Where's Eugene Debs? Or Big Bill Haywood? Or any of the big-government-loving Federalists? Sheesh, these people have no sense of history.
Though, credit where credit is due: Saul Alinsky is an inspired choice. That said, Woodrow Wilson? Really?
Worse than Manson, Gacy, Berkowitz, and Bundy combined, yes.
I mean, you can't argue with science, Ari.
Gacy was good on taxes, apo. Berkowitz was a friend of Israel. And Manson was actually something of a libertarian, so he gets points for that. I'm not sure about Bundy's virtues. Maybe he killed a liberal or two.
Truly Carter, Roosevelt, and Barry O. ought to have been strangled in their cribs.
Interesting. The only people on that list that I'd ever heard of are Professor Bainbridge and Vox Day. Things have changed. Remember when it seemed like everyone with a political blog was a right wing nutjob, the Instapundit ruled the world, and Atrios was like a lone beacon of sanity? Bad times.
5: Uppity bitches who thought women belonged in college. Duh.
PFC Bradley Manning (the alleged WikiLeaks leaker of late) didn't make the list? My conservative acquaintance on FB has said some very unpleasant things about that guy and what should happen to him.
Maybe he killed a liberal or two.
Lots of college students, so undoubtedly.
I loved this, Also, it's worth keeping in mind that this is a fairly conservative group of barking mad assholes bloggers and their selections reflected that.
Margaret Sanger was robbed.
I think Abraham Lincoln was well and truly robbed. I particularly liked how John Wilkes Booth becomes a leftwing figure. Because the Confederates were such liberals.
Jimmy Carter is the worst person of all American times?
max
['There's some sad ignorance on display there.']
I am curious what they find so heinous about Jimmy Carter. I thought the big rap on him was that he was ineffectual, which you'd think would leave him trailing FDR and LBJ by wide margins. Is it the house-building or disease eradication or peace-brokering that he's worked on since leaving office?
Also, he was mean to George W. Bush in public. So crass.
And yeah, he's trying to lift up the downtrodden. What a dick.
5 - Student nurses are likely to turn into future union members.
the Instapundit ruled the world
Give the guy a break. You don't know how tough it is to spend all day resisting the Statist Leviathan from a tenured position at a public university.
FDR and LBJ were warriors, and therefore their totalitarian social programs can be forgiven somewhat.Lincoln was a warrior and a Republican, so the whole freeing-the-slaves thing can be entirely forgiven.
What did Jimmy ever do to make up for Israel-Egypt? Nothing. Not even a war with Iran, which was practically a gimme. Hence, history's greatest monster.
Ted Bundy was a Republican (he was a tracker for the Republican in the gubernatorial race at one point and worked for the state party) but he was a Rockefeller Republican, so he may be worth maybe 2.7 demicarters on the evil scale.
I am curious what they find so heinous about Jimmy Carter.
Well, he installed solar panels on the White House and he told everyone to turn the heat down and put on a sweater. That's evil, man, pure evil!
FDR and LBJ were warriors, and therefore their totalitarian social programs can be forgiven somewhat.Lincoln was a warrior and a Republican, so the whole freeing-the-slaves thing can be entirely forgiven.
What did Jimmy ever do to make up for Israel-Egypt? Nothing. Not even a war with Iran, which was practically a gimme. Hence, history's greatest monster.
I see where they are coming from. Michael Moore has done far worst things to America than, say, Jefferson Davis.
25: I know, right? Benedict Arnold makes the list, but, really, his treason was chump change comparatively.
I'm trying to think of who I would rank as the 25th worst person in American history. Maybe Spiro Agnew?
(Am I the only person who invariably pictures Peter Brady when they think of Benedict Arnold?)
7:Moe Lane, IIRC, was the founder of Obsidian Wings. I can only hope I played a small part in driving him over the edge with my suggestion that Republicans use naked Arabs on leashes as party favors for their 2004 Convention.
Yeah, no Debs, Gompers, Perkins, Douglas...just another in the endless useless series of Stupid Republican Tricks.
Conservatives all think it would have made sense to consign sixty American Embassy workers to death so that America would have been justified in bombing the everliving fuck out of Iran for having had the nerve to take hostages. They believe that had Carter just behaved like some lunatic Stallone character, everything slightly unpleasant from the last thirty years would have been averted.
Hey, if anyone is bored with trolley problems in philosophy class, I'm sure that an Iran Hostage Crisis problem or two would liven up discussions.
Moe Lane, IIRC, was the founder of Obsidian Wings.
You RC.
That is a truly remarkable list.
The first comment in that thread:
This kind of 'conservatism' is a social disease.
I point this out only because I saw a bumper sticker on a car (truck) recently: "Liberalism is a mental disorder."
Strong words! It's the first time in a long time I thought of, I don't know, racing past the driver to give him the finger (useless, foolish) ... or running up to him while stopped at a red light, pounding on his window, and asking excitedly: "Where did you get that? I want to get one that says "[blank]"!" But what would it say? "Conservatism is a mental disorder" is pretty lame, and doesn't even particularly make sense.
running up to him while stopped at a red light, pounding on his window
And shouting "Sir! Sir! Someone put a really stupid sticker on your bumper! I just thought you should know."
(Speaking of stupid stickers, lately I've been hating the ones that say "Drum machines have no soul." I see them on expensively swipple cars, usually, and when I do I'm certain that the person who affixed it a) has no soul and b) that I have nothing in common with them.)
Every day, in every way, I think worse of the sort of person who makes enemies lists. It's like Richard Nixon is the Charles Atlas of 98 lb. right-wing weaklings.
How many centicarters are in the Carter Center?
33: This kind of 'conservatism' is a social disease.
"This kind of conservatism can be cured with penicillin."
max
['It's the tertiary form!']
How many centicarters would Carter have sent to the Carter Center, if Carter had sent centicarters?
39: Sorry, I don't listen to hiphop.
I don't know why you're on about this 7, apo. Whoever trained you failed to explain that when in doubt, the answer is 1. For god's sake. Sometimes it's 2. One or the other, though.
Apo does not seem to be in doubt. He gives every impression of utmost certainty.
I'm trying to think of who I would rank as the 25th worst person in American history. Maybe Spiro Agnew?
I'm torn between Cotton Mather and Christian Laettner.
Does "the Rosenbergs" include Willow? 'Cause you'd think a lesbian witch might be able to slip past FDR into the number 3 spot.
What do you have against Cotton Mather? I mean, yeah, the witch trials are bad but they would have happened without him, AND he's responsible for getting a whole bunch of people inoculated against smallpox.
So I'm not surprised that no one involved in slavery or the genocide of the Native Americans is on their list, but I'm wondering who would be on a more objective list as representatives of these crimes. Jefferson Davis and George Custer?
Historians, help me out.
Someone should start a "Cotton Mather created autism!" meme and see how long it takes it to hit TV news or a major talk show.
47: Jefferson or Jackson for the former, I suppose, though the Indian wars had been ongoing since the early colonial period, so blaming any one person is probably unfair. Still, let's say Jackson -- for the sake of convenience, and because he was a bloodthirsty piece of shit.
Slavery is even more complicated, but I'm happy to blame that one on Calhoun or Taney or even Jefferson, if you'd like. Whatever, they're all fuckers*.
* Historians term of art.
17: For both, Andrew Jackson fits the bill nicely, in my opinion. (But mostly for Native Americans.) I'll have to bring this up as a topic of dinner conversation tonight with my fellow nerds.
I meant 47, and I am pwned, but at least not in a horribly embarrassing fashion. (Jackson isn't responsible for any major pieces of legislation, etc re: slavery but he fits as your not-so-average average slaveholder and he seems to have bought and sold quite few.)
What do you have against Cotton Mather?
It's #25. He only has to be as bad as Saul Alinsky.
But yeah, I guess that's a decent tiebreaker. How many people has that sorry bastard Laettner gotten inoculated?
I'm puzzled by the thought process that led Timothy McVeigh and Richard Nixon to be included on that list.
55: Maybe they thought it would keep them from appearing biased. Besides, Nixon pushed some kind of commie pinko healthcare plan.
I'm sad Jane Fonda is so far down. poor Jane-- lost radical street creds w/the exercise videos I suppose.
Ari, (): Interesting. I remember suggesting Jackson years ago discussions of the "worst president in history," and being told that Buchanan probably had him beat. I'm not sure if that was here, though. Also, "worst president" leads you to thinking about incompetence more than evil.
The right-wingers I know who don't like Nixon talk about the EITC, not the EPA. And that's a very small number of people.
I'm really kind of bemused. Why would those two guys' names in particular come to mind, independently, of a half-dozen or more of the poll respondents?
Just a truly pathetic display. Michael Moore? Chomsky? A number of the people on this list never actually made a difference. That the Rosenburgs aren't the consensus number one is also amazing.
Nixon losing to Kennedy has to be the reason he'd make their lists...
Yeah, it's just regionalism, but my 25th worst would have to be Scott Norwood. Maybe even 22.
The Earned Income Tax Credit? Really?
Hey, this is an interesting follow-up to my question before about what happens if someone sues the state over a law that the state doesn't want to defend.
Doug Mataconis, via Lawyers Guns and Money:
If neither Brown nor Schwarzenegger chooses to appeal the case, and no law requires that they do as far as I know, then an appeal by the people who helped put Prop 8 on the ballot and get it passed isn't an appeal by the state and that by itself could be sufficient grounds to dismiss the appeal on the grounds that it was not brought by a party with proper standing.
I totally would have assumed there was some law that said they had to appeal. Not that I've spent more than ninety seconds of my life thinking about this.
6: Yes, really. Again, it's an awfully small number of people, though. I haven't heard many conservatives express opinions on Richard Nixon, and of those, I haven't heard many negative ones.
"The consensus" s/b "their consensus" in my above. I haven't figured who I'd put as number one. Probably Andrew Johnson.
I'm puzzled by the thought process that led Timothy McVeigh and Richard Nixon to be included on that list.
I'm a little puzzled too. The website doesn't give the exact form of the question asked.
To be rather cynical, in light of the bloggers responding, and the rest of worst-25 list:
Nixon: disgraced the office, leading to equal skepticism about Republican as well as Democratic leadership? (This really doesn't work.)
McVeigh: introduced the concept of domestic terrorism? Thereby mucking up the idea that the bad guys are over there.
Also, Harry Reid? What's his special malevolence that puts him so far ahead of Tom Daschle, George Mitchell, or Robert Byrd?
Candidate for history's greatest fashion monster: the guy in a blue sequined t-shirt I overheard on the NJ Transit today rambling about how men in New York don't know how to dress, unlike the more enlightened NJ residents like him.
McVeigh: introduced the concept of domestic terrorism?
Probably holds the record high body count for an American killing Americans in the modern era.
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What is the term in economics for the kind of perverse incentive that is created when one party makes a buying decision and another party actually has to pay the bill?
I'm thinking specifically of textbook prices, but more typical examples come from medicine and brokerage houses.
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I'm a little bummed Durbin didn't make the list. He got the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity reduced! He compared GWB to Hitler! He is a prominent Illinos politician who has not been indicted for anything!
71: Yeah, so he might deserve to be on the list in some fashion or other, given that it's a list of American monsters. I find it really difficult to think in US-centric terms in this way.
That Barack Obama gets twice as many votes as McVeigh is remarkable.
I can only assume that these blogger-responders are unserious people. The thought that they really mean it is, of course, frightening. But I'm not saying anything new here.
69: They have short memories. Een though I like politicalfootball's theory in 24, I wonder if this doesn't explain Carter's prominence.
