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Billy_TParticipantSo, again, WV, I probably misunderstand you. But if you’re seeing a symmetrical dynamic of some kind between a “Dem-MSM” and a right-wing MSM . . . . I don’t agree. It’s asymmetrical, to begin with, and, as mentioned, I don’t think the first part exists.
I think ALL of the MSM tilts right, and that the only reason it appears, in places, at times, to prefer the Dems to the GOP is when it’s just impossible for them to maintain the lie regarding “balance” or “both sides are the same” or “they both have equally valid positions.”
When they can no longer play that game, and they finally come out and show the reality that the GOP engages in more destructive shhht than the Dems, it just seems they back the Dems.
It’s not going to happen in my lifetime, but I hope America evolves beyond the two party system, cuz it’s killing us. Both parties are horrifically bad for us, and the planet, with the GOP being substantially worse. Our only chance is to move beyond them to include the far, far better voices, ideas, ideals and policies to the left of the Dems. Well to the left of them, IMO.
. . . . The Dems are the real “conservative party” now, and have been, really, since the early 1970s. In order to actually represent the entire political spectrum, they should be considered America’s “right-wing” party, and they should be opposed by true left-wing alternatives which I’d support . . . again, like the DSA platform and further to the left. My own preference being for staunchly anticapitalist, small is beautiful, localized, egalitarian, cooperative economies, federated, under a fully democratized economy and society . . . . antiwar, mind-your-own business, protector of the environment, etc. etc.
Billy_TParticipantOf course, if they were exposed to actual leftist ideas, philosophy, principles, ideals and policies, they’d dump BOTH the major parties and vote for something like the DSA platform. They’d say fuck off to the Dems AND the GOP, if they were really enlightened and voted their interests.
But with the game rigged against alternatives, and for the duopoly, the MSM HAS to keep the contest alive.
In short, IMO, there is no such thing as a “Dem-MSM.” But there is such a thing as right-wing media, and the latter doesn’t try to play things down the middle to keep the contest going.
Billy_TParticipantWell before we even get to the changed landscape between now and the 70’s — there’s the issue of THE TAPES. Nixon taped himself doing all this shit. Without that unique dynamic, Nixon would have stonewalled and survived.
But as to the video — 70 percent of Americans trusted the MSM back in the 70s. Was that a ‘good‘ thing? Good ole days of trusting the corporate media?
I agree with the commentator that things are a dumpster-fire now. And i agree that things have changed with the rise of the rightwing-lie-machine.
But things were not good in the olden days either. It was a different kind of dumpster-fire back in the 50’s, 60s, and 70s, etc. Back then i was listening to TV-MSM and i was being mislead every night. (Now, with the internet I have at least a small chance of finding my way toward the light.)
I think the vid makes some good points about the change, but where I’d disagree is that he kinda tries to make the case that the MSM was more truthful back in the 70’s — because there was hardly any rightwing media. But i think the MSM has always been in the pocket of the Corps, as Chomsky talked about in the 80’s in Manufacturing Consent. Its just that now we have the Right-MSM lying to us from the right, and the Dem-MSM lying to us from the ‘left’. What do we do with that?
Its also been my experience that Tucker Carlson (wacko that he is) is sometimes way more insightful on some issues than the Dem-MSM. On Syria for example. What to do with ‘that’ ?
To me the voters are staggering toward catastrophe because they DO trust EITHER Fox OR NPR/MSNBC. They ought look at both behemoths as Factories-Of-Lies. But they trust one or the other. They ‘say’ they dont trust the MSM but they do — they trust one of the lie-machines. Or the other.
Used to be we had one lie machine. Now we have two. So yes, things have changed.
Just my opin-yun. Call me Mary Sunshine.
w
vGood point about the tapes.
We agree about so much of the above . . . but I part ways with you on the concept of a Dem-MSM and a right-wing MSM. Though I’m probably misreading you . . .
I don’t see NPR or MSNBC as necessarily pro-Dem or anti-Republican. I see some individual water-carriers for the Dems, like Maddow and Hayes, but if you look at their entire lineup, it leans to the right. They have as many conservative hosts as so-called “liberal” hosts. It’s just that their conservatives can’t stand Trump, but they don’t support the Dems, at all.
NPR is deathly afraid of offending conservatives, so it tends to be as straight down the middle as possible, which will always skew reality. The reality is, from empirical evidence, that the right’s view of the world, on down to its individual issues, is just not in sync with that world, and wrong on solutions. So if media try to be “fair and balanced,” and give as much validity to right-wing thought as left of center, it’s not telling us the truth. If you have an argument between a flat-earther and a normal human, and you set things up as equally valid, you do the nation a huge disservice.
