U.S. Politics: Huff and Puff the Socialism away

[DireWolfSpirit]

On 12/3/2019 at 5:03 PM, DMC said:

To be fair to FB, big pharma has indeed not been able to capitalize on any type of acid/shrooms substitute I'm aware of.  And if they have, and you know how to get some, please PM me.

Whatever Silk Road has renamed itself as probably has some on their mail order cart.

[mormont]

3 hours ago, DMC said:

The issues with Sanders campaign largely stem from complaints about 2016, not the current campaign.  That's why he did a mea culpa. 

My point exactly: I can't imagine a scenario where Kamala Harris gets to do a mea culpa and run again. 

[sologdin]

Heroin was developed as a legal item, as was morphine, and more people are dying from fentanyl (which is also entirely legal, if controlled). Didn't stop black people from being locked up for heroin use. Cocaine was discovered as a legal item. MDMA was as well. Quaaludes and valium were all prescriiptions that were heavily abused. You might have a point...

kal--

this is coming across as somewhat needlessly confrontational. heroin has been unlawful in the united states for almost 100 years and is not now used medicinally, despite its origins.  cocaine's official medicinal use is currently minimal; MDMA's is hypothetical? 

no one is disputing the race disparities for the US, wherein structural racism is less incidental than intrinsic.  but it is a matter of disparity; i doubt you are arguing that no african americans use prescription opioids unlawfully and that no non-african americans are jailed for heroin--these would be trifling assertions. 

no dispute that substance abuse and addiction should be a matter of treatment rather than punishment. 

why focus on the corporate executives, as opposed to the owners? that's the same as objecting to banker bonuses but not to finance capital, the droplet rather than the flood.

[DMC]

28 minutes ago, mormont said:

My point exactly: I can't imagine a scenario where Kamala Harris gets to do a mea culpa and run again. 

I don't know about that specific circumstance.  Hell, Klobuchar had that staff blow-up right around when she announced and it didn't seem to affect her campaign long term.  But we're not really arguing anymore - I totally agree that there's a double standard on this type of stuff with women candidates, and that's only compounded (a quadruple standard?) if you're a minority woman.

[Mlle. Zabzie]

1 hour ago, sologdin said:

why focus on the corporate executives, as opposed to the owners? that's the same as objecting to banker bonuses but not to finance capital, the droplet rather than the flood.

Solo - think that in the case of Purdue that works really well (and the Sacklers are vile, so they make really good cartoon villains).  The problem, I think, emotionally, is that a lot of pharma is (one way or another) owned by public companies.  I think the big examples are J&J, Allergan (I think most they sold to Teva), Mallinckrodt, Endo, but that's just sort of off the top of my head.  The more than 5% shareholders of those companies tend to be people like Blackrock, Vanguard, etc. (not 100% true, but tends to be pools of capital one way or another).  And that means, fundamentally, the "owners" are us, through our 401(k)s or otherwise a VERY disparate and non-coordinated group.  And that's not a comfortable thought (if you are otherwise so included).  It is intellectually satisfying to put the blame on the 'executives' rather than on the "owners" because the 'executives' made the decisions that are behind the business practices.  The 'owners' had very little (if anything) to do with it (other than, of course, the Sacklers).

If your broader point is that the objection should be to capitalism that is (i) on-brand :), (ii) fair, and (iii) we can agree to disagree .

[Fragile Bird]

8 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Fair enough. Conversely, it's really easy to assume that someone knows all about your situation when they start talking about the situation you're in as if they know all about you, and then when they're proven wrong gets huffy about their lack of knowledge. 

 

Don’t be such an insufferable jerk, Kal.  I have never seen any news stories about opioids focus on the fact that black people weren’t prescribed opioids. The stories, on CNN for example, focus on the devastating effect of the opioid crisis. And the angle of the stories has been the fact that it all started with prescriptions and more white people had medical insurance than black people. This pre-dates the ACA after all.

Looking at the stories from the researchers on Google, I see the actual number being quoted is that 31% of white people were prescribed opioids versus 24% of black and Hispanic people, about a 30% difference but not exactly black people not being prescribed opioids.

