So yeah, the crazy Democratic party loyalists, who I think act like a bunch of idiots sometimes, are still critical to preventing further movement towards the Right in this country. ”

You couldn’t be more wrong.

Democrats take the Republicans’ complaints and vocabulary, only to offer half-rightish solutions. Solutions that look less extreme to be sure, but the point is the Opposition endows the Republicans’ imperial and racist complaints with justifications for later action.

Take the Iran case. The Democrats voted FOR the Lieberman bill defining the Revolution Guards as terrorists. But they want to negotiate they say.

Well maybe that’s what they want, but the Republicans will say “What ? Negotiate with terrorists ? You pussies !” And they will win.

True opposition in this case would mean opposing the bill and saying the Guards are not terrorists.

This is only one example. This happens all the time. This is how there is a movement to the right in the USA.

BECAUSE THE DEMOCRATS DO NOT OPPOSE THE IDEOLOGICAL GROUNDS OF THE RIGHT. THEY AGREE WITH THEM. THEY SUPPORT THEM.

And when Republicans come around to the offices of Power, they are absolutely free to unleash whatever they want.

Stop voting for Democrats, else you render yourselves guilty of the next war of aggression. Already more than a million dead in Iraq. After 8 years of Clinton, more than a million people died at the hands of a Republican president.

WHAT KIND OF OPPOSITION IS THIS ?

No you’re not. These are tags that politicians choose, they mean nothing. You will elect someone who convinced you he was a progressive, and then he will cave in. Remember Feinstein, remember Dodd, remember Obama himself.

Also, there are pressures that makes incremental change within the Democratic Party impossible or unrealistic.

It may be time to remember that the Democratic Party has been existing for more than a hundred years, and this country has always had progressive people like you.

It’s not time for gradualism. It’s time for radicalism.

In fairness to Dsquared, I haven’t read the back half either.

And while we’re discussing angry moralists, the fact remains that while up in heaven or The Aether or the land of The Forms, where truth is Truth and nothing else exists, John Brown is wrapped in silk and drinking tea with Moses while Abe Lincoln is washing their feet, in the real world Lincoln, the politician, the negotiator, the half-in/half-out guy, is the more important figure. Moralists have their place, they serve a purpose too in our Nada’s Nonexistent Plan, but what interests me is why I trust Markos Moulitsas, political player, intellectual middleweight and vulgar empiricist a hell of a lot more more than I trust John Quiggin and theories of creative capitalism.
The thing about moralists is they’re not really vulgar, they only use vulgarity to mock vulgarity. Deep down the hate it. The thing about rationalists is that they found their logics on their own imagined a priori orders. And those orders are never vulgar.
But politics is vulgar. Life is vulgar. The ideal world doesn’t exist and never will. I prefer angry idealism to idealistic optimism, Anti-Pangloss to Pangloss, but still with the Devil’s eye.
And Quiggin does not understand that in trying to reform the market as the market, all he’s doing is expanding it, and the role of instrumentalism in communiation and social life. The end of his logic is to say “Art is Commerce” and he’s too unobservant to realize it.
Art and commerce need each other as antagonists. Duty to oneself and duty to others are conflicting obligations. The conflict is what gives resilience. Quiggin et al offer reasoned reasonable mush:
Posner for pussies.
I propose a moratorium on the use of the term “creative.” Try replacing it with “observant” and see where it takes you. People these days are far too creative, and not nearly observant enough.
That’s what’s disappointing.

Now that’s what I call naive utopian idealism…

Otherwise.one thing to add: to Rich Puchalsky (07.23.08 at 4:54 am), who said: No, please, not another Faurisson-go-round …

It’s always worth putting in a bit of time to nail a lie, particularly so in support of someone, like Chomsky, whose opponents seem to rely almost exclusively on misrepresentation, the drawing of false ‘logical’ conclusions and, when all else fails, bitter, name-calling, evidence-free rants.”

I made no misrepresentations; I didn’t lie. I quoted exactly the words that the great man signed his name to. They stand on their own feet, so to speak. They were, and are, disgraceful.

“you’ll always have to pick and choose what to keep and what to throw away. True with anybody actually”

How could one disagree?

But “he never admits [being sloppy or indulgent.]”—You can’t support that statement.

So side from your dislike of the attitudes of some of those who “share Chomsky’s rationalism and his idealism” (something for which it is at the very best unclear how Chomsky is responsible), and your contempt for his assumptions about humanity (which you don’t give us any way to verify or examine), there’s nothing left but such rants as “context, history and ambiguity, empiricism, are not things he takes seriously.”

You were on to something back at #69.

Criticizing US political system for the lack of democracy is a different matter; his main shtick is exposing hypocrisy of the powerful, that’s where it fits, I think.

sincere thanks

“The rest of the world” means every other country in the world including the EU, Iran, and Syria. I suppose that Obama is closer to consulting with these nations generally. I am sure that Seth has noticed that there is a schizoid tendency in right-wing Zionism. Right-wing Zionists want the US to continue to support Israel wholeheartedly but are almost proud of the scorn of the rest of the world. If you are an Israeli politician you need the help of the US and whoever is in power there. But it is obvious that the Israeli politician might think that this was not what Zionism was supposed to be about. A truly independent country can survive without alliances.

Intellectually Chomsky is in a time warp; his idealism concerning humanity as such is as dated as his linguistics, but he’s still a hero to the young. Yet when he’s caught being sloppy or indulgent he never admits it. He tries to argue his way out of anything, even if it would he easier to just own up and move on. It’s the same with his philosophical arguments. His brilliant imagination is also thin and brittle. You can contextualize him, as a post war rationalist, and still value his insights. But you’ll always have to pick and choose what to keep and what to throw away. True with anybody actually. But context, history and ambiguity, empiricism, are not things he takes seriously. However good a reporter he is, his intellectual model as a thinker and a philosopher, and his model of the world, is deeply deeply flawed.

Hey, I like Seth too. I am a big fan.