OT, but Rory built a bridge at camp, from cardboard and string, which supported 1200 pounds. Proud mama...
77: Damn, send that girl to MIT.
Also, Harry Reid? What's his special malevolence that puts him so far ahead of Tom Daschle, George Mitchell, or Robert Byrd?
None of those guys tried to spread the Pelosi Agenda.
71: interesting factoid.
What if we count people responsible for death sentences?
72: Agency problems? I have a feeling there's an exact phrase I'm bobbling, but the word you want is agency.
78: That's actually her current plan...
I think it's "Principal-agent problem". The agent is the person who makes decisions on the principal's behalf.
So is Woodrow Wilson on the list for income tax?
The right-wingers I know who don't like Nixon talk about the EITC, not the EPA. And that's a very small number of people.
Are you sure it wasn't his guaranteed income plan, not the EITC? Or wage and price controls, peace with Communist China, or national health care? He didn't really start the modern EITC.
There's no obvious actual worst American; I'd imagine obscure slave traders would dominate the top ten. Curtis Le May's probably in there somewhere.
Barack Obama is second, and he's not even American.
Also, where is Bill Ayers? Obama is his puppet anyway.
69: They have short memories. Een though I like politicalfootball's theory in 24, I wonder if this doesn't explain Carter's prominence.
Speaking of short memories. I don't know why that just got resubmitted.
With his endorsement of the right of the Cordoba House folks to build their center in Lower Manhattan, I suspect Obama would take out Carter in a re-vote. The WaPo has a pretty craptacular article up on it--headline is "At Ramadan dinner, Obama defends plans for Ground Zero mosque". Sure, since screeching bigots have labeled it the "Ground Zero mosque", I guess who are the Washington Post to refer to it as anything else.
Yeah, I dunno, any mainstream list that fails to account for Pierce and Buchanan as awfully bad Americans is sorely lacking. Here's my personal green anarcho-feminist queer list of worst AmeriKKKans, in no particular order, since lists are bourgeois:
1. Roy Cohn
2. Elia Kazan
3. Clement Vallandigham
4. John Wayne
5. Phyllis Schlafly
6. Henry Clay Frick
7. Jorge Mas Canosa
8. David Horowitz
9. Ronald Reagan
10. William Randolph Hearst
11. Webster Thayer
12. Bull Connor
13. Tom Metzger
14. Abraham Foxman
15. Billy Graham
16. Joseph Smith
17. Amy Semple McPherson
18. Jefferson Davis
19. Jim Jones
20. William Bradford
21. Stephen Foster
22. Thomas Edison
23. Walt Disney
24. Mary Baker Eddy
25. Every single goddamn last one of the rest of us. I mean, really, has any country in the history of the planet pursued banal mendacity and grotesque avarice with more verve and vigor than us? It's disgusting, and despicable, and we're recreating capitalism every day. I just want to BURN, like some fabulous yellow roman candle. Not enough darkness, not enough night. Blood! Fire!
With his love of monsters, I bet PGD just loooves Jimmy Carter.
Blood! Fire!
Isn't that the Salvation Army's motto?
17. Amy Semple McPherson
Technically Canadian.
... but you testify name names one time before HUAC...
90: The Times at least has a more reasonable article on it.
90/96: One of the bigoted dummies* with whom I went to high school has gone absolutely batshit about this. Obama is a SEEKRIT MOOSLIM (he already thought this), who is trying to introduce sharia and practicing -- I don't even remember the word, some arabic word that is supposedly some mooslim principle by which they are allowed to trick and lie to us non mooslims in order to conquer us all. The wingnut websites are filled with this word now (I googled it). Gross.
*I should just go ahead an upgrade him to flat-out racist. He really fucking hates all muslims, but in truth it's just all Arabs that he'd like to see in a camp. This was made plain by his hysterical glee about that serial killer in Michigan. The man may be an Israeli citizen and Greek Orthodox, but my god what can one expect of a Palestinian?!
97.1: Dhimmi, or Dhimmitude. They've been all about that for a while now.
98: No no. That is we non-muslims who capitulate to their perfidy. Sigh, I will go look at his page -- taqiyya.
Huh! A new one. That's exciting.
92: He's no Josef Stalin, but he's still pretty cool.
That certainly doesn't seem to mean what he thinks it means.
102: Yeah. Google it -- all the calumny is terrifying.
Like many Islamic practices, taqiyya was formed within the context of the culture of Arab tribalism, expansionary warfare, Bedouin raiding and inter-tribal conflict. Taqiyya has been used by Muslims since the 7th century to confuse, confound and divide 'the enemy'.
A favoured tactic was 'deceptive triangulation'; used to persuade the enemy that preparations for a raid were not aimed at them but at another tribe altogether. The fate in store for the deceived enemy target was an unexpected plunderous raid, enslavement of the women and death to the post-pubescent males.
90- Al Jazeera is calling it the Ground Zero Mosque too! In scare quotes though. Still. Weird.
104: The fate in store for the deceived enemy target was an unexpected plunderous raid, enslavement of the women and death to the post-pubescent males.
How dare they go Old Testament on their foes 1500 years too late. What loosers!
105: Fucking headline writers! How do they work?
What's their down on Wilson about? (consults Wikipedia) Ah, he was a Democrat. I didn't actually know that.
I mean, really, has any country in the history of the planet pursued banal mendacity and grotesque avarice with more verve and vigor than us?
Thatcher's England? Present-day China? Trebizond? Putin's Russia?
you sure it wasn't his guaranteed income plan, not the EITC? ...He didn't really start the modern EITC.
Yes, of course you're right. But the "[X] percent of people don't even pay any taxes!!11!!" refashioning of reality is IME reasonably common among rightwingers, and they seem to fixate on the EITC as the modern mechanism by which that is achieved. I suspect they just conflate it all.
But I really don't know -- I was just casting about for reasons that Nixon might have shown up on this list. I'm not especially married to my theory.
I would think your China notion was more plausible if I knew how old the respondents were. It'd hard to believe that's a live issue for the under-40 set, but maybe it is.
I come over here expecting the Carter-Simpsons connection to have been made ten times over, but I must learn to live with disappointment. Even conservative wankers like when pop culture validates them (see also "cheese eating surrender monkeys").
Yeah, I suspect Wilson is League Nations as slippery slope to UN/One World Government.
I mean, really, has any country in the history of the planet pursued banal mendacity and grotesque avarice with more verve and vigor than us?
I was just thinking that in its current incarnation, the American Empire is quite benign by world historical standards. Compare us to the Roman, Mongol, or Spanish Empires, for instance.
Of course, things go downhill quickly once you look at the 19th century and earlier. Then we are pretty much on a par with the Spanish conquistadors.
In the end, though, the logic of empire is pretty much always the same, and leads to roughly the same behavior.
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I have really been enjoying ttaM's Dysthymia mix. That is all.
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Pace 2, Alinsky is not an inspired choice -- it's just something in the water because of Glenn Beck's blackboard arrows to Obama. At best, a stopped-clock inspired choice. If they had any sense of history they would have picked Walter Reuther.
The Athenian Empire, the Egyptian Empire.
Also, any army that ever paid its soldiers by giving them the enslaved women of the conquered people.
Carter is on the list for Blaming America First.
3. Clement Vallandigham
Why Vallandigham? I know a fair bit about his life but I'm wondering what it is that provokes 'greatest monster' for you. (He does have one of the best deaths ever.)
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Myths of Class ...Lenin's Tomb
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Also, any army that ever paid its soldiers by giving them the enslaved women of the conquered people.
That doesn't narrow it down very much.
125: Man, after all that work of slaughtering everyone, you still get stuck with the job of head boiling and skull stacking.
125: That's what one takes slaves for, old boy.
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For nine fucking months I slowly and carefully walk the female dog around the neighborhood to build up the muscles in her repaired leg so that she does not blow out the opposite side tendons. For the last three months the roommate has taken her once a week to the park, 5 min 5 miles away
Today, without telling me, she takes the dogs 100 miles round trip with two other dogs in the back bench seat to go swimming in a pool with 100 other dogs and no ramps. She forced her to jump off the edge and scramble back up. While there, "just couldn't stop him" the female was topped twice by a Newfoundland.
Surgery coming. After the second leg...I don't know.
But golly isn't it all about having fun with her friends? The way women display and treat their "toys" is another reason I have never had kids.
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Shit, hope the dog's ok ... Sounds highly frustrating - I hate feeling like I'm the only one who is putting any thought into *whatever*.
I appreciate that you're just ranting really, but erm - that last sentence is kind of insulting.
129:Good
It's the social. Social is trouble and risk, and distracts and helps makes irresponsible. Foolishness in groups and crowds.
Adult (30+) women are more social, as a rule.
I knew this was coming.
It's just heartbreaking.
The little female knows she has bad wheels, is shaky and scared in crowds, and usually hangs pretty close. It is a very smart dog, careful on curbs, moving behind me when other dogs are near.
So I know the dog wasn't like a 100 feet away. I can see that 150 pound Newfi come running up, doggess looking for help and protection, and fucking BITCH is joking with her friends and just doesn't notice until it is too late.
God, Bob, everybody isn't a hermit like you.
120 - Boy, does he! Wow, that's fantastic. (Wikipedia's summary is nicely deadpan.)
132: Yeah, great story. And he's apparently buried in a cemetery where a dozen or so of my relatives are also buried.
Thanks for making that explicit, neb.
Hey bob, is "the roommate" the same as "the lady" or do you live with two women?
136:I only live with one. Roommate, partner, whatever.
1) She came home, took a nap, now the vet's closed down for the weekend and we are short on pain pills.
2) This was a vacation week from a very high stress pressure job. Next week will be hell anyway, but taking off for surgery will not go well.
3)I of course blame myself for not watching her more closely, but the "the dogs' purpose is to provide entertainment and excuse for social activity" has been a hard argument since the injury. She loves her car, she loves her friends, she loves to go places.
But I want to talk about women. Grant that it is a little essentialist, and of course I don't mean all, but I still think the Patriarchy has instilled a "pressure to socialize" in women will be one of the last identity markers they recognize as problematic. I will grant that men are also indoctrinated that gathering and cuddling are what being human is about, but with (nomad, cowboy, etc) greater permission to rebel. "Romantic wandering woman" is not a common theme in literature or art.
This "pressure to socialize," which takes more forms than mere physical presence for instance conversation and communication, social mores, etc is of course the primary source of many other sexist pressures, like body image.
Which gender initiates and organizes meetups? Shall I check the archives? Y'all know better than invite me to Austin, even though I have a house there that needs visitin'. My dogs need me and I don't need you.
bob, my sympathies about the dog's new injury.
One thing I miss in this so open and intimate blog, because I know it's there, is the discussion of the vicious rageful things-irretrievably-said fights that I know happen in all couples and relationships, and are gotten past. Or not.
I'm actually happy to say that women are on average more socially oriented than men and even that this difference is evolutionarily entrenched.* Here are my reasons, in order of their felt weight to me, not their actual logical force, which is very low in all cases.
1) Molly is so much more social than I am. I would have no rl friends without her.
2) Most of our evolutionary cousins form troops that diverge and come together at different times during the year, and males are more likely to spent time wandering around alone.
3) Women in species like ours have more investment in the well being of the offspring, and human society mostly exists to nurture our offspring through their extended period of dependence.
*I'd say genetic, but my understanding of evolutionary biology right now is that there are all sorts of mechanisms of inheritance that are clearly not simply cultural but fall outside the genes --> proteins --> you pathway.
