Shock and Aw, we knew it already

But the tape converts “those things we knew privately but didn’t talk about” into “those things we all know NOW because it’s out there in the open.” Like in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” when the Emperor stepped out in public and started to parade in his ‘clothes’ everyone knew that he was naked. But no one said anything so no one knew that every one else knew. The moment that pesky little kid blurted out “he’s neckkkid!!!” everyone knew that everyone else knew. It became public knowledge.

At a guess: deniability, even to oneself. The crucial voters are people who don’t like Trump, but who always vote Republican. Those are tempted to downplay Trumps flaws, for themselves and to others. Not proven, then it’s not proven.

From the NYT story –

“The leaked email, dated Jan. 25, does not contain Mrs. Clinton’s full speeches to the financial firms, leaving it unclear what her overall message was to these audiences.”

In other words, Russia’s intelligence services probably have edited the information they have chosen to release via their front organisation, Wikileaks.

As an aside, what a terrible shame it is that, when Assange and Wikileaks first emerged, no-one thought to question the wisdom of treating a man with incredibly dubious ethics, motives and actions as a credible source for anything.

Daragh, you’re misreading the NYT story. The leaked email was edited by her staffers to highlight which comments they thought might not play well in front of the electorate.

Also if Clinton thinks Russia is manipulating the record there happens to be a super easy way to prove that–she could release the transcripts herself.

The initial Clinton response is the typical Clinton response to bad news, and exactly why both Clintons are so irritating as politicians–they try to sound like they are denying it without actually denying it. (Except on the Lewinsky thing where Lewinsky got painted as a crazed liar until the dress showed up).

We knew she didn’t get paid to harangue the financial sector when banks were paying her to speak. I understand why she didn’t want these released – especially during the primary where any kind of conciliatory or positive expression to bankers would’ve been vilified – but they are barely news. She believes financial insiders know the business best and therefore know how to regulate it best? She doesn’t preclude outsiders being involved to make sure there’s no corruption – she’s just making the very obvious observation that you need to know about the thing you’re regulating. During the primary I thought that the worst thing the speeches had were some relatively innocuous praise of the banks that would’ve been red meat for the Bernie left – no matter its merits. The example I had in mind was “the banks played a pivotal role in preserving our economy in the wake of the recession.” This would’ve played horribly then (Bernie shouting: “In 2008 I remember the banks were destroying our country!”). Everything released has been at about that level. Politically inconvenient and not particularly interesting like gmafb I’m supposed to be outraged that she was nice to the people she was paid to address?

I should probably add tho full disclosure I am not horrified by open borders / free trade comments bc I think they’re more-or-less correct and that the protectionist left is wrong on this particular issue. If you were feeling some relief bc Hillary said she’d oppose TPP (though these don’t indicate that she’ll reverse that stance – she has staked too much of her campaign on it) I could see you being upset to learn that position doesn’t represent her true feelings on creating growth.

A torrent of mud works better for HRC than Trump. I find pretty much all critiques short of Trump-Hitler to have some/a lot of merit, and I say that as someone who’d prefer Americans take a chance on Trump. Cue the wailing.

The last discussion HRC want to have is on her record, and that of the administration. It’s only slightly amusing that the reality star who insulted his way to the top of the garbage heap now finds himself going to toe-to-toe in a mud-slinging match where his frat-boy antics are served up days before a ‘serious’ debate on the issues. Whether we’re talking about Mark Foley stalking congressional pages, or Anthony Weiner, the slime is never too far from the discussion.

I cringed when reading Trump’s latest spew in much the same way as I do whenever I recall Clinton’s comments about a cigar. I don’t like to think of myself as a prude and consider the sex lives of the candidates a non-issue.

But really, could it get any worse? I expect the HRC folks will come out with ‘serial rapist’ charges whilst chasing down Trump’s kids to get them to ‘distance’ themselves from dad. Trump has wisely avoided (so far) going too far on Hillary’s sex life. As noted above, she’d prefer to have do that discussion, rather than on the Affordable Care Act, rising premiums , and the new jobless figures.

I can’t see many people feeling particularly satisfied with the outcome, whatever that outcome may be. I wanted Sanders to win, refuse to offer support HRC this time round, and find myself now cheering for the rodeo clown. I wouldn’t want my kids within fifty feet of any of them.

My only consolation is that Ted Cruz is out of the running this time round.

As for the prognostications, HRC needs to be up by 5, at least, after the 3rd debate. Any major attacks, or bad economic news between now and the election and voters aren’t going to care what Trump said in 2005 anymore than what he said in 2016.

I haven’t watched any of the debates, or any other kinds of coverage. We can spare ourselves that much at least.

“Trump has wisely avoided (so far) going too far on Hillary’s sex life.”

You didn’t watch Trump’s apology video. He explicitly mentions Bill’s abuse of women in it and makes it clear that he plans to bring it up at the next debate.

= = =I hope you mean they are frustrating facts not frustrating comments = = =

(John – not saying you did this personally). It was, and still is, the endless flow of arrogant condescending statement about the childishness and naïveté of those asking the questions that Sanders asked from Scott Lemieux and his ilk. Head on over to Washington Monthly or LGM and you can still read them, along with demands that Sanders voters abase themselves (it not being enough to have bent the knee). I’m no Millennial – way too many years and political campaigns behind me for that – but guess what? Wall Street and neoliberal economics _are not working_ for much of the country outside NY/DC/LA/Seattle. Bringing Wall Street into yet another nominally Dem administration is doubleplusunwise.

“Politically inconvenient and not particularly interesting like gmafb I’m supposed to be outraged that she was nice to the people she was paid to address?”

Hillary supporters remind me of gullible spouses who excuse their partner’s cheating. It didn’t happen. And anyway it only happened once. And it was just a fling, he/she didn’t mean it when they promised they’d divorce me. And dishonesty to them doesnt prove he/she’s dishonest to me.

