own aging mothers.

    There are all sorts of ways to push women back to the kitchen, and restricting access to abortion and birth control,is only one of them.

    In a shrinking economy, where inequality is increasing, women will be first on the chopping block. History has demonstrated that over and over again.

    The only way to keep or advance lasting social justice is to fight for economic justice, and you can’t do that by voting for the guy who’s made poverty and inequality worse than it was under the last republican president.

    And in fact, like it or not, by voting for Obama you give your consent to his policies. You don’t get to pick and choose and say you’re voting for this but not that. Obama was very clear during the recent campaign that he intended to cut the safety net further and that he’d continue down the neoliberal path of global,wage arbitrage. He was very clear that he intended a declining standard of living for the 99%.

    Lots of people have been “so fucked” in lots of places in history. But going along with being so fucked didn’t get them anywhere. I truly do not understand how liberals and progressives can read history and not see the value and power of conviction and refusal.

  89. Occupy, given what’s taken place over the last 4 years should have been a huge F-U to Obama and “both” his parties, and it should have either explicitly supported the greens or started up its own party. That it failed to clearly do all this made it seem vacuous and impotent. That type of movement, with vision, would give a lot of cover to the liberals all over America institutionalized by the two-party prisonhouse.

    This is a very old dream, old from before Nader, but first online back then in a big way. It’s essentially the same dream, unchanged, with exactly the same debate, exactly the same rhetoric, exactly the same divisions. The same accused villains, the same hypothetical heroes.

  90. Ian Welsh

    Ah Mandos, always with a reason why the status quo, but with decline, is the best anyone can hope for, so they should vote Dem. A very old argument, old from before Nader. So very, very predictable. The eternal gadfly, always arguing that abuse is all one can expect from American politicians, so since it’s inevitable, you should vote for it.

  91. Ah Mandos, always with a reason why the status quo, but with decline, is the best anyone can hope for, so they should vote Dem. A very old argument, old from before Nader. So very, very predictable. The eternal gadfly, always arguing that abuse is all one can expect from American politicians, so since it’s inevitable, you should vote for it.

    Or, to resuscitate an infamous quote, “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

  92. jcapan

    What Dandelion said, which reminds me of something similar I said here over 2 years ago:

    “Most Americans don’t give a shit about the environment or dead Afghani children–at least not if it means they’re going to have to sacrifice or fight on their behalf. It may sound brutal but the truth usually is. You can’t build a movement by relying on conscience. They’re too busy looking for work or struggling to pay for their health care or kid’s college to give thought to the biosphere or innocents being slaughtered by drone strikes … these other goals can only be achieved (if at all) once a more egalitarian society begins to materialize. As long as Americans are this divided from one another, they won’t be able to achieve much of anything.”

    And that’s what ID politics accomplishes as well, division. Unless we’re united by what Lambert calls the “key log” of class war, waged against an oligarchy that’s been beating our ass for over 30 years now, we are a divided and easily conquerable enemy.

    And Mandos, I’d quote RFK but I’m afraid you’d laugh at that too. So, clearly you’re for dem party redemption over 3rd party empowerment/generation. OK, point to a path FWD that achieves such results, but I’ve got to tell you that leaves me a bit misty-eyed as well. At least results before big brother assumes total control. What’s the path FWD for you? Surely we’re not ltd. to the ballot box right? Occupy type protests and civil disobedience wrapped around newer better dems? Are Grayson or Warren the beginning of some authentic liberal revival or are they the latest Kucinich(es)?

    In the words of the inimitable IOZ:

    “See, here, well, um, I have long been under the impression that what Dennis Kucinich was doing was providing a reliably quote-unquote liberal outlier, a lonely tentpole on the far, far side of the bombing range where the Democratic party pitches its big tent, around which the sort of folks who overpay for yoga instruction and carry their own bags to the grocery store could crowd, having convinced themselves that its slender shadow is the shade. A few paces to its left is a single, well-occupied dining room chair, upon which rest all of Ron Paul’s supporters; it’s their seat at the table, get it? Look, people within institutions serve institutional functions, whether the like it or not, whether they know it or not. Does Dennis Kucinich help you to continue to believe that you are an, oh, god, citizen? That by speaking out you are “changing prevailing political mores”? Maybe all isn’t lost . . . maybe . . . maybe I ought to continue to participate . . . it may not produce any immediate, tangible successes, but, given time . . . attitudes change . . . people change . . .