I still think the Patriarchy has instilled a "pressure to socialize" in women will be one of the last identity markers they recognize as problematic.
Do tell me more! Please teach me about the Patriarchy, oh male one!
141:Back on the veldt...
138:Psst: "house in Austin?"
Rich rich rich great retirement investment (with other investors), half-a-million 350k 175k rental unit that provides us a steady income no end to net expenses, hassles, and worries.
142:Long time no see, Blume. Home Saturday night? It's ok.
Somebody (else) fight with me so I can keep a roof over my head.
I have a counter-anecdote to your analysis in terms of gender.
A good friend of mine, Marc, was once, a decade or more ago, roommates with another (male) friend of mine -- they'd met through me, I think -- and they lived in a large warehouse space with 30-foot-high ceilings. The space had originally been Marc's, and he'd been slowly renovating it; kind of an artists' warehouse thing.
At some point Marc, who had two beloved cats, realized that the paint flaking off the ceiling onto the floor was laden with lead. So he dragged a ladder all around and pinned up plastic sheeting over the ceiling, until the paint could be dealt with. He very seriously did not like the idea of his cats walking or rolling around on the paint flakes and then licking themselves clean.
One evening his roommate was having a party -- Marc himself was out late doing something else -- and the roommate decided that the plastic sheeting over the ceiling was unsightly. So he dragged the ladder around and ripped it down. This of course dumped paint flakes all over the floor.
Party commences. Marc comes home, sees this, confronts the roommate, and after a few words, including the roommate saying something more or less like "Oh, fuck the damn cats," punches the roommate in the face.
There was a big to-do in ensuing weeks. People were talking to Marc about anger management, berating the roommate for shitheadedness, etc. They broke up shortly thereafter; that is, they weren't a couple, but the roommate was forced to move out.
Anyway, bob -- I think this kind of thing is more a function of a person just not being a cat person (or a dog person), having different priorities, and failing to respect the other, non-human beings in the house. Little to do with gender.
It's barely after 8, darling. Young people go out after the oldsters are in bed.
Man is it ever gonna be an awesome show tonight, too. We might not make it to the all-night bike ride.
Dude, it's an all night *architecture tour* bike ride. (We wouldn't want bob to think we're not cultured!)
Architectural detail is surely not shown to its best advantage at night, oder?
I suppose that depends on the architecture.
Aw crap. NMMT Esteban Jordan. RIP El Parche.
Please teach me about the Patriarchy, oh male one!
You get a pretty sweet lapel pin.
I don't even remember the word, some arabic word that is supposedly some mooslim principle by which they are allowed to trick and lie to us non mooslims in order to conquer us all
verily, there is no new thing under the sun. This was/is a staple of anti-Semitic writing. In general, the anti-Moslem stuff is chock full of old-school anti-Semitic themes.
148:Not feeling the bad-in-age. Nor really the origins of NATO, although it is a good read. Have I mentioned my views on Judt's self-rehabilation in his last decade? Brilliantly done.
Do tell me more! Please teach me about the Patriarchy, oh male one!
Ok. You asked for it, for an incoherent and incomprehensible meaning of "it" (and what else would you expect?)
First, here is David Sirota on why Obama will not get a meaningful primary challenge in 2012. (Sirota worked very hard in Colorado against Obama's corporate PoS and is broken-hearted)
it's clear that kind of Left is not built like successful social movements of the past - and it doesn't yet seem to have the structure, independence or stomach for oppositional politics that could fuel a genuinely credible presidential primary like those we've seen in past eras....and why not?
What is the meaning of an internalized passionate anti-Leninism? What does it mean for a Leftist to say "we need about 100 million passionate committed radicals before we" change the Senate, get single-payer, raise taxes to where they need to be, protect choice? It means defeatism and the loss of agency. This corporate model protects corporatism.
And yes, maybe I should study more anarchism, (read some Graeber last week) but it is so modest and local that I can't help seeing underpants gnomes
1) Line-dancing!
2) ???
3) Utopia!
What has this to do with the Patriarchy and socialization? Ahh....
What is the Patriarchy for? To make white working men feel good? Partly, but isolating is also what feminism is for. There ain't no liberation happening here, just a battle for the spoils of hegemony. Mostly it is for the accumulation of Capital at the top.
from link in 121 Hell
Eastenders' depiction of socially conservative "Muslim thugs" beating up a gay character named Christian (yeah) is a recent, poor example of a storyline that trades on a progressive angle for reactionary ends. This is not unrelated to the invisibility of class. If there is no social background that structures various forms of oppression, they can merely be treated as unfortunate prejudices or cultural atavisms. This is, of course, excellent material for spurious controversy.
It is this treatment of class, in its myriad variations and elaborations, that produces the cultural, lifestyle-based ideas of social class that underpin the output of polling companies. It is this which leads to discussions of class based on the 'white collar' vs 'blue collar' dichotomy, in which a white collar profession is assumed to be 'middle class', no matter the situation of the worker with respect to the means of production. It is this which leads to constructions such as the 'underclass', the 'deserving poor' and the 'respectable poor'. It is this deliberately cultural conception of class, forged in the state bureaucracy, that leads to a curiously racialised, ethnicised discussion of class - as in 'chavs', the 'white working class', and so on. And it is this conception of class as a ladder of status and esteem that ties so neatly into 'aspirational', careerist ideology, obscuring the reality of class as a relational structure.
Neo-liberalism redirects the desire for political and economic change into a tribalized desire for mass social and cultural change, claims the latter must precede the former, and as a liberalism, implies that an absolute majority must be enlightened in order to effect change. The Patriarchy must be defeated by a corporate, massively socialized enemy. Since if we ever got there, the fight would be over, we don't need to fight at all. Just talk to or neighbours. That'll work real fast.
How do we keep the Taliban from cutting off women's noses? Well, we can spend a couple centuries trying to change the culture, or we can have ten women in an attack copter who aren't interested in oil, opium, or a balance-of-power. Or the approval of their domesticated peers.
We need Inglourious Beeches
(PS:IFC showed why Tarentino played with the spelling last week.)
Have I mentioned my views on Judt's self-rehabilation in his last decade? Brilliantly done.
What is the meaning of an internalized passionate anti-Leninism?
I think someone needs to read Judt.
No more masturbating do D/avid H/ull. TA'ing for him was my most influential experience in graduate school. I never took a course from him. He wasn't on my committee. But he really had a profound impact on me. I was pleased, when several years after I had left Chicago, I ran into him at the APA and he remembered me.
One thing not mentioned in the obit: he trained as an artist for a while, and was actually a really good painter. His apartment was filled with art. He explained to us grad students that all the realistic portraits were his. The abstracts were by other people. He had painted portraits, it seemed, of every lover his lover Dick had had. I thought I heard a twinge of jealousy in his voice when he showed me the portrait of the only female lover. That was the first time I had really encountered a long term open relationship.
here is David Sirota on why Obama will not get a meaningful primary challenge in 2012.
Because (even) moderately successful Presidents don't get challenged by their own party. Gee. That was simple. Now where do I go to write this kind of stuff and make the big bucks like Sirota?
156:Everything I can get my hands on. pg 206 of Postwar. But not necessarily because I like him, I think he served the neo-Liberals for thirty years, and then picked three terrific issues in the aughts that made him impervious to posthumous Leftist criticism.
I hope to be corrected, but I read social democrats critically.
More Richard Seymour, from comments to "Lenin" links above. (italics his)
The fact is that while class has declined as a visible marker within the spectacle, class consciousness is remarkably resilient, as successive social attitudes surveys disclose.
Anybody read the Stanley Fish takedown of Law and Order? terrific
Bob, you're recommending Stanley Fish?
I think I'd rather see Law and Order take down Fish than vice versa.
114: the American Empire is quite benign by world historical standards.
Umm, but we sell 60% of the weapons used in the world's various conflicts. I don't know why other people don't think that's significant. Maybe I'm just crazy or something, but that fact alone seems pretty damning to me.
Our economy is vertically and horizontally integrated towards the production and export of war. Yes, certainly you could argue the this was the case with the Romans or Mongols at various times, but they never had anything like our hegemonic control over the world markets in war.
Then too, there is the whole "we should know better" aspect. We've had this discourse right from the start, from Tom Paine on through the Abolitionists and the early feminists and the labor movement and free speech campaigners and gay liberation etc. that the best and true purpose of a nation is NOT, in fact, to plunder and destroy and subjugate anyone weaker, whether internally or externally. Absurd as it seems, the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact is still the law of the land after all.
I don't want this to be another Stalin vs. Mao argument or whatever. I don't doubt that Ferdinand and Caesar and Genghis Khan were pretty awful fellows, and I'm not seeking to minimize their crimes, or those of contemporary bad actors. But there is something that sticks in my craw about hearing how much we love peace in this country when we're fighting all these wars all over the planet, and selling the guns and tanks and planes to the belligerents in a whole bunch of wars we're not even technically part of. (Often, of course, our weapons wind up in the hands of both sides.)
I mean, I know this is crazy, but what if we just shut down all of our weapons factories? Sure, the Belgians and the French and the Russians and the Chinese could pick up some of the slack, but with no war profiteers whispering in congressional ears, I wonder if a lot of these conflicts around the world wouldn't suddenly fizzle out.
Somebody should totally do a mash-up of "Fish" and "Law & Order" on YouTube. And now that I've mentioned it, it should already exist. Yay!
It is sort of brilliant gender jiu-jitsu to put "party-too-hard-and-don't-take-care-of-the-vulnerable-dependent" tag on women instead of men.
162: the Mongols did straight-up kill tens of millions of people. I think of America as comparable to a milder version of Rome, adjusted for a more stable central government -- evident benefits of peace and civilization for those who accepted their rule, but piles of corpses along the way that were not so well publicized.
Wasn't Fish on an episode of L&O as a philosopher who defended a sex molester on the grounds that he was so post-modern that he wasn't post-modern at all and therefore couldn't have committed the crime because he was and wasn't at the scene of the crime?
that the best and true purpose of a nation is NOT, in fact, to plunder and destroy and subjugate anyone weaker, whether internally or externally
You said "nation" instead of "state", but my first reaction was:"I thought NP was an anarchist. Maybe I need to post some IOZ or Silber links." Of course war, internal and external, is what a state is about, what it is for
This is what comes from anarchism being defined away from demonstrating that the state is illegitimate by breaking the state's monopoly on violence.
161: Yeah, I'm not really interested in minimizing the evil of the current empire. I'm just periodically flabbergasted at the depth of evil in human history.
Wasn't Fish on an episode of L&O as a philosopher who defended a sex molester on the grounds that he was so post-modern that he wasn't post-modern at all and therefore couldn't have committed the crime because he was and wasn't at the scene of the crime?
This reminds me of Danto's (real-life, actually happened) defense of Roy Lichtenstein against the charge of plagiarism on the grounds that what the artist produced was an artwork and the alleged plagiarized diagram was a diagram, hence the former was of an ontologically different nature and could not have been a plagiarism of the latter.
The above is not at all a caricature of the argument: "Loran's is not a work of art at all, but just, after all, the diagram of a painting. The issue of plagiarism is silly, inasmuch as the objects belong to disjoint categories, though both may be allowed to stand classification as vehicles of representation."
163:I wasn't talking about "men", and usually don't, but I will say that the male can be proficient at neglect and abuse without ever leaving the confines of his home.
166: Well, of course, we also have the anarchist tradition in this country, which advocates against the state/monopoly of violence. And that's my first recourse when trying to make sense of things. I was trying to point out though, that even if you are an unapologetic statist, there's plenty of ideological underpinning for arguing against the maximization of war-making, especially in a US context.