“Clinton also told a housing trade group in 2013 that on certain issues, she has “a public and a private position.” “If everybody’s watching, you know, all of the back room discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least,” said Clinton. “So, you need both a public and a private position.”

Idiotic. What she said isn’t disqualifying. She wasn’t ‘cheating.’ She is who she was all along – a center-left politician. She’s more left on social issues than economic issues but she can be pushed on economic issues as well. Your cheating analogy is indicative of the weird moral expectations you have of politicians. Her inability to satisfy your particular ideological requirements doesn’t make her a cheater.

Re her comments about a public and private position read them carefully, particularly the part that says “all of the back room discussions and the deals.” Now maybe you don’t know a lot about politics but that is how things get done – you agree to support their cause in exchange for their support. Or you promise them a position in your government if they deliver a vote on an important bill. This isn’t like – you’re so naive. This is more like – you don’t understand how great Presidents (Lincoln, LBJ) have gotten important legislation passed. But she’s right – obviously from your very comments – that many American voters find this kind of insider negotiation disgusting. It’s not because they’re correct though. It’s bc they’re political children.

There’s a lot of silliness here, such as “if the Democrats lose, a lot of blame should go to Hillary’s primary voters” — but the biggest thing is the way that some paid speeches to bankers are considered a smoking gun or fundamental insight. Does anyone have any evidence that Clinton will treat Wall Street in a fundamentally more favorable way than Obama did? Are her policies likely to be anything other than some window-dressing of reform, with a basic support for this sector? Because I don’t remember the vast outpouring of progressive angst over Obama’s re-election; or professions of commenters here that they were voting for ‘none of the above’.
Hilary leads a coalition of Democrats, she’s not going to be Queen. That coalition has become significantly more liberal over the years; its not necessary that its leader be in the vanguard. This whole ‘true feelings’ debate is silly, both because there is no way to know what Clinton’s ‘true feelings’ are (and it’s silly to assume that they are revealed in a paid speech, any more than my ‘true feelings’ are revealed in a political discussion at work), but because even if you do identify them, they’re going to be mediated by the interactions of her caucus, and the Republican caucus.
Remember how much of the 2008 campaign was about each candidates health care policy? It would have been far more productive if that had included talk about the health care policy of Vote 59 and Vote 60 in the Senate.

Who said anything about smoking guns or disqualifying? So defensive. Not that that means anything of course. No emperor, and surely none of their apologists, has ever been naked. I’m sure of that.

milx,
The arrogant assumption that those who question the financialization of the economy and extensive fan service to the ultra wealthy are naive and inexperienced is part of the problem. We got the very weak CFPB – great. Then the Dem Party teamed up with the financial institutions to start dialing back the (weak) protection. We see the results in the massive Wells Fargo identity theft and fraud: no criminal charges. Do you think we don’t see this?

This sounds a lot to me like when the DNC emails were revealed and though everyone who could read quickly realized it was some DNC staffers who didn’t like Bernie but never organized or conspired against him, some Bernie supporters continue to pretend like it constituted evidence that Clinton cheated him out of the nomination. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

@22
Purity politics always claims the moral high ground, while disdaining compromise and negotiation as inferior.

Which is really an insult to the notion of seeing ourselves, not as Master and peasants, but as equal citizens negotiating our interests and ideas and reaching a consensus.

Purity politics is really just a form of theology, where the one true faith should rule without question or resistance.

@sebastian_h

Oh dear – missed that. Thank you for catching. That being said, I’m still deeply, deeply skeptical of anything that comes from Assange, and it’s interesting that the leak is of the excerpts the Clinton campaign considered most damaging, not the speeches themselves (though to be scrupulously fair perhaps Wikileaks was unable to access them for some reason).

That being said – I’m largely with Nick. I’ve never really gotten the outrage over HRC’s Wall St. speeches. A little distasteful, sure, but I’m not that fussed about a politico taking cash to say nice things to bankers after dinner, if her actual campaign is reasonably progressive – which it is! More to the point I don’t see how the speech revelations undermine the most fundamental argument against Sanders’ candidacy – that however laudable his policy positions and goals there are massive structural obstacles to their implementation, and when presented with this inconvenient truth Sanders simply handwaved them away. That’s pandering, not radicalism.

I don’t like to think of myself as a prude and consider the sex lives of the candidates a non-issue.

The sex lives of consenting adults may be a non-issue. The normalisation of sexual assault is very much an issue.

@18, 17 Trump has already discussed Hillary’s role as ‘enabler’ of Bill’s abuses and his repeated on-camera lies are a matter of record, as is his tasteless behavior. But who are we to judge? Pretty much all of Trump’s supporters want him to avoid the mud bath, but he’s doing it his way.

Re: down-ticket Republicans preferring Trump, I’m referring to GOP elected officials in Washington, not voters. My comment was a response, in part, to comments about Republicans working with Obama and HRC on security issues, drone strikes, etc. and to calls from Republican elected officials for Trump to quit.

The entire mess is a train wreck on both sides.

“I’m referring to GOP elected officials in Washington”

I know who you meant. I’m pointing out that they won’t be elected officials much longer if this turns into a landslide for Hillary.

Cranky Observer has it correct in comments above. The basic fact that it’s important to remember is that HRC supporters are not the kind of people to do their excusification during the election and then stop afterwards. It’s joined up with their personal virtue signaling, so it will never stop. After the election there will still be the same old tropes: anyone who opposes HRC from the left must not like her because she’s a woman: anyone who opposes bombing or “free trade” agreements is a racist. They are not allies to the left or committed to the left in any way.

The human psyche seems to need a defining moment in order to crystalize an actionable thought out of nightmare gibberish.

@7: Clinton’s campaign hasn’t denied the quotes, so we may assume they’re genuine. I agree that context matters, but I don’t doubt the quotes.

@6: I’d never vote for any candidate proposing himself for the presidency who refused to release his tax returns, as Sanders did, consistently. (Eventually he said he would do so – after the convention.) This not only put him in dubious company with Romney and Trump but meant that an important aspect of his candidacy went unvetted — actually, Sanders was never properly vetted, because no one thought he would win and Clinton went pretty easy on him.