But one of the research articles completely backs up what I said about the different perceptions of the opioid problem and the illegal drug problem. The researchers reviewed media articles about cocaine use in the 80s and found that the calls for aggressive police action against cocaine users went from 3% to 64% in the space of a couple of years. An extensive review of major news media on the issue of how opioid use was being addressed showed references to opioids had a similar increase but the media was calling for treatment of the victims, not jailing or aggressive police action. And the fact that the CDC declared there was an opioid ‘crisis’, something they have never done with regard to illegal use of other drugs. 
 

[sologdin]

 And that means, fundamentally, the "owners" are us, through our 401(k)s or otherwise a VERY disparate and non-coordinated group.

MZ--

this was my suspicion.  objectionable practices are distributed broadly, a basic problem of bourgeois democracy.  proletarians become owners of the means of production through retirement plans and other forms of compensation that are not exactly voluntary in the same way that day trading the S&P 500 might be, but follow as more or less non-negotiable incidents of employment. this is a deconstruction of the core terms of classical historical materialism, an implosion of the binary required for revolutionary theory.  the decisions may be taken by professional managers, but those managers were retained in pseudo-democratic form by the owners.  it is more evidence of arendt's banality of evil.

am otherwise appreciative of your tripartite reply to the broader objective.

[mormont]

[mod] Please lay off the personal comments, folks. We do allow a little more latitude in politics threads but argue the point, don't call people names. Thank you. [/mod]

[IheartIheartTesla]

Sexism is definitely in play for Harris losing traction and dropping out, but there is also the unfortunate primary schedule that for instance allows Mayor Pete to remain in the race past the first few states. I imagine once SC and the other heavily AA populated primary states appear on the calendar his chances will go significantly down. The way the primaries are structured provides great institutional barriers to certain candidates at the expense of others, and I give Obama credit for overcoming the handicap that Iowa provided him.

My vision would be having 4 Super Tuesdays for 4 quadrants of the country and be done with them within a month. I think having them all on one day is a bit too aggressive, and people in different states should have a chance to interact with the candidates.

By the way, by the time the primaries reach Michigan, if they are still standing I am still deciding between Warren and Sanders.

[Zorral]

9 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Conversely, it's really easy to assume that someone knows all about your situation when they start talking about the situation you're in as if they know all about you, and then when they're proven wrong gets huffy about their lack of knowledge. 