But that’s what the MSM does. And it doesn’t want the Dems to win more often than the GOP. It wants a a horse race, a food fight, a conflict — that sells. It doesn’t want reality, evidence or facts to overcome “fake news” as presented by the right, because that hurts ratings. It wants a horse race between the two parties . . . which wouldn’t occur if Americans actually knew what was going on and voted their own best interests. Roughly 90% of them, at least, would vote Dem over Republican, with just those two choices.
Billy_TParticipantI think Trump benefits greatly from the ginormous volume of his misdeeds, his criminality, his buffoonery, and the way the MSM has chosen to overwhelm the nation with this. The sheer volume acts as a kind of shield for Trump, because people tune it out. If there were fewer scandals, with greater intervals between them, I think people would concentrate more on them in isolation, and any one of them could bring him down. But it’s like we’re surfers who keep getting knocked off our boards by massive wave after massive wave, and we barely have time to come up for air, much less actually contemplate the corruption.
I think if people really could step back, pull all of this together, and just calmly, dispassionately review, they’d have to come to the conclusion that Trump is easily the most crooked, corrupt and aggressively odious president to ever enter the White House, and it’s only gotten worse since he’s been in office.
In short, he’s not in jail right now primarily because he’s done too MUCH to sort out and pull together. A kind of “too big to jail” scenario.
Billy_TParticipantYep. Campbell was a huge influence for me.
The shattering came first, as a kid. A good kind, a necessary kind of shattering. When I got older, mythology did help heal, like he said it would. And led to magic everywhere.
Another coincidence of sorts, it would appear: You “got” Chomsky back in 1988, a long time before I did. I think Campbell’s Power of Myth series with Moyers was the next year?
Moyers himself seemed to have undergone mini-epiphanies during that series of interviews. It may just have been his way, the way he did all interviews, but I remember thinking Campbell was breaking through to him, unlike what would happen to most journalists in that kind of process.
Billy_TParticipantI think leftists need our own color.
There’s a red America, and a blue America. What about a leftist America? What color would that be?
Demographics tells us that most Americans now live in cities. And Dems dominate voters in cities. The vast majority of the nation is red, but not the vast majority of people. Rural, semi-rural, etc. etc. . . . it’s red even in the so-called blue states. But cities are blue even in the red ones, etc.
The Trump coalition is trying to slow down the browning of America via actual changes to immigration laws, quotas, special programs, etc. etc. They’ve pushed for more people from Northern Europe, for example, and this would have remained under the radar if not for Trump’s comments about “shithole” places.
The alt-right wants this to happen, desperately. The tide can’t be stemmed, but it’s possible they can slow it down enough to get through their own lives still on top.
An ugly, ugly vision of the world, and not where our focus should be. Dreamkillers. The two major parties are dreamkillers.
. . .
A much more important prophecy for 2030: The World Wildlife Fund said we’ll need two entire planets to cover our resources needs, though if everyone lived like middle class Americans, we’d need four. But to make matters worse, this prediction is already ten years old or so. It’s likely far too optimistic.
Billy_TParticipantAnybody remember a time when you read a book and it had a big effect on you. A transformation. A significant change.
Back in 1988, i was on the ninth floor of WVU’s old Library, and it was late at night, and i was all alone on the ninth floor. I think it was a Friday night. And i remember coming across “The Culture of Terrorism” – an old Chomsky book.
And i read it for a coupla hours, and it kinda cracked up or cracked open my mind. It was like when you dial in the numbers on a combination lock and that last number lines up and there’s a “click”. My brain went “click”. Things were never the same after that. Newsweek and Time never seemed the same after that. I was no longer a mainstreamer politically. I didnt know much but I knew somethin had changed and i couldnt go back to Time/Newsweek/Face-The-Nation world.
James Joyce would have called that an “epiphany.”
I think I’ve probably had too many of those moments for my own good.
May have the dates wrong for this one, but reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces, followed by Robert Graves’ Greek Myths — those were the first profound reading experiences I can recall. I think I was 9 or 10. Weird, but it wasn’t that far removed from becoming a Rams’ fan.
I could never look at Christianity, god, gods, religion the same again. It shattered all those things for me. The biggest, brightest light came on . . . that if there were thousands of different gods and goddesses, and thousands of varieties of belief through the millennia, all across the world . . . how could there be any thing like “the one true god”?
Fast forward to a much later epiphany: Reading William Barrett’s Irrational Man. Perhaps the best single intro to Existentialism ever written. Nothing was the same after that, either. I think that was 1983.
A lot of mini-epiphanies since that time, with some launching many others.