=”I won’t even say”

Also, the effective legalisation of felony theft.

Oh, wait, that is not an issue.

“From what I understand Trump was exchanging observations about the power that comes with celebrity, money, and greed.”

Yeah, I guess that’s one interpretation of ‘Grab them by the pussy’ — it’s an abstract observation about the power that comes with celebrity, money and greed! Nothing to see here, folks, just Philosopher King Trump ruminating. Maybe in a ‘stretch’, this ‘might’ have something to do with sexual assault. Must analyze.

As for Clinton, the killing and dismemberment of innocents abroad was normalized long ago. Sure, she’s going to continue it — that sucks. Are you arguing that Trump’s foreign policy wouldn’t be violent too?

Nick: “As for Clinton, the killing and dismemberment of innocents abroad was normalized long ago.”

No, not really. Let’s assume a U.S., post-WW II context. Both parties agreed that anti-Communism (really, opposition to the USSR) justified killing and dismemberment of innocents abroad. But in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s once the USSR was gone, there was a chance at this becoming a contested issue again. People on the left began to revert to an anti-war position, a good majority of them rejected the Iraq War because it was Bush’s war. But they turned out to only be anti-war for partisan reasons. Obama continued what Bill Clinton had begun and normalized killing and dismemberment for “humanitarian” reasons, and HRC will continue in this neoliberal tradition.

Trump, I assume, would be worse. But there is nothing tougher in a U.S. context than to oppose something that both main parties agree on — killing and dismemberment. And HRC supporters can not separate their support of HRC from their support of killing because they can’t face supporting HRC as strictly a lesser evil.

The problem with the Glenn Greenwald narrative that Democrats only opposed GWB’s war because he was a Republican and excused the same actions from Obama is that it doesn’t make sense. Lots of people opposed GWB’s war because they thought it was predicated on a lie, or would be extremely costly, or cost too many American lives. Some of that opposition was also radically anti-war in any manifestation but Greenwald’s sleight of hand requires you to not distinguish dove/hawk sentiments on any spectrum. I imagine the American consensus is: “No new wars. Yes to projecting ‘strength.’ Yes to bombing terrorists.” If GWB had limited himself to this the opposition would have been much less significant.

Like do you really think people would’ve been out in the streets in any kind of number for a NATO-approved “interventionist” GWB bombing action in Kosovo and Libya? I doubt it.

As an act of charity, to settle Daragh’s mind, I declare officially I am not running for President of the United States. (I think he has dark suspicions about some of the regulars.)

Trump has just admitted to a habit of sexual assault, and the discussion is focused on the issue of Clinton’s truthfulness and financial sector policy . . . Seems a little odd, frankly. A politician dissembling in private is a standard occurrence, but confessing to a habit of assaulting women is not, you’d think people might find those two big revelations a little, shall we say, asymmetrical?

“asymmetrical”?

What we usually argue about in these U.S. election threads is how far people should go in the cause of protecting the world from a greater evil by pretending Hillary Clinton is not a monster. Not especially a monster as an individual but a monstrous manifestation of a monstrous politics. Clinton giving speeches or talks for big bucks for major banks and keeping the content secret takes us into the heart of darkness, and not for the first time. If you don’t really care about anything but your personal virtue and whatever twisted counterfactual you confuse with evidence, then sure, the contrasts of private policy position with public policy position is all “nothing to see here, move along” maybe with a sidelong toss at Bernie Sanders didn’t disclose his income taxes. Clinton in public wants campaign finance reform; Clinton in private circumvents the limits and corrupts the DNC. Clinton in public promises to fight for the common man person; Clinton in private tells banksters she will support cutting Social Security.

The revelation that Trump is personally a pig and reveled in the power that comes with being a celebrity billionaire? That is a different heart of darkness. Is it disqualifying for high office? Probably should be. You don’t give more power to people who cannot handle it. Duh.

We have only one commenter who regularly argues for Trump I think and he is not a U.S. voter. So, our arguments are always about Clinton.

I have never thought Trump had a realistic chance. So, the more hysterical lesser evilism has always seemed both overwrought and unrealistic. I get the Dems have a made for teevee propaganda template built on a supposed Republican War on Women, and they will crank the Wurlitzer because they can. If we change the culture to reduce the frequency of sexual assault in the process, that is all to the good, I guess; I hope that is what is happening and not just vilification of the white male.

I worry a bit about whether Clinton oversells herself as the anti-Trump, mostly because of the effects after the election on her legitimacy, but also because of the still very small risk of “winning” what has become an unpopularity contest. (“The Russkies hacked my email” seems amazingly and bizarrely short-sighted.)

My own view remains dominated by the expectation of coming catastrophe, not especially caused or meliorated by Clinton personally, but very much an outcome of our degenerate politics. Kunstler had a good rant after the first debate.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/sizing-up-the-endgame/

Nick: “A politician dissembling in private is a standard occurrence, but confessing to a habit of assaulting women is not, you’d think people might find those two big revelations a little, shall we say, asymmetrical?”

Yes.

@ Cranky Observer

Two discussions running in parallel and not converging

They converge on the corrupt and decadent neoliberal global order.

kidney and Halbo–

It’s been quite a while since I checked in but I see you’ve changed your tune. Same views on HRC (understandable) but you’re unbridled support for Trump seems to have waned. Of course, I told you the other shoe would drop — lied about his taxes, lied about his charities, lied about his income, couldn’t stop insulting, and on and on. This will not stop either. There is always more. Stuff is being held back. I tried to tell you, but… btw-he’ll be more awful in the Town Hall debate than debate #1.

JH – You probably aren’t familiar with the Ray Rice incident. He’s an American football player. He admitted to hitting his wife who was knocked out. However, it was only when the video of the incident appeared that he faced real consequences. A video is way more powerful than a transcript. And yes, Trump’s full tax returns are worse than you can imagine. Literally seeing 18 signed returns with a 0 for taxes owed is worse than knowing he paid nothing.

