Some Personal Thoughts

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.

Ian; yes!

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.

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

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

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

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.

@ 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.

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?

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

@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.

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.

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.

“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?

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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/

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?”

… 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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

” 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

.

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.

.

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.

@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.

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.

“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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

…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…

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.