Why the Wave Election of 2018 Could Mean Nothing

I think you are an optimist. Too much money in campaigning, and poor people by definition have no money. QED, they do not work for US. Add some revolving doors, lather, rinse, repeat, and here we are.

Then be sure to avoid all debate about actual policy, and simply shout bumper sticker sized slogans. Be sure to demonize anything remotely critical or useful. Reduce the news to he said/she said, and make it click-bait friendly.

Simmer and stir every hour.

Serves 100 billionaires well, too bad about the rest of us!

@ Ian

“But when they win, they have to actually DO IT. Especially once they have a President, they must just ram thru the right shit. 51 votes in the Senate is all it takes if you are serious. That’s a choice.”

Yes, well, though, here’s the problem with that. If we put our faith in them again, then they inevitably betray us again, and we will have to accept eight more years of movement in the wrong direction, probably followed by another Clinton-cult-type holdover effort.

I know I’ll be dead by then. Sometimes, patience can itself be the enemy . . .

Both parties are committed to betraying the regular working folks whose votes they court. We should support anything that tears them down and creates space for a true third party that is committed to representing the People. The Establishment guys never will.

Remember the definition of insanity.

Let’s play out a scenario: (i) the dems do take both houses, but (ii) they are largely of the establishment variety, then (iii) we have a Bernie-slide in 2020, while (iv) maintaining majorities of establishment dems in both houses. We can be pretty sure Bernie wouldn’t be a milquetoast like Obama. He’d try to push his agenda for a “significant majority” of the people.

Question: do the establishment dems get on board with Bernie’s progressive agenda and start ramming things through, or is there continued infighting with the establishment dems chipping away at his proposals through a constant campaign of the “tyranny of amiability” and “pragmatism”?

Question: how does the significant majority of people that Bernie is trying to help react to the establishment dems chipping?

My two-cents: we still haven’t been hit hard enough over the head by the neoliberal policies. People are largely still comfy enough to be distracted by the shiny consumer objects the 1% keep dangling in front of them. Then, as usual, the wave will peter and die, and ping will once again meet pong.

This is the problem. The .1% knows it needs to keep those shiny objects cheap enough that the 99% can still purchase them and be mollified. Yes, they are entirely sucking the demand side out of the economy. But it doesn’t take much. A big cheap television, an X-box, and a 20 year old car will keep most people in this country comfortably glued to the manufactured distraction enough to serve the 1%’s divide and conquer strategy.

Ian is correct.
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In my red state, D’s 2018 campaign strategy seems to be expanding Medicaid, something that the Republican-controlled state government refused to do when Obama was in the WH.
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There are two problems with this D strategy. First, regardless of how you feel about expanding Medicaid — I’m not keen on it for a variety of reasons — it would only benefit a small percentage of the population. How do D’s expect to build a base around a controversial program that only benefits a small percentage of the population?
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Second, state R’s will probably expand Medicaid before election day, thus co-oping the D’s election strategy. R’s only opposed expanded Medicaid when it was Obama’s idea, now that Obama is gone they’re willing to reconsider it. Mind you, the R version of expanded Medicaid will probably be crapified by privatizing it and requiring copays and deductibles that the poor cannot afford (and that’s in addition to putting a lien on the Medicaid recipient’s assets to recover Medicaid expenses), but Medicaid is a crappy program anyway so the crapification is merely a matter of degree.
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So D’s lack a good strategy, and they don’t have any ideas to fix things. For example, they have no plan for free (or at least cheap) universal health care. Even Bernie’s health care plan — which the D party has not endorsed — calls for a major regressive tax increase on the poor and working class, so that’s a hard sell and it’s poor economics. D’s won’t get serious about going after the rich because they’re beholding to the rich, so they fall back on social issues, where Republicans have the advantage in the heartland.

It is true that the Democrats fumbled the ball in 2009-10. However, the sweep of the Republican Tea Party in 2010 was based, not on doing the right thing, but on making things even worse! Santelli’s rant was not about helping out underwater homeowners, but about screwing them over. It was not, “We bailed out Wall Street, now let’s bail out Main Street.” It was, “Enough bailouts already!” The Dems might have fought that idea, but they had already embraced belt-tightening. In 2009 Obama said that the government had run out of money. (!) In 2008 the Bush administration had realized that there was always enough money, when they baled out Big Finance and Wall Street.

Those Dummies books seem to sell well. Maybe a Rationality For Dummies Party, with yellow and black colors and triangle head mascot guy, wouldn’t need wealthy donors.

This is now well beyond Politics As Usual.

Most people think this insanity can be righted during the elections of 2018 and 2020, so they’re biding their time and while they do, normalization of the insane continues at a steady pace.

They are sooooo wrong waiting for the elections to right this insanity.