Most recently reread a book that did that, but in an odd sort of way: George Scialabba’s awesome What Are Intellectuals Good For? It’s odd because it’s a collection of essays and reviews (primarily) about intellectuals who caused some of those mini-epiphanies in the past, or would have caused them if I had know about them before. Rereading the book made me want to chase them down all over again, or for the first time. A great collection for leftists, especially.
Billy_TParticipantCoupla guys from Commentary were on Morning Joe today. They, too, spouted the supposed revelation from Netanyahoo that Iran had broken its agreement. Trump shouting this as well in service of breaking the agreement.
Trouble is, the supposed bombshell was about pre-2003 Iran. It was “intelligence” already known.
Interesting how opposition to Trump creates such strange bedfellows along these lines. You’ll occasionally see old Israel-firsters speak out against Trump, if he trumpets something like this. A coupla diplomats pushed back and said this was old news, and Senator Murphy pointed out the time line, debunking the supposed revelation.
The folks at Commentary, however, aren’t in that camp. I haven’t seen them break ranks with Likud even as they oppose Trump.
. . .
Personally, I despise the Iranian government and all theocracies. But between Israel and Iran, I view the former as the much greater threat to peace, and it’s really not close. And, of course, Israel already has nukes, and has attacked Iran directly. The reverse is NOT the case.
It looks like Trump is headed to war with Iran, at the behest of Israel, the Saudis, and much of the Sunni Arab world.
Billy_TParticipantI’m not seeing anyone talk about this in the MSM:
How was this deal supposedly so bad for the USA in the first place?
We gave up absolutely nothing, and Iran gave up its sovereignty via its nuclear program. This didn’t cost us a penny. We ceded no ground. We merely eased up on sanctions that we didn’t really have a right to impose in the first place, for inspections of a sovereign nation’s own nuclear program which was none of our business either.
(America is also the only nation to use the bomb to murder nearly 300,000 innocent civilians on two already defenseless islands.)
Easing up on sanctions is kinda like this:
Joe Smith is pounding the much, much smaller John Doe, smashing him into the ground, stomping on him. They finally cut a deal for Joe Smith to stop doing that. In this case, Smith stops because Doe says he will open up his home to the entire neighborhood to inspect, even though no one else in the neighborhood has to do this, and he hasn’t done anything illegal, or anything that Smith hasn’t done himself already.
I don’t get it.
To me, the Iran deal is one of the most one-sided deals ever, but in the opposite direction. It greatly benefited America, cost us nothing, and hurt Iran. Why rip that up?
May 6, 2018 at 3:51 pm in reply to: The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant #85943Billy_TParticipantMichael Perelman talks about this in his superb The Invention of Capitalism.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Invention-of-Capitalism/
Feudal life was no picnic. But in many ways, the triumph of capitalism made things infinitely worse. It actually extended the range of people who could become “masters,” and treat others as slaves . . . when, prior to it, that number had mostly — with exceptions — been limited to “nobility.”
It also meant the near destruction of autonomous home production, which “the peasants” and others engaged in as needed. They worked to live, not the other way around. So they ended up spending many more hours with family and friends, and had many more holidays set aside and more access to the Commons. The Commons themselves were larger than they would become, and there was far less religious push for them to fill all of their hours with work, lest they be considered lazy good for nothings.
The “Protestant Work Ethic” actually had some very sinister underpinnings, arising when it did, at the beginnings of the shift away from small farmers, artisans, autonomous home productions, to work in the new factories.
Oh . . . and unlike the capitalist mode, where nothing you produce is yours, if you’re not the owner . . . everything was yours, under feudalism. You had to tithe to the Lord of the manor. But the results of your labor were at least initially yours, and ended up being mostly yours, when all was said and done.
Too bad the economic revolution after feudalism didn’t just end all aristocracies and ruling classes, instead of replacing one with another.
Billy_TParticipantInteresting article about the eroding-or changing face of communism over the years/
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gitlin-communism-anniversary-20180504-story.html
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“…During the preceding half-century, despite all of Communism’s recorded crimes, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries had remained committed to the absolute rule of a single party as the only viable remedy for capitalism. Around the world, Soviet-style governments enjoyed a reputation as the best imaginable route to social progress….”
——–Thank goodness we have something so much better than a SINGLE party here in America.
I mean we have TWO whole parties that rule everyone. 🙂
w
v
“I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile – at best.” Todd GitlinI’ve been having that argument with Dems on another forum. They were trashing Jill Stein, as usual, and calling the Green party reprehensible, and “spoilers” and so on.
I made the point that in an actual democracy, you can’t have “spoilers,” cuz everyone would be welcome to run for office, try to win hearts and minds, try to win the ability to represent us. None of our votes are owed to the duopoly. They don’t own them. No one who votes for another party is “stealing” votes from the Dems. Those votes were never the Dems’ property in the first place.