    And this is how you end up reliably offering your consent to one or other gang of murdering psychopaths. So who’s crazy, here, the murdering psychopaths, or the fella who keeps handing them the keys to the gun cabinet? The old saw about the real definition of insanity is the truth: it consists of the endless repetition of the same action with the expectation of a different result. If the Democratic party can contain a Kucinich, it must be less evil than the evil rethuglican menace, right? If the Republicans have a Ron Paul, they must be at least somewhat, marginally more committed to some kind of reasonable limits on the reach and scope of the federal government, right? No, wrong, wrong! If a fucking candy bar contains real coconut, that does not make it a fruit; if you fruits drink enough Miller Ultra Lite, you will still get fat.”

  93. And in fact, like it or not, by voting for Obama you give your consent to his policies. You don’t get to pick and choose and say you’re voting for this but not that.

    Followers don’t believe in consent or choice. They take what they are given and obey their leaders. Therefore, they rationalize, they are not responsible for the consequences of their actions.. And their leaders must never be questioned.

    always arguing that abuse is all one can expect from American politicians, so since it’s inevitable, you should vote for it.

    Abused children still expect to be abused as adults.

  94. BlizzardOfOz

    For all of Americans’ non-stop wanking about “freedom”, do they even have any clue what it is? I say most of them do not, not anymore. This is despite the aesthetic of freedom pervading our history and literature. What ever happened to “those who would choose security over liberty deserve neither”? A free person behaves like Giles in the Crucible: *more weight*. You can kill me, but I’m a free person until I embrace your framing and assent to my own enslavement. To put it another way: Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. Ok, but of course Frederick Douglass was just a naive purist. They broke Winston in the end, but it took a hell of a lot more than the teevee telling him he had to choose between evil and 1% more evil.

    And I love how, even here, we’re having this discussion while pretending that the Democrats give a shit about women’s rights. Abortion is effectively banned in large parts of the country due to right-wing vigilante terrorists, and Democrats won’t lift a finger to stop it. Do prominent Democrats ever even so much as mention that fact, let alone muster a serious opposition to it, let alone enforce the law? They tacitly support it in their silence, and some women will *actively* support them in the name of feminism? But sure, it’s a very difficult choice to put down the Demo’rats’ Kool Ade.

    When Bush was elected, it was possible to think “half the country is stupid”. When Obama started fellating Wall Street and murdering Muslim children, it was possible to think “the country voted for change and was betrayed”. So, what can you think now, when Americans of all stripes will rally ecstatically to the support of the robotic tools of their oligarch overlords? I say there is none, that they’re complicit now; I agree that disaster is what they want.

  95. Morocco Bama

    .

    Grady,

    I talk about it with them, but they increasingly consider me a kook and increasingly embrace the System in which they must survive until it is no more, so I still talk about it, just not with any imperative attached. It will come, and only then will we know what’s in store and how to react. You cannot prepare for it. In fact, if anyone thinks they’re prepared, they’re more than likely not. Things never shake out as planned. That’s been my experience, at least. So, I think mostly now about the aftermath, and the possibility for a new beginning….where Civilization is a thing of the past, and hopefully never resurrected….if we don’t go extinct first.

    .

  96. Bruce Wilder

    Susan of Texas, very wise of you.

    The “Tea Party” mobilized outrage and anger, with more electoral effect, because they knew how to get funding, and they were willing to organize available authoritarian followers. Liberals, for the most part, want politics to be free, or advertiser-supported, like the Media that they futilely keep expecting to acquire professional ethics, and they would rather cry, “racist”, than contest for the votes going to the Tea Party. Liberals and progressives have only managed to acquire political power, when they were willing to make populist appeals, and manage mass membership organizations.