What I'm saying here, is that, while I think even nice, happy little states like Estonia or Uruguay or Botswana are abominable and should be dismantled by their subjects, I am particularly incensed to live under the control of a state which pursues the object of murder-for-profit with equally zealous ferocity and hypocrisy.
Yes, what really puts the US empire over the top is its hypocrisy.
166: This is what comes from anarchism being defined away from demonstrating that the state is illegitimate by breaking the state's monopoly on violence.
And I am very much pro-Ravachol and pro-Bonnot. I don't advocate their particular tactical regime right now, because conditions have changed significantly in the decades since they were around. But, as someone who is, for now, mostly an anarchist-of-ideas, I admire their commitment and pluck.
171 As opposed to, say, the French empire or the Soviet one?
I'm just periodically flabbergasted at the depth of evil in human history.
Well, that's the whole argument for the American empire. Empire-adjusted, we're awesome! We're at the top of the league tables, we're not so great compared to some abstract ideal but we're an angel compared to all those demons, right? That's why the arguments about "history's greatest monster" are so important ideologically.
History's greatest monster is the Man in the Sky.
Although I think there is one way in which the US can be considered the worst empire in human history: since its inception, the US has, I'm guessing, contributed more to the destabilization of the global climate than any other.
I thought IOZ was on a vacation.
Because . . . because in the alternate future history in which we're living the Norse Dynamite Commission gave him [Al Gore] a Best-in-Show award? They gave that shit to Obama, too. I'll say this, for Al. At least he resisted the temptation to address the dignitaries from atop that monstrous pile of Afghan skulls and weeping Pakistani women.
...
The "activist base" . . . oy, you've got to love this self-conception: the scurrying loyalists of a top-down factional hierarchy perceiving themselves as engaged in activism, like the catering staff considering themselves titans of industry because they lay out the water bottles before a meeting of the board of directors.
Thanks, guy, I needed this.
US ... worst empire in history
But, but ... but, Mr. Rogers!
Mr. Rogers glorified the aristocracy.
177:We have barely begun to rule and exploit
"I expect our fat, ugly empire to bump and grind its way through at least another depressing century." ...IOZ, from a post above 176, this time dissing Krugmanian declinism
Me too, at least another century. Then the genocides, and finally...well, the last Empire will be the worst Empire, but only the inhuman will be able to judge.
181.last: Let's go play ... putt-put golf!!
Young people go out after the oldsters are in bed.
Okay, that's it. Off my lawn!
The key to keeping the youngsters off your lawn is to sleep there.
And it was a great show! The first band had six drummers! Wicked. And then there was rap! And after the rap, some really nice whatever it was! With the homemade instruments? Real good. We skipped the all-night bike ride, which is apparently heavy on the architecture lectures and light on the actual bike riding.
We must be somewhere between young people and oldsters. The shots we did after the show for Sifu's BIRTHDAY sent us straight home, rather than to meet up with the architecture tour people.
We did a laudable number of shots, though. I think I had three? Of Jaeger, if I remember. Blume had less, and one of them was a girly shot (and she couldn't remember the name of any girly shots so we had to ask the bartender. I believe "Washington Apple" is the name of the shot she came up with, which frankly sounds a little too US History and/or computer retail to be canonical), but by god she downed them.
Huh, crap. I wonder if any FPPs are up.
I left your fewer/less grammar confusion as punishment.
Woohoo! Thanks, Stanley. Per my e-mail, I owe you a dirty comic book.
by god she downed them
I got the Jaeger on ice, and sipped it. Why one would do a digestive as a shot is beyond me.
Why one would do a digestive as a shot is beyond me.
Because Jaeger tastes like medicine, so you might as well get it down as quickly as possible?
As long as we're dishing on bar fun, I had fun drinks and repartee with Cosma, JP, Moby and JRoth tonight. And if Moby's willing to confess it, he can tell you how he made my night with a particularly hilarious question.
DU0D you drank with Cosma? I'm super jealous.
I mean, I want to meet the rest of the gang, too. But I bet Cosma is super fun to drink with.
Kobe is also jealous. Who would have thought the place to be tonight was Pittsburgh?
Matt Y recommends The Kids Are Alright
Will this Link work? Thread: "Absolutely disgusted." "Saw the movie yesterday, went back home and cried for about an hour." Long, long thread, and the OP - original poster - may have misinterpreted. But a very moving statement. I need to read the responses. Sometimes IMDB is kids, sometimes very smart educated adults
An alternative view, maybe for Thorn or for us all
Maybe for NP, because of High Art and that I think Lisa Cholodenko is pretty complicated as a movie maker.
PS:Bedtimes for Blume. Some of us old folk can barely sleep at all.
Looked it up at Wiki, Cholodenko is a lesbian
"Lisa is in a relationship with musician Wendy Melvoin"
"Lisa?" The poster in 201 does that. I don't.
Anyway, Mark Ruffalo doesn't look a thing like Justin Bieber. I can suspend disbelief only so far.
I wonder how the critics would have reacted if the movie had been about two gay men in a relationship where one of them is seduced by the surrogate mother of their children and has over the top heterosexual sex with her because after so many years of being with a man, all he really needs right now is a vagina. Would this movie be seen as progessive? Would it have a 93% approval rating on rottentomatoes? I highly doubt it.
"Flip the script" is a useful argument if you want to generate empathy, e.g. "how would you feel as a gay man if you saw a movie about..." But I hate this version of the argument. "If they made fun of black people the way they make fun of me..."
Sometimes IMDB is kids, sometimes very smart educated adults
The poster's name has "1982" in it. I'm guessing she's 28. And I'm guessing she's having a hard time.
Spoilers
Major spoilers, if spoilers bother you.
It is as I guessed. Cholodenko makes very smart dark and nasty little movies, where the kneejerk socialized interpretation is not necessarily even what is on the fricking screen, plain for all to see. Our socialized expectations affect our very perceptions.
High Art was about a reasonably functional and happy family of trust-fund junkies completely destroyed by an ambitious little bitch. Seen by most of the audience as a beautiful and tragic love story where Sheedy could have been "saved" from her partner by the love and trust of an innocent who really cared. Amazing.
I suspect the problem for the poster linked in 201 is that she thought Cholodenko was filming a positive portrait of a lesbian family, with a bad mistake made to please a straight audience. With that expectation, of course she is disappointed. But my expectation is Cholodenko wanted to show that gay families can be as bad as hetero families, insular, cruel, callous, destructive. In that case the affair isn't a mistake of the moviemaker, because the point isn't about sexuality but to show a thoughtlessness and indifference (or worse, a deliberate individual or group cruelty) to outsiders that some families nurture to create boundaries and entropy.
I am really looking forward to this.
I went and tried to refresh my memory of Laurel Canyon with little success. The only thing I remember is feeling as I watched it that Cholodenko was seriously messing with liberal attitudes and certainties.
All know my attitude about kid lib. Power corrupts, and there is no greater power than that which a parent has over a small child. Thus all families are corrupt. It is my experience and theory that war and greed and exploitation and cruelty are not exceptional aberrations but simply expansions of what goes behind living room windows and In the Bedroom of almost every household in the world.
And so I like the LaButes and Hellmans and Solondz and Ingmar Bergman and Yates and all the other artists of the domestic and quotidian who show the ubiquitous cruelty and coercion at dining tables. War and religion, ideology, sports, art are not impediments or obstacles to becoming fully human but are releases and escapes from the greater horror of what we do to our nearest and dearest each and every moment of the day according to our deepest natures. Or earliest experience. Behind every smile a snarl. Why do they love you? Because you haven't strangled them yet today.
Cholodenko seems to be in that class.
And of course y'all aren't like that all.
"Lisa is in a relationship with musician Wendy Melvoin"
Wendy?
Yes Lisa.*
Is the water warm enough?
Yes Lisa.
Shall we begin?
Yes.
*Same Wendy, different Lisa.
tried to refresh my memory of Laurel Canyon with little success. The only thing I remember is feeling
What I remember feeling was that Kate Beckinsale should *always* be on my TV screen.
Anyhow, I agree with lots of Natilo's list, but leaving off Kissinger is a crime all to itself.
Let Germany have him: he'll decrease the evil quotient of villains in both countries.
198, 199: Thanks to Stanley for being the spark for the get together (aka Stag Night at Kelly's). Was overdue to put some faces to names and/or faces and names to handles. I'm not sure if I heard (or just don't recall or wasn't there for) Moby's question, so out with it dude.
--Cosma was rather self-effacing, but entertaining of course.
--JRoth could not make it until late and shamed me into switching to mixed drinks (Genoas for me) from beer at a precariously late juncture (he also pooh-poohed our prior choice of food items), but so far proactive treatment with Vitamin I and lots of water is working.
--JRoth authorized me to send his love to all and he misses everyone (but apparently not so much as to come back and be on the blog right now). He also knows some stuff about some people and stuff--apparently there are communication channels other than the blog!
--JRoth once kayaked to some manner of professional meeting in town.
Off to swim kayak.
I'm probably outed since you all saw JRoth, so I need to clear my name and say I felt totally guilty for not having a meet-up when I was in Pittsburgh recently, and would have loved to have met everyone.
I was travelling with a close real life friend, and I'm Internet-closeted, and I couldn't figure out any way to make it work. So I just stayed mum.
161
I mean, I know this is crazy, but what if we just shut down all of our weapons factories? Sure, the Belgians and the French and the Russians and the Chinese could pick up some of the slack, but with no war profiteers whispering in congressional ears, I wonder if a lot of these conflicts around the world wouldn't suddenly fizzle out.
This is the same "Merchants of Death" gibberish that was popular after WWI. Current low level conflicts mostly use stuff like AK47's which are easy to make. Stopping exports of F16s won't make any difference.
Current low level conflicts mostly use stuff like AK47's which are easy to make.
213: Oh, it might have come up. But, of course, no one should feel obligated to reveal their movements around the country (other than Muslims, of course). On a number of occasions I've not even informed family members when I was going to be in their vicinity.
Morning moment of Zen: Huge flocks of birds caught as expanding crescents on radar as they leave favored roosting grounds in the morning to forage.
I'm glad there were no internet meetups during my 10 years in Pittsburgh because then there would be even more people for me to miss having moved away last month.
Also I pray that all internet trolls receive the psychological help they need.
Ned don't I remember you insisting vocally that there was absolutely no way you would ever be interested in meeting any unfogged commenters, ever?
And if Moby's willing to confess it, he can tell you how he made my night with a particularly hilarious question.
Ah, wait. Of course, now I recall.
I only didn't know if Standpipe had another blog or not. It was great to see people. My head doesn't hurt much.
205: I did think "The Kids Are All Right" was a little lame and sentimentalized, and that the script clearly did make Paul into a villain of sorts (not in the sense of being depicted as a bad person, but in the stock sense of the family intruder). Interesting alternative interpretation, but I don't think it was intended in the movie.
Wow, TOS is really spinning out there.
Actually, maybe I'm not doing the complexities in Kids justice -- the lack of sexual chemistry in the marriage was incredibly obvious and set the tone for the whole movie, but I sort of ascribed that to both actresses being straight as opposed to directoral decision.
214: Current low level conflicts mostly use stuff like AK47's which are easy to make. Stopping exports of F16s won't make any difference.