They never get it.
And when I point out that, no, Nader didn’t cost Gore the 2000 election, Gore did that himself, they scream. And then I ask them which number if higher:
The 350,000 Dems who voted for Bush directly in Florida, or the 23,000 Nader voters who might have voted for Gore if the Greens had not run?
350,000 versus 23,000. And beyond that, half of the Dems stayed home.
A two-party system is waaaay too close to a one-party system. They don’t get that one, either.
Billy_TParticipantInteresting article about the eroding-or changing face of communism over the years/
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-gitlin-communism-anniversary-20180504-story.html
I think we need a different word for it, for what happened in the USSR, Cuba, China, etc. Cuz it definitely wasn’t “communism” in any meaningful or theoretical sense. It couldn’t possibly be. Communism meant no “state.” The absence of the state. You literally can’t have a communist state if you’re even remotely close to the theory.
The theory, with a lot of variations, of course, depending upon the era and the thinker — modern communism goes back to the 18th century, at least — the theory is basically that we implement real socialism first, and after we’ve internalized that long enough for it to become second nature, we can kick off the training wheels of the state entirely, and just do self-rule. Full self-rule, with democracy fully realized, no ruling class, no class of any kind.
And real socialism meant, again, going back to the 18th century, democratic self-rule too, with a very small “state,” almost no class divisions, decentralized back to the community level, egalitarian, the people owning the means of production, directly, not via political parties.
So, in both cases, socialism and communism, you couldn’t have what they had in Soviet Russia or Maoist China or Castro’s Cuba . . . because the theory doesn’t allow it. Direct democracy doesn’t allow it. And there’s a huge difference between “nationalized” and “socialized,” as Emma Goldman shows here:
There is no communism in Russia.
Americans need to also remember that communists and socialists contributed mightily to all campaigns for social justice in our history, and if you took them out of the picture, we might still be in a Dickensian hell when it comes to workers and the workplace. Their contributions to human rights, consumer rights, minority rights and women’s rights was incalculable as well.
We need better words.
Billy_TParticipantBanking and War:https://www.truthdig.com/articles/i-know-which-country-the-u-s-will-invade-next/
“….I think I’m noticing a trend. In fact, on Jan. 4, it was reported that Pakistan was ditching the dollar in its trade with China, and that same day, the U.S. placed it on the watch list for religious freedom violations. The same day? Are we really supposed to believe that it just so happened that Pakistan stopped using the dollar with China on the same day it started punching Christians in the nose for no good reason? No, clearly Pakistan had violated our religion of cold hard cash.
This leaves only one question: Who will be next on the list of U.S. illegal invasions cloaked in bullshit justifications? Well, last week, Iran finally did it: It switched from the dollar to the euro. And sure enough, this week, the U.S. military-industrial complex, the corporate media and Israel all got together to claim that Iran is lying about its nuclear weapons development. What are the odds that this news would break within days of Iran dropping the dollar? What. Are. The. Odds?…see link
I read this today, over at Truthdig, while I was getting chemo. Really excellent. Um, well, not the chemo, the article. One of his best, evah. Thought about posting it here, in fact, and then I noticed you had already done so.
There aren’t that many people who can drive home deadly serious points, while throwing in the occasional bit of humor, and make it work. He does. Consistently. It’s not going to happen, and we both know why . . . but I wish he had his own prime time show, on a network that wasn’t shunted over to the side or hidden, etc.
What’s your own take on what he says, WV?
Billy_TParticipantI definitely want to see it, ZN. But I am a bit behind, as far as the MCU goes. Haven’t seen Black Panther yet, for instance, but we have a new, low-cost theater nearby and I hope to see it this week, if all goes well. It’s a digital theater, for $3. Have never seen a film in that format before, so who knows?
I do remember being bothered by TV shows that were shot in digital, but that was years ago, and I think they were done in 1080i or p, and I’m guessing today it’s all 4K. Likely makes a huge difference.
Film is waaaay superior to digital at that lower rez. Don’t know about comparisons with 4K yet.
Anyway . . . I’ll take your advice about not reading review stuff first. I’m that way about most things — books, movies, TV. I don’t even like introductions that tell us how we’re supposed to interpret this or that work of fiction. My preference is for Afterwards, or reading the intros later.
Exceptions are when it’s a non-fiction work, especially history, when I already know how things turned out.
;>)
Thanks, ZN.
Billy_TParticipantWow.
Come on, Nittany. Not everyone has the time to read through your voluminous verbosity regarding current movies. I mean, some of us are just too busy with our semi-retirement days for any such laborious endeavor.
Would you mind summarizing your take a bit, please? Could you please put all of that in a “Hack-size” post, instead?
April 21, 2018 at 12:32 pm in reply to: Ray McGovern's puzzling argument regarding new DOJ referrels. #85301Billy_TParticipantFrom where I sit, it’s too obvious for words. Led by Nunes, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, those eleven House members are desperately trying to kill the investigation into easily the most corrupt president-elect we’ve ever had. It’s. Not. Close. And why? Why would they do any of this if he were innocent? They wouldn’t. The referrals are unprecedented. They’ve never happened before in our history. Again, why? No innocent man acts in the way Trump has acted since Day One, and no innocent man needs all of this protection from the truth.
And I’m saying that’s the case even if we completely ignore the possible election interference/cooperation with Russia. In fact, I’d be fine if they dropped that altogether and just concentrated on Trump’s business practices and his straight up election-law crimes — like those payoffs. If the probe concentrated on nothing but that, it would expose the most corrupt person ever to enter the White House, with mob ties for decades, protected by an endless series of NDAs, protected by folks like Cohen and now the GOP itself.
. . . .
And, again, I have never, ever understood why supposedly left of center media outlets would work so hard to defend him, especially given what he’s done since he entered office . . . the tax cuts for himself and the super-rich, the privatization of millions of acres of public lands, sold off to Big Oil and Big Coal . . . . the abject surrender of the EPA to the Extraction industry . . . . accelerated bombings, drones, war-fronts, plus the easing up of already too lax “rules of engagement.”
There just isn’t a single thing he’s done, on any front, that a leftist should support. Why all the energy spent defending him? Clinton lost. She’s not an issue. Taking down Trump won’t give her the presidency. It won’t even give it to the Dems. The GOP will still hold the White House, at least until 2020.
Why fight so hard on his behalf, and, in effect, the GOP’s?
Billy_TParticipantLotsa things to comment about. Listened so far up to the talk about the legitimacy of the state. But the previous topic was skipped over too quickly, IMO, especially by the leftist host.
He didn’t push back on the idea of Lockean rights to one’s own labor, in the talk about factory ownership, though I thought the lefty host would.
To me, the logical conflict with that is: Wage labor doesn’t get to own ANYTHING they produce. Under capitalism, it’s legal to take that away from every worker and hand it over to the capitalist. The capitalist legally owns what his or her workforce produces via THEIR labor. They (the workers) own nothing that came from their own two hands.
It surprised me that the lefty host didn’t discuss this.
But lots of other good stuff. Will probably listen to it again this weekend.
Would like to hear your thoughts too, WV.
Billy_TParticipantAsk average west virginians on the street what ‘neoliberalism’ is and they will either not know or they will say it means liberal or democrat.
I actually think this ‘naming’ thing is important. I know it is. And neoliberalism is the wrong term to be using unless the audience is academics.
You can have corporate capitalism without neoliberal economic policies. They’re not the same thing.
And the reason most people don’t know about it is because mainstream news does not address the issues. In fact it does not identity neoliberal economics as a “thing.” It has nothing to do with the name. Give it another name and it will still be a mystery to most news outlets and most citizens.
We had “corporate capitalism” under the Keynesian consensus, too. It’s actually, in a sense, a redundant term, cuz incorporation is one of the chief markers for capitalism itself . . . separating it from previous economic forms.
As in, prior to capitalism, the norm was home production, without incorporation. Home production, family production, small family farms, artisans, craftsmen, who never even thought of incorporating what they did. They didn’t need to. They made their products themselves, with use-value in mind, with a local market in mind — an independent local market, one outside any unifying force.
Capitalism changed all of that, killing that home production, killing those family farms and local producers, artisans of use value, etc. etc. . . . forcing people to give up their autonomy and flock to the new factories to work for OTHERS, to make THEM rich instead. Those factories were incorporated, and incorporation became the norm instead of the rare outlier. Corporations then started the process of banding together to lobby for better and better environments for their businesses, all the while workers lost more and more of their independence, status, say in their own destiny, etc. etc.
“Neoliberalism” is basically an attempt to undo the one serious, extended regime of reforms in capitalist history (Keynesianism). It’s the Revenge of the Death Star and the Empire Strikes Back, etc. . . . and seeks a return to minimal regulations on capital, workplaces, benefits, and so on. It wants the lowest possible taxes on corporations and rich people in general, and the privatization of as much of the Commons as is possible . . . almost none of which would have been necessary if not for the brief period of reform already mentioned — which, again, still fell waaay short.
The media won’t talk in those terms because it won’t allow actual criticism of the capitalist system — at all. That’s verboten, as are discussions regarding the homogenization of culture, the commodification of pretty much everything in the life-sphere, and the dumbing down of our politics to make sure no meaningful critiques take place.