    The Right has Fox News. The Left has Media Matters for America. The Left has MoveOn. The Right has the National Rifle Association. The Left pretends Brad DeLong or Scott Lemieux (or Paul Krugman, when it comes right down to it) are not neoliberals working for the plutocracy, and supports deregulation to destroy unions and “open borders” approach to immigration, and then wonders why the Republicans can come close, even with a robotic, vulture capitalist tax cheat as a candidate.

  97. Ah Mandos, always with a reason why the status quo, but with decline, is the best anyone can hope for, so they should vote Dem. A very old argument, old from before Nader. So very, very predictable. The eternal gadfly, always arguing that abuse is all one can expect from American politicians, so since it’s inevitable, you should vote for it.

    You know, I have no trouble with people voting for other parties and candidates, as long as they know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. In the thread you closed, I outlined some of the reasons why it might make sense to vote for other parties—or not vote at all.

    But there is at least one reason why it does not currently make sense from everything we know about the American political system and American society. That is the belief that you can pull the Overton window to the left by turning the country wholesale over to the extreme right. I don’t even really blame people back in 2000 for voting for Nader. Everything is worth trying once, they couldn’t have known how it would really turn out.

    And none of you have learned a thing since.

    When I saw the OP cri de coeur, I knew immediately that it would attract in droves the usual crowd of self-styled Cassandras to the left (Cassandras to Cassandras, basically) whose eyes have been opened, all of a sudden, to the new-old realization that the left-wing of American representative democracy has been very right-wing indeed. And, like Cassandra, they valiantly attempt to lead the left out of the Troy that is the Democratic Party, but unlike Cassandra, are upset and very very confused that…not very many people are following them. Perhaps the recalcitrant Democratic masses are corrupt, or blind, or stupid, is what the various theorizations boil down to. Why can they not just see????

    When I try to explain to you why, I am informed that I am displaying the pattern, as an adult, of an “abused child,” although I know a former abused child or three—as most of you probably do—and I’m pretty sure I’m not one. I suppose that makes me a Cassandra to the Cassandras to the Cassandras.

    That is why, *yes*, abuse is all you will get either way. Well, at least someone, in all these years, has learned something.

  98. Hmm. Left-wing internet Cassandra recursion. I like.

    But, anyway, y’know Susan, I love and read your blog religiously, but if there’s one path of thinking down which I don’t, ah, follow you, it’s the armchair moral psychology.

    It leads on its very own to a helpless place, not a “wise” place at all, as Bruce would have it. A place where everyone’s status as “abused children” leads them to be “followers” who don’t believe in “consent or choice.” And, at first glance, having judged all reasons to doubt the brave Stepping Off to stem from an untreated moral psychology rather than even allow for the probability that it is a response to a rational assessment of the environment, we are thereafter absolved of further consideration of the point of view of others.

  99. Rob Grigjanis

    @Lisa Simeone: “Ted Rall demolishes that argument nicely”

    Does he? I hate the idea of drones, or any remote control killing. The people in the target area should be foremost in anyone’s mind when thinking about them. So what is to be made of this?

    I sure as hell don’t know. But as is often the case, the picture always has more shades of grey than one’s initial reaction suggests.

    Frankly, I hate the Internet as an information source. Too much fucking noise. People have a tendency to choose what they want to hear. So those of us who want the truth, but don’t have hours per day to sift, tend to listen to voices which sound honest and informed. So: Hedges, Chomsky, Welsh, a few others. And still, always doubt.

  100. “It is sort of like do you want Bush running FEMA or Obama”

    Yes, Obama’s FEMA is doing so well on Staten Island, isn’t it?

    And Obama’s policies of encouraging fossil fuel-burning sure won’t create more natural disasters to clean up, will they?

  101. ks

    BlizzardOfOz,

    And I love how, even here, we’re having this discussion while pretending that the Democrats give a shit about women’s rights. Abortion is effectively banned in large parts of the country due to right-wing vigilante terrorists, and Democrats won’t lift a finger to stop it.