I'm very dubious about this line of reasoning. Yes, of course, the AK47 is very popular as a means of arming rank-and-file soldiers, both governmental and non-government. But, with a very few exceptions, most of the world's conflicts depend on infusions of heavy weapons, at least on one side, often on both. Yes, it's true that you don't see a lot of F16s used in the average brushfire war. Why is that? Well, mostly, it's because they're too expensive. Where governments have enough money to buy them, and use them, they do. Same on down the line. Whether it's RPGs or Stinger missiles or mortar rounds or whatever, the more of them there are available, and the cheaper the price, the more they're likely to be used. (Funny how all that Econ 101 stuff about rational actors and supply-and-demand goes out the window when it's not convenient for for schmibertarians, isn't it?)
I mean, are we supposed to believe that the worldwide weapons industry (and as I said above, I'm not exempting Britain, France, China, Russia, etc. from this critique) is motivated by altruism?! Yeah, that makes sense. The weapon makers aren't out to make a profit. They don't want more conflict which will create a demand for more of their products. They actually want wars to stop, so they can sell weapons that will never be used, and just be piled up in ever larger warehouses.
No, of course we are not going to believe that, because it's insultingly stupid. People make guns and warplanes and bombs and warships to kill people. You can dress it up with whatever nonsensical euphemisms you want, you can otherize the enemy to pretend they're not actually human beings, but at the end of the day, a weapon is a weapon. And profit is profit. Why can't so-called libertarians understand that?
227: You've never heard the phrase "lesbian bed death"?
224, 227:Paul was not quite an intruder, he was invited, actively sought out by the kids for their own reasons.
I obviously haven't seen Kids, but High Art was in part about a longterm relationship with a dependent partner and waning sexual chemistry. I have my guesses about the dynamics in Kids. I do think that Laurel had a message that sex, youth, and excitement is very tempting, but not anything to coast out on. So Cholodenko may have a theme, one that bucks her SWPL audience's attitude of party hearty, fuck like bunnies, produce like Stakhanov, or might as well die.
Natilo, I doubt that your ordinary defense contractor cares that much whether the product is ever used -- they just want to make the sale. And then another sale, so that customer A can stay ahead of customer B.
I sort of had the impression that the United States and its sole ally in the Middle East were the only countries making active, killing-people use of F-16s and similar aircraft these days, the rest of the world having little occasion to use them except in, say, exercises over the South China Sea.
Morning moment of Zen: Huge flocks of birds caught as expanding crescents on radar as they leave favored roosting grounds in the morning to forage.
That's awesome, Stormcrow. There is a researcher in BC who is tracking migratory bird roosts (in CA & elsewhere) using similar technology. He occasionally sends out emails to the birding list serve about where to find them. I went to a cornfield in the middle of nowhere to see hundreds of thousands of tree swallows coming in for the night - it was spectacular. I also recently learned from a researcher on tri-colored blackbirds that there are spots in the Delta where you can see millions (!) of passerine birds coming in at night in the winter to roost on the islands. I'm so there.
226.last: I'm not sure why it's libertarians in particular who are blind to the reality of the military-industrial complex. Are you just invoking them because Shearer commented?
No more masturbating to Mary Anne Warren. I teach her book Moral Status every year. To my knowledge it remains the only book-length presentation of a unified theory of the topic.
233: "The following comes from SWIP-L". Heh.
It was a lot of fun to put faces to names, and voices to voices, as it were. I succumbed to JRoth's peer pressure re drinks enough to switch from ale to Maker's Mark. I would like to think that when the cat started chewing on my fingers around noon, she was trying to make me get up and let her out, and not determining whether or not I was edible myself. Suffice it to say that I am now in the ideal mood to edit my student's dissertation for the rest of the day.
Really, everything is admirably arranged.
OT: This Maureen Dowd column is one of the most obnoxious I've read in a while. Yeah, yeah, I know.
Perhaps I should say that it's frustrating rather than obnoxious, at least if you read past the first several paragraphs, if only because it accedes to the increasingly popular notion that the Democrats' house is not remotely in order. Because of the, y'know, leftists. (A discussion could be had about whether a false equivalence is being drawn between the leftists and the, er, rightists, that is, the Tea Partiers in this case.)
The talking-head shows this morning managed to aid in perpetuating this idea: on one of them (Chris Matthews' show), the question was floated whether a serious Independent run for the presidency in 2012 might be in play. The quick roundtable consensus was: yes, if Mitt Romney or Sarah Palin is the Republican candidate, it's expected that Mike Bloomberg of NY will run as an Independent.
Huh. (Does anyone know why Bloomberg is an Independent rather than a Democrat? New Yorkers?)
On preview: this has been your episode of political frustration for the day
Does anyone know why Bloomberg is an Independent rather than a Democrat?
If I recall correctly without looking anything up, he was rebuffed by the Democrats when he sought their support for his first footsteps.
238, 239 - It's more that he felt that he couldn't make it through the primary.
I thought it had to do with him being a plutocrat.
No more masturbating to Abbey Lincoln, either.
241: He did come out strongly in favor of private property rights with respect to the Ground Zero mosque Muslim community center. I don't know if he mentioned the fact that Feisal Abdul Rauf, the prospective imam of the center, is a really good guy. (One last kvetch regarding the talking head shows this morning: no one said the man's name. It was "the admittedly moderate Muslim who wants to build the center" or "the gentleman".)
229: It strains credulity to believe that defense contractors are so stupid as to think that wars are not good for their sales figures. Imagine you're a widget maker, and you have two courses of action: 1. You make lots of widgets, and they're the best widgets you can make, and you work really hard to market them, but then you refuse to use any of the considerable influence your widget-begotten wealth has brought you to ensure a continuing demand for widgets.
2. You live in the real world.
230: With F-16s specifically, that may well be the case. But if we're using F-16s as a metonym for "the array of large, expensive weapons systems produced wholly or in part by the US weapon makers and their overseas partners" then I think you're going to find a lot of that sort of thing in use from Colombia to Cote d'Ivoire to the DRC to the Phillipines to Kashmir. Even if, indeed, one side is only armed with AK-47s and stolen grenades or whatever.
Also, and perhaps I should have made this more explicit, I also indict the US weapons makers (and others) for providing weapons to security services of countries that murder and oppress their largely non-violent opposition movements and/or regular civilians. That is also very bad.
232: On this issue, as with others, it's bizarre and irritating to me that the most staunch defenders of capitalism, private enterprise and corporations refuse to believe that there is any such thing as a capitalist. It's as though they actually believe that every anti-trust action is just arbitrary governmental meddling with the operations of the so-called free market. That when faced with the choice of playing by the rules and making a smaller profit, or breaking some rules and making a larger profit, most people who run large business concerns will not take the latter route.
It's just absurd. Look at this recent example with Target Corp. Target's initial non-apology basically said, in so many words: "we like the benefits we get from being seen as a liberal concern by our customers, but we also want to use our wealth to influence politicians to make sure that we get what we want from the government." How much more proof do you need?
248: Oh, you don't have to convince me.
Parsimon is making my blood pressure glad I don't watch Sunday morning TV or read Maureen Dowd.
On the other hand, what I've bumped into instead is rather disheartening.
Why the Iraq War costs so much, part eight zillion (it's an old link):
One of KBR's contracts was for transporting supplies between American bases. Fleets of new Mercedes Benz trucks, costing $85,000 each, travelled up and down Iraq's central highways every day, accompanied by armed US military escorts. If there were no goods to transport, KBR dispatched empty lorries anyway, and billed accordingly. The lorries didn't carry replacement air and oil filters, essential when driving in the desert. They didn't even carry spare tyres. If one broke down, it was abandoned and destroyed so no one else could use it, and left burning by the roadside.
(Via Obsidian Wings.)
Anonymous Internet commenter misses the point of fair housing laws rather spectacularly:
Here in Mississippi we are much more civilized. If you don't want to sell your house to somebody its nobody elses business. You can also be picky about who you buy from. Called a free market. Much more civilized.
And the Guardian offers a mostly-reasonable take on the case of the young man whose TV outburst after his sister was assaulted has been turned into a song:
WAFF TV was criticised by viewers complaining that broadcasting the interview stereotyped the black community. The station replied that to censor Dodson would have been "far worse". "The fact is Dodson is a victim and, just like any victim, has the right to speak out," Gentle said.
Dodson backed up the TV station's case, alleging that the housing officer to whom the assault had been reported next morning treated the allegation as a joke. "She was making fun of us, she was actually laughing in our face. So we just left. We got back to the apartment, called the investigators and the news people, asking 'Is anybody taking this seriously?'"
When the news team came, Antoine let off steam. Events then took an extraordinary twist. Captivated by Dodson's outburst, The Gregory Brothers, a New York band who run a popular YouTube channel, AutoTune The News, transformed the interview into a song called "Bed Intruder". Almost overnight, it became YouTube's number one video. Last week it was watched more than 30m times.
The bolded part is what interests me. I never get used to how subjective the creation of crime stats is.
244: Some of these weapons systems are genuinely useless, though. One commentator said that the most likely situation that the F-35 would be useful in is an alien attack.
||
Remember ladies, flashing your breasts at Juggalos will only make them more violent. This is the sort of safety tip they really need to make PSAs about.
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I spent about an hour last night reading about juggalo culture. Fucking Insane Clown Posse, how the fuck do they have fans? I can't help thinking that the kids who proclaim "clown love forever" would have attached to some other music or identity 10 years ago; needing to belong to some group of spat-upon outcasts seems to be the dominant thread that binds them together. Also, pro-wrestling.
needing to belong to some group of spat-upon outcasts seems to be the dominant thread
Shut-up. We had a very nice mini meet-up and nobody spat on us before 10:30.
As they say in theater, you gotta leave while they're still clapping.
226
I don't believe US munitions makers are motivated by altruism so I don't know why you are attacking that strawman.
232
last: I'm not sure why it's libertarians in particular who are blind to the reality of the military-industrial complex. Are you just invoking them because Shearer commented?
I am not a libertarian but it is easier to argue with strawmen.
245
On this issue, as with others, it's bizarre and irritating to me that the most staunch defenders of capitalism, private enterprise and corporations refuse to believe that there is any such thing as a capitalist. It's as though they actually believe that every anti-trust action is just arbitrary governmental meddling with the operations of the so-called free market. That when faced with the choice of playing by the rules and making a smaller profit, or breaking some rules and making a larger profit, most people who run large business concerns will not take the latter route.
I believe most people (including people who run large corporations) have a moral code which they mostly obey. So they for example won't kill their spouse to save on divorce lawyer fees. However it matters what this moral code is. Society attempts to give young people a moral code which is socially beneficial and it matters how successful it is. Capitalism works better when there is a general social moral code of honesty and fair dealing. I think libertarians underrate the importance of this which is one reason I am not a libertarian.
Now they've gone too far. An attack on Tila Tequila is an attack on America.
Attacking Tila Tequila is the duty of every enlightened American, yet it took a moron dressed like a clown to make this manifest.
From the link in 249:
The witness asked not to be identified so that he does not anger the juggalos.
250: The existence of juggalos is a handy counterpoint to contemporary superstitions about the virtues of simple people of the meth states.
Capitalism works better when there is a general social moral code of honesty and fair dealing. I think libertarians underrate the importance of this which is one reason I am not a libertarian.
I think this is one of most frank things I've ever heard you say, James. There's a lot packed into "fair dealing," of course, and I gather you feel that the libertarian conception of fair dealing is insufficient ... for making capitalism work best? To keep it from breaking down?
I'd like to ask what moral code you think is requisite to keep capitalism from breaking down (or working badly) -- that is, to add some content to "honesty and fair dealing" -- but I don't even know if you're there. Also: is the idea to start with capitalism as a desideratum, and go from there to what's needed to make it work?
needing to belong to some group of spat-upon outcasts seems to be the dominant thread that binds them together.