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This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by Billy_T.
Billy_TParticipantOh, and to further illustrate how times have altered things so much . . . Sanders rarely talks about poor people, even though he talks all the time about economic inequality. His focus in speech after speech is on the middle class.
Contrast that with RFK and a few other actual “liberals” from the 1960s, who talked all the time about the poor. RFK campaigned in the Delta, and on Indian reservations, and spoke eloquently — often quoting Camus whom he knew by heart — about the horrific lot of the poor. And he was antiwar when it was dangerous to be antiwar. As much as I like Bernie, he hasn’t exactly been outspoken on that subject.
Of course, just as it’s asking too much of the word “liberal” to cover the entire left, it’s asking too much of word definitions to remain constant over time. Naturally, they’re not going to mean what they did 50 years ago. Which is all the more reason for updates and tuneups.
I’m proudly in the leftist camp, well to the left of liberal — even RFK’s much better version of liberal. And I wish we were included in the national narrative about this stuff. But it makes it a hell of a lot tougher to talk accurately about what we’re against when the terms used are stretched to a breaking point (IMO).
As in, I’m diametrically opposed to most everything on the right, with the exception of some of its now forgotten views of capitalism’s horrific effects on the family . . . and how some conservative intellectuals once saw capitalism as tearing families and communities apart (and why). George Scialabba’s book of essays is really good on that subject, btw.
But when liberal and conservative belief sync up or get close on things like war, empire, the surveillance state and the other stuff already mentioned . . . what am I really opposing? If they’re on the same page, does it make sense to use two different terms?
Billy_TParticipantSo, again, IMO, using “Dems” is better. Cuz they’ve been roll-over monkeys for decades. It’s been enough for them to be Republican Lite since at least the early 1970s. It’s been enough for them to try their best to split the difference between their donor class and hoping their own constituency holds together, with most of that hope coming from a wish and a prayer:
1. That “We’re not as bad as the Republicans” will work
2. Saying the right things about women and minorities (without necessarily doing the right things, at least since the early 1970s) will work. Basically, not being a white nationalist party, which is what the GOP has morphed into.An actual “liberal,” at least the kind I grew up reading, watching, wouldn’t roll over on the GOP at every chance. They wouldn’t cede the argument before it even started. They’d actually assume “conservatives” were wrong from the start and go from there. A RFK from his 1968 campaign, for instance, wouldn’t allow the narrative to be framed in the way a Chuck Schumer would, 50 years later. Does it make sense to use the same political terms for such different political beliefs across time?
I think most “liberals” today could fairly be called “conservatives” on most topics. Perhaps a few culture war issues, and maybe the environment, they can still claim left of center. But on economics, taxes, the surveillance state, war, regime change, coups, empire, capitalism, privatization of public goods and services, etc. etc. . . . all too many are center right. Are they still really “liberal” when they’re center right?
Boiled down, aren’t most “liberals” today really just “woke” conservatives? Again, minus a few issues . . . .
Billy_TParticipantThe part of the article I liked best is the explanation of how liberals let the right completely dictate the frames of debate, how they meet them on their turf, and accept their values.
I think that’s a crucial part of the article, and spot on — with a caveat or two. I wonder if it makes more sense to substitute “Dems” for “liberals” in that case, and I wonder also if it’s not time to take another look at our usage of the word, period, just as “neoliberalism” is considered for a tuneup as well.
Gut feeling: The meaning of “liberal” has been so stretched thin by our national political narrative, it strikes me as impossibly loaded and all but useless. The vast majority of mainstream discussions basically give Americans just two choices in political ID: Liberal and conservative. Obviously and logically, if that’s the case, then you’re going to have liberals who are diametrically opposed to conservatives and don’t cede them any ground, and you’re going to have liberals right next door to conservatives — kissing cousins, basically. If “liberal” runs the entire gamut, that’s gonna be the case.
We’re asking “liberal” to serve as a catchall indicator for the entire left, IOW, and most of us here choose other terms, well to the left of liberal. Those terms are rarely acknowledged in any discussion in recent times. Again, you get those two choices, and that’s it . . . . though, lately, I think right-libertarians have made a big push to gain their own place on the right’s spectrum, and in the process, they’ve managed to all but kill the use of left-libertarian, or libertarian socialist, or libertarian communist, which preceded them, ironically, by two centuries.
So, basically, liberal, conservative and libertarian. Since right-libertarians have all but won the PR battle, they don’t even need to add the qualifier. Does it make sense to talk about political philosophy, policy, reforms, etc. etc. using the word “liberal” when it’s asked to cover so much ground?
Not to me.
(More later . . .)