    What I find remarkable is that it’s not even called terrorism.

    But I guess I can’t be too surprised when a guy can tie up his wife and daughter in their house, set it on fire, get in his private plane and crash it into an IRS building, killing himself and an IRS employee, leave behind a long detailed anti-government rant and folks debate!!!!?! whether or not to call his act a terrorist act, and him a terrorist, simply because he wasn’t Muslim.

  102. ks

    jcapan,

    And that’s what ID politics accomplishes as well, division. Unless we’re united by what Lambert calls the “key log” of class war, waged against an oligarchy that’s been beating our ass for over 30 years now, we are a divided and easily conquerable enemy.

    I hear you though, imo, the oligarchy has been beating our asses for closer to 300 years than 30. The class war has been and is being waged, mostly by them against us, and they’ve mostly been winning. But still, resist we must.

  103. “Men who have jobs, and especially good jobs, also don’t beat their wives nearly as often.”

    I wasn’t going to say anything about this at first, because I did not want to drag this discussion into a tangent, but then it popped up again and again so I don’t want to hold back, and this thread is all about intellectual honesty anyway. So here goes: The more social scientists study domestic violence, the more they find that men are victimized by it more often than women. Example:

    “The most recent large-scale study of domestic violence was conducted by Harvard researchers and published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study, which surveyed 11,000 men and women, found that, according to both men’s and women’s accounts, 50 percent of the violence in their relationships was reciprocal (involving both parties). In those cases, the women were more likely to have been the first to strike. Moreover, when the violence was one-sided, both women and men said women were the perpetrators about 70 percent of the time.”

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/14/a-domestic-violence-victim/

    I expect people to have a hard time believing this, because I had a hard time believing it at first. But the more you look, the harder this conclusion is to ignore. For another perspective, Google the story of Erin Pizzey, who opened the first domestic violence shelter in England.

    This is one major reason why I have no patience for identity politics anymore–so many of the people who preach it don’t even have their basic facts right. I’m not talking about Ian Welsh (I think I can understand why he would think of a man when conjuring an image of a domestic abuser) but about the “I voted for Obama because I wanted to protect abortion rights” crowd. Oh, you might have a harder time getting a pap smear if Romney won, eh? Hey, who has a longer life expectancy, men or women?

    I love the quote above about “once you’re locked up in Gitmo I hope you have all the abortion access you want.” That pretty much says it all, as does the Ted Rall cartoon linked to. Of course, Obama’s abortion rights record is much worse than his voters think anyway.

    “Abortion Rights Groups Wary About Sonia Sotomayor’s Views”

    http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/SoniaSotomayor/story?id=7699191&page=1#.UKLdQ1ESw2z

    It seems like every justification I hear for voting Obama boils down to “sure, he locks up people forever without a trial, and blows up people he has no reason to believe are guilty of anything, and started a war without Congressional approval for no particularly good reason, but he gave ME ________ so it’s alright.” And that absolutely INFURIATES me.

    Enjoy those abortions. Hundreds of innocent people in Pakistan and Yemen and Afghanistan died horribly to bring them to you.

  104. BlizzardOfOz

    @Mandos

    I don’t even really blame people back in 2000 for voting for Nader. Everything is worth trying once, they couldn’t have known how it would really turn out.

    I just hope people recognize how truly insane this line of reasoning is, especially if you’re as self-styled *progressive* — and yet it’s rampant on the left.

    * You can’t take any actions unless you prove beforehand that they’ll lead to good results; and the only way you can infer future results is to look at what happened 5 minutes ago.
    * No one is allowed to vote for a party other than the Democrats until the other party already has a majority of the vote.

    Maybe we need to start talking about epistemology, and the fact that yours is empiricism. Like a good empiricist, you don’t recognize the existence of anything too complex to measure — and paper over the difference with shit you made up.

    Not only do you fail to recognize that history is nonlinear, you reduce it to the simplest equation imaginable: Vote third party = bad stuff happened. That’s your idea of a universal law of nature. Somehow, mysteriously, you don’t make a similar inference from Vote for Democrats = bad stuff happened.