I think re Trump, one of the more convincing arguments I’ve seen (made by, e.g., Sam Wang at PEC, Zeynep Tufekci et al on Twitter, etc.) is that it’s in large part because Trump is already behind and likely to lose—so jumping ship is easy/makes sense. I don’t know if that explains all of the reactions, but it probably does play an important part.

” It must mean that you support gropers! ”

Or that you never worry about being groped yourself.

What many of the posts above forget is the Unruh Rule.

Jesse Unruh was, for many years Speaker of the California House. When new members came on board, he always took them aside and said, “Son (for in those days it always was), there are going to be a lot of people up here offering you all sorts of things to get your vote. But if you can’t eat their food, drink their liquor, their women, take their money, and still vote against them, you don’t belong up here.” Sexist, yes, but also true for anyone in a legislative position.

Yes. I wouldn’t take any near-promise Hillary made in a speech to bankers as a pledge that she would do anything at all for them if she gets to be president. Indeed, I’d wager that nobody in the management suite of an investment bank would take anything she said in a speech to them with anything less then a boulder of salt. When she gets to be president, she’ll do what seems politically feasible and fits the promises she made publicly in the campaign, just like any other successful candidate for that office. And her head-nods to bankers at private gatherings won’t be worth a bucket of warm spit.

I think Bill Benzon #1 nails it — certain events become nucleation sites for cascades (like those videos for Cokes that instantly freeze on some kind of shock). It’s hard to tell which shock will lead to a cascade. However, there is nuance here. The real question is whether the pro-Trump electorate was in some kind of unstable denial state.

I think the GOP elite was, but the pro-Trump voters are not. The elite is realizing everyone in the elite could move to the new anti-Trump equilibrium and may do so (e.g as js mentions above — Trump’s behind, so jumping ship is easier). I have my doubts about the GOP base voters. Some might, but the question remains as to whether there will be a cascade or simply more denial. From everything I’ve seen so far, doubling down (yet again!) seems very likely. And then there is the question of whether the electorate feeds back into elite opinion.

This is a complex dynamic state and I would not even try to predict the outcome!

Trump has emboldened quite a bit of ugly anti-Semitism. As well of course as anti-Muslim sentiment and nativist bigotry and virulent sexism. Making the fight against all that a priority was not stupid. Did Puchalsky really just say that? Wow. By the way, it would have been nice if the OP had acknowledged that Trump had a horrific Friday not only because of his sickening conversation with Billy Bush (Al Roker knows how to talk to that guy) but also because of Trump’s stating that he still thinks five innocent black teenagers should have been put in a gas chamber.

I find the false equivalency inherent in this post frankly bizarre. To recall something Trump said, I imagine that if Trump shot a man dead in Times Square in front of ten thousand witnesses tomorrow, John Holbo would write a post, the gist of which is that we knew Trump was the sort of monster who would kill a man, just as we knew that Hillary was the sort of monster who would say nice things to people who were paying her to say nice things. Then Bruce Wilder would say that, in fact, Hillary was the bigger monster, since Trump’s body count was so much lower than he predicts will result from Hillary’s speeches; and Rich Puchalsky would say that the real problem is that people will think ill of him, Rich Puchalsky, if he agrees with Bruce’s assessment.

If we change the culture to reduce the frequency of sexual assault in the process, that is all to the good, I guess; I hope that is what is happening and not just vilification of the white male.

Am I misreading this? He ‘guesses’ that reducing sexual assault is a good thing, but is worried that it might really be all about vilifying white men?

If it made sense, it looks like Bruce Wilder might be saying something awful here. It’s hard to tell because it doesn’t make sense.

As for Rich Puchalsky suggesting that people who talk about sexism are anti-Semitic (not for the first time) again it’s hard to respond because it doesn’t make sense.

It does seem like BW is claiming that if you are concerned about sexism, you are probably anti white men, while RP is claiming that if you are concerned about sexism you are probably anti-Semitic. Both of them are free to correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s how it sounds to me.

Seriously, I think the CT owners should do something about this, because it’s damaging CT.

“RP is claiming that if you are concerned about sexism you are probably anti-Semitic”

Ah yes, the usual quality of reading that will make Val’s academic career a joy to behold. That must indeed be what I meant: there could be no other explanation.

What did your response to Lynn mean then? Can you explain it?

efcdons: “What false equivalence?”

I think I was perfectly clear. If Trump shot a man dead just to see him die, apparently no one would be able to say “gosh, that Trump fellow is really awful”, without feeling obligated to go on to say “…and Hillary, too, she’s awful, see how she said nice things to those people who were paying her.” It’s false equivalence, there’s-no-difference-between-them-ism. But one is a sociopath who preys on women and thinks that wanting to fuck his own teenage daughter is so normal that he can talk about it out loud, in public, in front of an audience and recording devices; and the other is not. But hey, they’re both awful!

Bruce Wilder @57 “Clinton…corrupts the DNC.” Like Kaine before her, Debby Wasserman-Schultz wasn’t working for Clinton, but President Obama, the head of the party until replaced. Also, the Democratic Party is in no shape, form or fashion socialist. The cognitive dissonance has always been a supposed socialists running as a Democrat, not the party being unwelcoming to a socialist.

Trump confessing to crimes is indeed asymmetric, if you believed him. Since he wasn’t under penalty of perjury, I’m not so sure. I gather there have been a couple of allegations against him, though. It’s a damned shame who ever had this video didn’t think it would be useful to examine in a deposition or a trial.

Not satisfied with the current state of false equivalency, christian_h undertakes to top it!

Apparently in Layman’s internal dictionary, “false equivalency” stands for “talking about anything but what I, layman, currently find important”.

@81

Sure, only one person can be awful at a time. It’s not possible for two separate people to be different kinds of awful for different reasons. There is only enough awful to go around for one person at a time.