I suppose we all do that on occasion though.

~~~~~~~~

In the meantime, down in Louisiana, we hear a group of older, obviously well-heeled, white American couples on a ripsnorter vacay where what happens in Sin City stays in Sin City, discussing loudly the sheer hateful temerity of women and "blacks" still thinking they can run for President.  Look, they got their Obama, why do they think they can have another one right away, especially when everybody knows he wasn't even an American. Hillary keeps losing but women don't learn their lesson and keep running for it.

All the women at the table were as much participants as the men.  They were, of course, being served by a black woman.

 

 

[IheartIheartTesla]

By the way, of all the things to criticize Mayor Pete for, I think his time spent at McKinsey is the least important. He was probably a relatively low-level employee that didn't have too much say in what upper-upper-management was doing. At the same time, I dont think his experience there is particularly relevant to his credentials either.

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Don’t be such an insufferable jerk, Kal.  I have never seen any news stories about opioids focus on the fact that black people weren’t prescribed opioids. The stories, on CNN for example, focus on the devastating effect of the opioid crisis. And the angle of the stories has been the fact that it all started with prescriptions and more white people had medical insurance than black people. This pre-dates the ACA after all.

Looking at the stories from the researchers on Google, I see the actual number being quoted is that 31% of white people were prescribed opioids versus 24% of black and Hispanic people, about a 30% difference but not exactly black people not being prescribed opioids.

But one of the research articles completely backs up what I said about the different perceptions of the opioid problem and the illegal drug problem. The researchers reviewed media articles about cocaine use in the 80s and found that the calls for aggressive police action against cocaine users went from 3% to 64% in the space of a couple of years. An extensive review of major news media on the issue of how opioid use was being addressed showed references to opioids had a similar increase but the media was calling for treatment of the victims, not jailing or aggressive police action. And the fact that the CDC declared there was an opioid ‘crisis’, something they have never done with regard to illegal use of other drugs. 
 

The difference in racial treatment for drugs goes way back; whether it's cocaine vs crack sentencing, or black people not being prescribed opioids.  John Oliver recently did a segment about how doctors are very reluctant to prescribe opioids to blacks, black women especially are not believed when they tell their doctors that they are in pain.  One could probabaly make a convincing case that the entire war on drugs was a white supremacist enterprise, or at least a convenient example of how the poor and minorities have an entirely different criminal justice system in the US since forever.

[DMC]

I did a presentation on mandatory minimums being racist back in high school.  Must've been 2001-2.  The root of it isn't the "war on drugs" exactly, it's the "war on crime" of the 80s that coincided with Reagan completely making shit up like "welfare queens."  The media scared white people into thinking there was some huge wave of crime when there wasn't, but that was just part and parcel of a cohesive message of blaming black people and stoking racial resentment.  And that legacy continues to perpetuate via privatized prisons and all the other iniquities.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

My vision would be having 4 Super Tuesdays for 4 quadrants of the country and be done with them within a month. I think having them all on one day is a bit too aggressive, and people in different states should have a chance to interact with the candidates.

I agree with the notion that it should be condensed, but four is too small. Poorer campaigns will always struggle to gain traction in that scenario.

[IheartIheartTesla]

There is no ideal scenario, but I don't have as much sympathy for 'poor' campaigns as those hobbled by other factors. Still, anything that removes the impact of the early states would be a good first start.

Even if you have the same structure, start with states like Michigan and Nevada for crying out loud.  IA and NH are low population states that need not be courted so much. Just a waste of energy and money all round. I chose those states as a way to engage minorities, moderates, party jumpers etc right at the start.

[DMC]

If we're doing ideal scenarios, I'd just have one day all the primaries.  Try all you want, but it's not gonna be fair one way or another if you break it up.

[The Mother of The Others]

On 11/28/2019 at 6:24 PM, sologdin said:

cannot win the White House

i don't think it an ultraleft deviationism to regard this sort of failure as the electorate getting punished with fascism for a while because of its credulous ideological mix of exceptionalist imperialism and market triumphalism.

Let's fix this one blurb for ya as an example of how backwards this thread is.  The electorate got what they wanted and so were rewarded.   You're trying to punish them by turning against yur own nation and reversing the election instead of focussing on Russia dicking with us.  Fascism is being generated on college campusses (i refuse to say campi), not in the whitehouse.  Your nominees do want to kill the market, so you got that right, but this would be even worse for the nation than the current anti-American activities of your party.  Bernie or Warren, by killing the economic engine, would accomplish more for our enemies than the counterculture ever yielded them before.  It is the economy, doncha know, that props up the gov's ability to do all these wondrous "free" programs.  These decrepid candidates would kill that golden goose, so hungry are they like vampires to bring everything under governmental control by choking out all competition (The People, the businesses you so despise).   

 