  105. Mandos, we all have the option of rejecting a pattern of behavior. By rejecting abusive authority we become free to make our own choices, which is a postition of strength and power. We are no longer compelled to seek the approval of of an authority, whether that authority is an abusive, controlling parent, God or priest, president or someone else. It is this mostly unconscious desire to please and obey in exchange for belonging, love, approval, etc., that makes us weak and therefore easily controlled and obedient. The obedient are powerless.

    I did not see people make rational assessments of the environment in this election. I saw them ignore the facts they did not like and spin the facts they could not ignore. I saw them say that drones are fine because we are in danger from Pakistani terrorists and Obama is keeping us safe. I saw them ignore the fact that 87% of US counties have no abortion facilities and Obama ignored the enormous rise in abortion restrictions. I saw them ignore the rise in income inequality under Obama. And I saw them attack the few people who did not join in the praising of and enthusiasm for Obama. Most of all I saw them ask me over and over and over and over why I said they should not vote for Obama, which I never said.

    It was utterly fascinating. The denial, the self-delusion, the tribal cheering, the tribal border policing–the venemous attacks on anyone who threatend the cohesiveness and uniformity of the group. The willful blindness and deliberate misinterpretations. It was like seeing an Alice Miller book come to life, a Stanley Milgrim experiment on a national scale. And yet there was nothing they could do to shut me down. They were helpless. They had no power over me because I did not need their approval and didn’t care if I was cast out of the group or not.

    You’re right; I don’t need to consider their point of view. I make up my own mind and don’t need anyone else to tell me what to think, or what is moral or immoral.

  106. Ian Welsh

    I don’t know the male/female split on domestic violence, but when it gets serious, I’d be surprised if the women didn’t get the worst of it most often: like it or not, on average, most men have a lot more upper body muscle. Nonetheless, it doesn’t change the broader point, even if true, poverty causes violence, and people suffer, including women.

  107. Celsius 233

    Susan of Texas
    November 13, 2012
    You’re right; I don’t need to consider their point of view. I make up my own mind and don’t need anyone else to tell me what to think, or what is moral or immoral.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Nice. I, likewise, keep my own council. Ultimate responsibility…

  108. Formerly T-Bear

    @ Susan of Texas

    Your:

    Mandos, we all have the option of rejecting a pattern of behavior. By rejecting abusive authority we become free to make our own choices, which is a postition of strength and power. We are no longer compelled to seek the approval of of an authority, whether that authority is an abusive, controlling parent, God or priest, president or someone else. It is this mostly unconscious desire to please and obey in exchange for belonging, love, approval, etc., that makes us weak and therefore easily controlled and obedient. The obedient are powerless.

    is the best definition of Withdraw Consent I have seen. Kudos

  109. Susan:

    And yet there was nothing they could do to shut me down. They were helpless. They had no power over me because I did not need their approval and didn’t care if I was cast out of the group or not.

    As I said in the pre-election thread, if this were all it was, well, then I don’t disagree particularly strongly with you. If it’s the case that you view your choice of whether or for whom to vote as the potential ratification or rejection of a set of principles, and that it is important for you to do this in full moral autonomy, then I certainly won’t advise you to do otherwise.

    What I do disagree with is any sort of claim that that alone will have some sort of grander positive political influence on the world. The whole meaningless “withdrawing consent” nostrum—a left-wing fortune cookie, meaningless as an act on its own.

    The reasons for that are neatly exemplified by the remainder of your post. I simply disagree that there was no underlying rationality to the behaviour many of the people you decry, and so I disagree with the psychologizing, the use of “abuse” as a metaphor, and so on and so forth. I’ve expounded on the reasons recently enough that I won’t repeat them here.

    So as turnabout is fair play, let me psychologize a bit now: people with Cassandra complexes are nearly incapable of stepping into the shoes of those they disagree with. And until they are, they’ll be as ineffective as they always have been. With the usual caveats that this is relative to electoral politics, etc, etc.

