Saying Is Doing

Trump is a 70 year old bully, an egomaniac, and an intensely ignorant and intellectually lazy man. Anything that doesn’t have his name or picture on it, he is going to piss on. Reality be damned. His usefulness, and this is marginal at best, lies in his tearing back the curtain on the kleptocracy which rules this country and sharpening the contradictions which underlie it. The country will survive Trump, but I do not think it will recover from him. Blind malevolent stupidity has its costs.

saying is most certainly “not doing”. Symbolism, while not unimportant, is not material progress…and in this day and age symbolism is often an excuse for doing nothing. Think the Clintons.

None of this has anything to do with the obvious fact that Trump is a dangerous and incompentent fool.

Marie Antoinette had no idea what was coming.

To translate this for dummies:

“We need more time to get out of oil.”

Sorry, that should be vein and not vain.

Marie Antoinette probably didn’t even say “brioche”. Her problem was a very typically European and now American one: striving to block change until the cavalry came over the hill, and it never did.

Lovely. An Obama-as-savage-with-club cartoon. I stand by my previous post’s every word and see how it connects with this one: saying is doing.

I have a better saying.

Do as you say, and say as you do.

You obviously didn’t get the point of the blog post. Both the so-called “Left” & “Right” are wrong on this issue. They’ll always be wrong on this issue. This issue transcends politicization. It’s existential. If you want to address it properly, remove the Politics As Usual. That includes your politically-visceral reaction to Obama portrayed as a savage with a club in a cartoon. What would Samuel L. Jackson say about your umbrage with that cartoon? He would respond to you the same way he did with this reporter per the following video clip. You have no right to be offended for others who are not what you believe them to be or what you want them to be, and there is no possible way you could be offended for yourself, so why are you always so offended and looking for offense under every rock and behind every tree and if none can be found, you make it up?

Django Unchained Star Samuel L Jackson Challenges TV Reporter To Say N-Word

And, you know, because The Truth matters. Obama is not portrayed as a savage in that cartoon. He’s portrayed as a Corporatist Troll & Ogre, which he was and is. He is a Corporatist Philistine and the Constitution is meant to be David to his Corporatist Goliath.

Leave it to Lame Liberals to turn that into racism. It’s one of the many reasons we have Trump — because Obama simply couldn’t be criticized within the confines of The Democrat Party without the critic being labeled a racist. That’s real constructive. So constructive, we now have Trump.

I agree with Hugh and Ian, Trump is good in the sense that he is unwittingly disrobing the Emperor once and for all. America is now a full-fledged nudist and what a grotesque sight it is. I’m not a fan of plastic-covered furniture, but I’ll lower my standards, considering. I don’t want that nasty, nude buttocks mingling with the fibers in the fabric in my furniture. That shit will never wash out. Yuck. Gross.

I noticed somewhere that the predictions for the Atlantic hurricane season are calling for an active one this summer. Were I a weather Deity and ruler of hurricanes, I would spare Miami, but I would for sure scour Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago off the map and return it to the sand bar it once was. And maybe for good measure scour the Carolina coasts and the Norfolk military installations. That might get some attention.
Mother Nature, who is whispering so far, needs to speak up. And while you are at it, Tornado Alley needs some attention.
Cheers, John

And, you know, because The Truth matters. Obama is not portrayed as a savage in that cartoon. He’s portrayed as a Corporatist Troll & Ogre, which he was and is. He is a Corporatist Philistine and the Constitution is meant to be David to his Corporatist Goliath.

The cartoon used obvious racist symbology and it is completely dishonest to say that he was just being portrayed as an “ogre”. I mean, the cartoonist didn’t put a horned helmet on him or something, he chose a particular visual language that means something in this culture, in a context in which Obama was regularly being attacked by similar, even more explicit racist symbology.

Totally, totally disingenuous. Talk about denial.

Leave it to Lame Liberals to turn that into racism. It’s one of the many reasons we have Trump — because Obama simply couldn’t be criticized within the confines of The Democrat Party without the critic being labeled a racist. That’s real constructive. So constructive, we now have Trump.

No, you can criticize him — while simultaneously respecting how hurtful it is to many people in the US black community that a conventionally successful member of that community cannot achieve conventional success without alleged allies deploying symbols of discrimination.

Saying is doing, and the cartoonist did something by drawing Obama that way.

You obviously didn’t get the point of the blog post. Both the so-called “Left” & “Right” are wrong on this issue. They’ll always be wrong on this issue. This issue transcends politicization. It’s existential. If you want to address it properly, remove the Politics As Usual.

“Existential” questions are the object of politics. The only way to a politics beyond usual are “politics as usual” — which includes the “normal politics” of, for instance, radicalizing the masses, the thing that radicals in the West have in recent times been less than successful at doing, for reasons I’ve tried to explain one way or another repeatedly for years and years here.

My great-uncle Marvin was a big jokester and quite a character.

He loved to instigate trouble and delighted getting one over on those around him. I remember one time back in my youth when Marvin was egging on this other fellow about “planting by the signs” which he considered a practice rooted in complete superstition. The other fellow, George, was getting quite upset when Marvin told him to just point out the worst possible time to plant his potatoes that spring. George consulted his almanacs and his lunar charts (and whatever the hell else you need for that stuff) and chose his time.

Marvin planted on that date with a smile on his face. I can still remember later on that summer when he unveiled his harvest to George and the rest of us down at the local loafers roost in town. The man pulled some of the most gargantuan potatoes I’ve ever seen from the ground and laughed about it until he left this earth years later.

Two points:

1) All the internet arguments and pearl clutching in the world won’t change the size of the potatoes you grow… or how much CO2 is in the atmosphere. This climate agreement was of no more consequence to nature than George’s lunar charts and almanacs.

2) Mandos if you are going to instigate those around you it might be best if you took a page from Uncle Marvin and got a sense of humor about it. He won arguments in which the losers still had to smile at his impishness.

Will

If I symbolically cut your head off, will your actual head bounce when it hits the ground?

It depends on who you did it in front of. In front of the right kind of mob and it is entirely possible!