Considering Clinton is going to be the next President unless something incredible happens it seems like her potential awfulness would be a little more important to dissect and investigate than Trump’s obvious and gigantic, but ultimately meaningless in the long run, awfulness

“Just as Jews never have to worry about white nationalism and have no understanding of what it means to be a religious minority in America, or they would obviously have the same stupid priorities that you do and there could be no other reason.”

The crazy thing about this assertion is that something like ~80% of Jews will likely vote for Hillary over Donald, partially because they know what it means to be a religious minority in America.

“Also, the Democratic Party is in no shape, form or fashion socialist.”

True. So much the worse for it, especially starting in 2020 when millennial voters will outnumber boomers. Either the party will change or it will die. And the alternatives on the right are only going to get worse.

Stevenjohnson @54

Hmmm – I’m assuming you’re claiming Trump was a candidate in the so-called ‘invisible primary.’ To be fair, that’s a fairly subjective assessment, dependent in large part on whether other Republican elites considered him to be a serious potential candidate, and whether Trump himself seriously considered and prepared for a campaign. The fact that Trump publicly mused about a run is neither here nor there – he’s been doing that since the 90’s at least. I personally come down on the side that his 2011 tilt was a PR stunt for the apprentice, and I think the evidence backs me up. But like I said that’s a subjective assessment.

More to the point, I was responding to this part of your comment – “Really, it seems to me the interesting question is why the video didn’t surface in Trump’s run in 2012, or in the Republican nomination campaign? Talking about generals “reduced to rubble” and hinting he’ll fire them til he gets a winner has finally brought out some big guns against him. It’s too late to give him the silent treatment after they’ve fed him free publicity for so very, very long.”

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that as you suggesting that there’s something fishy going on here, and that the tape was withheld as some sort of October surprise, which is unlikely for all sorts of reasons. If I’m wrong, then there’s no argument to be had here.

christian_h: “No Layman I really do not follow.”

So you say, but then you go on to make explicit the equivalence implied in your earlier comment. You say that Trump and Bill are equivalent; and that people who voted for Clinton in 1992 are equivalent to people who support Trump right now. If that was not the point of your fatuous question, what was?

@ milx 10.08.16 at 4:35 pm
> “We are coming tonight. You will come out from inside. Prepare yourselves from tonight. We will find you in your closets.”

What exactly was he supposed to tell armed rebels? ‘We will cuddle with you?’ This wasn’t addressed to the entire civilian population. From the Reuters article reporting on the speech: ‘Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear.’ http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE72G7SB20110317

Re the Trump tape – yes, this is piggish behaviour. Since, AFAIK, it’s also *traditional macho* piggish behaviour, I suspect that it mostly wouldn’t be seen as a big deal by the demographic that votes for Trump.

Re HRC’s speeches, the revealed duplicity might harm her image a bit. What’s worse is that I think that it was in these speeches and not in her public pronouncements that she was sincere on the subject of open trade and things like raising the Social Security retirement age (a lot of other evidence pointed in the same direction), and that this will have practical consequences for her policies.

The reason people here are discussing one and not the other is, of course, that there is nobody here to defend Trump, and there are lots of people to defend Clinton. Also, it’s interesting that one scandal is about who the candidate *is* as a person (a pig), and the other one is to some extent about what the candidate is likely to *do* (open and cut).

Jim V writes:

“The site has become very tiresome with a lot of noise and not much signal – uncharitable readings and not much fact-checking before making accusations, from people of whom I used to think better. Have fun storming the windmills.”

And I completely agree. I don’t frequently comment here, but I used to read it often — on this year’s Presidential election, however, the comment section of Crooked Timber has become a real embarrassment. I don’t know if the original posts aren’t conducive to debate, or if for whatever reason regular commenters avoid these threads; but this one here is an excellent example of really pointless ‘political’ arguments. When I want to engage with people at the level of vague abstractions and bad-faith sophistry, there are plenty of other places on the Internet to look, it’s a shame CR has come to this.

RP @ 82
There’s a lot of debatable claims in what you said, but I will stick to the main point. There is nothing there to explain why you made the association between what Lynne said about being groped and what others may have said about Jews.

There is no logical connection. What you did was use the rhetorical technique of guilt by association.

The thing is, you’re quite good at using rhetorical techniques (including insults, I’m not sure if that’s classified as a rhetorical technique). I think quite a few people get taken in by this. It’s a pity for two reasons, one that you sometimes have some good points, but they get buried by the rhetorical techniques and insults. The other is that it affects the tone of debate at CT and makes it a less worthwhile place to try to have discussions on important issues.

I hope you’ll think about this and try to tone it down a bit. I also hope some of the CT bloggers might talk to you about it (again – I know at least one has done so already).

I have concerns about why you are allowed to go on as you do, while RNB got banned. I think there could have been more reasonable outcomes, but I’d better leave the meta stuff now.

Layman, I did a search and I didn’t say what you think I said. That was christian_h.

stevenjohnson: Debby Wasserman-Schultz wasn’t working for Clinton, . . .

Not on this plane of reality.

“We will find you in your closets.” This is a threat to find and kill people who are hiding, not people who are fighting.

Rich Puchalsky @82:

All right, here is the explanation. Since the beginning of this election, HRC supporters have cast everyone on the left who does not support HRC sufficiently as not supporting HRC because that person is a member of a privileged class. Here are two examples of this syndrome:

You’ve been saying that, and you even came down on me (when I was describing my personal criteria for political discourse relative to the moment within a presidential election cycle) with the full force of this argument despite the obvious fact that I’m not even a Clinton supporter. Problem is, while there without doubt exist such people in particular if they’re party-loyal Dems, I can’t even find them anywhere close to the left and know hardly any in person.