Billy_TParticipantMy own view is that the term is generally useless, but can be made better by adding “soft” and “hard” as adjectives. Ironically, the article mentions Washington Weekly, which some say is the main source for the “soft” version of neoliberalism arising in the early 1970s. WW changed a lot in its overall focus since then, but it was once the bastion for those “soft” version ideas.
But my main problem with the term is that a lot of people take it as referring to something new. IMO, it’s actually a return to previous forms of capitalism, with updates, prior to the short-lived Keynesian era. Unfortunately, I think a lot of Dems and liberals have, in the back of their minds, at least, the idea that the “natural” form of capitalism was in that era, and all we need to do to fix everything is return to those halcyon days and everything will be groovy again. While that era was the best that capitalism has yet produced overall, it was never anywhere close to good enough — when it comes to allocation of resources, wages, fair trade, fair pay, the environment, sustainability, etc. etc. It fell waaaay short in all those areas, and it required a fluky confluence of events in the first place. It was just better than what preceded it and what follows it.
Neoliberalism means the return of the Death Star to me. The return of an all out triumph of Capital over pretty much everything else, with enough crumbs thrown to the masses to prevent all out revolution, or at least mass strikes. It means stripping away Keynesian reforms, which again fell short . . . like modest regulation on Finance, the free flow of Capital, workplace safety and so on. It means we’re getting closer to capitalism in its raw form, but because of that rawness, mass propaganda has to be more and more sophisticated than ever before, has to fool we the people more than ever before, and distract us with enough new baubles to make us forget how badly we’re being used . . . and, yes, “exploited.”
Rereading a truly fantastic collection of essays by George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For, which I should finish later today. A treasure-trove for leftists, and he touches upon a lot of topics in Zooey’s article. He’s just brilliant, and modest about that too. I recommend it highly to all here, and will post about it this weekend.
April 19, 2018 at 10:14 am in reply to: have to take the dog in for the last time…this has been superseded #85235Billy_TParticipantSorry to hear about that, ZN.
Dogs can be — or at least seem to be — better friends to us than humans. As a kid, I felt that way sometimes about our doggies, and have known several people who didn’t even question this. They consistently say they loved their dog unlike any human friend, and it wasn’t close for them. My father was like that to a degree.
Condolences . . .
Billy_TParticipantThanks.
I’m guessing we all have done the same thing. No worries.
You didn’t see the joke. Look again.
Oh, man!! I DID miss it!!
Good one, Billy T!!
;>)
Billy_TParticipanta little more on the C.A. thing:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/mod-cambridge-analytica-parent-company-scl-group-list-x
MoD granted ‘List X’ status to Cambridge Analytica parent companyMPs call for investigation into concerns over SCL Group and its access to secret documents
Hey, WV, hope I haven’t been too argumentative on these topics. It’s never personal if and when it does happen. External stuff I should never let bug me, and I’m working on that. Getting back into Buddhism the last coupla days, starting with a reread of the Dhammapada.
Anyway, as a way to kinda sorta wrap up this thread from my end:
If Cambridge’s parent company is tied to various secret services, and has engaged in the kind of sleazy stuff that’s coming out, isn’t that all the more reason to investigate further? If it’s anything from a remote connection, all the way to an actual front company, I’d say that just adds more urgency, etc.
Bring ’em down. Bring ’em all down.
Billy_TParticipantBilly_TParticipant“What you will not find in this data is support for the common narrative that we have a free speech crisis on college campuses in America, driven by political correctness on the left. That narrative is essentially a myth. Like many popular beliefs, it does not survive confrontation with actual facts.”
Link: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/free-speech-perception-vs-reality/
Here’s another recent article debunking those myths:
The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth. Here are the facts.
Billy_TParticipantWill we ever see the film ‘the Lobby’:https://popularresistance.org/will-we-ever-see-al-jazeeras-investigation-into-the-israel-lobby/
Excerpt:
“…
…..Almost every journalist I’ve met in the Middle East has encountered similar problems. When I worked for the The Times, I alerted the then editor, Charles Douglas-Home, to evidence that Israeli officers had secretly buried at least seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners – done to death in an interrogation centre – at night in a Sidon graveyard in 1983. He wanted me to spend as many weeks as necessary to find out if the story was true. Then, months later, when witnesses emerged with evidence of the burial, including the gravedigger – the bodies still had their hands tied behind their back with nylon rope when they were brought to him – I called my editor. My witnesses were being “visited” by armed members of the Israeli Shin Beth intelligence agency, I told him, and I was being trailed around Sidon by Israeli-registered vehicles. It was time to run the story.To my shock, Douglas-Home – an editor who otherwise loyally stood by me in every Middle East dispute over my work – replied that he wasn’t sure “how we’re justified in running a story like this so long after the event”. In other words, we had to be sure of our facts on such an important story – but by taking the time to do just that, the story was now out of date.