I think that almost all of the hardcore records I listed to in the early 80's have aged quite nicely, thank you.
Altruism? I have no idea what that would even mean in this context. I think they sell fighter aircraft hoping for (a) a bit bunch of dough right away, and (b) a long and lucrative tail of spare parts business. I don't think Boeing (for example) spends any time at all trying to get countries to go to war. Rather, they spend their effort trying to promote their 'solution' to the particular sub-issues war preparation and/or fighting creates.*
To get a little deeper in the weeds, IMNIE, defense contractors are very reluctant to do anything at all that isn't going to be paid for, by the government, immediately. Oh, they'll spend time and money to woo customers when a big buying decision is on the line -- will Kuwait buy the Mirage, the F-14, or the F-18 to replace its aging A4s -- but otherwise, it's pretty direct.
* Analogy violation: do lawyers drum up strife? I suppose some do, but most big time lawyers don't have to drum it up. People do that on their own.
Libertarian underestimation of the inefficiencies entailed in the enforcement of legal rights renders the whole philosophy foolish. One need not even reach their amorality or ahistoricality.
262.3:Without doctors, there would still be disease. But without lawyers (broad meaning), there would be no laws and no cases. There would be disputes and arguments but these would probably be settled by authority figures.
Lawyers do create the demand for their services, by shaping society in their image and in their favor. We don't have to be abstract. Glass-Steagall was 20 pages;the new Finance Bill is 2000 pages.
Arms merchants work much the same way, or did before the America Empire triumphed. The new Mirage becomes available, neighboring countries fear an imbalance.
266.2 -- It's not lawyers. Or, rather, lawyers are only agents. Capital/property wants rules.
"Legalism" obviously wasn't invented in 1650, but I do think there is something specific about liberalism that breeds lawyers like...whatever. It is not just a mild preference for rule-based decisions and judgments but a religious opposition for any character or virtue or tribal conflict management. "Rule of Law not Men" and prepare to drown in a sea of lawyers.
I am sure people much much better than I have explored the topic.
Bob, why do you think commercial lawyers are all excited to put arbitration clauses in their contracts? It's a yearning for tribal justice.
Rather, they spend their effort trying to promote their 'solution' to the particular sub-issues war preparation and/or fighting creates.
From one perspective, this is not far from trying to promote war. Or rather, it's not far from having a vested interest in war preparations. Rather again, not far from an interest in promoting (preparation for) military solutions.
The analogy to the legal profession is rightly banned: lawyers don't need to lobby congress to pass appropriations bills for the government purchase of legal brainpower.
267:Maybe. Not new and always complicated.
But in Pillars of the Earth the Prior and Earl both want the quarry and the forest. King Stephen says "Ok, Prior gets the quarry, Earl gets the forest. Begone now."
Then came the damn Magna Carta, which, yes, was a step toward extending property rights.
I need to get back to Judt.
Countries don't go to war because they have advanced weapons. If we didn't have B-1s to bomb Afghans, we'd use B-52s. And if we didn't have those, we'd use B-17s. And so on, all the way down to waging war with sticks, stones, and boxcutters.
King Stephen says "Ok, Prior gets the quarry, Earl gets the forest. Begone now."
Whereupon, the Earl signs up with the Empress, who's promised him the quarry, and the right to dispense justice on the Marches.
272: Well, not to get all hysterically arm-wavy or anything, but I don't think anyone would remotely consider war with Iran armed with sticks and boxcutters. I doubt we'd have approached Iraq in such circumstances either.
The viability of military responses grows tremendously with advances in military technology; and the military-industrial complex has an interest in promoting ever-more-complex technologies, because they cost more, and the mark-up over actual production cost is greater. (More replacement parts are needed.)
The Marquis will be surprised to find out that someone else has the right to dispense justice on the marches.
A standing army creates its own demand. I'll agree that it doesn't matter so very much (shy of three or four hundred years out) which weapons you use as long as they're expensive, but without a large army's reason to exist there's no sales of weapons. And a large army in turn has to be the best army in the world, or it is too expensive to justify.
We just happen to have the most expensive army in the world on a per armed forces capita basis.
max
['The Russians have the same kind of problems.']
||
Why must parents be such a pain in the ass about making plans for independent/assisted living--especially if they could live in a nicer place for the same amount of money?
Moreover, when my father dies, my Mom can't get around on her own.
Does it occur to people that their own denial of mortality and aging just makes it harder on their children, particularly if their financial affairs are not in order?
I know that parents want to see themselves as parental/authority figures for as long as possible? But they are just making themselves a greater burden in the long run.
End of Rant
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274 -- Well, a society advanced enough to be capable of forming interests wrt Iran would either (a) have better technology or (b) go to war with sticks and boxcutters if the interests demanded it. I really don't think the tools (much less the toolmakers) drive the interests as a general proposition. The exception, I think, is the run-up to WWI where the various European powers had plans based on the limits of their technology, such that Rubicons had to be crossed before it was really clear that war was inevitable.
War might be good for business on paper, and in plenty of cases. If you were running a US railroad, say, during WWI, you might have been surprised at how it worked out.
A standing army creates its own demand is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.
Thank you, Vice President Gerry.
I really don't think the tools (much less the toolmakers) drive the interests as a general proposition.
I really disagree. Part and parcel of what it is for the society to be advanced enough to form 'interests' regarding Iran is that it have the technology rendering it capable of doing so with any chance of success. This is your (a). I think (b) is hogwash insofar as any interest in going to war with Iran with sticks, etc. would evaporate before it was formed.
Recall Rumsfeld's prosecution of the initial invasion of Iraq: entirely predicated on highly advanced technology. It's not clear to me that we've walked away from that.
Elbridge Gerry would have commented on Unfogged? Seems like.
Further to my 280.last, It's not clear to me that we've walked away from that
We seem to be comparatively humble in Afghanistan.
We've transferred a hell of a lot of the money-making to third-party contractors. See Witt's mention of KBR in 247 upthread, and a bazillion other examples.
I find it impossible to support the view that these military adventures would be occurring regardless of the structure in place that doesn't just support it, but promotes it. Apparently I will continue to be mad about this until someone concedes. Seriously, don't be silly: follow the money.
277: My thoughts for you in dealing with those issues.
279: That is the best quote I've heard in a long time. I'm going to start posting it everywhere.
I went to a cornfield in the middle of nowhere to see hundreds of thousands of tree swallows coming in for the night - it was spectacular.
We had an apartment in Houston with a nice balcony where we could sit and watch huge numbers of starlings return from feeding in surrounding rice fields to a huge roost on the campus of (appropriately enough) Rice University. (However, my wife worked there at the time and they were a huge menace on campus--people used umbrellas walking around in the evening--so she was a bit more ambivalent about the majesty of the display.)
I'd love to have seen a radar display of a mega-flock of Passenger Pigeons; that area was their heartland*--last reported wild sighting and last captive one died in the area shown on the radar.
*Also of the juggalos, coincidence?
OT: Am I missing stuff or has Mad Men become a completely directionless period soap opera with quirky editing? Or was it always like this?
As I understand it the heartland of the juggalos is places like Indiana, Illinois and Iowa and also the Rust Belt (particularly ICP's home state of Michigan and other places Faygo soda is available).
ICP had its biggest commercial successes from 1997 (The Great Milenko, first of two major-label albums) through 2002 (see "Juggalo Homies", which fit in with the rap-rock on the airwaves at the time), rather than now when they have a smaller following which has become a complete subculture thanks to the various other acts on their label.
It seems like a decade ago there was a ton of popular bands combining a sort of horror-movie image with misanthropic lyrics and not-particularly-violent metal music (Slipknot, Mudvayne, Mushroomhead, Static-X). Not sure why that sound isn't on the rock radio stations anymore, since commercial radio is more than ever a place for teenagers.
OT: Am I missing stuff or has Mad Men become a completely directionless period soap opera with quirky editing? Or was it always like this?
I'm feeling like Betty was much more central to the show than I'd realized before.
I find that there is a part of me that is rather in sympathy with the juggalos (not a particularly admirable part of me, but there it is--you can take the boy out of the semi-hopeless defeated industrial Midwest but ...). If early punk rock was when, "stupid on purpose became the new smart", the juggalos are sort of when "stupid on purpose became the new stupid". And as self-defeating and exploitatively commercial as it is, maybe not all that inappropriate response for the inarticulate to the plutonomy.
Not sure why that sound isn't on the rock radio stations anymore, since commercial radio is more than ever a place for teenagers.
Because emo/pop punk and slick Nashville was also in the running, and emo/pop punk and slick Nashville formed an alliance and carried the commercial-radio day? (Taylor Swift, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, etc.) And that's without even mentioning the RB/Hip-hop commercial-radio developments, about which I'm notably less familiar.
"Because emo/pop punk and slick Nashville were also in the running" I meant.
287.1: And SW Ohio has a lot of all that.
290: But they do have rock bands on commercial radio, they're just the enervating bands like Three Doors Down and The Fray and Switchfoot. What are teenage boys listening to?
292: I thought you were talking about Rice University.
What are teenage boys listening to?
Crude way to get data, but: for those listening to rock, Linkin Park. And that damn "Lisztomania" song (which I like, but wow, it's had a long run).
And maybe the outcast kids just go to Pitchfork to see what's cool today or something.
293.2: My anecdote was about Rice and Houston; the radar I posted upthread that Parenthetical was responding to was from SW Ohio (last holdout of the Passenger Pigeons). My transition was not clear.
259
I'd like to ask what moral code you think is requisite to keep capitalism from breaking down (or working badly) -- that is, to add some content to "honesty and fair dealing" -- but I don't even know if you're there. Also: is the idea to start with capitalism as a desideratum, and go from there to what's needed to make it work?
This wasn't really a statement about capitalism, socialism or feudalism would also work better given a culture of honesty and fairness. Society benefits from a moral culture in when people identify at least to some extent with society as whole and are reluctant to act in ways that hurt society as a whole. As CharlieCarp pointed out compelling people to behave properly is inefficient and expensive. It is better if most people behave properly most of the time because they believe it is the right thing to do not because they fear punishment. Cultures vary widely (high trust vrs low trust for example) and some lead to more congenial societies. Libertarians often seem to completely ignore such issues in favor of an unhealthy obsession with the exact details of the tax code and the like. However libertarians are not the only offenders, Americans of many political tendencies are reluctant to accept the limitations of government policy when dealing with an inimical culture.
Given that I am familiar with capitalism (and American culture and society in general) and it has has worked well enough for me I am more receptive to proposals for incremental improvements than drastic changes.
(last holdout of the Passenger Pigeons).
I think they opened for Taylor Swift.
288: I think there were a lot of subplots (Don and Betty's relationship, the tension between Peggy and Joan's achievements, Sal, etc), that played themselves out and haven't really been replaced.
297: the Passenger Pigeons
Their motto is "We can carry a tune—and much, much more!"
Kobe probably frowns on a strained carrier-pigeon joke.
270
The analogy to the legal profession is rightly banned: lawyers don't need to lobby congress to pass appropriations bills for the government purchase of legal brainpower.
Judges, prosecutors and public defenders are all paid by the governement.
And lawyers have an interest in laws and other public policies that encourage lawsuits and other work for lawyers and lobby in favor of such laws and policies.
OT: Am I missing stuff or has Mad Men become a completely directionless period soap opera with quirky editing?
Yes on one, no on two. The seasons always take a while to get rolling, and I would basically guarantee that you'll look back on this season and see it as a stunning build to a shocking but fundamentally inescapable conclusion.