A genie has been let loose from its bottle and it won’t be put back in until the requisite massive amount of blood is shed, and even then the sacrifice may not suffice to contain the genie.

We are now Beyond The Pale and most anything negative is possible.

The Handmaid’s Tale is instructive. Build it and it will come. Think it, and it will happen.

It’s happening. And those you thought would protect against such a thing aren’t doing a thing. They’re sitting idly by and letting it happen.

There Will Be Blood.

Pickup Pussies

It is important to insist on the truth that the Democrats did not do what they “obviously” (obvious to Ian, to me and to most commenters here) should have done in response to the GWB administration’s cumulation of critical failures: Iraq, GFC, and on and on.

Lots and lots of people who identify as Democrats or are inclined to vote Democratic are in denial about that historic failure (not to mention its consequences). Obama is fairly popular retrospectively and most could not give even a shortened litany of his failures such as the ones Ian might produce.

There is plenty of economic and political dissatisfaction in the country, but the prevalence of denial in place of understanding or (yes I will use the word) ideology is a managed fact of politics and political Media. We have a structural problem and it is a deep structural problem in American politics, which is preventing rational adaptation and reform.

That the wave elections of 2006/8 did not produce change is an indication of a deep structural problem in politics. That the Democratic Party could put forth in 2016 a status quo candidate identified with policy failure (NAFTA, sentencing reform, Libya, Iraq, Goldman Sachs and on and on) and not catch onto the deep dissatisfaction in the country demonstrated by a primary challenge is another indication of a deep structural problem.

I think many of us commenting here have some sense that the dependence of the Democratic establishment on fundraising from billionaires and the executive class running large financial institutions and business corporations is a critical piece of this structural problem, maybe only one piece of many but let’s just consider that one piece for a moment. It seems to me that the Democratic establishment, still loyal to Clinton, has done a remarkable job of filling the political mindspace with the connivance of the degenerate journalism of the rump Media. Russiagate stands as a monument to their power to conjure a storm to fill both the old sock of cable news and the new stocking of the twitterverse with utter nonsense.

I have talked to people one-on-one in meatspace about why Clinton lost and how Obama failed the country and quite often the response has been nothing less than hysterical. People get really, really angry when I have suggested, say, that the U.S. military still operating in Afghanistan is an abject policy failure and the U.S. should simply withdraw from there (and Yemen and a bunch of other places). “Admit failure and quit” is as simple a policy prescription as I can come up with and many people do not respond thoughtfully. The idea that the foreign policy establishment in the U.S. is a mindlessly stupid blob may have some currency in the blogosphere, but not purchase in the wider community. People can feel some dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy, but still not be accustomed to have any critical thought pass thru their minds, let alone form the kind of expectations for the behavior of politicians that might motivate policy change. I don’t go anywhere near the real hot button issues (anything related to Israel and its authoritarian idiot regime) that mostly famously paralyze both Media and Congress.

I have tried to talk to people sensibly about why Clinton was a really, really bad candidate and I have found that it is easy to get soft agreement with that proposition as long as you do not go into any detail. Understood as a matter of style or celebrity-personality impression, people go along. Connect with policy, and not so much. I have tried to explain why the consequences of (Bill) Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall and other financial deregulation combined with NAFTA to devastate manufacturing in the American midwest with terrible economic and social consequences. If “really, really bad candidate” gets translated into policy specifics, like opposing single-payer, reckless militarism in the Mideast, subverting a $15 minimum wage, advocacy for financialization and so on, some people seem inclined to start screaming. (Yes, really, screaming. Hillary has been a feminist champion and always an advocate for the children, doncha know?)

A democratic politics needs public deliberation to thrive, which requires forums for public deliberation. Politics is how a People (collectively) thinks. And, we in the United States do not think collectively. We have been deliberately dumbed down into an idiocracy. It has not always been so.

In previous great crises of American political development, the country managed some remarkably sophisticated feats of mass political thought. The Revolutionary period processed a legacy of Whiggish political theory thru the Committees of Correspondence and then the Congress and produced a rationale for independence and finally culminated in the classic Federalist papers. The antebellum period produced some very sophisticated political thought as people debated the institution of slavery and other legacies of deference. In the 1850s, a twice-weekly newspaper only had 8 pages, but people read those 8 pages and those 8 pages reproduced the full Lincoln-Douglas debates and many other closely reasoned speeches. The Populists and the Progressive Era produced a deep critique of problems of political economy and invented new institutions; its extended coda was the New Deal, which greatly extended the regulatory welfare state and during the course of the War, created a new, liberal international order.

As Ian has pointed out many times, our politics is the result of the Boomers not being interested in how the carefully managed political economy of the New Deal actually worked. They listened to Milton Friedman and the neoliberals, right and left, and for forty years, we have been playing jenga with the U.S. economy, pulling out pieces and watching it collapse. Now, there is a political interest in feeding off crisis. Further collapse is deliberately sought for its financial benefits for the few and maybe the perverse psychic satisfaction of a frustrated and angry populism.

