The guy has rhetorical chops that don't come around very often. Talk about perfect pitch. Too bad he's the antiChrist
apo, those are some of the best comments I've ever seen.
BREAKING NEWS:
I came up for a replacement for the infamous "ccmc" for when Ogged starts dating again!
ip2eac -- Insert, Pump Twice, Ejaculate, Apologize, Cry.
Maybe Adam has a different, fancier technique. That's the only sense I could make of it.
CCMC: Cry, cry, masturbate, cry.
It first entered the Unfogged lexicon when Ogged was reluctant to ask out a Swedish grad student.
Or no, actually he was reluctant to attend the party where he ended up meeting the Swedish grad student.
I was hoping for some kind of Worst Commenter Ever award.
as I recall it, he was reluctant to attend the party, then reluctant to e-mail the grad student, for fear of breaking her heart. Then she didn't respond to the e-mail, because she "moved to sweden."
But as it is an oral record, there is no telling what actually happened. There isn't any one ogged, or if there is, it's a different ogged than the one you thought.
CCMC: Cry, cry, masturbate, cry.
Um, I did get it, Kotsko.
I think he got that you got it, which is why 9.
Yes, and I was granting his wish in 11.
Apostropher -- Very elegant.
As for Obama -- I kind of wish that someone could work on convincing the American people that they want "progressivism" or "social democracy" or "Stalinism" or whatever it is they're calling it now, rather than just being so damn "reality-based." I know you do elections with the population you have, but when I read this thing from Obama, I think: "Well of course they don't want a 'progressive agenda' -- they've never even fucking heard of such a thing!"
But as it is an oral record, there is no telling what actually happened. There isn't any one ogged, or if there is, it's a different ogged than the one you thought.
Is this whole line of talk my fault?
as I recall it
Funny, the way I remember it, ogged went to the party, tried to make a move on the Swedish college student, only to have her slap him and place him under a curse. The curse caused his clothes to turn invisible, whereupon all of the women at the party (including, strangely enough, Ex, ExBeforeLast, and his mother) started dancing around him, laughing and pointing, while chanting SMALL PENIS! SMALL PENIS! SMALL PENIS!)
I kind of wish that someone could work on convincing the American people that they want [...] "Stalinism"
Sigh. Too bad Lewis Lapham's lead essay in the latest Harpers isn't online. It's a great Swiftian call for America to cast aside its reflexive association of fascism and the mid-20th century atrocities, and show that we can be the best that fascism has to offer. He then goes on to list all the ways that we are so far ahead of Weimar Germany in achieving it, so it wouldn't even require that much effort.
Chopper, too bad your story was ruined by the gratuitous parenthesis at the end.
I've decided that in reality, Weimar Germany (pre-Hitler) was the best possible form of government. In close second is the Hapsburg Monarchy.
The number one recommended diary on Daily Kos right now is called "What an appalling diary from Barack Obama".
Those folks at the Daily Kos, they know the antichrist when they see him.
I'm actually torn between the two arguments, believing that Dems need a good cop/bad cop approach. When GWB ran for the first time, he was all sweetness and light, letting his underlings be the ones getting their hands dirty. It made him look reasonable to a lot of voters, even though the Republican hatred of Clinton was well-known to anyone with a heartbeat those 8 years. I think the party itself needs to be tough and firm, but the public faces of the party should probably be reasonable and trustworthy, rather than ideological lightning rods.
I think the party itself needs to be tough and firm, but the public faces of the party should probably be reasonable and trustworthy, rather than ideological lightning rods.
Yup. I pretty much agree with the criticisms in the diary, except that I think that Obama is an excellent 'good cop'.
Here's a question: what would it take to spark an actual civil war again in this country, in which states seceded? Could it ever happen again? Would total fiscal meltdown, coupled with an extra-spicy dose of end-of-the-world religious fundamentalism, do the trick?
Sometimes our way of life seems a whole lot more precarious than most people imagine.
Obama's tone is good--too good. It makes it hard for me to trust him.