Your problem is that you think mindfuckery is a good thing.

It isn’t.

Whatever you call it, it’s not whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. It just is, just like the climate. Perhaps it is a flaw in a species that does not possess a hive mind that by evolution simply has a single coordinated purpose. Then if a coordinated purpose is needed, it must be arranged for. That is why saying is doing.

What matters is that the Paris accords were the unifying symbol of public agreement that climate change was a thing.

No they weren’t and still aren’t. What they are a symbol for is not doing anything material or significant against climate change — that thing you say doesn’t matter. So if, as you say, “symbols are at least as important as what is material”, then their being a symbol for not doing anything material against climate change would make the Paris accords much worse. But since you didn’t even get that part right (it is not true that symbols are a least as important as what is material) then the Paris accords aren’t quite as damaging as your dictum would dictate.

This post falls into the category of the second kind of climate change denial. We know the first kind, which is reported on and mocked regularly, and the US President is signatory. The second kind is in denial that we’re not doing anything about it.

>striving to block change until the cavalry came over the hill, and it never did.

Sure it did – after Waterloo. But that was way too late for her. As for brioche – probably a myth, but the reality is stranger – Rousseau put the story into print, before it was said – life imitating art.

“Saying is doing” – Mandos confirmed for the Platonic form of the Jewed Indian.

See that’s why I enjoy your contributions even though I want all your works to perish from this earth: the imagery!

This is pure Qabbalistic magical thinking of the same kind that underlies political correctness: if we just don’t call retarded people retarded, then they won’t be retarded anymore!

Pfff far more traditions and mythologies than qabbala have this concept.

That’s right, the cavalry never showed up. And she lost her head. Without ever knowing why. Yes, she probably never said brioche just as she probably never said “let hem eat cake”, and though ever The Lady she probably never apologized to the gaol for stumbling at the step. History is rewritten by those in a position to get away with it. That’s not the point. The point is she died without knowing why.

As Ian has pointed out, the future is not going to be pleasant. At some point the masses will mob up and those of the gated communities will discover those gates work both ways.

The speed bump in history is Trump, not working with other nations to deal with climate change. Is it bad news to take the next four years off from handling CO2 emissions and having a directed and unified front on CC? Sure, but we didn’t have that before and, unfortunately, we were already headed for disaster with or without the Paris Accords.

I do hope this unifies the climate supporters though and they put these morons in the back of the bus where they belong for the rest of the trip.

Mandos, are you German by any chance? If not, you’re hereby an honorary one. What you characterize them as, you are. You claim the Germans think they know everything and know what’s best for everyone and so too do you, therefore, you must be German.

The “Savage” you refer to has strapped sandals on — strapped all the way to its knees. Last time I checked, African Tribes weren’t wearing strapped sandals with the sandals strapped all the way to the knee. You assert the cartoonist meant to characterize Obama as an African Savage. If so, why the sandals? Why not a bone through the nose? Why a club versus a spear? I think the cartoonist went out of his/her way to avoid being racist and yet still paint Obama as the Ogre Enforcer for the Corporate Behemoths.

Hey, What Do You Know, Goliath Forgot His Helmet

@ Mandos

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

“Do as I do, not as I say.”

Does that jog anything inside your skull, Mandos?

@Will,

This is a side-point and a tangent I know, but . . . do you know what your great uncle Marvin did to grow those big potatoes? How he managed his soil, what he added to it, what he planted in the potato space the year before the potatoes went in there, etc.?

Various thoughts:

The Paris Accords are a sham. Obamacare was/is a sham. As has been pointed out repeatedly above, these are steps away from, not steps toward addressing global climate change and healthcare in America, respectively. Mandos needs to go back and read what the Paris Accords actually say just as he needs to revisit the history of the healthcare debate of 2009-2010. Some of us here were heavily involved in that debate. The short form of it is that most progressives were played, bought off, not by Obamacare, but by a purposely vague, constantly shrinking, and finally eliminated public option which was supposed to be attached to it. In return, any mention, beyond an occasional derisive dismissal, of universal single payer/Medicare for All was suppressed. Obamacare was sold as healthcare for the people, but it was really welfare for the insurance industry. Rather than being a step toward a functioning universal system of healthcare such as most of the rest of the industrial world enjoys, Obamacare was instituted to keep such a system from ever happening in the US.

As for the Paris Accords, this is a comment I wrote back in November 2016 on them and the international process behind them:

The first yearly meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (The treaty for the UNFCCC was negotiated in Rio in 1992.) took place in 1995 in Berlin. It is referred to as COP1 (Conference of the Parties). The Kyoto Protocol was COP3 in 1997. COP11 took place in Montreal in 2005. It is also designated as CMP1, that is the first conference of the Meeting of the Parties since Kyoto. COP15/CMP5 you will remember was the meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 whose agreement the newly minted American President Barack Obama spiked. The Paris Agreement from COP21/CMP11 came into force a few days ago on November 4, 2016. It pledges to keep the increase in global average temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius and below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It does this, by get this, letting each country in the world determine on its own its contribution toward this goal. I mean seriously what could go wrong? Other than UNEP (the UN Environment Program) estimates that the Paris framework will result in a temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius. By the way, this year’s (2016) conference will wind up tomorrow on November 18, 2016 in Marrakech. It is designated as COP22/CMP12/CMA1 with CMA equaling “Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement”.

So let’s be real clear, this is a very unserious process which has already been going on 24 years and aside from some impressively impenetrable bureaucratic gobbledygook has accomplished virtually nothing. Meanwhile 15 of the 16 hottest years have occurred since 2000 with 2016 shaping up to being the hottest to date. And as I keep saying we have only until 2030 before it is game over if we don’t have a sustainable societal model up and running in the US with regard to both climate change and population. As for large parts of Africa and Asia, I am afraid it is already too late.

@Mandos — Of course rhetoric matters (sometimes). Of course propaganda works (sometimes). That’s why people use rhetoric and governments and corporations use propaganda.

If you are trying to say any of us are disputing this, you are arguing w/imaginary foes. No one is saying rhetoric never influences events and no one is saying propaganda never works.