And, it is proving very difficult to get any collective action moving around recognition that this has been going on, sufficient in size and scope and, yes, depth, to permit governing in the interests of a mass majority. I do not think most people I meet and talk to in the real world have an inkling that politics could be about their economic problems.

Good governance by the politicians requires good governance of the politicians by the People and I do not see that pre-requisite as being met in the near future. The existing Media, embedded in the corporate business world with its networked-monopolies, is a huge obstacle. The accelerating collapse of journalism over the last decade has, if anything, made things worse; the remaining professional journalists are concentrated in a few urban centers, mostly in the Northeast corridor and they are young, and when not actually stupid in a foppish overeducated manner, they are cynical and recklessly opportunitic. EZ-rah Klein, indeed.

I do not think Obama and Clinton are the leaders we deserved, but they are the leaders the neoliberal political system produced and We the People, in our ignorance and stupidity are part of the system that produced them. We really need to think more about the system that produced our collective ignorance and stupidity. I do not think it is simply a matter of lacking spontaneous good will. Something else is lacking, something else is missing — a structure to hold the processes by which we might think together and do better.

The Democrats may indeed fair well in 2018 against a very unpopular President. But an unpopular celebrity President is not the problem. The problem is a political system that can no longer respond. Declining life expectancy is kind of a key indicator that governance by the state of the political economy is poor. But, governance of the politicians by the people is moribund. Most of us — most of those who voted for Clinton anyway — still cannot see how bad she was, or how bad Obama was.

Maybe, it is not in their interest to see. The professional and managerial classes are doing OK, I guess — certainly better than the formerly working classes. But, I am not sure that it is a matter of interest so much as it has been simply the absence of social institutions where critical thinking might take place or be modeled, let alone platforms from which collective action might be taken. (Instead, we have teevee.) In my considerations of this problem, I keep coming back to the secular decline in social affiliation — the “bowling alone” problem — and its replacement among the liberally-educated by synthetic affinity as in so-called identity politics. (“You are an Asian-American, that’s your position, here are your assigned stories, this is what you think.” That there is no corresponding organic culture held in common and embedded in actual community is brushed aside.)

OK, I’ve wandered off. Sorry. I will post anyway. I regret the hyperbolic tone of what I wrote above — some people won’t be able to read it as I would wish as a result. I recognize that I feel like the Englishman stuck in France, who doesn’t speak French, but resorts to talking louder in a doomed effort to make himself understood. Oh well

“Old- stock Americans”?
Trump a chess master?
Say, Blizzard, you aren’t from around these parts, are you? (Meaning the planet.)

“Old-stock Americans”?

I was not aware that Cheeto Mussolini was a champion of Native Americans. I thought he was more of the alleged champion of the descendants of the pale invaders who displaced them. 😈

Of course, he is the actual champion only of the affluent portion of the descendants of the pale invaders.

https://imgur.com/aKyWjAe

Dan Lynch: “There are two problems with this D strategy. First, regardless of how you feel about expanding Medicaid — I’m not keen on it for a variety of reasons — it would only benefit a small percentage of the population, etc.”

Item 1: Medicaid provides health insurance coverage to more people than any other insurance carrier in the United States. Currently, more than 70 million people are covered by this program (Medicare covers about 55 million people). About 50% of the people in nursing homes (mainly middle-class people) rely on Medicaid to pay their nursing home bills. Even special education programs for children with disabilities at local schools are funded, at least in part, by Medicaid. This is NOT an insignificant program.

Item 2: The quality of the Medicaid program can vary considerably by state and location within the state. Some states have better Medicaid programs than others. At some localities within a state, the Medicaid program is accepted by most physicians and specialists and it covers almost all health care services, but at other states and locations, the Medicaid program is crappy (as you stated). Generally, Medicaid programs are better run in urban areas of liberal states, but less well managed in rural areas of conservative states.

Item 3: Contrary to what you have stated, the Republicans want to destroy Medicaid altogether, they do no want to expand or improve it. The real target of the failed health care bills of the Republicans was Medicaid, not Obamacare. They tried to cap Medicaid expenses at a measly $5,000/yr., which does not even come close to covering typical emergency room expenses in the United States ($20,000 per admission) nor would it have covered the costs of a typical pregnancy ($30,000 per delivery).

The old Democrat (sic) party is dying – the will live long, but not by much.

Bruce: Thanks for always providing some of the most thoughtful comments on the intertubes. Over and over again.