297, 298, 300: Truly natural history's greatest monsters. Making cheap jokes about a species your species exterminated.
Why didn't the dodo cross the road?
Why didn't the dodo cross the road?
Weren't tasty.
Because by the time they built roads there were no dodos to cross them.
Fuck 'em. The dodo could fly, or at least the ancestors of the dodo could. They got lazy and they got eaten. That was supposed to happen. Why do you hate Darwin?
Mad Men still has the transition to the mid-late 60s to go, right? I haven't seen this season yet (I get them on DVD), but I thought they were only in about 1964. If they jump the shark before that, they suck -- infinite potential for drama there.
272: really, Charley, you must be kidding.
267
It's not lawyers. Or, rather, lawyers are only agents. Capital/property wants rules.
Practically everybody wants rules.
302: They do have a history of dramatic season endings, but it seems like they were a bit more interesting in the build up.
I just reviewed a couple of books about the history of extinction. Man, that was a depressing assignment. Still, I can't say I found myself becoming more sympathetic to pigeons.
But we like *you*, ari.
Stay away from me, okay? And no, you can't drive the fucking bus.
302 I would basically guarantee that you'll look back on this season and see it as a stunning build to a shocking but fundamentally inescapable conclusion.
I don't know. Isn't it basically a law of nature that by the fourth season any television show will start to unravel?
Isn't it basically a law of nature that by the fourth season any television show will start to unravel?
No?
Isn't essear a physicist? I think we should defer to him on laws of nature.
What, I can't generalize from a handful of examples to "law of nature"? Fuck. Next you're going to tell me I could learn something from reading Hume.
I am not kidding -- you people are ridiculous. If there had been no innovation in military hardware over the last 20 years -- no drones, etc -- we'd still have gone to war in Afghanistan. Using the technology we used 20 years ago in Kuwait/on Iraq. (Or if you want to push it back a little further in time, using the technology we used in Grenada.) We're not in Afghanistan because we have drones. We're there because someone thought it useful to attack the world's superpower with boxcutters, and have been able to not only survive but thrive in an environment where they are completely and utterly outclassed by weaponry.
I don't see any evidence of any kind of humility in Afghanistan. Not that this has anything to do with it.
The idea that we wouldn't have gone into Afghanistan but for some sort of lobbying, either open or not, on the part of the defense industry ignores, IMO, the critical facts of record. And we would not have left but for the interests of the defense industry -- much more substantial tribal interests are at play. Ignore/minimize these at your peril.
Season 4 of Buffy started to drag, but 5 definitely picked back up.
319.last: but I think this undersells the argument a bit, no? The idea is that the whole US economy and governmental structure is built around war as a key profit center for the industrial economy, dating from the end of WWII, so that any time when the US is not involved in an active war will be a time when there is a huge amount of structural pressure on the government to find a war, or at least an armed conflict, or at last resort a potential existential threat. None (or very little) of this pressure is so crassly obvious as lobbying -- it's more that the very nature of the military-industrial complex demands continued feeding, lest it (in the absence of heroic intervention) fester and metastasize and begin to feed on things that are necessary for our nation's survival. At least, that's how I've always understood the argument (as forcefully expressed by James Carroll, among, I assume, many others).
The MIC makes plenty of money in peacetime, and I don't think you can point to a single US war where domestic political factors aren't so much more important than the interests of the MIC as to make the argument about the interests of the MIC just a bunch of hippy-dippy nonsense.
I mean, Vietnam had much more to do with Lyndon Johnson's dick than with General Dynamics' profit.
Does anyone think John McCain wants to bomb Iran because Haliburton will make a bunch of money? No, it's because he wants to be great. This is who these people are, and who we are are the kind of people who put these kind of people in (or near) power.
Now obviously, there's not much positive to say about the fact that there are a bunch of people looking to make a bunch of money off LBJ's concerns about his dick.
Does anyone think John McCain wants to bomb Iran because Haliburton will make a bunch of money?
Truth value of that statement aside, yes, lots of people do.
The sort of structural claim Sifu is making (or reporting) doesn't come down to a set of claims about the motivations of individual actors.
Yes, well, I think it's a lot more complicated, and a lot more fucked up, than being about some small group of companies making money.
I doubt you'll get much disagreement on that.
325: I think that's right, yeah. John McCain, by this understanding, is just as much a product of the MIC as Afghanistan.
OMG, a strawman! Here on the internets! On unfogged! Oh, where is my pearls, I must clutch at them!
See, I've commented before, Shearer, that this is your typical modus operandi. You stake out some ridiculous position ("fire all the teachers and the schools will work better" or "keep gay people as second class citizens to ensure our continued freedom") and then when people call you on your shit, you're all "oh, I wasn't arguing that". Whatever. It matters not a whit to me that you refuse to identify yourself as a libertarian. You're firmly in the schmibertarian camp when it comes to arguing on the internet, which is the only context that matters, since that is what we are doing.
You were, very clearly, averring that the military-industrial complex does not exist. That is evidence of either your ignorance or your deceitfulness.
If we want to talk about specific weapons systems, as though we have all been suddenly drafted into the 101st Fighting Keyboarders, let's talk about the V-22 Osprey. It's a ridiculous project -- the genesis of which was the US invasion of Grenada, which was pure imperialism on its face. The V-22 has never worked all that well. It was expensive to develop, it can't really do what it's supposed to do (especially w/r/t lifting enough ordnance to be useful in battle), and it's ostensible reason for being -- amphibious aerial attacks -- just doesn't come up that often. Yet because it had a lot of money behind it, which bought a lot of lobbying of a lot of legislators, even Dick Cheney couldn't kill it. Just as I don't believe that altruism motivates defense industry executives, I don't believe Shearer's ridiculous "general social moral code of honesty and fair-dealing" motivates them either. Capitalists do what they do in order to amass capital. If they wanted moral credibility they would be moralists. They're not. They're capitalists. They might pretend to be committed to honesty and fair-dealing, when it suits their purposes, but at the end of the day, they're always going to try to do the things that help them amass capital, to the best of their abilities.
This is the absurdity of Shearer's argument: Capitalists, he insists, aren't capitalists at all. Or if they are, then only in small degree. Actually, he says, they're committed to something other than profit and capital accumulation. They like honesty and fair-dealing because (get ready for some handwaving and Just-So-Storytime) capitalism mystically "works better that way"! Talk about ideology as a "camera obscura"! Jeezum Crow! You could give people like Shearer a Surefire E1E Executive flashlight with brand new batteries and they still couldn't find their way out of this darkened room.
326: well, sure! And Afghanistan is a lot more complicated, and fucked up, than the sum of foreign interventions into its business. But if we unwind our interventions, we unwind a bit of the bigger ball of yarn, and maybe it's the key bit to start the whole thing rolling. Is again, how I read the counter-argument. I'm pretty unsure all around, personally.
330.4(a) -- Exactly right. The makers of the Osprey don't need to gin up an actual war, They just need to buy enough congresspersons, and retired generals, to sell their product.
The V-22 has never worked all that well.
Now that they've worked out the avionics some Marines swear by 'em.
Ground Zero electricity monsters
I only had free electricity once, in DC, but I don't remember leaving the AC on during the day, let alone for a several day trip.
334: that article is some of the most horrendous divide-the-middle-class-against-itself-by-anecdote writing I've seen in quite a while. Those poor landlords! Luxury buildings with built-in climate control (let alone office buildings) go unremarked.
I lived someplace without individually metered utilities for a while. Many of my neighbors were pot growers. It ruled.
True, but it does encourage greater use of electricity, which is not a good thing. Btw, what do you mean by the luxury building comment? I haven't heard of or noticed higher end buildings being centrally climate controlled.
315: Essear is just consoling himself that even if Veronica Mars got a 4th season, it would have sucked anyway.
Oudemia you should sign on to gchat.
Oudemia now has a capital 'O'? Is there a story behind that?
But, with a very few exceptions, most of the world's conflicts depend on infusions of heavy weapons, at least on one side, often on both.
No they don't. Most of the world's conflicts get by just fine with nothing much heavier than a few DShK, a couple of truckloads of 107mm and a sprinkling of mortars.
330
More ridiculous strawmen concluding with:
You were, very clearly, averring that the military-industrial complex does not exist. That is evidence of either your ignorance or your deceitfulness.
What I actually said was that if the US stopped exporting weapons peace would not magically break out worldwide.
I believe there is a war lobby in the US, that it has too much influence, that the defense budget could and should be cut heavily and that the war in Iraq and the current effort in Afghanistan are foolish. I don't believe US weapons exports (and hence the profit motives of US munitions makers) are an important cause of conflicts in which the US is not directly involved.
I suspect Shearer's right on this one. The military-industrial complex profits from selling weapons, not necessarily from getting them used. In fact, in a way, war's bad for them.
True, in a war helicopters are lost, so the army has to buy more. But not actually that many more; you lose helicopters in peacetime too, after all, and most of the US army's helicopter losses are still accident rather than hostile action. And the sheer expense of fighting a war - most of which doesn't go on buying high-end weapons, but on non-MIC things like fuel, water, bullets and personnel costs - cuts into the budget you have to spend on new weapons. Look at the UK, for example, where there are very serious debates going on about Typhoon (for example) vs. Afghanistan. Or look at what's happened to much-loved MIC projects like Comanche and Crusader - ditched because they would have been no use in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Meanwhile, you can have vast amounts of military spending without a war to justify it. Look at the US navy. It hasn't fought a proper war since 1945.
What I actually said was that if the US stopped exporting weapons peace would not magically break out worldwide.
This is a truism. Are there no arms manufacturers in Russia, China, France, Britain...? Do they not want to sell their shit? Would they not all get totally drunk if Lockheed Martin decided to start making ploughshares instead?
The MIC, as conceptualised by Eisenhower, is an exceptionally powerful combined lobby for reasons we all understand. But it no more runs the government than does the Trilateral Commission.
330
... You're firmly in the schmibertarian camp ...
You are just using this as a meaningless catch all insult for anyone who disagrees with you. There are a large group of people in the United States who are generally supportive of a market economy. I am one of them. There is a small subset, libertarians, of these people who believe free markets are a magical elixir that will solve any problem (for example poorly performing public schools). I am not one of them.
I'm not sure insults can be meaningless. Even if they're poorly formed or justified, they still mean "I insult you!"
336: well, I really just meant buildings with climate control in the units, as opposed to buildings with separate AC units in the... units that can be turned on or off. It strikes me as much less likely that somebody would say "oh! I'll turn the thermometer to 80 before I leave so I don't waste electricity" than they would say "oh, better turn off those big, humming machines that are making the apartment cold before I leave", included electricity or no.
There is a small subset, libertarians, of these people who believe free markets are a magical elixir that will solve any problem
I feel like this small subset you describe would themselves call this a straw man argument. I can't say for sure, but I think when I've levelled the charge at (some of) them directly they've gotten quite huffy.
I'm pretty sure that most of the buildings where electricity is included use window units, certainly the ones I've seen in NYC do, and the one in DC was a loud built in wall heater/AC.
348: well, right, that's what I'm saying. The article was about people in (theoretically, for new york) somewhat moderately-priced apartments who occasionally left the AC running because they don't have to pay for electricity, but the rich people who live in apartments with built-in climate control that never turn it off because they aren't worried about their electricity costs go entirely unmentioned.
I dunno, maybe I'm being over-alert to not-much. It's just the Times, you know? Can't trust those fucks.
||Jesus, now someone else* has started up with the taqiyya shit. Epidemic!