But “saying is doing”– Okay, Trump keeps talking about MAGA. He and his supporters could hardly say this more. Are their words making America great again? NO. (we can agree on this, right?)

Trump kept talking about improving the lives of Americans. Do you think he’s taking steps that will accomplish this? If he doesn’t, do you think it matters that he keeps talking about it?

If not, why are Trump’s symbols unimportant, but Obama’s are mighty?

Obama was a MUCH better speaker than Trump (to be fair, Obama is probably the best public speaker and the best at using speeeches to persuade of anyone I have ever seen), and frequently, his speeches about the need to fight global warming were quite good, but the actions were sadly lacking. One could argue (I would argue) that he did the absolute bare minimum to keep significant chunks of base from rebelling, when it was obligatory upon him to do much more if he actually believed what he was saying. The hypocrisy was noted and helped provide fodder for opponents and helped convince people who were otherwise unsure that the whole issue wasn’t really a big deal, because if it was, why the fuck weren’t our fearless leaders trying to DO anything? Why did they keep babbling about “the great threat” whilst promoting fracking? The only answers are they didn’t really believe what they said (the right wing position) or they were evil sociopathic scum who figured every living thing dying in the fairly near future didn’t matter as long as it all happened after they were dead, and the worst would probably happen after they were dead, and probably someone else could fix it for them so they could have their cake and eat it too (my position).

The best rhetoric in the world means nothing if you don’t follow through on it. Obama pushed for transparency in government yet was the toughest administration ever on whistle blowers; spoke about bringing justice to the people who destroyed the economy yet actively made sure nothing like that ever got close to happening, and argued for one thing then did another more than any other public figure I can ever remember (Trump has probably already surpassed this, in his own unique way; given that he has taken two contradictory sides on practically every issue at one point or another, everything he does is going to be against something he has said) .

It’s sad–Obama had the rhetorical and political skills you so admire, and he had the moment. The entire country was as desperate then as in 2016, but unlike Trump and Bernie the desperate voters weren’t split and were all with him. He could have done anything he wanted. He … was a more competent version of Bush, with better rhetoric.

You say you don’t live in the US anymore, so maybe you just have a wrong impression (hint: Breitbart and Red State do not represent the majority of American voters) and aren’t a knowing propagandist of lies, but he could have pushed single payer through just as easily as the garbage he did push through. The public will was there, the public was happily malleable on top of that and desperate for someone to do practically ANYTHING, we had dem majorities everywhere. He could’ve pushed through an adequate economic stimulus instead of a band-aid guaranteed to fail, long term; he could’ve pushed through a massive infrastructure rebuild and a massive green energy program. He didn’t even try to do any of these things, and actively subverted any effort to do so. His good rhetoric and wonderful symbolism instead went to prop up the kleptocracy as best he could.

You can babble about category errors all you want, but that is all true. The Paris accords were not a symbol that motivated people to do anything. Their destruction might be, but I don’t think you can honestly say that was a goal when they were signed (or even that all the signatories had the same goal, or viewed it as the same sort of symbol). You can try to make excuses for the people who keep killing the world, but it’s becoming ever more obvious that they ARE killing the world, and pretending that tossing a dixie cup on a fire is meaningful is truly just as despicable as tossing a gasoline can on it.

Also +1 to everything Hugh said. And I’ll quit w/the plus 1’s for now. Gotta go anyway.

Various thoughts (cont.)

Trump is not a populist, although he plays one on TV. He is an American kleptocrat. He is also a liar, but then so are the likes of Merkel, Macron, and May. What’s up with the letter M and European leaders, anyway? What has the panties of our ruling classes both here and abroad in such a twist is that Trump’s lies are so out of whack that they destabilize, undercut, and show up their carefully crafted, and completely mendacious and self-serving, narratives.

Let us all reverentially salute the Paris Accords, not that they solve climate change or keep it to acceptable levels, but because they address the issue and show how very serious and responsible our rulers are. All hail the Accords! It is like calling the captain and crew of the Titanic heroes. They saw the iceberg well in advance, and maybe even decided to slow the ship a little. Of course, the ship will still hit the iceberg and sink, but hey, what great guys!

What I can’t help finding funny is that now that the US is out, or sort of out, or possibly was never actually in, China, one of the world’s great polluters and contributors to greenhouse gas emissions is now being touted as the new savior to global climate change. And elite consensus did this mental gymnastic without missing a beat, or tripping over its incongruity.

But returning to Trump, as I said, once you cut through the populist crap, he is a kleptocrat through and through. He will say it is all about helping the American people, but follow the money. Helping the American people always seems to come down to sending more wealth to rich people, like him, and the corporations they own.

Naked Capitalism pointed me to an article appearing in my local paper, the L.A. Times, occasioned by Elon Musk and Disney’s Robert Iger resigning from some sort of Trump advisory boards in protest. The article ends with this revelation: “And Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, condemned Trump’s move — doing so in his first-ever tweet.”

As liberalism has become nothing more that a suit of rhetorical clothes for plutocratic power, so “symbolism” has become its stock-in-trade.

The symbolism of the Paris Climate Accords was a blockade on effective action, at least on effective action that doesn’t slide all the costs onto the poor and merely middle class.

Note to those of you arguing against the Paris Accords and in favor of Trump’s withdrawal:

Your arguments are not the ones being made by Trump.

The sham nature of the Accords do not enter into his argument against them. The ineffectivenesss of the Accords is hypothetical. It’s simply false to continue to claim that “nothing has been done” about climate change since Kyoto.

What enters into his arguments are sovereignty, jobs lost, nationalism, America First, and refusal to transfer money from the rich to the not in order to enable greater compliance by those with fewer resources.

When you start dealing with these things on his plane, the absurdity of what Trump has done becomes clear.

@MohaveWolf

If you are going to remain a true believer in the Technocrat solutions to GW then you’ll need to begin loving fracked gas. The CPP depended on fracked gas to replace coal and meet its CO2 reduction goals, it’s the only viable, abundant and relatively cheap replacement fuel.