  110. Maybe we need to start talking about epistemology, and the fact that yours is empiricism. Like a good empiricist, you don’t recognize the existence of anything too complex to measure — and paper over the difference with shit you made up.

    ?! Seriously? You’re going to argue rationalism vs. empiricism with me here? The whole point of me mentioning Nader, if you bothered to read further in my post, was to point out exactly that many of you are apparently unwilling to learn many of the lessons of that moment and the period afterwards, and the underlying reasons why.

    Not only do you fail to recognize that history is nonlinear, you reduce it to the simplest equation imaginable: Vote third party = bad stuff happened. That’s your idea of a universal law of nature. Somehow, mysteriously, you don’t make a similar inference from Vote for Democrats = bad stuff happened.

    No, I make this inference, to keep it (far too) simple: vote for Democrats, status quo + decline factor. Vote third party: status quo + accelerated growth of decline factor. Using Ian’s own terms for his assessment of my opinion, why not.

    What you are all attempting to claim—any one of you who is actually claiming that a vote for a third party is not only a declaration of moral autonomy but also salutary in the wider political sphere—is that you of all people have found the process by which voting third party reverses the decline factor.

    I am not at all convinced of this, and my confidence is not improved by the general level of contempt. I’m not saying that there isn’t such a process necessarily…but clearly, you haven’t found it.

  111. What I do disagree with is any sort of claim that that alone will have some sort of grander positive political influence on the world.

    Fortunately I made no such claim.

    The whole meaningless “withdrawing consent” nostrum—a left-wing fortune cookie, meaningless as an act on its own.

    I don’t wait for grand events or mass movements to take a stand or make an ethical choice.

    I simply disagree that there was no underlying rationality to the behaviour many of the people you decry, and so I disagree with the psychologizing, the use of “abuse” as a metaphor, and so on and so forth.

    You persist in fighting claims that nobody is making. Since psychology is the study of the mind and behaviors it is appropriate to apply it to political behavior, not to mention the relationship of parent to child and how it affects political decisions.

    I do not use abuse as a metaphor, I use it literally.

    So as turnabout is fair play, let me psychologize a bit now: people with Cassandra complexes are nearly incapable of stepping into the shoes of those they disagree with. And until they are, they’ll be as ineffective as they always have been.

    People who understand the nature of abuse and authoritarianism and its consequences are fully capable of stepping into others’ shoes. I understand why people vote against their interests and I am sympathetic to their emotional needs. I just refuse to go along with their self- and mass deception.

  112. Fortunately I made no such claim.

    Glad to hear it. If only more of my interlocutors would follow your example.

  113. So as turnabout is fair play, let me psychologize a bit now: people with Cassandra complexes are nearly incapable of stepping into the shoes of those they disagree with.

    This has been a riveting discussion, with little beams of light shining through, variously intentionally and inadvertently, and your contributions have had much to do with this.

    But I would say “back away from the psychologizing,” with this assertion. It is so untrue that I’m surprised that your pre-frontal vetted it.

  114. But I would say “back away from the psychologizing,” with this assertion. It is so untrue that I’m surprised that your pre-frontal vetted it.

    Your advice to back away from the psychologizing is correct, of course. I won’t do it again. 🙂

    OTOH part of my complaint is about the perhaps over-eager ascription of motives in certain situations.

  115. ks

    Susan of Texas,

    People who understand the nature of abuse and authoritarianism and its consequences are fully capable of stepping into others’ shoes. I understand why people vote against their interests and I am sympathetic to their emotional needs. I just refuse to go along with their self- and mass deception.

    But, but, but… the “Cassandra Complex” should have made you “nearly incapable” of that simple understanding. How ever did you overcome it!? Congrats.

  116. But, but, but… the “Cassandra Complex” should have made you “nearly incapable” of that simple understanding. How ever did you overcome it!? Congrats.

    Obviously, I’m not convinced she did, but we can only take her word for it.