Here’s an example of a Clinton supporter (as of right now), loosely modeled on a person close to me: Former resident of NY while HRC was US Senator, came away with an excellent impression of HRC’s understanding and commitment to rural and small-town economic development and overall competence; not a registered D (left because of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform), but WFP then and independent now; Pacifist, and highly critical of HRC regarding war and Wall street; thrilled about Sanders initially, disenchanted over his failure to address race and his deficient movement-building; ended the primary season with “I’d be happy to vote for whoever gets nominated”. Or another: Bernie all the way; registered D, caucused for Bernie; doesn’t trust Clinton to understand the local way of life, or to be not beholden to Wall Street; gun owner, but angry at gun mortality and morbidity who’s used to sparring with the local libertarians on reasonable control measures; currently engaged in peeling off voters from Trump via comment threads with (typically libertarian or conservative) neighbours.

1. If a man thinks that Trump boasting about being a groper is not as important as HRC boasting about having one policy for the public and another for the financial industry, this must be because this man is not a woman and therefore does not worry about being groped.

2. If a Jew thinks that concerns about Trump oppressing Muslims are overblown, this must be because Jews are white and naturally don’t worry about white supremacy in the U.S.

“Groper” is a mild term, but whatever. For 1., it would be an invalid conclusion based on insufficient premises, but it’s a legitimate question what that man’s attitude towards gropers is. Is it disqualifying, but the financial industry thing is, uh, more disqualifying (how can there be anything worse than disqualifying?)? Is the first an amusing foible and the second a serious, but not disqualifying failure? If the first is less important than the second, what would his argument be for not preferring Trump over Clinton? The questions may have good answers, of course.

As for 2., no, no, no, no… even if someone were to affirm 1. (which I don’t), it follows in no way that they would affirm 2. None of my actual Jewish family members or friends even thinks that thinks that concerns about Trump’s attitude to Muslims are overblown. In my experience, Jewish people are more likely than Christians to be sensitive to that. That’s just pure straw man, even if it happened to you.

Me: I get the Dems have a made for teevee propaganda template built on a supposed Republican War on Women, and they will crank the Wurlitzer because they can. If we change the culture to reduce the frequency of sexual assault in the process, that is all to the good, I guess; I hope that is what is happening and not just vilification of the white male.

Val: If it made sense, it looks like Bruce Wilder might be saying something awful here. It’s hard to tell because it doesn’t make sense. . . . It does seem like BW is claiming that if you are concerned about sexism, you are probably anti white men.

Why do you think it is A-OK to presume that something you admit you don’t understand is “something awful”?

I supply a sentence you omitted from your quotation of me that might supply context if you understood it, which you might not, because you are not in the United States where you might be exposed to the 24/7 news cycle onslaught that powers this kind of media frenzy.

On American television media, a number of pundits and commentators serve as reliable surrogates for the Parties and / or Candidate Campaigns and supply an enormous quantity of commentary and argument, the volume of which rises noticeably during one of these media frenzies. This propaganda machinery has sometimes been referred to as the Wurlitzer, after a brand of very loud theatrical organs, because the ability to mechanically fill the sound space with talking points and histrionic (and largely fake) outrage. The Republican War on Women was a theme that the Obama Administration has successfully used in its propaganda in the past, which has been repurposed in the present news cycle.

I “guess” because I am not certain what the eventual effect of these propaganda campaigns may be. One positive possibility is that the country takes one more step toward greater awareness and less tolerance of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Another not so positive possibility is that the over-the-top expression of outrage alienates people or wears out their moral sensibility. Clinton may be overselling herself as the anti-Trump and encouraging a degree of tribalism that is not healthy for the country.

I saw this on Hullabaloo (digbysblog.blogspot.com), a blog I often read whose main author (styled “digby”) I admire:

[quoting the NYT:] “Within the white male demographic, 37 percent of those who are college-educated support Mrs. Clinton, versus 48 percent for Mr. Trump, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll. Among white men without college educations, Mr. Trump’s lead is even greater: 76 percent to 17 percent. “

[digby:] That is a sad comment on the college educated white male demographic. But it is clarifying. If they don’t have enough sense to know that Donald Trump is a fascist demagogue who will destroy everything in his path it’s obvious the country can no longer rely on them to run it. It’s a good thing there are a bunch of people of color and women ready to step up.

I think those statistics are very disturbing, too, but I don’t know that I think digby’s response is positive or helpful. It is resentful and angry and heedless of reactions. The U.S. doesn’t need more tribalist polarization along any dimension. If men are feeling alienated from Clinton’s campaign, that might be a problem Hillary Clinton needs to address, now and during her Presidency.

@ milx 10.08.16 at 10:36 pm
>This is a threat to find and kill people who are hiding, not people who are fighting.

Again, Reuters explicitly reports that he said, in the same speech, that ‘people who had no arms had no reason to fear’ and that he had ‘told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee’. The regime was also ‘warning residents to avoid rebel installations’, thus clearly separating insurgents from civilians, not threatening to slaughter civilians indiscriminately. Without a broader context, I don’t know how the bit about people hiding in closets was supposed to make sense combined with the above statements about unarmed people – perhaps he was imagining a stage of the conflict where guerrilla-style resistance continued after the military defeat of the rebels, with active guerrilla fighters hiding in houses; perhaps it was some kind of rhetorical image intended to discount the very possibility that the rebels could mount any military resistance and had any choice but to hide trembling; perhaps it was a lapse into incoherent rambling (there was plenty of that in the Zenga Zenga speech, too). In another speech, he stated: ‘Throw away your weapons, exactly like your brothers in Ajdabiya and other places did. They laid down their arms and they are safe. We never pursued them at all.’ (this quote and more evidence that the claims of impending mass slaughter were unfounded can be found in the report of the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, summarised in Salonhere)

bruce wilder @106 “stevenjohnson: Debby Wasserman-Schultz wasn’t working for Clinton, . . .

Not on this plane of reality.”