These growing moments of crisis for the powerless Warmers seem to bring out some of the extreme thoughts of certain believers. They’re the ones who describe the international mandates already agreed to as ineffective, too weak and not enough. They don’t offer what would be enough because it would probably be an authoritarian world government structure that could force compliance and maybe even torch some non-believing heretics in the fires of inquisition.

There is a quiet celebration happening in many places because we how have Trump who will confront these fanatics and their agenda. He and Tillerman won’t blink when dealing with this type of power seeking globalist they have faced before.

@Will,

I am a hobby gardener. My survival does not depend on it. Maybe I can learn enough to do it effectively for real when my survival does depend on it.

Planting by the signs is one of those things I want to believe in. But I haven’t seen or even heard of the kind of double-blinded ( or even triple-blinded for something this controversial) research which could answer that question. Perhaps the “worst days” to plant potatoes really were bad, but your great uncle was good enough a gardener so as to be able to overpower the “bad days” effect. How would one construct an experiment to figure that out? Till someone does, all we have are anecdata.

Meanwhile, the truth is out there. I want to believe.

Pretty much every move Donald has made has been straight out of the “inverse” identity politics playbook. I’ve maintained for some time that there really is no difference between Hillary and Donald. Or, their supporters for that matter. They are both Ivy League educated neoliberal kleptocrats that simply reward different constituencies their bezzle. Their supporters are of a kind too. Both just self-absorbed enough to be transfixed by the shiny identity (or inverse identity) politics course du jour.

That all it was Mandos. Just one more serving of right wing identity politics grist to keep the base distracted from the bezzle. Same as it ever was.

Agreed that the agreement is symbolic in nature. I’m not sure about the damage. Everyone knows the emperor wears no clothes. Some will still use this as cover for their ills, but I think many more will increase their commitments because now there is a common enemy. Donald Trump has made himself the ugly face of climate change.
Tally ho!

I can’t help but smiling watching the snowflake warmers remain stuck in the first stage of grief, denial, due to their massive and continuing loses. This stagnation guarantees they will remain disconnected from voter’s needs and will continue to slide into a permanent loser status.

While the snowflake pearl-clutching continues many working people can reflect on the destruction of a number of real threats to their well being. The Red Queen was stopped dead in her slouching towards DC, broken on the election wheel and left on display and I think deep down even some of the snowflakes know that was a good thing. Next Trump smashed the TPP another globalist threat to working people but that was just the beginning of the unwinding of real threats not the over-imagined and agenda fed warmer catastrophe fantasies.

The next bold move was to directly attack and lance the political climate change cist growing to control the EPA. This was reason for much garment rending and wailing from the CC scientist class who thought they had international political protection. Trump has permanently destroyed that illusion and the so called symbolic Paris Accord can no longer produce real disruption, displacement and job loss, through the CPP, in the US without a vote of any kind for or against its imposition.

The ultra-neoliberalism is folding. What is the difference? A neoliberal wants the correct level of foreign trade – which is often much more than what union people want – the ultras want more trade regardless of whether it is in anyone’s best interest. That’s why FDR and WSC were neoliberals, but not ultras. The problem is that ultras run out of things to profitably the liberalise, and then the pyramid scheme takes over.

The problem in the US, is that NAFTA was good, in general, for the US economy – which unions did not like, and the conservative Democrats didn’t have a good idea for what to shove them into. Instead, they talked about “training”, but did not have any ideas as to what to train them in – though there were a few businesses, but they were reserved for profit laundering companies. So they wanted to profit from it rather than grow employment.

But everything after NAFTA was at best a wash, and more likely the deficit to the economy – except for oil and coal ( with natural gas providing “competition”), which is never a good thing for the US economy. The problem with the left is very simple: they must replace oil with other things because fossil fuels will bankrupt the American economy even as it, itself, can make money – not counting the damage it does. When the damage it does is counted, one can see that it doesn’t actually make money, it transfers it – but renewables make more money, though they don’t have as large a business block. This will change.

The end sign will be a Paris Accord II with real teeth.

Seriously, Trump understands that all that matters is to grow your pile as big as possible. That way, you and your family or your heirs will survive while the poor and the middle class will be devastated by climate change or by nuclear war, whichever. Cover it with whatever symbolism, rhetoric or ideology you like.

If climate change were really a threat to the global 1%, it would have been addressed long ago.

For quite a while now, it has been too late to prevent significant harm to many, many people.
Lowered emissions and economically viable renewables are at best going to slow but not prevent widespread damage. What the world needs is fewer people. Technology will make peasants and manual labor obsolete.

Say whatever, mix it up good. Prepare for war and civil conflict. Cut the funding for social safety nets and increase the allocation to the police and the military. What don’t you get about Trump?

@bruce wilder

“As liberalism has become nothing more that a suit of rhetorical clothes for plutocratic power, so “symbolism” has become its stock-in-trade.”

That’s all liberalism ever was. Marx was making this very point 150+ years ago. And Mandos demonstrates it with every inane comment and post he makes. I can only assume that Welsh is using Mandos to illustrate the navel-gazing, meaningless absurdity of neoliberalism. In fact, how do we know Mandos isn’t actually just a sockpuppet of Welsh?

Trump has been wonderful for getting people to finally start getting outraged about all the things that were already happening. Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is meaningless because the Paris Agreement was itself always toothless and meaningless. But it may ultimately lead to some other agreement that actually does something.

To point to the same thing happening with another issue, we absolutely, positively, would not be seriously talking about Single-payer Healthcare had Hillary Clinton won. But with Trump having won, people are now actually talking about how crap Obamacare really is, how it’s imploding, and how we need to just bypass private health insurance companies altogether.

Of course, the biggest danger is all the genuine outrage and new activism being co-opted by establishment Democrats to get people to vote for more of the same old, failed liberalism. You know, the crowd Mandos exactly represents. Liberals, as ever, remain the most dangerous enemy of progressivism.

Here is an interesting take on the Paris Accords itself from a commenter at Naked Capitalism. It also includes a linkable site-source. I will cut-paste it here.

dontknowitall
June 3, 2017 at 8:49 am

Re All the crying about Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement, here’s a quote from the world socialist website:

“At the time of its adoption in 2015, leading climate scientist James Hansen aptly characterized it as a “fraud” and a “fake.” That the Paris agreement has the support of major corporate giants, including energy companies like ExxonMobil, says everything about its true character.”

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/03/pers-j03.html#pk_campaign=sidebar&pk_kwd=perspectives

I remember how shabbily Obama treated James Hansen so it grates to hear him bleating about Trump.

The Paris agreement is first and foremost a grifting mechanism to pass on moneys, 100 billion in the case of the US, to less developed nations whose people will never see a single cent as it gets bleed to intermediaries, banksters, NGOs and ‘foundations’. This is Clinton’s Haiti writ large. Its sole purpose is to make it look like something is being done while nothing actually changes, meanwhile after signing the agreement the EU proceeded to increase its CO2 emissions since 2014.

https://euobserver.com/environment/137777

Most progress to date has been due to technical innovations generating efficiencies in solar and wind, to the point that coal and oil are in trouble, and not due to political theater.
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MoiAussie
June 3, 2017 at 9:37 am

You get it. I would have linked this, on Paris and Australia’s dirty plans, here if I’d seen this first.

Governments with dirty carbon resources are doing their utmost to extract economic value from them as fast as possible to prop up their financialised economies, aided and abetted by energy multinationals, before these “assets” are stranded. Paris was nothing more than a PR exercise to provide cover for crimes against the planet and create some iron ricebowls.
Reply ↓

Mandos needs to go back and read what the Paris Accords actually say just as he needs to revisit the history of the healthcare debate of 2009-2010. Some of us here were heavily involved in that debate. The short form of it is that most progressives were played, bought off, not by Obamacare, but by a purposely vague, constantly shrinking, and finally eliminated public option which was supposed to be attached to it.

I do not need to revisit that history — I was right here, arguing with y’all about it, as well as, for a brief time, at Corrente, and lurking at FDL. And the same arguments were made about the politics of Obamacare, and I fundamentally disagreed with them, and the same insults/accusations were levelled, etc, etc. The fundamental problem is that y’all are trapped in a rather optimistic framework that there is actually an underlying public demand for the policies you like, and that the establishment is actually trying to pretend to deliver those policies via cheap and/or deliberately counterproductive substitutes.

Back then (I haven’t heard people talk about this much), this very wrong belief was justified by survey and opinion-assessment techniques that ripped the policy question out of its social/political/cultural context.

In return, any mention, beyond an occasional derisive dismissal, of universal single payer/Medicare for All was suppressed. Obamacare was sold as healthcare for the people, but it was really welfare for the insurance industry. Rather than being a step toward a functioning universal system of healthcare such as most of the rest of the industrial world enjoys, Obamacare was instituted to keep such a system from ever happening in the US.

Again, it assumes that universal health care is a policy that would have somehow gone forward without the passing of Obamacare. The underlying problem always was and is cultural and notional, and that is the same with climate change. What needs to be addressed is how people feel, in sum — only then can one potentiate “real” action.

You are arguing that being a jerk and promising to change is better than being a jerk and not promising to change. You are still a jerk; and I am still in a terrible destructive relationship. You being sorry about it only makes it more confusing and difficult for me to make meaningful change and leave your sorry ass.
Hard to believe you do not see the difference Mandos.

That is because you are using the wrong metaphor. The sort of metaphor that would fit would be ones where you attempt to get a large group of people with disparate interests and sentiments to do something urgent that not all of them even believe in, but requires all of them to act. And you have no weapon to force them all to do it. An abusive relationship is the wrong metaphor, because it removes the crucial element here that makes politics political.

“The fundamental problem is that y’all are trapped in a rather optimistic framework that there is actually an underlying public demand for the policies you like”

Gee, it’s not like these ideas having majority support in polling or anything. Oh…wait…

“and that the establishment is actually trying to pretend to deliver those policies via cheap and/or deliberately counterproductive substitutes.”

That’s literally exactly what is happening. Because real change would be too disruptive to the various rice bowls the establishment, liberals included, depends on for their status and income.

“Again, it assumes that universal health care is a policy that would have somehow gone forward without the passing of Obamacare.”

I distinctly remember the campaign for the ACA involving the deliberate deception and then betrayal of public option supporters, to say nothing of the “the little single-payer advocates”, in Obama’s own words. As for right now, I see an increasing number of Republicans taking the idea seriously, while establishment Dems refuse to endorse it, instead deploying long debunked conservative talking points as their excuse. I’ll say it again, if Cliinton had one we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Liberals would mostly be ignoring the disintegration of Obamacare because the person in charge has a (D) in front of their name (we’ve danced this dance many times before). But since the guy in charge has a (R), and is Trump at that, suddenly there’s unleashed momentum to actually make a revolutionary change. Again, no thanks to the Dems. The Democratic Party stifles progressive change, it doesn’t facilitate it.

“I see I have once again gotten a citation at NC, except that once again, it is attributed to Ian, because I guess no one ever reads the bylines or the bold, allcaps disclaimer I put in because no one ever reads the bylines…”

To be honest, one doesn’t even need to read the byline. The difference between Mandos and Ian Welsh is that Mandos is an idiot, while Welsh isn’t. So if the post is moronic, by definition it almost certainly wasn’t written by Welsh.

Gee, it’s not like these ideas having majority support in polling or anything. Oh…wait…

You missed the part where I said: “this very wrong belief was justified by survey and opinion-assessment techniques that ripped the policy question out of its social/political/cultural context.”

You can get people to agree to all kinds of things in a survey that takes the question outside of its social context. My opponents, including yourself, stop exactly at the point of the survey without giving the slightest thought to how it connects to the crucial issue of who gets to sit where in Washington DC, in state legislatures, etc, etc. The characteristics of representative democracy is what is missing from the argument. In a representative system.

The most hilarious example of this was when some pro-single payer group attempted to “improve” opinion research by having a kind of citizens jury kind of thing where people deliberate rationally about policy — and naturally came up with single payer as the best solution, which of course it is! But what election that supports political careers operates like a calm citizens jury where people are led to particular conclusions by factual discussion?

As for right now, I see an increasing number of Republicans taking the idea seriously, while establishment Dems refuse to endorse it, instead deploying long debunked conservative talking points as their excuse.

I remember lots of people like you repeatedly using the Lucy/football Charlie Brown metaphor. The lack of self-consciousness is amazing. What do you think that “increasing number of Republicans taking the idea seriously” (LOL) going to actually do? How do you think its going to play in their primaries if they actually tried to do anything about it?

Again, we’re relitigating an old debate, but this Paris/Trump business has raised all those issues again. The first and foremost need is to have the symbolic agreement that there is a problem to be solved, that developed countries have different obligations from developing countries, that it is a problem that requires international coordination, etc, etc. Until you take that seriously, forget it.

Haha. The NC people think I was a mainstay at DailyKos. I had a diary there for a few months as I recall and occasionally got upvoted but that was in political internet pre-history, practically — I haven’t written there in well over a decade. But I used to get around quite a bit on the internet, and I think when people see a name they vaguely recognize, they ascribe it to DailyKos as the most likely place.

Or more to the point in the USA, why can’t the misruling class fall back on its ancient strategy of hiring goons from the ranks of the Stupid White Folks to kill anyone, of any skin tone, who gets uppity?

They can and have. People haven’t gotten very uppity of late. As the wheels come off the wagon of state, that’s apt to change. As our recent military escapades demonstrate, the US military is GREAT at mass devastation. Actually defeating a popular insurgency, not so much. There are number of ways a potential revolution could occur and not all of them require armed mobs or easily detainable individuals. Check out William S. Burroughs’ essays on revolutionary theory and practice some time. There’s more than one way to bring down a state and the attack most likely to succeed is the one concealed until the last moment.

So if the liberal Establishment only wanted to talk about and support the corporate welfare of Obamacare, then obviously no one wanted universal single payer, and any evidence to the contrary is made up and completely untrustworthy.

No, that is not at all what I said, and it is a disingenuous reinterpretation of it at best. It is or not primarily with the what the “liberal establishment” “wants” or doesn’t “want”, it is what will get career politicians elected or not elected, given the political system that exists. And if you think a major reorganization of the political system that involves the abolition of the private insurance sector is something that would have let marginal politicians who have effective veto power survive the next elections, you simply know nothing about the country in which you (and I at the time, but not now) live.

How do they know this? Because if anyone wanted Medicare for All, it would have been because they the liberals would have been talking about it. Since they weren’t, nobody wanted it. QED.

No, lots of people wanted Medicare For All, but not enough to support political careers. Instead, the most politically ineffective and electorally fickle segment of the American political spectrum wanted it. That’s enough alone to ruin it, but there was a bigger problem along the critical path: American culture, American beliefs about taxes and social insurance, and yes, American racial (and other cultural) politics.

So Democrats keep running to the right to get the most conservative Democrat possible elected, usually helping authentic Republicans elected instead, and then moan about not being able to get a more progressive agenda passed because they have a lot of conservatives in their ranks. Except of course that they don’t try, let alone fight for, anything progressive. What conclusion does Mandos draw from all this? It’s the progressives’ fault and then he doubles down on his saying is doing BS.

The simple question is this: What reason do progressives, or really anyone else, have to vote for Democrats/liberals? Answer: None.

So Democrats keep running to the right to get the most conservative Democrat possible elected, usually helping authentic Republicans elected instead, and then moan about not being able to get a more progressive agenda passed because they have a lot of conservatives in their ranks. Except of course that they don’t try, let alone fight for, anything progressive.

Now we’re getting somewhere. The fundamental problem of sustainable coalition-building in representative democracy — where there are, in addition to overlapping interests, inevitably contradictory interests, moral world views, etc.

Let me put it like this: say in some hypothetical alternate universe, you got yourself elected back then to Congress in the leftiest district in the USA and had managed to get majority support from the Democrats on single payer. Presumably, some Democrats would have had to fall on their swords for it, but OK, they did it — in that alternate timeline. Would you be satisfied then?

What can your negotiating partners expect from you, when they have to defend some other interest you abhor in order to maintain themselves in office? At what point will they be able to predict that you’d vote for something you despise, in order to help them remain in power? Now that you got your single payer. Will you vote to help protect the credit card industry in some fellow congressman’s district? What?

Until you can answer that, why should anyone deal with you? For anyone attempting to run a political career, they are going to be very afraid of relying on a political constituency who is, as I said, electorally fickle — no predictable point at which they will give something to interests they hate. Now, there is an alternative way of thinking about this…

The simple question is this: What reason do progressives, or really anyone else, have to vote for Democrats/liberals? Answer: None.

…which is not to play the game at all, and instead attempt either to supplant the Democratic party or supplant the system as a whole. I suggest the former is easier than the latter. So yes, you can conclude that you have no reason to vote for Democrats or any incumbent player in US representative democracy (which is in many ways an oxymoron, but whatever). You can conclude that, because you have decided that there is no point at which your negotiating partners should rely on you give them something they need to further their political careers, when it compromises your political principles.

So, OK, you have a policy message that you think has broad support. Since this support is as broad and deep as you seem to think, why not supplant the Democratic party by running candidates of your own? It should be easy to attract votes — after all, we know that the American public claims, in polls, to want a lot of things that the “guns-and-butter” left want. It seems like it should have happened already…

Give me a thousand Mandos’ and I can rule the asylum!!!!

So Democrats are just career politicians who don’t believe in anything, or stand for anything, or fight for anything other than their own personal interest. For Mandos, the pragmatic thing is to sell out to them for pennies on the dollar and even though they have long histories of screwing us out of even the pennies. Mandos just keeps digging his hole deeper and deeper.

There’s no hole to dig — I’ve argued for years and years that the political career is the central feature of a hierarchical, representative political system. Even if you enter the system with the best of intentions, the primary goal of any political representative in the US system designed the way it is is to advance a political career. Why? It’s because the amount of influence one has within the system in accomplishing the secondary goal of the political system — producing policy — is related to whether one’s career is rising or falling.