  117. Formerly T-Bear

    EPU-ish encomium – “Some personal thoughts”

    Leaving behind the devolution comments have taken, some thoughts …

    When you look at the current range of emotional skills in the US public, nearly 4/5 ths demonstrated seem to be one form of anger or another, probably 8 to 10%, give or take revolves about some misconception of romantic “love”, and the balance comprise various ill-defined and nebulous miasmas in the emotional spectrum. In all likelihood the state you experienced is not anger at all but a warning that continuing something was not healthy, bodies give such warnings all the time; those warnings are best heeded when they happen.

    Much ado in the comments concerning “seeing” a.k.a. perspective. Education is rich in that ‘vitamin’ as is travel, both classical methods of broadening a person’s horizons. Literature, biography and history all provide doorways to wider worlds of the human experience. But often overlooked is a personal state of development in which the person’s ‘narrative’ reflects the world about themselves in an accurate way. Such people neither lie to themselves nor to others, many times a parallel characteristic has to do with being secure within themselves or having grown and developed into a mature adult, either a rare enough event in itself. One of the best examples of this was Robert Mapelthorpe’s photographic presentation that put the frosting on Jessie Helms’ jollies. Robert’s artistic skill placed the viewer in the position of being a mirror, it was up to the viewer to determine their own level of ability to reflect what was before them. Jessie Helms of course was an abject failure at this ability to transcend the limitations of his being. Another aspect of mirroring comes from fiction (h/t Bram Stoker), the inability of a mirror to reflect Dracula. Curiously, mirrors have never been able to reflect what isn’t there. Likewise someone who has the characteristics of reflecting their world with fidelity will seldom reflect the falsehoods comprising that world for something that isn’t there. So another method is to develop the balance and tranquility of a mirror, reflecting the world as it presents itself, nothing more, nothing less, again a rare skill seldom achieved.

    Thanks not only for walking away when you did, but for returning after that ripple passed, keep reflecting.

  118. Has everybody read The Archdruid’s 5 part story of how the American empire might end? Get your political fix in fictional form. Highly entertaining. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-it-could-happen-part-one-hubris.html

  119. I second MM’s recommendation. A speculation credible enough to be chilling.

  120. Ian Welsh

    No Mandos, that doesn’t work. But since I can’t explain anything to you, I’m just going to state as a fact that you still don’t understand the core of what I write. Plenty of other people do, so I’m inclined to think the problem is you. Enough.

  121. S Brennan

    Ian,

    I read this post this morning. GREAT POST.

    I’ve been commenting under my own name for a more than a decade, everything you said matches my experience, just one nit…many “bloggers” were ready and willing to sell out…

    …Like whores walking a cold, rainy city street, they couldn’t wait to get in somebody’s car for a little “dry time”. When the Iraq Invasion drove by, they jumped in forgetting to even negotiate the price, then Obama drove by and they knew they had chosen the right profession.

  122. Ian,

    I simply think you’re wrong about this. That, I suppose, is by definition that I “don’t understand.”

  123. Celsius 233

    …Like whores walking a cold, rainy city street, they couldn’t wait to get in somebody’s car for a little “dry time”.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Now there’s some stuff…

  124. Socrates

    It all does not help. No amount of writing and analysis will make as much as a scratch in their armor.

    What would have made a real change, just as Henry Ford – one of America’s true last entrepreneurs – suggested, would have been the abolishment of interest and interest on interest. That way the power of the financial golems would have been curtailed.

    The wish to do this was, in my opinion, also the single most important reason for the second world war.

  125. mike

    Notorious P.A.T. makes some very good points. To add to the statistics mentioned is the fact that, if you include prison rapes, more men than women are raped in this country. There’s a reason that men have shorter life expectancies than women, higher rates of incarceration, higher rates of alcoholism and drug abuse, higher rates of suicide, higher rates of homelessness and so on. I also find it rather frustrating that so many women talk about their right to do what they want with their bodies (which I support) they don’t stand up for the right of people to smoke pot or do other things with their bodies. And that abortion has become the litmus test for Supreme Court nominees when issues such as corporate personhood and the rights of people to do drugs if they choose directly impact more women than restrictions on abortion.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén