U.S. Politics: Oh Donnie Boy, the Feds are calling...

[felice]

12 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Now gather around the camp fire kids and let me tell you a very scary story.

It's the story of Dr. Franken-Republican.

It's about the conservative that created a monster he could not control.

Of course it's the doctor who's the real monster in Frankenstein; his creation is just more blatantly horrible, and driven to evil acts in response to rejection (much like Trumperdoo would have been happy to run as a Democrat if only they'd have accepted him).

[A Horse Named Stranger]

3 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

The Alt Right's relationship with Neitzsche.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer-nazism

 

The alt right may misunderstand Neitzsche, but it does seem to me they did take the epistemological stance of post modernism. And that is something that some elements of the left might want to think about.

First the nitpick.

It's Nietzsche, with IE, not Neitzsche with EI. First I assumed it was a casual typo, but since you did it twice, I assume it's really a mistake.

German language the letter E coming after the letter I is singnifying a lenthening of the I sound /i:/ for the linguistic nerds so IE in German sounds like the EE in feel in the English language. Or beer (or Bier in German).

The letter I following the letter E is however a different vowel. That's the /ai:/ sound, as in die, dye, lie, cry, sigh.

Second I've never been that fond of Nietzsche. However, acknowledging that those are human constructs is one thing, what you do, or at what conclusions you arrive after that, that's an entirely different question. Since I don't want to derail the thread too much (and I think this is better placed in Scot's Imagination thread), what else are those things if not human constructs? God given truths?

[Zorral]

Gads -- I open the NY Times to see -- Elizabeth Warren announced 3 minutes ago she's running for POTUS.

That's just what I don't want to see. Yet another MA, non-charismatic politico, another non-charisatic woman, after what we saw just two years ago, running for an office of a government that isn't even operating, announcing she's taking on the orange nazi. Stupid, stupid, STUPID DEMS!   This isn't going down with voters in any way but negative, announcing with the government shut down and nobody doing a damned thing to get it up and running again.

Know what I WANTED to see? A concrete plan to get the government up and running and funded. But no. For them as much as anyone else it's only about ME ME ME, I WANT PRESIDENT. Nothing about the country and the people who she presumably believes will vote for her.

Guess what? WE. the VOTERS. Don't. Want. You.

Especially when your sense of strategy is so bad that you begin by shooting yourself.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Gads -- I open the NY Times to see -- Elizabeth Warren announced 3 minutes ago she's running for POTUS.

That's just what I don't want to see. Yet another MA, non-charismatic politico, another non-charisatic woman, after what we saw just two years ago, running for an office of a government that isn't even operating, announcing she's taking on the orange nazi. Stupid, stupid, STUPID DEMS!   This isn't going down with voters in any way but negative, announcing with the government shut down and nobody doing a damned thing to get it up and running again.

Know what I WANTED to see? A concrete plan to get the government up and running and funded. But no. For them as much as anyone else it's only about ME ME ME, I WANT PRESIDENT. Nothing about the country and the people who she presumably believes will vote for her.

Guess what? WE. the VOTERS. Don't. Want. You.

Especially when your sense of strategy is so bad that you begin by shooting yourself.

She won’t last long in the primaries. Her early polling isn’t good, her chance pasted her by in 2016 and frankly, she’s a terrible matchup against Trump.  

[lokisnow]

1 hour ago, Tywin et al. said:

She won’t last long in the primaries. Her early polling isn’t good, her chance pasted her by in 2016 and frankly, she’s a terrible matchup against Trump.  

Indeed, and the sanders affiliated media are determined to relentlessly attack anyone they perceive as a threat to their philosophy, hence the above attack that it’s tone deaf to announce during the shutdown has already spread rapidly through the chatter-chain much like fox noise disseminates attack lines. Impressive how fast this one moved!

i’d say given the Zorral post above that the following Chait article is now equally applicable to Warren. (And the Bernie camp rage when Biden announces will inevitably be something to behold)

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/bernie-sanders-beto-orourke-feud-2020-campaign-democratic.html

The Sanders partisans who are attacking O’Rourke — like Zaid Jilani, David Sirota, Branko Marcetic, Elizabeth Bruenig — are not representative of Sanders voters as a whole. This distinction is the key to deciphering the whole episode. Sanders attracts the intense support of a small left-wing intellectual vanguard who see American politics in fundamentally different terms than most Democrats do. The primary struggle in American politics as they see it is not between liberalism and conservatism, but between socialism and capitalism.