My thoughts. The Dems might win, but they won’t do anything useful with it. The donor class won’t allow it. On the Pub side, this was already clear. The donor said “Get us tax cuts or don’t expect any more money”. The Dems will desperately seek a way to get elected without offending any donor interests. “You want to break the glass ceiling for a few female CEOs. Great.” A $15/hr minimum wage? Single payer? Free college? ” You’ve got to be kidding”.

Plus for the Dems to accomplish anything useful they would have to pry the cold dead hands of the Clintons off the party. No sign whatever of that happening. If anything, they are getting more entrenched. Some wag guesses the Dems policy prescriptions ” Means-tested micro loans for student lunch debt!”. Sounds about right.

So here’s a guess… Like Ian intuits, ping, and pong. The underwashed 90% keeps voting for change and neither party will give it to them. Hence we eventually get the Authoritarian Populist. The actually competent Trump. Probably from the Pubs, as they are more comfortable with Authority.

He’ll declare a nation wide rent freeze, take out a few PharmaBros and shoot them (best comment ever on Shrikelli, a prospective juror said “I’m completely unbiased. I don’t care if we hang him or shoot him”) and institute free health care in one form or other.

The public applauds. Nobody notices or care much that his opponents seem to go off to some camp in the desert and never come back.

We’ve seen this shit before and we should know how it plays out. No surprises.

I didn’t read all the responses so I might be repeating what someone has already covered.
Yeah, a Democratic takeover, for what it’s worth, is a long shot. Hopefully a lot of Trump supporters feel burned and pissed off. I’m not sure if the polling or anecdotal observation is indicating anything very accurately. It’s gonna be the luck of the draw. Gerrymandering weighs in on it too.

Anybody who claims that Trump “has never showed a reason to doubt his sincerity or competence” is going to be about as credible as an Alex Jones disciple.

the electoral system is lame by definition, based as it is on yet another secret society. what rules vet and hold accountable the members of the electoral college? these fuking alpha elitists who pleasure themselves in governmental phantasies, working out their distorted self-actualizations in imposing their will on others. jungle law’ers is all they are. all dressed up to amplify their self-importance. otoh, goverment’s purpose is to serve the corporate mission, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. someone has to design and implement the complex supply chains that serve the masses. the public utilities. (and fuk the rationale for killing-purposed defense. morphing all too soon into empire-building. are not humans with their neocortex a higher life form than limbic-driven animals of the jungle?) all the while the danger of the bio-mimicry of cancer lurks nearby. when income-driven corporations — and that includes foundations, non-profit and for-profit legal collectives — were legalized as persons and permitted to vote by buying elections, the cancer metastasized and will soon kill the host. c’est la vie.

@ Altandmain

Sure, Bernie would have been a good step. Too bad the loathsome Establishment/Clintonite Dems stole the primary from him.

Another thing to never forget.

NR, I trust you have seen demographic breakdowns of the Presidential vote. The “white” vote is a good approximation of the American nation, that is American-Americans and not the post-1965 invaders: you will see they went for Trump in an FDR-esque landslide. It’s no surprise that he is unpopular with Mexicans; everyone rightly sees him as a champion for Americans.

@BlizzardOfOz:

” The “white” vote is a good approximation of the American nation,”

And this one little comment tells us pretty much all we need to know about you. America is not just white people, but it’s not surprising that you think it is.

And by the way, Trump has lost quite a bit of support even from white people since taking office. People like you are pretty much the only ones left supporting him at this point.

Pretty much agree with everything you’ve preached to a choir that’s already frustrated corporate funded MSM never brought these issues up enough when there were better odds to slow the drift towards dystopia. Not to mention how much the media, in general, has degenerated into whatever it is now but I guess I’ll just digress…

@BlizzardOfOz:

Yes, you’ve made your view that only white people matter quite clear. Sadly for you, the United States is not made up only of white people. And also sadly for you, even many white people have stopped supporting Trump over the last year due to his gross incompetence as a leader. Expect that trend to continue on into next year. Eventually, he’ll be left only with people like you still supporting him–and you’ll find that people that believe as you do are not even close to a majority of the country.

@BlizzardOfOz:

You mean, you got your racist BS called out? Yes. Yes, you did.

A nation is a real thing. “Americans” – if referring to the descendants of British colonists – are a real nation, related by blood, and with a shared language, history, religion, and culture.

I guess the great national game played from 1861 at Fort Sumter through 1865 at Appomattox Courthouse proved that descendants of British colonists were a nation.

(Apologies to most of you for feeding the troll, but this was just too funny).

Deportations have been less under Trump than under Obama. According to campaign promises, with everything in DC being ‘Brand R’ controlled these days, it shouldn’t even be close.