Oh yes, that sort of nonsense comes from your scam about how Obama isn’t responsible for anything, so we simultaneously fake criticism of Clinton from the left while approving worse in action from Obama. Obama picked Wasserman-Schultz. The head of the DNC does not ignore the sitting president to take orders from a mere candidate, except in your plane of unreality.

christian_h @ 92

>…it is absolutely obvious that he was the kind of man who hits on every woman in the office, every woman he comes into regular contact with.

Sorry, but I still don’t see what’s wrong with that. Some people like casual encounters. I’d say that whoever really acts like this must not mind being rejected a lot. If, on the other hand, someone really is capable of making himself desirable for a large percentage of the potential partners he comes into regular contact with, then more power to him, and I don’t see any reason to see these potential partners as victimised. Would that were the worst thing you could say about Bill Clinton.

stevenjohnson @ 116

Obama *and* HRC are bad in very similar ways, and I think most critics of HRC here have also been critics of Obama for a long time. That said, there is enough evidence that she has been, is and will be more hawkish than him, unfortunately. I do have to admit that this ‘Stalinists for Clinton’ shtick of yours is fresh and original and adds to the entertainment value of the site.

Rich Puchalsky, #113:

What? Even if it happened here on CT, it’s a straw man? Does that mean something like I have to find an example that’s less obviously foolish because this one doesn’t count?

Sigh. I thought I’d have to address that one. No, the plural of anecdote isn’t data. Someone was being an idiot if they jumped from one to the other. There’s no basis for you to affirm that this is some sort of general problem, without actual data.

Obama *and* HRC are bad in very similar way

HRC = Obama + extra hawkishness + Clinton dynastic lineage – (intelligence + charisma)

is basically how I see it

Suzanne: I can’t imagine that Clinton wants to go down in the books as the Democrat who sold out the social safety net.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/the-end-of-welfare-as-we-know-it/476322/

Engels, I don’t think Clinton is actually especially hawkish for a mainstream US politician; she only looks so in comparison with someone like Sanders or Maxine Waters, both very much out of the mainstream.

“”Debby Wasserman-Schultz wasn’t working for Clinton, . . .””
“Not on this plane of reality.”

It is incontrovertible that DWS was and is working for the payday ‘loan’ (theft) industry, and that neither Obama or Clinton see a problem with that. Bit of a concern….

Does faustusnotes’ comment #129 above count as only one more anecdote? Let’s see: “gaddafi loving leftists” and “if you’re e kind of dude who thinks grabbing women’s genitals in the office ain’t so bad”. No doubt this is just one more incident not connected to anything.

christian_h: “Bill’s and Trump’s behaviour towards women is equivalent, yes.”

Not so. A huge amount of effort was spent making that claim; the Clintons have been stalked for decades. In the end what turned out to be true was two consensual affairs, and perhaps one instance of harassment. And then there is William Clinton’s marriage with Hillary Clinton. This is also very different from Trump, who cheated on and ultimately left two wives, and would never in a million years consider marrying a woman as strong as Hillary Clinton.

Would you claim that Hillary Clinton would have stuck with William Clinton, if he were a rapist? That is not the least bit plausible.

HRC = Obama + extra hawkishness + Clinton dynastic lineage – (intelligence + charisma)

You’re almost certainly wrong on the intelligence. And… charisma? Really? Not sure how important that is beyond winning votes. Otherwise, I agree.

Meanwhile. And CT commenters be like—yeah, totally cool man! (#notallctcommenters)

Mr. Observer,
I don’t really understand your sensitivity to fairly gentle jabs from transitory factional opponents. So what? We’re both old. None of this matters. Fighting genuine anti-science, anti-rational, theocratic fascist, racist bigots matters, IMHO. How are you helping?

I voted for Nader. I wonder how that worked out… let me think, premature Alzheimers is a bitch… Oh SHIT. Not so well, actually!

Missed this one from HRC’s Wall St speeches:

“We were up against Russia pushing oligarchs and others to buy media,” Clinton told tinePublic on June 18, 2014. “We were even up against phony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort — oh that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you — and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia.”

Rich just look a little unthread for f foundling defending gaddafi and saying theboffice girls might like a bit of casual groping.

Cranky, you could think the democrats have delivered nothing for their rational voters – but you’d be wrong, and ludicrously so.

Oh and just to piss you all off—Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Traister have been the most incisive commenters on the election season. Consistently. (You should all really read that Traister piece, tho I realize that those who haven’t already aren’t about to start now.)

Slate is such a good site for informed political analysis. If we’re talking women-hating pornographic speculations, I can’t think of a better. Here’s the Slate hit piece on Sarah Palin from 2008, the Republican ‘scare doll’ of that election.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/09/the_sexy_puritan.html

The visual doesn’t do the piece justice. There were actually two, one for the article and another for front page. We don’t need to deconstruct the article image at any great length other than to note that the image of a women grinning with a cross between her legs invokes some unfortunate connotations, especially when the political ‘analysis’ consists of Christian fisting, masturbation and voyeurism.

And while we’re on topic of taboo subject matter – namely liberal misogyny – who can forget good old Martin Bashir, new hire at the BBC.

If you were ever wondering when it’s acceptable to argue that a certain kind of woman deserves to have someone defecate in her mouth, we can turn to Martin, who did precisely that live – on air.

Martin kept his job in large part thanks to the deafening silence of so many good liberals. Eventually (Trump should quit now!), Mr. Bashir issued a non-apology apology and blamed the woman for ‘forcing’ him to humiliate himself live on air.

Somehow it’s always the woman’s fault, even in liberal land.

Rich Puchalsky, #140&141:

One sec, your point 1 started “If a man thinks that Trump boasting about being a groper is not as important as HRC boasting about having one policy for the public and another for the financial industry …”, so why are you objecting to faustusnotes’s ““if you’re e kind of dude who thinks grabbing women’s genitals in the office ain’t so bad”. Sounds like a fair paraphrase to me. For what it’s worth, f. already answered themselves regarding the other bit. I don’t read the two as referring necessarily to the same person. So what are you complaining about?