Sanders labels himself as a socialist and frames his rhetoric in Marxian class terms, which sets him apart from other Democrats. (Even a progressive like Elizabeth Warren calls herself“a capitalist to my bones.”) Socialists — at least those who aren’t willing to settle for the incremental advances traditionally held out by liberal Democrats as their only option — see Sanders’s presidential candidacy as uniquely compelling. The struggle between Sanders and other Democrats strikes them as far more significant than the contest between the non-socialist Democrats and the Republicans.

The voters who pulled the lever for Sanders, by contrast, are ideologically indistinguishable from the rest of the party. Among the minority of voters who identified as “very liberal,” the most left-wing choice, Sanders and Clinton performed about equally. In 2016, Sanders voters actually had more conservative views on economic inequality and changes to Social Security and Medicare than Clinton voters did.

Sanders built most of his support on personal contrasts rather than ideology. While Clinton was mired in scandals over fundraising, speaking fees, and the use of a personal email server, her opponent presented an earnest, scandal-free profile. Sanders dominated Clinton among young, white, and male voters.

in other words, the sandernistas view defeating trump as less important than eating down their ideological allies.

Vanity fair ran an article about gop insiders and their hope that trump can be lucky enough to run against sanders or warren in 2020. They’re most scared of trump running against Biden, then Hickenlooper, and maybe O’Rourke, but in general no one seems to know what do think about Beto.

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/why-gop-insiders-fear-beto-and-biden-over-warren-and-sanders

 

But more than all of that, Republicans are happy to run against any progressive who tries to compete with Trump on Trump’s terms. Exchanging barbs on social media platforms; name-calling; questioning his capacity mentally, physically, and the like. As much as the Democratic base might be clamoring for a standard bearer to force-feed the president a dose of his own medicine, there is no beating the genuine article at the game he perfected. Trump is too quick and too shameless, and that approach offers little change to voters who want to turn the page from the chaos and anxiety that has characterized the current era. “A Democrat is not going to defeat Trump by being more brash, blustering, and strident. They will win over voters they need to retake the ‘blue wall’ states by connecting with those voters on substance but presenting an alternative to his leadership style,” a Republican consultant told me in an e-mail.

Indeed, if there’s a key aspect to the fear Beto O’Rourke inspires in some Republicans, it’s the outgoing Texas congressman’s combination of sunny disposition and 21st-century social media agility. Sure, he’s unabashedly progressive, but to borrow a phrase from Vice President Mike Pence: He’s not angry about it. Nor, as it happens, does O’Rourke look down upon so-called heretics, or, if you prefer, “deplorables.”

Ignore the Beto mockery prevalent in Republican circles during O’Rourke’s near upset of Senator Ted Cruz this past November. Party insiders were taking notes, and taking the 46-year-old from El Paso far more seriously than suggested by the apparent delight they took in lampooning everything about a figure who has drawn comparisons to a onetime up-and-coming Democrat named of Barack Obama. “A Democrat who can carry Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or North Carolina is problematic,” a Republican insider from a critical swing state said. “Someone like Beto, who can campaign on the fly, raise money, and excite young voters, could put those and other states in play.”

d who is that? As often as Warren and her like-styled cohorts were mentioned as easy Trump foils, former Vice President Joe Biden was cited as among the few Democrats who many Republicans believe might dispatch the incumbent with relative ease. Is Biden progressive? Absolutely. Gaffe-prone? Duh. But he is the antithesis of Trump, with the added benefit that he’s been vetted before, and passed muster. “He wreaks calmness and normalcy, which I feel like people crave over the chaos of the Trump administration,” a Republican strategist headquartered in the Southwest said. Another Democrat who fits that bill, more than one Republican volunteered to me, unprompted: John Hickenlooper, the 66-year-old outgoing two-term governor of Colorado, former Denver mayor, and small-business owner. “One of the main disasters to avoid is to think 2016 is like 2020,” the Republican strategist based in the Southwest explained. “Trump got lucky and people held their nose against Clinton. That’s not likely to happen this time.”

The problem for Republicans, lamented a seasoned G.O.P. hand in Washington, is that despite the challenges the Democrats face heading into the next election—a crowded and divisive primary and a restless base not necessarily uninterested in nominating calm, competent, and normal—“is that the Trump apologists won’t put the blame where it belongs and are burying their heads in the sand.

[lokisnow]

Sorry, mobile safari won’t let me fix any of the above quote formatting fuckups. Take your best guess at where the quote ends, should be hopefully clear.

[SweetPea]

8 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

The Alt Right's relationship with Neitzsche.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer-nazism

The alt right may misunderstand Neitzsche, but it does seem to me they did take the epistemological stance of post modernism. And that is something that some elements of the left might want to think about.

I'm really not sure if that is a fair characterization. I've yet to see an alt-right personality who doesn't reject post modernism and is critical of it. And the article overexaggerates Nietzsche's influence (or popularity), going so far as to call him their "favorite philosopher". That's just flat out wrong. I've been following several alt-right figures for quite a while now, and Nietzsche is rarely if ever brought up.

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

Gads -- I open the NY Times to see -- Elizabeth Warren announced 3 minutes ago she's running for POTUS.

That's just what I don't want to see. Yet another MA, non-charismatic politico, another non-charisatic woman, after what we saw just two years ago, running for an office of a government that isn't even operating, announcing she's taking on the orange nazi. Stupid, stupid, STUPID DEMS!   This isn't going down with voters in any way but negative, announcing with the government shut down and nobody doing a damned thing to get it up and running again.

Know what I WANTED to see? A concrete plan to get the government up and running and funded. But no. For them as much as anyone else it's only about ME ME ME, I WANT PRESIDENT. Nothing about the country and the people who she presumably believes will vote for her.

Guess what? WE. the VOTERS. Don't. Want. You.

Especially when your sense of strategy is so bad that you begin by shooting yourself.

You don't support a woman for the presidency? How sexist can you be?

Just kidding. She has no chance of winning, but she will probably be great material for a ton of funny memes, I can't wait.

[Zorral]

49 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

’d say given the Zorral post above that the following Chait article is now equally applicable to Warren. (And the Bernie camp rage when Biden announces will inevitably be something to behold)

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/bernie-sanders-beto-orourke-feud-2020-campaign-democratic.html

I don't want Sanders either, and neither do most of us.  These people haven't come up with any new ideas in their lives.  They have lived on the ideas of previous generations' activists, organizers, progressives and social justice warriors.  But they haven't come up with anything to address all these matters in the terms in which we have to navigate them in this post digital, post climate catastrophe age of galloping inequality and oppression of everyone who isn't already obscenely wealthy and entrenched in the systems of the ruling class that keeps them the ruling class generation after generation, while refusing to do anything about disintegrating and dysfunction infrastructure of transportation, housing, communications, health and physical safety.

In the meantime:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tsa-officers-government-shutdown_us_5c2a47aee4b05c88b7029f3c
 

Quote

 

“While Congress and Mr. Trump get to stay home, enjoy their personal time with their families, and still get paid, we have to struggle and suffer,” a Transportation Security Officer told HuffPost in an email. The officer, a single mother, now worries how she’ll take care of her kids if the shutdown drags on.

 

 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

22 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Conservative health care experiment leads to thousands losing coverage

'I have pre-existing conditions. But all they could tell me was, 'sorry, you didn’t comply,'' said one Arkansan who lost coverage.

 

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/30/conservative-health-care-experiment-leads-to-thousands-losing-coverage-1076876

I was in Medicaid in Colorado for a couple of years, and I think Colorado is fully supportive of Medicaid's expansion (they don't want people kicked off). The method for signing up through the website was HORRIBLE. Whoever designs these things for the gov't. clearly has little experience designing user friendly systems. I went through three times following the instructions very carefully to report my new income, and then it took me calling them to get it right. No matter what I did it would only save that I had new insurance or new income--never both. If I tried doing the reports separately, it'd only save the last one, and it wouldn't let you add them at the same time. When it turned out I had the program for three months too long, they gave me one more month before booting me. 

I bring this up because at least our state seems to want you to be covered. I can't imagine if I had little to no experience with the internet, if I was terribly sick, and I had to rely on that shitty system to get my info in. Your other option is going in and meeting a tech (last time I went, and this wasn't even for the initial sign up--just a re-verification meeting) I was there for four and a half hours. You can call them but I have never waited less than an hour (once two hours and I gave up). Sometimes they call you and say, "You need to come in and meet with us. Tuesday at 2pm is your meeting time. Please call if you need to reschedule, but we make no guarantees we will get back to you." Oh, I work Tuesdays at 2pm.  So you call and they don't call back and you know you have a four hour wait time ahead for "dropping in."

It's a terrible system that needs some money put into it. But since it's for the poor, who cares, right?

[davos]

4 hours ago, Zorral said:

Gads -- I open the NY Times to see -- Elizabeth Warren announced 3 minutes ago she's running for POTUS.

That's just what I don't want to see. Yet another MA, non-charismatic politico, another non-charisatic woman, after what we saw just two years ago, running for an office of a government that isn't even operating, announcing she's taking on the orange nazi. Stupid, stupid, STUPID DEMS!   This isn't going down with voters in any way but negative, announcing with the government shut down and nobody doing a damned thing to get it up and running again.

Know what I WANTED to see? A concrete plan to get the government up and running and funded. But no. For them as much as anyone else it's only about ME ME ME, I WANT PRESIDENT. Nothing about the country and the people who she presumably believes will vote for her.

Guess what? WE. the VOTERS. Don't. Want. You.

 Especially when your sense of strategy is so bad that you begin by shooting yourself.

i really don't care that she announced during a shutdown.  The country is likely to be in a perpetual Trump created crisis for the next two years.  Its very possible that there will not be an ideal time to announce one's candidacy and avoid being accused by someone of being tone-def.    Her timing doesn't effect my opinion of either Warren or her candidacy either way.  I frankly doubt it will carry much lasting impact on her chances.   We are so far out that any negative impact would long be mitigated, if she had a solid candidacy and a well run campaign in other aspects.  

Given that a POTUS campaign is long, requires the building of a massive machine to support it , and the gathering of equally massive financial resources, many candidates have already in all but name thrown their hat into the ring.   We are almost certainly going to see others making it official in the coming weeks.  They almost have to.  Its ridiculous.  Its poisonous.  And its an integral part of the US presidential election cycle.  While a few big names maybe able to wait and not hurt their chances and a few currently less well positioned may chose to come in late hoping to look like a fresh alternative to what will have become an all too familiar pack, most who want to run have to make their moves soon regardless of the situation.  This is not stupid democrats.  This is not being selfish.  Its reality.  

I'm not big on Warren, but I'm not really sold on any of the long list of potential candidates at the moment.  She has done some good in her public career and she's certainly qualified.  She's likely to not make it that far.   But I can understand the rational for her run.  

[Kalbear]

I think it was a stupid, tone deaf move that is less important than what it signifies about her political acumen - which is that she is probably not a good shot for anything other than moving goals and getting better ideas out there. It's not surprising - any more than her tone-deaf DNA test was. 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

10 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

The Alt Right's relationship with Neitzsche.

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer-nazism

 

The alt right may misunderstand Neitzsche, but it does seem to me they did take the epistemological stance of post modernism. And that is something that some elements of the left might want to think about.

1 hour ago, SweetPea said:

I'm really not sure if that is a fair characterization. I've yet to see an alt-right personality who doesn't reject post modernism and is critical of it. And the article overexaggerates Nietzsche's influence (or popularity), going so far as to call him their "favorite philosopher". That's just flat out wrong. I've been following several alt-right figures for quite a while now, and Nietzsche is rarely if ever brought up.

You don't support a woman for the presidency? How sexist can you be?

Just kidding. She has no chance of winning, but she will probably be great material for a ton of funny memes, I can't wait.

I'd say Jordan Peterson is their "philosopher" and he's leading the charge on these poor Nietzsche readings. Strangely, though, Nietzsche really is a post modernist. 

I'd also argue the left is very much post modernist in their approach to identity. The removal of binary lines from things like gender, for example, are not only a project started by Nietzsche (to be clear--the removal of binaries in general) but were picked up by Foucault. Jordan Peterson's biggest rant against liberals is their allegiance to "Neo-Marxist-post-modernist" professors who infect the youth. While there is no neo-Marxist-also-post-modernist out there (very different theories and epistemology in terms of what they intend to impact), I would agree that post modernism is beginning to win big in the Democratic party. I think this is a good thing. But this is precisely where we see the Democratic rift. I'll put more below.