Gov control works out well next to never.  Warren doesn't suggest all these nutty expansions of gov because she loves you, she does it to increaae her own control over a previously free society.   This makes the Sideous Factor of the dem candidates far greater than what you see from the Trump administration.  It"s the dems who seek to gather all power under their thumb like Palpy (palpatine).  And as a clue for you, they're as hideously aged as the sith lord.  This thing you guys are saying about trump making himself pres for life like Sideoua is only revealing how deep your delusions go.  Trump likes it when free people flourish and the economy strengthens.   He's going to leave them freer than when he took office.  That's why you lost to him, because the same can't be said of your party's creepy ambitions.  He's on the side of the people with his actions whereas you only pay lip service to the people while your dreams for America are strange and would drag the people through all kinds of new hell. 

 

Once your policies derailed the future for a few years' worth of funding....what you'd realize is the gov isn't staffed by angels.  You've noticed that trump isn't an angel.  Congratulations.  Now you're ready for the next epiphany: the entire staff of government beauracrats you'd have overseeing all the gov's new powers also wouldn't be angelic.  They'd do the crappy job large government agencies  always do.  There'd be a more frustrating world on many fronts, and we'd pay for that "progress" by handing over more and more of our freedoms so the new agencies could be free to mistreat us.

On 11/28/2019 at 1:20 AM, ThinkerX said:

 Complaints against Biden tend to either get mired in the Ukraine stuff (which Trump fans appear to be uncomfortable discussing in depth) 

Are you implying I'd be scared of pointing out that Biden stands guilty of quid pro quo in fact ?  while a two year Democrat smear campaign meant to shift Biden's crime onto Trump has failed to eatablish Trump's imaginary quid pro quo?   You're right: there was no need to go into great depth there.

On 11/29/2019 at 10:41 AM, Zorral said:

Bloomberg .....is preposterous.

they'll vote bedbug before they'll even listen to one of those.

Would Bernie then be the humbug?  Yes and no.  His purse would be wide open and empty from all his "generosity" with other people's money, so that's like the opposite of Scrooge.  But look at his demeanor!!!!    He's the humbug made flesh!    100%

On 11/30/2019 at 4:50 PM, DMC said:

 

Just saw this article on NH voters being sick of Tom Steyer's face. 

 

Steyer is so clearly butthurt about some past run in with Trump!   His ads say he wants to show he's the success in business and trump the failure.  But nobody buys a quintillion dollars worth of TV time just to point that out.  Unless.... some personal history of defeat haunts Steyer.   He must have gotten screwed at some point when his interests took him into Trump Country, NYC?  Something.  Also, he doomed himself instantly with dems by admitting he likes business.   Seeing bisiness fail, and thus the nation, is the dem wetdream.   Ask Sologdin!  He knows.

On 11/30/2019 at 5:35 PM, Kalbear said:

 

And there is no 'other side' to jump to. What, Republicans are going to become Democrats all of a sudden? 

That's the evil of the two party system.  When your party went insane a couple years ago, for instance, there was no way for you to jump ship.  You"re trapped into going along for the ride.   We'd all probably do well to retreat from identity politics.

On 12/1/2019 at 2:30 PM, SkynJay said:

The problem is, as I see it, that the new conservatives replacing the dying boomers are even more extreme. Growing up idolizing alt-right idols

Everybody with a voice is more extreme.  Again, this is the problem.   The sane are moving out of california and out of politics.  And remember the alt right only exists in your own shop talk.  It's you dismissively mislabeling the other party.  (Like I have throughout this post.  If you feel like my labelings have been inaccurate, yet you trust to your own.....)

On 12/1/2019 at 2:47 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

My fear theory of politics, which explains why conservatism increases with age (fearfulness increases with feelings of vulnerability, and feelings of vulnerability increase with age), means old people never die out, they just get replaced by a new batch of old people.

 The right even trains people to fear the govt 

 I liked the first part.  Thoughtful.  We're really one and the parties are tricking us into thinking like we"re two different species when really it's an adventurous youth vs. aged wisdom thing, like a bodily process.

As for the second part, I've already explained why it"s proper to fear the government as it grows ever larger and more intrusive.  The gov isn't Jesus, you guys.  Stop religioning it.   

 

[The Anti-Targ]

5 minutes ago, The Mother of The Others said:

 

 I liked the first part.  Thoughtful.  We're really one and the parties are tricking us into thinking like we"re two different species when really it's an adventurous youth vs. aged wisdom thing, like a bodily process.

As for the second part, I've already explained why it"s proper to fear the government as it grows ever larger and more intrusive.  The gov isn't Jesus, you guys.  Stop religioning it.   

 

There are two problems with this, that leads to erroneous conclusions 1) fearfulness should not be equated with wisdom. I'd argue that fearfulness is more a sign of a lack of wisdom. Wisdom is a higher brain function, fear is a lizard brain function. Wisdom should allow you to overcome fear. Which leads into 2) fear of govt is not the right response. People should be cautious, critical and wary of govt and hold it to account, but they should not fear it. Fear leads to irrational responses on political issues. Fear has no place in collective decision-making about the macro aspects of our civilization. 

[Zorral]

I stumbled upon this 2007 NY Times review of Norman Mailer's final novel, The Castle in the Forest, which imagines how the baby born Adolph grows up to become Hitler.