@Jonathon:
Nice straw man. Yes, we are ruled by laws. It’s indisputable. The problem is that rich people made the laws then and continue to make them now. You probably should have done more than just read the cover of The People’s History of the United States.
And you should probably read Colin Woodard.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, however.
Happy New Year

Yes. Ping. Pong. Till plutocratic rule ends. A hundred or so families stealing everyone else’s wealth is inherently unstable throughout history. Nuclear weapons make a major world war with draftees impossible without destroying the Northern Hemisphere. Holding back the start of a war with Iran or North Korea plus virtual money is keeping the wheels from spinning off, right now. The accelerant, when the crash comes, is the oligarchs incompetence, love of torture, disdain for science, and overwhelming greed.

An alternative is the restoration of the rule of law in democratic nation states with strong borders protected by an armed militia plus government job and health guarantees. All paid for with taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Direct rule by an in-your-face faction of the plutocracy — as we’ve been experiencing most of this year — is an ugly thing to be sure, but it is only marginally different in substance than the indirect rule by more or less “polite” factions of the plutocracy that we’re used to.

Yes.

Unfortunate that even here there is still discussion of “politics” as if any conflict–other than a lingering concern about appearances–actually ruffled the waters of our betters. When I typed “politics”, this was the first definition the ether produced: the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power. We don’t have politics because we don’t have any conflict at the top. How could there be? If you are fabulously wealthy in the US there is nothing that will not be done so you can make yet more money. As most people at the top of the heap in the US did not get there by being nice, for them this is probably as close as humans can get to a perfect state of affairs.

So far as I am permitted to opine, there are perhaps two avenues for change (other than the continual downslope of the US into a version of Mexico). The first is idealized, and while unlikely is not impossible, namely, organizing and passing a constitutional amendment barring private money for once and all in American elections (more specifically, as some other amendments have done, vacate/render null and void a Supreme Court decision, here Buckley v. Valeo and all its perverse progeny. I’d argue it’s worth doing even as a long shot because the evidence in support of the amendment would, if nothing else, open the eyes of the increasingly hapless public. The somewhat more likely path is the traditional US reform method: breakdown of the existing order forcing a realignment and significant political changes. The only real reforms in the US have been the product of revolution and catastrophe: Revolutionary War, Civil War, Great Depression (the Progressive Era was an interesting ameliorative affair, but the substantive changes had to wait for the love affair with Wall Street to crash). Now, since the government’s sole economic policy is to prop up Wall Street at the expense–explicitly–of the people they are ostensibly working for, a crash that would break the neo-hypnosis exemplified by the continuing hero worship for Clinton and Obama is so unlikely as to be impossible.

As a related aside, I think it is fair to say that those who still think WJ Clinton was a good president are no less in the grip of a fantasy than the most ardent Trump supporter. Better spoken, perhaps, but just as fantastically bound to their hero. Maybe we do need to pull down all of our statutes. The point of my aside is simply that there is a great swathe of the public that prefers its narratives to reality, and that this swathe has nothing to do with party and everything to do with human nature. Those folks will continue as they have until events force their way into their consciousness. Both parties know this, and make good use of it.

Lawyer here.
How does money equal free speech? Go and see if you can get your own personal billboard message for free, That’s how. That’s the argument. And it won the day. The question is not how. But, why?

It’s like asking how does the “well regulated militia” phrase gets ignored in “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It gets ignored because politics matter. Just look to the make up of the court at the time. The four Conservatives appointed by Nixon — including the Son of Satan, Powell, of Powell memo fame — were in lock step with big money. Stevens abstained. And the Democrat appointees split their dissents resulting in a plurality. When there is a plurality, the argument that recieves the most similar opinions wins. That was the four conservatives. All the other justices dissented in differing forms.

The whole thing started because when Nixon got busted during Watergate it was discovered that the Kochs and Adelson’s of the day were cheating the election laws in effect at the time. Congress responded with even tougher campaign finance laws and a cabal of Conservatives (Buckely being William F. Buckley’s brother) challenged them. They knew they had the court and went for it. The left has never had a Court since that could do anything about it.

Now, this may be highly unpopular to the commentariat here, but I’ve said it before so here goes. The last time this country was even close to sane was under Roosevelt. Roosevelt straight up fucking battled an extremely resitant court until in the end attrition won out and he had the court he needed to get reform done. I argued vociferously with commenters over at naked capitalism once Bernie was robbed that we should take it on the chin and vote for Hillary rather than stay home or split the vote with Jill Stein for one, and only one, reason. The fucking Supreme Court matters. As I said upthread, we are a nation of laws. The Supreme Court tells us what those laws are. It is ESSENTIAL to have the Court if you want real change in this country.

But, oh no. I got skinned alive on naked capitalism by a bunch of butt-hurt dipshits that were so pissed Bernie was robbed they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. We could have primaried Hillary in four years and guess what, we’d have a left leaning court for decades. Kiss that shit goodbye for the rest of your lives.