 

2 hours ago, lokisnow said:

Indeed, and the sanders affiliated media are determined to relentlessly attack anyone they perceive as a threat to their philosophy, hence the above attack that it’s tone deaf to announce during the shutdown has already spread rapidly through the chatter-chain much like fox noise disseminates attack lines. Impressive how fast this one moved!

i’d say given the Zorral post above that the following Chait article is now equally applicable to Warren. (And the Bernie camp rage when Biden announces will inevitably be something to behold)

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/bernie-sanders-beto-orourke-feud-2020-campaign-democratic.html

 

 

I'm not sure there is a Sanders affiliated media (maybe some specific outlets are more in line with him), but even this one you post kind of gets it wrong. In some ways, I am exactly the kind of supporter they allege: I am a Marxist (not a socialist necessarily). I believe the Presidency is about the ideology of either heavily chaining down OR dismantling capitalism (as we know it). Sanders is in an argument against the monetary system that governs this country, and that, to me, is the biggest flaw in this country. 

However, when Sanders lost the primary, me and my little coven of communists (we meet at craft breweries and talk Marx) all sucked it in and said, "Hillary it is then."

We aren't some cabal of (complete) lunatics. We all saw Hillary as fundamentally better than Trump. She wasn't fighting the battle we were interested in, but she was a step closer, we figured.

A lot of the Sanders stuff seems really strange. See below:

 

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

I don't want Sanders either, and neither do most of us.  These people haven't come up with any new ideas in their lives.  They have lived on the ideas of previous generations' activists, organizers, progressives and social justice warriors.  But they haven't come up with anything to address all these matters in the terms in which we have to navigate them in this post digital, post climate catastrophe age of galloping inequality and oppression of everyone who isn't already obscenely wealthy and entrenched in the systems of the ruling class that keeps them the ruling class generation after generation, while refusing to do anything about disintegrating and dysfunction infrastructure of transportation, housing, communications, health and physical safety.

In the meantime:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tsa-officers-government-shutdown_us_5c2a47aee4b05c88b7029f3c
 

 

Which people haven't come up with new things? Do you mean Sanders? His team? Or his supporters? In terms of supporters, anyone with a Marxist philosophy has plenty of new ideas, and we see Sanders as a good step in the right direction, but he is trapped in classic Marxist belief patterns: All society's ills can and will be solved if we address issues of class inequality. Neo-Marxists as far back at the Frankfurt School began shifting that singular vision to understanding class is just a piece of societal ills, for example, race and gender are equally important.

You still have modern Marxists who focus on class (Slavoj Zizek) but he would look at Bernie as someone not willing to commit fully to the paradigm of communism--the final evolution of human society.

Sanders promotes democratic socialism, which is an interesting notion. But he also looks at issues beyond class. He is the only candidate I remember ever directly addressing the issue of police power and abuse of power in honest terms: "And thirdly, we have got to demilitarize our police departments so they don't look like occupying armies. We've got to move toward community policing, and fourthly, we have got to make our police departments look like the communities they serve in their diversity."

So depending on who "they" are in your post, I think a socialist is looking exactly at the problems you mention about the massive income inequality we're seeing in America. Many of these people are informed by the works of new views on Marxism and socialism who view America's capitalist system as no longer capitalist, but hyper-capitalist (a form of extreme capitalism that comes at the cost of traditional values, and it benefits the already wealthy). Some activists really make the argument that the system of capitalism is so corrupt, that we have to trash the whole thing (Wayne Au).

I will also add this caveat: The work of modern activists, politicians, and scholars may partly be a redux of previous thoughts and writing, but as you read their work and see what they're doing, they're really having to go over that work again to undo the misconceptions Americans have about these original ideas due in large part to the Cold War.

I love Sanders. I love the progressive socialists he's inspired such as AOC, but I am under no illusion that even if he (or she or anyone) were elected, that they could enact the necessary change to the problems you noted. The system is so entrenched in money, how long would it take for that to change? More than four years. More than eight. I mean think about the tax increases Roosevelt put in place with the New Deal. How could we ever hope to get to that again in the modern climate? You point out the post digital world we live in, and that's a scary world because people are so overloaded with info, they don't support policies in their interests. If Roosevelt had to deal with social media and the vast amount of misinformation put out there by those who opposed him...I don't know what he could have done.