That is more or less the explicit intent of the political system in most large representative democracies — to reorient policy-making around the personal interactions of a small group of people, rather than mass movements and political convictions.

Insofar as those have had an influence, it has been under exceptional conditions where the system itself has broken apart (say, the US Civil War and the period surrounding it), or when the leaders of those mass movements have been willing/able to operate within the system knowing the above, while holding together a mass movement. Walking and chewing gum.

But we have, peculiarly, a large section of the US left unwilling to concede the primacy of the political career, yet unable to construct or even clearly envision the means to proceed without them.

Thank goodness the two parties haven’t erected institutional obstacles to the creation of third parties and other challenges to their power, even mild ones like the Sanders’ campaign. Thank goodness the media treats such efforts seriously and covers them fairly. Oh wait …

There will always be barriers. These are your options:

1. Operate within existing political parties, but then you need to offer a compromise to existing incumbents that they can accept as well as demonstrate that you really can bring enough votes for your own policy.

2. Start a new party — but you say that there are institutional obstacles to this.

3. Supplant the system entirely — the system has an army.

4. Ignore the system and attempt to persuade the public to your viewpoint without attempting to participate in the legislative process, in the hope that down the road they’ll vote for someone who will implement your preferences — but you say that you can’t get a fair hearing from the media.

5. Abstain completely from any kind of political engagement.

Despite my electoral fickleness, the congressional reelection rate is 96%. I guess fickleness just doesn’t pay off.

nihil obstet: and most challengers, in primaries for example, are only going to rely on voters like you for support until they get into office (if that), because they can’t rely on you after that. Their first priority, once they’ve figured out the system, is usually to be part of the 96% re-elected.

@Mandos

I think there are some people in Congress who want to make our society better, but you give a good unvarnished statement of Democratic Party leadership thinking over the past generation — make false or misleading statements about what you will do during the election, don’t worry about making their lives better or worse once in office, and blame voters for insufficient loyalty if they hold you accountable. And justify it all with claims of pragmatism — we have to make your lives worse to keep them from being even more worse.

There is one president who clearly and obviously helped the people and the society by making their lives better. He was elected 4 times, took his party from the minority prior to his first election to the majority, and that majority continued for a generation after his death. The “electorally fickle” voted consistently for the party who made their lives better. They quit voting for the party when it started collaborating in making their lives worse.

It seems like Mandos is forcing the rational left to support term limits?

Mandos,

Actually, many of us are “way-fewer-guns-but-lots-more-butter” leftists.

We’re not looking for an activities director, but for good government. Just being active is not really a goal. Voting for people who sell you out is active, but I have not seen it lead to good government. The people in charge are in charge because they use power to make real opposition virtually impossible. If there were an easy way to effect the change we want, they would see it and close it down. Meanwhile, their courtiers preach precepts of loyalty to representatives who lie to and betray us and advise pragmatism as a mask for submission.

As Mandos goes along, his “saying is doing” takes on a more Orwellian “war is peace” “freedom is slavery” “ignorance is strength” tone. And we are to accept all this because as the Borg say, “Resistance is futile.”

I can’t help thinking of the Emperor’s New Clothes. In the Mandosian version of this story, if the emperor says he is clothed, even when he is stark naked, then he is clothed because the emperor is the emperor, and he has courts and an army. The kid who states the obvious gets vilified for his lack of realism by a crowd of Mandos lookalikes.

Re ‘fusion crackpottery’:

From “In the race for fusion, a dark horse takes the lead” , dailykos article @ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/3/8/1071933/-In-the-race-for-fusion-a-dark-horse-takes-the-lead

“illions have been spent, with more budgeted. Currently a number of large governmental programs are working on the problem. Among these are the Z-pinch machine at Sandia Labs (as big as a large house; final cost more than $1 billion); the National Ignition Facility, or NIF (as big as a football stadium, cost around $4 billion); and ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (housed in dozens of buildings on a 100-acre campus and projected to cost $20 billion).

And then there’s Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP), a startup company working out of a small lab in New Jersey. With a budget of about $0.001 billion, they have built an experimental fusion device that could fit inside your spare bedroom.

Care to guess which of these has achieved the hottest temperatures so far?”

I spoke to Lerner when he came to Newark, NJ to participate in a demonstration. He described what seemed to me to be an engineering problem as the holdup, which (I assumed) material scientists could fix for him.

Pretentious people, who know next to nothing about what pass judgement on, don’t impress me. Creative problem solvers like Lerner do impress me.

It really is a collective insanity not to support efforts like his.

@Metamars

I toured the z-machine while I was studying pulse power at Sandia Labs and they have made many advances since then. I don’t know much about Lerner’s big science in a small box concept but if it could be made to function as an electric power source it would probably destroy the world economy.

As Mandos goes along, his “saying is doing” takes on a more Orwellian “war is peace” “freedom is slavery” “ignorance is strength” tone. And we are to accept all this because as the Borg say, “Resistance is futile.”

Walk and chew gum.

I can’t help thinking of the Emperor’s New Clothes. In the Mandosian version of this story, if the emperor says he is clothed, even when he is stark naked, then he is clothed because the emperor is the emperor, and he has courts and an army. The kid who states the obvious gets vilified for his lack of realism by a crowd of Mandos lookalikes.

I take it from these invidious comparisons that you don’t actually have anything. The little boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes story had something: the story ends with the emperor being ridiculed. Here you are, having called the emperor naked at the top of your voice for years and years. You don’t have to convince the “crowd of Mandos lookalikes”, you have to convince the rest of the crowd.

But the rest of the crowd is already perfectly aware that the emperor is naked and has already been saying so. The problem is, they’re not convinced you’re not any less naked, or that you in your clad state are not merely dressed like clowns — and how you’re going to do that is what I’ve been asking for literally years.

MojaveWolf: Thanks for the note of appreciation 🙂 This is all actually quite mild and polite. I have been through much worse bloggy meat-grinders, to say the least.

Why would the CEOs of Exxon, GE, Chevron and SpaceX all be against Trump on this?