I'm a little wary of faith-based initiatives. I'd be okay with them if we lived in a country with a nice staid established church (mainly because that established church is my own), but I'm not really comfortable with them here--especially since if your goal is to provide a social service, and you don't feel the need to proselytize in the process, any religious organization can set up a separate 501(c)(3). I know of one soup kitchen run out of a not-rich church that operates this way. I'm not sure whether they get gov't money, but they do get corporate donations. Catholic charities has always had a bunch of gov't contracts. And it isn't as though this excludes all evangelism. The people eating in the church basement know that some of the people helping them are Christians and that they were motivated by their religion. I'm sure that if they want spiritual counseling they can go back to the church and talk to a priest.
And I'd really like to know what he means by market-based solutions in healthcare. I'm operating right now from the position that what is ruining our healthcare system is our reliance on market solutions, and I mean that in two senses. First there's the obvious Republican push for HSA's and the like, because they believe that individuals should ration their own care based on price. And, second, there's the misguided notion that we can have a system of insurance which doesn't include everyone and that the private markets are able to negotiate the best deals. Get me a sharp monopolis government procurement officer any day!
Part of the problem is that rank-and-file Democrats are always perfectly willing to savage their own over minutiae, while Republicans will reliably defend their own in the face of enormous ideological apostasy.
Reagan's 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.
Democrats' 11th Commandment: Only stop forming circular firing squads long enough to eat your young.
apostropher,
I consider unfogged a semi-private discussion forum, and since it's not a formally political blog, I don't expect the Republicans to snoop here.
None of the stuff he said in that piece enraged me. I just thought he was kind of slick.
I do think that CAFTA was bad, although I am mainly free trade, and I would like to have some more consistency in our party on some issues--especially health care.
Oh, I wasn't directing that comment at you, BG, but at the "What an Appalling" diary. I think it's commendable that we're honest in our criticisms of our own. That's far more defensible than the Powerline/Hewitt if-Bush-says-the-sky-is-green-then-it's-green tendency. That said, it does carry a price.
Oh, that makes much more sense.
Look, it's easy to sound decent and wise if you are willing to lie:
"
I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don't think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don't think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don't think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.
"
It was these supposedly decent American people that RE-elected GWB, and that was after Iraq had been proven a lie, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were known about, the massive tax giveaways to the rich had occurred.
A person looking at this would reasonably conclude that Americans really are closet fascists. What's Barak's alternative? That they are morons. There's a whole lot of truth to that, but I'd give him more credit if he actually spelled it out.
Most Germans did not, literally, know what was going on at the camps. But at least the country as a whole had the guts to take some responsibility after the war and admit that they should have known, should have put two and two together.
I'd like to echo 27. While that sort party discipline destroys whatever honesty, ideological or practical, has ever existed in the republican party, and converts the whole thing into a sort of naked power grab with no redeeming qualities, the problem is that that strategy is the strongest political strategy given US institutions. It's the kind of strategy that's going to win. And it's the kind of strategy that converts the winning party, not instantly, but eventually and surely, into fascists.
pdf23ds--If the winners must turn into fascists, then what's the solution. Are we, as Democrats, supposed to accept defeat to avoid becoming like the current Repubs?
I don't want to be lock-step on everything, and at the same time I don't want to tear up our own over small disagreements when we broadly agree, but I don't want to lose my country to these fascists who are in charge now.
Most likely, the Democrats end up adopting the same strategy, but gain success because the Republicans go jumping off the deep end while the Democrats stay more centrist (and hopefully pull back to the left some when they start to see some electoral victories here and there). I think the saving change in the long term might end up being fixing the institutions that currently make the two-party system so entrenched, and giving us a system more like all the other democracies, with preportional representation and such and so on. Whether that ends up happening is anyone's guess, though. The party in power doesn't like to make laws that change the balance of power, and election methods aren't a topic that really captures the popular imagination easily.
And how much the US suffers in the meanwhile? Well, I'm still interested in moving to the Netherlands.