In terms of existential threats, how do you overcome the issues of the social media age to deal with the "classic" societal issues of income disparity, racism, sexism, and hatred against the Other? The (post) digital age should have been a freeing time of unlimited access to information. And it is. Just not good information. 

Anyway, I write all this, and I don't mean to argue with you. I just want to clarify what I feel like the NYMag article got wrong, and in turn, what people have wrong about Sanders supporters in general. Don't forget, 90 percent of his supporters went on to vote for Clinton (where only 75 percent of hers went on to support Obama). A real divide exists in the Democratic party, but I think it's not so wide as we think. What we lost in 2016 were the independents, and on that...

5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Gads -- I open the NY Times to see -- Elizabeth Warren announced 3 minutes ago she's running for POTUS.

That's just what I don't want to see. Yet another MA, non-charismatic politico, another non-charisatic woman, after what we saw just two years ago, running for an office of a government that isn't even operating, announcing she's taking on the orange nazi. Stupid, stupid, STUPID DEMS!   This isn't going down with voters in any way but negative, announcing with the government shut down and nobody doing a damned thing to get it up and running again.

Know what I WANTED to see? A concrete plan to get the government up and running and funded. But no. For them as much as anyone else it's only about ME ME ME, I WANT PRESIDENT. Nothing about the country and the people who she presumably believes will vote for her.

Guess what? WE. the VOTERS. Don't. Want. You.

Especially when your sense of strategy is so bad that you begin by shooting yourself.

Just a minor point of contention here (as someone who wasn't a Clinton fan). I do think Warren is exciting and charismatic. She is a capitalist through and through, this is true, but she would be someone who would target those "independent" Americans that Clinton lost. Those who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. She talks a lot about income disparity.

However, my point of contention ends there. I tend to think you're right, she would not do well against Trump. His barrage of racist, sexist, and truthless claims would overwhelm her. Just the Native American issue might be enough to sink her. 

But how do you deal with that? Any candidate will face this from Trump. Hillary's emails, Warren's Native American heritage, and I (assume) Sanders' a communist. How do you get past this kind of thing?

Do you need a guy like Joe Biden who used to be Mr. Gaffe? (God, he seems so professional and statesman-like nowadays)

Clinton played the "address the nonsense very quickly and move onto more important things" but it didn't work. I remember watching her last debate with Trump and any doubts I ever had about her were completely removed. She was excellent. She was so qualified and smart and it just showed in how she carried herself.

But she lost. Emails? Jumpsuits? She seems mean? I don't know what it is. And I don't know what you do to get around Trump's barrage of insanity.

A minor edit to the last paragraph: I mean, I do know what it is that caused Clinton to lose--we all do. She's a woman. And so is Warren. Trumps stirs up so much bigotry that anyone who is not a white man would likely face a huge uphill battle. I'm all for this battle, but I just want to say that I understand why Clinton lost.

[Zorral]

By 'they' I mean all those white, middle-class. capitalists and / or politicos who have been in one high office or another just about all of their working lives, most of whom are nicely over 65.  They are not the answer to any of the crises we face, nor will any of them be an answer to taking out the orange nazi if he's running in 2020.  (As for, if it is Pence, the Dems will run against in 2020, I don't know .... except still, no answers and still has to be a white male.)

My personal opinion is the regeneration of everything from bottom to top will only come from quite relatively younger people, who may not have as much experience being politicians, but basically grew up swimming in media -- understand exactly how and why the orange nazi won because he was a TV creation and student of the most coarse and degraded national programming possible -- and tech and the knowledge that the planet is doomed from human excrescences, and have ideas about what to try.  Of course they will make errors, but at least they have the energy to try.  As much as those people over 60 think they understand this stuff -- they don't, not in the way people who grow up with it do.  And essentially orange nazi grew up with it too.  He was always crazy about his public image (even if his idea of what is cool and wonderful is ugly and mean beyond comprehension), and this is the only thing he ever studied.

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

FFS, the quote system is killing me.

Let's try again.