Clear things up for you Willy?

Bruce’s long post on the failure of “good governance of the politicians by the people” left me wondering how his argument differs from a simple complaint that — surprise surprise — voters do not behave according to the behavioural model to which Bruce seems to think they ought to conform. He writes in a seeming tone of puzzlement, but I would suggest that voters never did behave that way, and part of the problem is that a lot of would-be advocates of The People are mired in bad theories of how the The People ought to react, and are therefore unable to govern themselves accordingly.

I have written extensively in the past on this very problem. There are at least two facets of it. One is the psychology of the voter in the voting booth, and the other is the optimal behaviour of a career politician in a hierarchical representative system. That latter is the key — the hierarchical representative system of government. It conditions both voter behaviour and politician behaviour and constrains the form action can take to influence the political process.

IMO the absolute worst thing about 2017, is that Trump makes Obama look good.

Maybe BOO grew up like I did, in an idyllic kid neighborhood in a Midwestern city, with everybody white and middle class and generally happy.

Unfortunately my family moved away and I never went back.

Many years later, through the magic of Google and Facebook I found my old neighborhood had completely changed, turning mostly black. All of the surrounding public schools had either been closed or currently rate very poorly for academic achievement and student safety. And a lot of my old kidmates were Trump supporters.

Maybe that’s as far as BOO goes – there went the neighborhood because of “them”. But quite obviously, most of the people here go much further. There are reasons for reasons.

The best job I ever had was in the deep south working with a motley crew of ethnicities and ages, where conflicts were rare even with all the office pranks. The worst job I ever had was in a very liberal city in a strictly run all-white Office Space. Maybe that the latter was run by sociopaths, was what ruined it for me.

Mandos – that article isn’t altogether terrible, although the usual left-wing howlers are sprinkled throughout. The idea that modern European states are “liberal” — huh? Did things like massive state surveillance and suppression of dissident speech become liberal, while I wasn’t watching?

Willy – you seem like a sensible guy, I’m guessing we’d agree on a lot of stuff. Before I even knew much of anything about Trump, I hated our trade deficit (along with the loss of good jobs, Chinese buying up our real estate, etc). When I became aware of the mass migration of people into our country (whether it be low-skill Mexicans, Indian coders on H-1Bs, etc) I thought it was insane. I could go on and on — my point is that when Trump came on the scene, he seemed to be a godsend, because he lined up with my politics almost perfectly. I still had some thought that the left included people who cared about our country, and about the working class — so when they went into full meltdown I just had to laugh and shake my head.

Now, previously both our mainstream parties would pretend to lament the loss of our manufacturing, claiming that there was nothing that could be done. I think Trump has exposed the truth — that in fact, they like it that way, they support it. As one National Review writer put it, the white working class “deserves to die”. Again, outside of Trump, this is/was a fully bipartisan position.

Of course, today’s left has no answer to any of this — they won’t even engage, but just start shrieking about “racism”. You know it as well as I do. I doubt I have much in common with your friends back home, but their thoughts are probably similar to mine: if opposing the destruction of the town where my grandparents grew up is racist, then *shrug* okay, I guess I’m a racist.

RC: Because some people are more vulnerable than others in the “marketplace of ideas”. BOO is representing a well of cruelty that will do nothing to save the communities for which he claims to care so much, at a price of destroying other communities. That is because the communities are an alibi for the preservation of an abstract emotional state.

The problem I have with Trump, is that he has all the symptoms of classic narcissist personality disorder. That’s a diagnosis I arrived at myself. NPD means that he can say anything but will often do the opposite. One can predict what that opposite will be because it is usually be something which will benefit him personally, regardless of the cost to any others. I am also quite aware that his enemies will seize on NPD talk and try to poison perceptions. So I try to not arrive at my conclusions quickly or naively.

I can get stoked about locking Hillary up, or Mexico paying for walls, or the draining of swamps. But I must go with the results. When he said that it played well but now we don’t care, that is a very bad sign.

I’ve been down the road of fake promises before in my own personal life. Repeatedly. I finally did the big WTF – who or what are these people? So I studied. They are humans who are hardwired to use everybody, and I mean everybody, around them, to get the power and admiration their bodies desperately need. You cannot ever rely on somebody like that unless your own personal goals align with their own personal goals. And even then, as happened with many of his contractors who gave him a good deal hoping they’d mutually profit from future real estate deals, you’ll get screwed because the narcissists need for power frequently overrides the rationality of mutual benefit. They enjoy conning then screwing people even when it makes no sense, because the exercise of power gives them such a chemical rush.

Unlike autistics, or agoraphobics who are quite obvious, NPDs are very good at blending in. One only really knows them by their fruits, which unfortunately, is when it’s usually too late.