Then again, long-term (> 10 years) US politics don't really interest me that much, being a singulatarian as I am.
But the Democrats had this kind of control over all aspects of government during the New Deal era, right into the early 50's, and it didn't turn them into fascists. Quite the opposite, obviously.
The Southern Democrats were very different from the Northern liberals and even the machine bosses of the North. You really had a couple of parties under one label then.
Of course, but that's exactly my point. No ideological unity whatsoever, but still an efficient, winning electoral machine.
The post-reconstruction anti-Republicanism clearly was a factor, but they still won in all those other places, and passed all that progressive legislation, without anything like the lock-step purity of modern Republicans.
Also, the 30's to the 50s was a pretty wierd time in world history. That we didn't go too crazy is the basis for the claims that FDR was a great president.
This ain't no normal time neither, SCMT.
Why not? It actually does seem like a pretty normal time. We're not fearing annihilation, the limits of American "hyper-power" have become pretty clear to everyone, and people are a bit freaked out by raids by the barbarians. This is pretty much standard world history, no?
Ogged, I'm a pretty firm believer that the rate at which technology is improving is accelerating. There are some pretty clear existential risks involved in this, and they get worse as time goes on. Besides raising the stakes, they also change the playing field, by introducing new communication technologies (radio, telephone, television, blogging, what next?) and research technologies like google. You can't just throw out all these variables as inconsequential, though they affect the political process through too many layers of indirection for me to search through.
I guess I should have said, this period of relative normalcy is just about to end. We're about to grapple with a global energy/resource crisis unprecedented in human history, on top of the fact that the international global order (such as it is) that we spent decades building up is quickly dissolving. The world's great superpower is on an unsustainable spending spree because there's literally no other course for it to take at this point, and it's become a virtual one-party government unable and unwilling to make any corrections. Many, many signs point to the fact that we are at the end of this extraordinary age, and it's unclear what will happen next.
Much more like the world before WWI than the years after the depression, but still no less momentous.
I mean to say, "it also changes the playing field", as in the accelerating change and the political field. The existential risks do some, in changing what issues are involved in campaigns, but that's about their only immediate effect until the world blows up.
Or, maybe I just need to go have a pint and forget the whole thing.
For anyone who wants to hear Obama on NPR's "Wait wait don't tell me", you can hear the segment on www.npr.com and look under the august 6th archive.
Joe, you're spot-on. We absolutely are standing on the edge of a huge transformation of the "American experience" and of the international order generally.
At the end of WWI, it was big ideologies that people turned to - fascism, communism, welfare statism, neoliberalism, etc. I fear that this time, it's religion's turn and there are three really big fault lines: the Muslim-Christian-Jewish one, the Orthodox crescent through Eastern Europe, and the Hindu-Muslim lines in the Indian subcontinent. Tack that on to the end of century of wildly irresponsible arms proliferation, add in a rapid decline in living standards in the first world, and we could be facing a very, very scary near future.
Oh, and you forgot to mention that there are powerful segments of extremely fundamentalist sects in at least Christianity and Islam, one practically leading America and the other in control of a number of middle eastern states. Not sure about the others big religions w.r.t. fundamentalism though.
I'm guessing that the phrase "have a Lemsip and a wank, lad, tha'll feel better" doesn't translate too well outside the four square feet of northwest England in which it was coined.
Lemsip? Lemsip? As in the King Crimson improvisation titled "Sharks' Lungs in Lemsip"? Whatsit?
Lemsip, and I'm pretty sure a "wank" is a "wank", wherever you are.
Not sure about the others big religions w.r.t. fundamentalism though.
Well, there are Zionists who are willing to assassinate their own prime minister, and Hindus who commit atrocities against Muslims in India (especially over Kashmir), so it's all over.
I've never heard of fundamentalist Shinto, though. Don't know what that would be like.
Fundamentalist Shinto might look like the Great Pacific War.
OK, I simplify, but it did play a role.