38 minutes ago, Simon Steele said:

Jordan Peterson's biggest rant against liberals is their allegiance to "Neo-Marxist-post-modernist" professors who infect the youth. While there is no neo-Marxist-also-post-modernist out there

Depends on how you define that term, I guess. But wouldn't Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas fall into that category (at least to some extent). At least, when you consider how loosely the American right uses the term Marxist to describe anything that questions the absolutism of the free market.

Adorno and Horkheimer probably wouldn't like that label, but Habermas is still alive, so I guess I should put that into a book of questions to ask, if I were to meet him.

[IheartIheartTesla]

As bad as people here think Warren is, cant be worse than Terry McAuliffe, who isnt much better than last night's warmed over meatloaf (in other words, bland and forgettable). I fear the latter is someone the 'experts' think have the best chance of winning because they are centrist moderate bores.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

57 minutes ago, Zorral said:

By 'they' I mean all those white, middle-class. capitalists and / or politicos who have been in one high office or another just about all of their working lives, most of whom are nicely over 65.  They are not the answer to any of the crises we face, nor will any of them be an answer to taking out the orange nazi if he's running in 2020.  (As for, if it is Pence, the Dems will run against in 2020, I don't know .... except still, no answers and still has to be a white male.)

My personal opinion is the regeneration of everything from bottom to top will only come from quite relatively younger people, who may not have as much experience being politicians, but basically grew up swimming in media -- understand exactly how and why the orange nazi won because he was a TV creation and student of the most coarse and degraded national programming possible -- and tech and the knowledge that the planet is doomed from human excrescences, and have ideas about what to try.  Of course they will make errors, but at least they have the energy to try.  As much as those people over 60 think they understand this stuff -- they don't, not in the way people who grow up with it do.  And essentially orange nazi grew up with it too.  He was always crazy about his public image (even if his idea of what is cool and wonderful is ugly and mean beyond comprehension), and this is the only thing he ever studied.

 

I see--thank you for clarifying. I've felt the same way too about many politicians. I don't know. Such a cluster at this point that things seem grim. 

I like your point about young people growing up with it, and I hope that younger generations have developed skeptical eyes toward the barrage of BS they're bombarded with. My son is 14 now, and he's always coming to me about memes and Youtube videos he sees. He seems to know something is wrong with the arguments he's seeing (anti-women/trans/and everything else). I'm glad he wants to work through it. I hope this is true of most kids.

34 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

FFS, the quote system is killing me.

Let's try again.

Depends on how you define that term, I guess. But wouldn't Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas fall into that category (at least to some extent). At least, when you consider how loosely the American right uses the term Marxist to describe anything that questions the absolutism of the free market.

Adorno and Horkheimer probably wouldn't like that label, but Habermas is still alive, so I guess I should put that into a book of questions to ask, if I were to meet him.

I have trouble with the quote system too.

The biggest distinction to make between postmodernism and neo-Marxism (which puts them directly in opposition) is that postmodernism deals with the view that no canonical truth exists--only viewpoints. Neo-Marxism may take aspects of this, but people like Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, and the rest would argue they are pressing against a false canonical "truth" but there is a truth worth pursuing that will put the world right. Postmodernists deconstruct and lack activism while neo-Marxists take accepted "truths" (I like the term ideology better) and try to show how those ideologies are harmful. The neo-Marxists would argue that we can make positive change through political action. I have a definition from a text that seems reductive but maybe helpful--that this line of thinking calls current ideology into question, and then it initiates action. Neo-Marxism can be seen as a melding of practical theory with social action. Postmodernists would (likely) say you can't uncover and evaluate ideology (or for them power). Power doesn't exist as a reality imbued with meaning that needs uncovered, but instead it is a...thing(?) that just exists and it generates reality and meaning. Everything is impacted by it (positively or negatively) from the biggest aspects of society and culture down to the fiber of an individual. Foucault argued that you can't view power as a force of repression--that is too reductive. Instead, power just produces our reality.  So all you can do is engage with the dominant arguments/discourses from within this wide reaching force of power. Ultimately, one thing will be replaced with another.

I think another way of viewing this is through structuralism and post-structuralism. Structuralists (really Saussure) argued about the signifier and the signified. This gets so complicated though because what we are talking about is how language functions--nothing more. Signifier and signified are "word" and "concept." The concept (a horse) exists with the word created for it. They are inextricably linked. While post-structuralists would say that word and concept exist very much apart from each other. With that said, postmodernists align with poststructuralists (for the most part), and here is where I am making a leap (I can't confirm this, but I bet it could be confirmed), but Marxists and neo-Marxists are structuralists. They see the world in very different ways.