However, this review covers all of his previous career -- recall the depth and length NY Times Sunday Book Reviews could have, when there was such a thing as the NYT Sunday Book Review. No matter how gender bonkers Mailer may have been, I always thought him one of the most brilliant writers we have produced, and certainly of the kind we no longer can produce -- the sheer energy and willingness to charge into the darkest of what makes up the psyche of the average man (yes, man, not people, because he doesn't understand -- respect -- women as having minds at all -- so like someone else who is currently all the news all the time) has disappeared into style (though Mailer's style was extraordinary and evolutionary) and, by now, stylized into a mannered formula. He has predicted in his own writing, even as far back as the 1950's, where we have arrived today -- including the aspiration to be a mass murderer on the public stage. He's been a far more accurate political and cultural reader than any political pro, whether journalist, columnist, pollster reader, whatever.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/books/review/Siegel.t.html?

Quote

 

....This capacity to draw out new meaning from personalities and events may explain why Mailer is the only major American novelist to be really canny about politics. The subject worked Bellow up into sulfurous apocalyptics; it turns Updike coy and indifferent; it transforms savage, uncontainable Roth into a good old-fashioned Upper West Side liberal. But Mailer’s wild empathy endows his vintage political writing with a wild, visceral prescience.

He understands, for example, that consummate insiders are often temperamental outsiders — outlaws in the good or bad sense of the word. Here he is on John Erlichmann’s testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee in July 1973, in which an outsider’s character and dignity suddenly upended the insider’s sordid malfeasance: “He acted as if he were proud to be on the side he was on; his pride was what could not be suffered. For it spoke of a world whose real complexity could savage a liberal brain. Liberals could certainly live with the hot idea that they were fighting Mephisto’s own Nixon, but they couldn’t support the Kierkegaardian complexity that the good guys might be right next to the bad guys on the same team.” A lesser writer would treat the insider/outsider paradox as merely a lesson in hypocrisy. For Mailer it is further proof that the world “is always different in one manner or another from the way we have seen it on the day before.” His grasp of power’s myriad facets gives some of his political predictions a visionary accuracy.

Almost 40 years ago, in “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer characterized himself as a “left conservative,” thus envisioning a syncretic position that is now the holy grail of the best ideological aspiration. At the 1968 Republican convention, gazing at the legions of conservatives around him, Mailer realized that their faith “existed in those crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some.” He was the first serious liberal to take conservatives seriously — that is to say, novelistically. At his best (his post-9/11 politics have taken a turn into a kind of forced occultism), he writes about America as though he were an expatriate living in a Beautiful Idea of America, from which exile he notates the shadowy degrees between ideal and real.

No political foresight of Mailer’s can surpass the prediction he made in 1962, at the height of the cold war, in a debate with William F. Buckley Jr.: “So let the true war begin. It is not a war between West and East, between capitalism and Communism, or democracy and totalitarianism; it is rather the deep war which has gone on for six centuries in the nature of Western man, it is the war between the conservative and the rebel, between authority and instinct.” It was, he went on, “the war we can expect if the cold war will end. It is the war that will take life and power from the center and give it over to left and to right, it is the war that will teach us our meaning.” And he said this before the cultural conflagrations ignited by the ’60s, which burn deeper and wider now....

 

Down to The Castle in the Forest, Mailer's novel of the Hitler family, the German people and the Devil:

Quote

 

Mailer the wild empathizer, the maestro of the human ego, is keen and blunt about these delusions — what, in effect, are the deceptively homey psychological origins of evil. At one point the devil says: “We are keyed to look for excess of every kind,” and “every exaggeration of honest sentiment is there to serve our aims.” Elsewhere he notes: “People had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings. They could be working for Satan.” And also: “Rare was the man or woman who did not possess an intense sense of the injustice done to them each day. It was our taproot to every adult. It was a fury in every child.” The “ability to wall up the most unpalatable facts about oneself will always elicit my unwilling admiration.” ....

 

Does this not sound like so many of the Names Currently Always in the Media:

Quote

....Mailer has contempt for this devil, surpassed only by his loathing for young Adolf. Yet Mailer is also in awe of the devil’s multifarious nature. Dieter coquettishly insinuates that he wishes to betray Satan and go over to the side of the “Dummkopf,” a name Satan insists his legions call God so as to conjure a derisive image of a being who has a great, magnetic claim on their respect. (Mailer would be a fearsome adversary in the arena of office politics.) It is Dieter’s very complexity — “real complexity could savage a liberal brain” — that inflames Mailer and which he thus conscientiously evokes. Dieter says, “Yet is it not also true that one cannot find a devil who will not work both sides of the street?”....

 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

22 hours ago, DMC said:

Plus Jonathan Turley embarrassed himself.

I meant to loop back to this. Are you taking about a specific exchange or his entire performance? I missed large chunks of the hearings dipping in and out of meetings.