Because they fear that Trump will kick off the kind of Blue Rebel Bluelash that will lead to a much faster and deeper decarbonization than what the CEOs of Exxon, GE, Chevron and SpaceX all want to see.

I think this is fervently to be hoped, but if it is true, it crucially depends on the psychological expectation created by the signing of the Paris accords. If it is true, it depends on something like the Paris accords, as cosmetic as it may be in truth, to have existed. I’ll say it yet again: saying is doing.

There’s a category error goin’ on here. Y’all are expecting truth from a poster who is speaking power to truth. Stripped of its fake profundity, his message is basically “Shuddup, siddown, and eat yer shit. And if yer reeeeeeaally nice, we’ll let you suck us off for dessert.”

Mandos comes up with an idiotic premise that “saying is doing” to defend a totally corrupt and unresponsive system. There is no logic in anything he says, no evidence, just loads and loads of bad faith and intellectual dishonesty. And no, believing in shit that any ordinary person can see through does not equate to good faith or honesty. We like to accord the presumption that even if somebody is mistaken, they are at least striving after some truth, but I do not think this is the case with Mandos. He is basically propping up a rotten system and criticizing the rest of us for not giving it our support, and at the same time, sneering at our impotence because we haven’t overthrown it. What this illustrates for me is the divide between reformers and revolutionaries. You can not reform a thoroughly corrupt system, and Mandos’ Orwellian riffs show just how far he has to go, and is willing to go, to justify the current system. But no matter how much he buffs the turd, it’s still shit. And as history as shown, revolutions are always impossible until they happen. Among the first who are swept away by them are the hapless, useless reformers who should have known better, but who lacked the courage to, and refused to when it mattered.

MojaveWolf:

The underlying demand is there. And you say we rely too much on polls and surveys, well, some of us actually live here, and know what even our Republican-voting neighbors say about some of this stuff, and it backs up our beliefs.

I was living in the USA at the time of the Obamacare debate and had intimate exposure (as a patient) to some of the problems with the US health insurance system. I also had numerous conversations with my USian neighbours, colleagues, friends. I’m pretty sure I know something of what I speak.

“because X is all that has been done, we must assume X is all that can be done and all attempts to do not-X will fail”

I did not make this argument. I have argued, from the beginning, and for years, in essence that the “political radar” of US guns-and-butter leftists for what opportunities there are and what there aren’t is somehow oddly broken.

Trump (and before him, Reagan) are great at pushing policies that radically change the existing orders, yet, for democrats, this is fundamentally impossible?

Yes: the American right runs circles around the left in terms of taking advantage of political opportunities presented by cultural, social, and emotional conflicts. That is in part because it does not scruple to destroy — you have much greater freedom if your goal is to destroy, to break, to take apart. Which is why the slowness at which they have approached their plan to take away what small material good (but incalculable for those it affected) was done by Obamacare is so remarkable. But the American left is not only hobbled by the limits posed by a constructive ethic — something it cannot avoid considering its goals — but apparently also by the “procedural narcissism” I mentioned above.

Even if the polls backed you up instead of us, what do you think the point of leadership IS? Part of it is, when you think something is important, going to bat for it and persuading others. You cannot possibly believe that all good leaders are supposed to persuade their constituents to repeatedly accept the least-good variant in all given situations, because to strive for more might mean failure?

No, at least part of the point the point of leadership is to see opportunities or to create them when you can. This whole discussion essentially started from a disagreement on what the opportunity presented by things like the Paris agreement, by Obamacare, etc, really is. I certainly don’t see recognition of those opportunities as failure. The opportunity being: overcoming a psychological speedbump, so to speak. I know that some of you instead view it as blocking an opportunity that already existed. I don’t agree that that opportunity already existed, I think, whatever the intentions of its creators, that Obamacare etc made opportunities.

Okay, here we agree. So why are you defending people who seem to address how people feel only to go out of their way to AVOID “real” action?

You want leaders who take a certain kind of political risk in a system that is designed specifically not to encourage the development of that kind of leader. Because that exceptional leader has not appeared, you therefore want to, to use the cliché, take your marbles and go home. That’s what I see this whole line of discussion as being.

I don’t subscribe to Great Man theories of history and do not want to wait for the right kind of Maximum Leader who will sweep away the vested interests, etc, to persuade people to want better things. But judging by the ritual references to FDR and the New Deal, I have gotten the strong impression that that’s exactly what people are holding out for: the Great Man who will change history. My theory of history is more old-school leftist, depending on social conditions and systems and institutions, but I add a touch of culture.

And as history as shown, revolutions are always impossible until they happen. Among the first who are swept away by them are the hapless, useless reformers who should have known better, but who lacked the courage to, and refused to when it mattered.

To…what? I keep asking this and getting no answer. I list the possibilities, and no one has any idea, except to kvetch that single payer wuz robbed by Obamacare. OK, you won’t vote for Democrats. Fine. I respect, by the way, a principled stand against voting as such, because representative democracy, in case you hadn’t noticed, is an oxymoron. But is that what it is? Checking out? Or is the plan something more up close and personal, like just convincing your friends. OK, I respect that too, but it is kind of like showing up, as Sean Connery put it in a film IIRC, like showing up with a knife to a gunfight. But then, why all this gnashing of teeth?

This is the problem. RC et al have no replacement for the bullshit — except more bullshit and projection.

They’re desperately waiting/hoping for someone else to come up with a solution to their anxieties — so they can sit online and criticize it, call names, and obsess on what other people do or don’t do.

This is one reason why the intertubes are such valuable tools to the Overclass. Nothing much can happen to change things for the better so long as enough people can be kept arguing and insulting one another in cyberspace — and out of mischief in meatspace.

Genius.

Newsflash: power doesn’t care. That’s why it’s power…

As you skillfully demonstrate with every post or comment you write.

I mean all this for a disagreement on the order in which particular change is supposed to arrive, not even on the desired change itself.

My criticism was not about heroes to inspire the masses — it was about using FDR as a model of how to get things done, without taking into account the conditions under which he did it. I think you overstate the extent to which we are failing to communicate, however.