A postmodernist presidential candidate, then, would not likely be the best choice because no matter what he/she did or promoted, it would be contributing to the rise of another dominant discourse. A neo-Marxist believes positive change can occur, and ultimately, any Marxist believes a Utopian society does exist.

In some ways, I might argue Trump is a postmodernist in how he constantly changes what the truth is. There is no (T)ruth. It's a discourse he's in control of. But a neo-Marxist is adamantly against this. Truths do exist, and we can push back against the ideologies of someone like Trump.

I think this is useful to remember as we roll toward another election cycle. The ideologies we allow to shape how we see the world always need to be evaluated. Twenty years ago, it was progressive to say homosexuality was not a choice--you were born one way or another. A new (non-scientific) approach says it is a choice. Binaries and social action force us to choose, but that this is constraining on freedom. It's interesting--where saying homosexuality was once a choice was considered repressive, now that idea has been wrestled with and reformatted to allow individuals more freedom (in theory). 

Obviously, I love this stuff, but I always feel like we have to be careful when people like Peterson come along with a "simple" solution for all society's ills. His lumping of Marxism and postmodernism is the kind of re-crafting of truth someone like Trump does all the time. It is uniformed, it paints the other side as the Enemy, and it is very political. 

In conclusion (  ), Slavoj Zizek does a great analysis of the 1988 John Carpenter classic They Live where he likens Rowdy Roddy Piper's sunglasses that see through the illusion aliens have created as sunglasses that allow Piper to see through ideology and observe the world in its true state. A postmodernist would scoff at the notion that such a real world exists!

[lokisnow]

2 hours ago, Simon Steele said:

 

I love Sanders. I love the progressive socialists he's inspired such as AOC, but I am under no illusion that even if he (or she or anyone) were elected, that they could enact the necessary change to the problems you noted. The system is so entrenched in money, how long would it take for that to change? More than four years. More than eight..

It takes twelve years to get to five percent change/disruption of the old with the new.

an actual clear political representation of the timeline is how long it took baby boomers to get a majority in the senate. Joe Biden was the first in 1972, by kicking out an old guard decrepit dude much as AOC did in 2018. But he was alone there for quite some time. And I am pretty sure the number of millennial senators is still zero, so change has not even reached the start line yet, and we’re now about eight years behind the pace of change the baby boomers enacted on the system.

 

[lokisnow]

In more cheerful news, the attacks on the robot scabs has finally started. _good!_

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html

[DMC]

4 hours ago, SweetPea said:

going so far as to call him their "favorite philosopher". That's just flat out wrong.

Well, when you only know one philosopher..

1 hour ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

As bad as people here think Warren is, cant be worse than Terry McAuliffe

Don't like how large the field is, but thankfully there will be a dozen other options than those two.

20 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

It takes twelve years to get to five percent change/disruption of the old with the new.

I'm incredibly intrigued where you always seem to get these numbers from.  It must be a secret think tank that ends with "ass" the way you pull them out.

[Martell Spy]

Yeah the wall is just government by trolling the libs. Trump supporters won't see any actual gain from it, even if it were remotely possible to achieve. Trump just wants it as a political victory. He may as well have promised to burn billions in cash because it would piss off the Democrats. And the fact that Trump said Mexico would pay for it is just part of the troll. 

A Shutdown Reveals the Transformation of the GOP
Republicans used to force government closures in the name of fiscal restraint. Now they’re digging in for the sake of the profligate wall.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/gop-shutdown-shows-transformation-gop/579184/

Quote

This wall-induced shutdown is the greatest insult yet. Republicans in Congress must know that Trump’s campaign pledge will do nothing to address immigrants who overstay their visas, drug trafficking, asylum seekers, or the overall question of immigration reform. Leaving aside the ugly symbolism of the United States building a massive border wall, it would require the promiscuous use of eminent domain to seize private property, trigger an environmental nightmare, and cut off vast swaths of territory from access to natural assets such as the Rio Grande. Could it be that even private-property rights have gone the way of spending cuts and fiscal restraint? If Ann Coulter wants a wall, she must get her wall.