I don’t know what’s wrong with the Clintons. Maybe they’re on the NPD spectrum as well. But they’ve come under so much right wing attack, and are so slick, that it’s hard to separate the truth from all the mud from a distance. They may suffer from the same malady as certain state representatives who live in my own neighborhood. When called on by hundreds of OUR neighbors to stop a local business owner from polluting our area which was reducing our property values, these guys, both D then R, automatically sided with the employer who was operating illegally and trying to buy state favors to continue doing so. Apparently this is their culture now.

rc – it truly is a marvel. The (white) left has lost its freaking mind, and shows no sign of coming back any time soon. I think Mandos is actually his own separate case, as shown by his continued ability to form sentences and not just implode into a puddle of anger when questioned. Ian makes me sad — he started out attempting a clear-headed analysis of Trump, but he seems to have been cowed by the fanatics in his party — now occasionally emerging from his shell to signal a dutiful re-commitment to orthodoxy.

BOO,
Everybody is flawed. But I’ve had far better times with those who are working on their flaws, than I have with those who refuse to recognize them as flaws at all. And that goes triple when they’re in power. With my experiences, no amount of shaming from anybody who’s never walked in my shoes could ever change that.

If I was you, I’d itemize all the practical reasons why illegal-tolerance is not a good thing.

” The “white” vote is a good approximation of the American nation, that is American-Americans and not the post-1965 invaders”

The implication in that statement is quite clear: you believe that non-white people are not real Americans.

The implication in that statement is quite clear: you believe that non-white people are not real Americans.

More specifically, he is saying that there is a metaphysical “body”, called a “nation”, and that some Americans by incident of blood belong to that body, except an ever-increasing circle of cancerous growths in that body, not to mention all the foreign objects that have penetrated it.

RC: I support the existence of places like Ian’s where we can discuss the opposing propositions in a halfway civilized manner, but your argument is just the equivalent, in the ideological space, of the “neoliberal” argument that the market (of labour and capital) should remain unfettered for fear of placing a controlling authority over it that has its own interests.

In the “marketplace of ideas” we are not all equal and we have to take the paradox of tolerance seriously, i.e., there are people who are vulnerable to ideas aimed at their destruction and the destruction of the “marketplace of ideas” itself.

I think he’s Canadian.

Most people wouldn’t mind an actual, real realitychecker, who exposes and pokes like a master fencer. Cries of “touché!” would certainly give this place an elegant touch.

But IMO, the one we’ve got swings wildly with a Homey da clown sock. I think most of his many pop-head victims would rather be touche’d than… “Homey don’t play dat”, all the damned time.

IOW, if one doesn’t want to give others the impression that they’re being herded in some unknown direction, be specific with the realitychecking.

Mandos, I just love how you are willing to articulate this stuff. “Interchangeable” – you could have just as easily said “fungible”. This is where the bugman managerial class has found common ground with the shit-flinging street leftist. The leftist demands unlimited migration of people, because “equality” – why should a straight white male have the privilege of living in a nice safe community, while the 65 IQ Somali has to eke out a living on rape and subsistence farming? The bugman asks the same question in a slightly different form – why should he pay whitey a living wage when a third-world border-jumper will do the same job for a tenth of the price, and not make any impertinent demands.

Willy thinks that if he ever did run into a genuinely better mind than his psychopath-marinated one, the better mind would have an obligation to force-feed knowledge into him, to selflessly devote itself to putting up with his online stalker bullshit just for the privilege of helping him become a little bit less of a juvenile, self-admitted feces-flinger.

Behold, the future hope of our species.

Willy, at least take your hand off your penis while you type about me!

rc, you really suck at realitychecking. And you claim this is your highest calling?

Man, you’re the ultimate in linguistic shapeshifters. The very fucking ultimate.

No, I merely identify connections and similarities you are not willing to acknowledge. You object to neoliberal argument when it comes to goods and labour, but the very same objection can be applied to traffic in ideas and feelings. If that recognition makes me a nasty “shapeshifter”, then it pleases me to keep shifting shape.

“…and the ‘parting on the left’ is now ‘parting on the right’ …”
Sound familiar? The Who, 1971 ….

A penny saved is a penny earned, dc.

It’s good that you’re taking an interest in Somalia – here you will find the true rape culture that media elites have long fruitlessly sought among white gentiles. If Sabrina Rubin Erdley had focused her investigation on swarthy Muslims instead of blonds, she might have found a real gang rape instead of a made-up one.

dc, are you fact checking me? Just like your heroes do to Drumph on the teevee?

I don’t have any data for you, but I had a scientist friend travel to Somalia to study whether they are dumb savages (just to prove the bigots wrong mind you). He went to check the government records, but soon learned that there were none, nor was there a government. Then he was raped and murdered. Fortunately his family were very understanding, saying that Somalis are wonderful people except for a few bad eggs, and he could just have easily been murdered by a blond gentile (in a sense he was, really, if you consider how structural racism victimizes us all).