*This fellow is very bright, English, and now living in continental Europe, where he seems down with the various racist and anti-Muslim political parties. Charmed, I'm sure. |>
The rich will always be immune to any cost driven energy savings. If they want to drive an eight mpg vehicle or keep their poorly insulated mansion freezing cold/super hot, they will. That's not an argument against seeking to use cost to create more efficient energy usage patterns. But in any case, a great many of the very high end apartment buildings in NYC are prewar and thus use window units.
It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
-- freaking Douglas MacArthur
At the most fundamental level if you build the world's biggest army you are going to look for places to shoot it.
349: And Tweety is very *right* on this one, how dare those individual unit dweebs enjoy what central AC provides in commercial and other buildings. So while lucky tenants across the city relax beneath arctic gusts, their landlords and building managers are left to worry whether these weeks of record-challenging heat will break the bank. Boo-hoo, you'd think the landlords were bob mcmanus or something they way they whine.
And, But as any introductory economics course might explain, tenants who blast air-conditioners on their landlord's dime are making rational, predictable choices[emphasis added]. Just like the motherfucking building management folks were when they set up that system (*and* when they bitch about it now). But as always with the Times, just like bigoted right-wing demagoguery , the needs of capital are just part of the landscape devoid of any human agency whatsoever. You might s well criticize the mountain for being in your path
At the most fundamental level if you build the world's biggest army you are going to look for places to shoot it.
An interesting theory, but one that is belied by the actual behaviour of the world's biggest army, which is not the US Army but the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and which hasn't gone to war outside the borders of China since 1979.
314: I loved that book and I saw the play.
Rhetorical point to ajay for my leaving myself open to the gratuitous misread. Please substitute "most deadly"/"most expensive" for "biggest".
356: OK, I'll go for that. China also has the world's second largest defence budget. The PLA is the largest and the second most expensive military in the world. (No consistent "deadliness" metric exists.) So how come China isn't being more aggressive?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Even if such a correlation exists, the logical way for causation to run is surely "decide to go to war" --> "spend more on military", not "spend more on military" --> "decide to go to war". That's like arguing that people decide to have kids because they move to bigger houses.
(No consistent "deadliness" metric exists.)
Not a priori anyway.
359: so, to again discuss this argument without necessarily signing on to it (I might sign on to it! I'm really not sure!), I think the idea is that the US decided to go to war in WWII, and as part of that process created a hitherto unknown degree of militarization of the industrial and manufacturing base of the country. While that was rolled back to some degree at the end of the war, it created a powerful class of business people with a vested interest in keeping their (giant) newly-created industries alive, along with an enormous class of middle managers whose methodology and experience is founded in a military/defense approach to problem-solving. This lead (and continues to lead) to a much more militarized (or at least military-approach-comfortable) approach to all kinds of things, from large alleged existential threats like the USSR during the cold war to small problems like insufficiently deferential developing world governments to really, really tiny problems like some idiot with a car full of manure.
China is a problematic comparison in many ways, because, first of all, the defense spending per capita is way different and second of all military spending isn't integrated into the industrial economy in at all the same way.
How much of the PLA is being used to ensure domestic tranquility? Also, how good are they at projecting force? The US can place ordinance at will anywhere and face little political cost, domestic or foreign.
362: I would be that there are hundreds of government employees who discuss that every day. Thoughts like that cheer me when I feel that I have not used my day very well.
361: I agree with the first half of that, as who would not, but the point about modern war is that you buy stuff for them in advance. In 1940, when military equipment was much simpler, it could make sense in theory for (say) Chrysler to want a war, because a war would mean lots of government contracts for trucks and jeeps and aero engines and so on. But modern kit's so expensive and complex that it has to be made in dedicated factories - you couldn't just shut down an PT Cruiser line and turn it over to start making APCs in a month. Having incredibly sophisticated weapons means that you need a military-industrial complex - you can't just rely on industrial mobilisation in time of war, because you also can't expect high-intensity wars to last very long (because they're so expensive!), so you'll need to fight, to a large extent, with what you have on hand.
Having a militarised approach to all kinds of things isn't new. The US has had a militarised approach to all kinds of things for a long time. Ask the Sioux or the Cubans.
China is a problematic comparison in many ways, because, first of all, the defense spending per capita is way different and second of all military spending isn't integrated into the industrial economy in at all the same way.
Doesn't matter : JP's argument was that "if you build the world's biggest army you are going to look for places to shoot it", nothing to do with per-cap spending or industrial policy, just that if you have a large army it will tempt you into an aggressive foreign policy. China has a large army and has not been tempted into an aggressive foreign policy. The US had an aggressive, militarised foreign policy in 1960, when it had an enormous army, and it had one in 1910 when it had a tiny army, and it had one in 1870 when it had an even smaller army.
second of all military spending isn't integrated into the [Chinese] industrial economy in at all the same way
Citation needed! It's fairly common in China for the armed forces to control large investments in the civilian economy directly.
The US had an aggressive, militarised foreign policy in 1960, when it had an enormous army, and it had one in 1910 when it had a tiny army, and it had one in 1870 when it had an even smaller army.
But with the tinier army, it attempted to control fewer places.
On one level Stormcrow has to be right. Having an army large enough to control the world is a necessary condition for a global empire. On the other hand, it is not a sufficient condition, as the example of China might show.
To make the point another way, the military industrial complex is a contributing factor to American imperialism, but far from the most important one.
Also, I'm not sure why the arguments on this thread have become so heated.
No, I don't know why. I've stopped trying to make sense of world affairs through any grander theoretical framework.
370: Oh, now that I look the comments that I was thinking about are on the "runner's up" thread.
That air conditioning article is a great example of the principle-agent problem I was asking about earlier.
or maybe not. I'm not sure if the tenant can count as an agent of the landlord. If the paradigm of a principle agent arrangement is employer-employee, then it doesn't quite work, because the landlord doesn't pay the tenant. But the landlord does entrust the tenant with her stuff, and then doesn't have right incentive structure to get good stewardship.
the principle-agent problem
The problem being that the agents don't have any principles?
I want to be your Princi-PAL, just so long as nobody pees on my car like at the last school.
Oudemia now has a capital 'O'? Is there a story behind that?
No, no. Stupid iPhone field automatically capped it.
And here I was waiting for the story of 'O'.
There should be more letter-based erotica. The Story of B would be worth writing for the cover art alone.
The Story of B
The archive at her blog already has the outlines of the plot. We'd just need to fill in the steamier details.
Actually, I hadn't thought of that. I was just going for the general shape of the letter 'B.'
In re: PRC/US comparisons. It was never my argument that there's some kind of direct correlation between the US spending $1 on military procurement and $1 worth of havoc happening in the world at large. In fact, I should have thought it was obvious that rumors of war are often just as good as war from the perspective of weapon makers. However, I think there is a pretty direct causation of military force utilization by the actions of weapon makers. They've worked with jingoists to create a global system which supports ever-larger military budgets and ever more fervent appeals to use the weapons purchased with those budgets to kill people. That's the beauty of it, you see? One fellow makes the rifle, another makes the bullet, another makes the rifle sling, another one makes the plane that flies the soldier overseas -- none of them have any direct interest in making sure that comes down to one particular person being shot. And they can all sleep soundly at night because of their commitment to honesty and fair-dealing. But eventually, somebody does get shot, and it was their individual actions that made it happen, whether or not that specific person was bothering them or not.
384: And it's all part of the syndicate and everybody has a share.
Y'all know better than invite me to Austin
Yes, yes, we do.
However, I think there is a pretty direct causation of military force utilization by the actions of weapon makers. They've worked with jingoists to create a global system which supports ever-larger military budgets and ever more fervent appeals to use the weapons purchased with those budgets to kill people.
Yes. The military industrial complex creates a general climate of fear to promote their product. This is very different from directly lobbying for war, but it pushes in the same direction.
351 But in any case, a great many of the very high end apartment buildings in NYC are prewar and thus use window units.
I wonder if this is still the case with all the buildings going up in, like, the west end of Chelsea with kajillion dollar condos in them. I think old money lives, unsurprisingly, in old buildings but there is a lot of construction going on to accomodate new money. Um, anecdata of course. Me and my in-depth knowledge of real estate and the upper reaches of Manhattan society...
needing to belong to some group of spat-upon outcasts seems to be the dominant thread that binds them together
They are a giant pain in the ass. Juggalos and a lot of the other "street kids" think they're entitled to aggressively panhandle and generally just be aggressive assholes in public places. It then turns into a whine about discrimination because we jail them as often as possible.
389: I don't think I've ever seen a Juggalo here. Certainly not panhandling. There are a lot of oogles though, in the summertime.
Material interests shape ideology, and then the ideology reinforces the material interest. That's how stuff gets entrenched. If we seriously pulled in our international military commitments to take a less "imperialist" stance, that would mean a cut in military spending of at least $3 trillion in the next ten years and hundreds and thousands of job displacements. It's very naive to think that doesn't affect things. All of that spending has some kind of military "need" associated with it, in some planning document somewhere, and all those planners and the beneficiaries of their plans constitute a permanent militarism lobby in DC. When that militarism tips over into war is a contingent question, but I think the collective impact is enormous.
I don't think you can point to a single US war where domestic political factors aren't so much more important than the interests of the MIC as to make the argument about the interests of the MIC just a bunch of hippy-dippy nonsense.
I would argue the opposite -- the notion that the MIC is unrelated to U.S. foreign policy is what's naive, idealistic, and abstracted.
Anyway, in this decade the effect of weapons technology on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was very obvious at the time. Hell, we were so leery about casualties in Afghanistan we didn't even go after Osama at Tora Bora because we didn't want to commit ground troops. With Iraq it was even more obvious that we were thinking that our technology would make this an "easy" war without many casualties. Post-Vietnam a huge amount of political and military concern has been directed at avoiding U.S. casualties and avoiding the need for a draft, and advanced military technology that allows precision strikes with little risk to ground troops.
Also, gotta say it -- all the dumping on libertarians for being pro-militarism is ironic given that RON PAUL, the leading libertarian politician in the U.S., is along with Dennis Kucinich the strongest national advocate of radical cuts in military spending and overseas committment. I hope you all caught the joint Paul/Kucinich resolution calling for immediate Afghanistan withdrawal last month.
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Hell, we were so leery about casualties in Afghanistan we didn't even go after Osama at Tora Bora because we didn't want to commit ground troops.
No, you didn't get Osama at Tora Bora because you were determined that if he was going to get captured it would be by Americans dammit, so your general ordered the foreign SF team that was closing on him to fall back and leave it to 10th Mountain Division, who didn't manage to get him. The US command were willing to risk losing him altogether (as in fact happened) rather than have him be captured by non-American troops. In retrospect, we should have pulled out of the whole mess then and there. It was clear it wasn't going to be handled seriously.
347
I feel like this small subset you describe would themselves call this a straw man argument. I can't say for sure, but I think when I've levelled the charge at (some of) them directly they've gotten quite huffy.
If, like me, they aren't libertarians this is understandable. If they are libertarians how do they characterize libertarian philosophy?
If they are libertarians how do they characterize libertarian philosophy?
Well, for one thing, I think most libertarians who are interested in seeming thoughtful do acknowledge the occasional market failure in need of government intervention, (like defense, although I suppose that gets counted as a separate category for some reason) and when pressed almost all of them have a significant list of laws that they think are promising.
But I dunno, you'd have to ask them. I think it all kind of falls apart hilariously when you drill down to specific definitions, so I'm probably not the best person to explain it coherently.