After much argument – during which I suggested to the Israelis that they might like to institute a military inquiry into the deaths if they wanted to avoid a scandal (they said, mysteriously, that it was already under way, although I doubted this) – the story ran. A deputy editor, I was told, had tried to cut the report by two-thirds. He was overruled. Then the story ran. In full.
So, old story, new story. I’ve appeared many times on Al Jazeera. And never been told to mince my words. Nor would I. But a lot of us are waiting to see Swisher’s new documentary. If we don’t, we’ll know what to think of Al Jazeera.”
It’s almost a common place of history: The oppressed become oppressors when the power dynamic is reversed.
Reading again about early Christianity and the Roman empire, it’s pretty stunning to consider just how quickly Christians turned into vicious, violent and all too often sadistic oppressors of pagans, more than reversing the previous dynamic — actually, many times over.
Also just finished rereading a very good biography of one of my favorite writers of the 20th century, Bruno Schulz, a magical Polish/Jewish author who was killed by the Gestapo in 1942. Thinking about the Nazi terror, the Holocaust, the profoundly tragic loss of life, of art, music, literature, of culture in general. So many of Schulz’s friends and relatives died in pogroms or the Final Solution as well.
Fast forward to the Israeli occupation, its wars, etc. etc. . . . and they’ve become oppressors in their own right.
On an individual level, yes, humans can and do remember what we’ve gone through and make sure not to even come close to doing that to others. It becomes part of who we are. But in the aggregate, when that power dynamic changes . . . . it’s just amazing how quickly we can forget.
Billy_TParticipantMost of Palast’s article is really good, and that usually the case for him. He’s an intrepid reporting in the old school sense. But his opening, to me, is surprisingly clunky, and he engages in classic “whataboutism” and a straw man or two:
The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.
That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.
Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],
First off, no one is saying Cambridge is a uniquely bad apple. They’re reporting on its sleazy business practices, and the more that comes out about them, the worse it sounds. None of this prevents other reporters from going after what Palast would consider bigger fish. None of this stops any other reporter from going after the Kochs or whomever. But Palast seems to be saying, at least until near the end of the article, that we should ignore this because other stories are much more important.
To me, that’s like saying we shouldn’t worry about a chemical spill that killed a few hundred people, cuz much worse spills are on the way.
Also, no one is saying that Cambridge invented psychometric manipulation. It’s not even a part of the discussion. They’re just saying CA used this to harvest 50 million FB users without their permission.
It’s still a puzzle to me why some public lefties appear to be expending so much energy trying to dismiss stories involving Trump. Why? Especially when, in a case like this, folks like Palast can pursue their view of bigger fish regardless. Though I’m also puzzled why a president isn’t considered a pretty big fish. Anyway, no report on CA blocks him or anyone else from that, and it’s only recently become a story here.
It’s as if they’re telling us it can only be one or the other, not both/and. It can always be both/and.
Billy_TParticipantis that SCL, CA’s parent company used to work for MI6 (or be run by them) and this technology was used by them in god knows what elections around the world for the good of the empire
You know? I spent years criticizing USA actions messing up the democratic process elsewhere. But I (and the many like me) didn’t screw up elections elsewhere…various “security state” style american governments did. So I (and the many like me) were both critical of AND not even a tiny bit complicit with those kinds of anti-democratic actions.
And just because a government I criticized did it does not mean I am going to happily accept anybody, from the Mayor Daley machine to republicans to Russians to British sleaze firms messing up the elections I participate in.
It is getting so I completely tune that argument out.
One of the many problems with Trump is that he is complicit with a Russian autocratic imperialist. And advanced sleazeball British manipulation firms.
I didn’t stand up for elections elsewhere to be so cavalier about elections I myself participate in.
….
Hey, ZN. You mixed up the quotes. That originally came from WV’s post, not mine.
Anyway, I think you make a good point. Aside from the old adage, Two wrongs don’t make a right, 99.99% of the country wasn’t involved in the actions of our clandestine services around the world — from the top down to the bottom. It doesn’t make any real sense that we should feel guilty enough to make us accept having our own elections tampered with by other nations and their clandestine services. It’s not an eye for an eye, when it comes to the vast, vast majority of the country. It’s not even logical on the barbaric grounds of the Old Testament, or the more enlightened grounds of metaphor.
Oh, and if Cambridge Analytica really did have a history with various clandestine services, isn’t that all the more reason to want to see all of this come out in the wash, including the Trump connection(s)? Britain’s Channel Four seems rather unafraid of blow back from MI6 at this point, it would appear . . .
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