“dumm”?

“dummness”?

🙂

dc – as you well know, science has conclusively proven that all population groups are exactly equal in average intelligence and behavior. Therefore, whenever differences are observed, it follows logically that there is some nefarious reason behind it. For example, although Somalis have very low IQ on average, we can attribute this in part to the white supremacists who design IQ tests sprinkling their exams with topics that only whites would know about, such as regattas, indoor plumbing, and Hitler biographical details.

Similarly, there is a proven discovery of hard science called “stereotype threat” — basically, if you see people like you portrayed as unintelligent, you will actually score lower on any IQ test. So, for example, due to Hollywood bias, no blacks were portrayed as contributing to the moon landing, which in turn causes blacks to do poorly on IQ exams (kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy with retroactive efficacy). Likewise, portrayal of whites as dumb hicks in Jewish and east Asian media causes whites to have lower average IQ scores than those groups. I could go on, but you get the general idea.

In sum, science has proven that once bigotry has been eliminated once and for all, each population group and individual will be able to attain above-average intelligence.

@realitychecker,

Yes, linguistically motivated. Dummheit, dummkopf, etc. I hope other people will start using “dumm” instead of “dumb” when they want to mean ” really really stupid”.

@BlizzardOfOz,

I have learned that you are partially half-right about Somali society having a widespread rape problem. How did I learn that? By random listening to BBC last night. Here is a little written item loosely inspired by the interview with a Somali legislator-activist last night.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42604496

What the legislator claimed is that Somali society used to have people-enforced sanctions against rape, back when Somalis lived on the land and families’ young daughters herded the family goats. This legislator/activist claimed that the rape-load has gone up with the large-scale urbanization of Somali society, an ongoing exodus from the land, and the rise of aimless unemployed youth in town and city settings.

While there is no way you could have known about the absence, and suddenly the presence of a law against rape in Somaliland, you would have had plenty of time to learn about those other aspects of where the rape is coming from. So why didn’t you know about this stuff? Why should I have to find out about these things from a random BBC news show and then a back track web search instead of getting it from you when I asked? Why had you never bothered to find any of these facts to support your assertion about Somali rape culture so you could supply those facts when asked?

And now that you know these facts are out there . . . thanks to me and not to any research of your own . . . what do you plan to do about finding out whether Somali society had a rape problem back when it really was thoroughly rural subsistence based or whether the rape problem has emerged after the decay of Somali rural economics and the urbanization of large numbers of Somalis as the Somali legislator/activist being interviewed claimed?

And don’t you think you should begin gathering facts and evidence about all the other things you assert in case people begin asking you, in all sincerity, how you document and support those assertions? Don’t you want to impress people here and try changing minds?

@dc – all the information you need to know about Somalis, in order to conclude that they will have low intelligence and high rates of violent crime, is that they are black — that’s it. This goes for black populations in Africa, and the African diaspora in every other nation. While I’m sure there must be some few exceptions to this heuristic, I’m not aware of any.

The questions you’re asking are anthropological – those are interesting, for sure. (I have a book down on my reading list Africa: Biography of a Continent by John Reader which may answer some of them.) My glib reference that you latched onto was coming from a political question — if you let these people into your country (we do), they will commit rapes and murders at a high rate (they do). Personally I’d rather avoid that.

I was giving you troll responses because I didn’t think you were serious. If you actually were, then I apologize. In general, though, it’s not useful to try and persuade someone using facts, when their metaphysics or ideology has already decided the question. If you don’t know what I mean by this, please take a look at this blog post. Discussing this issue with a leftist is futile, because they are already resolved that there can be no biological differences.

It’s as if I say I prefer dogs to cats, because they are more affectionate — and then a leftist will tell me that, well, actually, while observed affection may be mostly higher in most dog species, it’s not universally true (some breeds of dog are not affectionate ever, and even the affectionate breeds aren’t always). Furthermore, these differences are only due to the history of how dogs have been selectively bred according to human preferences, and if we remove those structural inequalities, then the affection gap will disappear. Therefore, I shouldn’t prefer dogs because it’s not really true to say they are affectionate, (and anyway, it’s bigoted).

@ dc

Nothing there that I would disagree with.

But, I really come here hoping to have good high-level discussions that I can learn from. Same as when FDL was my online home. I’m happy to share what I have already learned, but self-interest brings me here more to try and learn what other thoughtful people, i.e., Ian and the others here that I respect, already know that I do not.

The distractions from that are just annoyances to be endured.

@ dc

Well, sure, that’s what we are trying to do, isn’t it? 🙂

But some come just to disrupt, and that makes it more difficult.

Still do-able, though.