Well, what you do seem to be complaining about is two things: a) tarring any men who thinks this with the brush of sexism and b) inherent anti-Semitism of anyone who does so. The first is, if that’s what happens, surely an example of either faulty reasoning or rhetorical use of hyperbole. Just because someone may have employed either of them it doesn’t follow that someone else who analyses the HRC situation through the lens of sexism (or racism) does. That would require data, which you don’t have — can’t have, except if you happen to do research (or have access to some) in the area. You called me (kinda sorta) a dipshit. Am I to assume that everyone else who disagrees with me and/or (both? either?) misrepresents my words also thinks of me as a dipshit? Surely not. I hope.

Someone who objects to fellow commenters making unjustified generalizations can be expected from offering them himself.

As for your 2., taken on its own its a lot more faulty than 1 (because it would require subscribing to anti-Semitic stereotyping at a minimum, albeit a rather idiosyncratic kind I haven’t actually encountered in the wild). But subscribing to 1. doesn’t imply any approval of 2. (You know, sexist Jews do exist. It’s quite likely that there are men that actually fulfill the conditions of 1. — preferring a sexist to whatever HRC is because of one’s own misogyny — without also being anti-Semitic. OR conversely without being inclined to have tender feelings for non-whites.)

And the Bernie-bros of yonder in my own social media network, all white, male, and lacking any substantial links to writers, journalists or activists of color, were quite real. They were inexperienced in any form of social justice or political activism but, unlike other excessively idealistic and enthusiastic politicised youngsters, bolstered in their self-esteem by, for most of them, above-average salaries by dint of their tech industry jobs. I didn’t invent them — I’d could have done without them. So I’m sure those journalists (the unknown, just starting out, middle-of-the-road ones) that later talked about quite disgraceful messages they received each time they dared to criticize St. Bernie. I quite doubt any of them was paid by the DNC.

“No, the plural of anecdote isn’t data. ”

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data-after-all.html

“I’ve used the quotation “The plural of anecdote is not data” in various talks over the years, never knowing the original source. I searched the usual places (though clearly not hard enough!), but never figured out whom it should be attributed to..”I said ‘The plural of anecdote is data’ some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student’s dismissal of a simple factual statement — by another student or me — as a mere anecdote. “

charisma? Really? Not sure how important that is

Here ya go

Charisma is very subjective . I find Clinton more charismatic than Obama, but I like that laid back, louche attitude that the boomers have. Obama has the personality of a trendy bishop, forever delivering sermons from his pulpit about how we’ve all fallen from grace . Admirable in a lot of ways, but not charismatic, imho.

“Look, what I was writing above was just too advanced an example of political thought for anyone to understand, apparently.”

Yes, that must be the problem.

And we had no clue, before this, that Trump boasted about the impunity granted by his riches. People who think otherwise must think that Trump would be a good President.

Look, this is really no different from the other thing you’re doing, which is exactly “If you think that Saddam isn’t history’s greatest monster, you must be a Saddam lover.” It was tiresome when Bush’s minion’s did it and it’s still tiresome now.

Since none of the HRC defenders here are capable of taking the other side and can only write gibberish, I’ll do that part of the argument myself and then answer it. The counter to this is obviously what John Holbo wrote in the OP: that the HRC mini-scandal doesn’t tell us anything new about HRC’s Presidential policy either. She was a go-along-to-get-along-with-bankers mild liberal before, and she remains one after. So who cares, because it only tells us what we already knew.

The problem with this is that Trump’s scandal seems to have confirmed what people “already knew” because it restated it more graphically and openly, while HRC’s defenders are not willing to admit that quotes of actual statements to bankers confirm what we “already knew” because anyone who thinks that they did must approve of women being groped.

Oh, excuse me. I wrote ” It must mean that you support gropers! “ And you wrote in response “Or that you never worry about being groped yourself.” So if we’re talking only about what you wrote, you only wrote that the alternate explanation was that people who disagreed with you must do so because they personally didn’t worry about being groped.

This is the same argument that has appeared throughout the election. If someone says “I don’t think that Trump could actually deport lots of Muslims: the President isn’t a dictator” the answer was “You don’t worry about being deported yourself since you are privileged, or you’d think differently.”

Of course, by mentioning both of these examples as part of a general description of a type of argument, I must be making bad analogies. The two are completely different, right?

Engels, as a casual brainless comment by a moron of unimaginable scale, that may well have been the intended meaning. But if so, it says a lot more than he intended. It says alphas don’t need to worry about consent, because they’ll get it afterwards. So, retroactively justified assault.

Jesus Christ rich, foundling up above is making a repeated case that gaddafi didn’t commit any crimes. Are you reading this thread or not? I’m not attacking some vague anti war hippy here, I was responding to the actual war crimes denialism on this very thread.

Back to the OP, I think the issue is denial rather than deniability. The key similarity: “locker room” and “back room.”

Both parties are divided into (indeed the psyches of their members are divided into) a cynical side and a naive side. The naives knows what the cynics know, but they use its deniability not cynically against the opposition but to support their own denial in bad faith. To convince themselves they don’t know it.

Between each party’s naives and cynics (and between each party-bound psyche’s cynical and naive sides) there’s a tacit agreement: the cynic shall not disturb the naive’s bad faith. That’s what’s new. Trump’s naives don’t care that this is proof to the public he’s a pig. They care that it’s proof to themselves. It’s supposed to stay in the locker room not to hide it from opponents, but from his faithful, who need deniability not for its own sake but for self denial.

Likewise, democrats don’t care about the transcripts because they prove to the public something. They don’t care about deniability to others, but the personal denial that rested on that deniability.

The cynic republicans failed their naives by not keeping it in the “locker room”, and the cynic democrats failed their naives by not keeping it in the “back room.”

Both sides want to believe and don’t. They want to believe their candidate is better than they know their candidate is. (Roughly: republicans want to believe he’s merely a bad boy not a loathesome monster and democrats want to believe she’s a totally adequate candidate with no serious drawbacks.)

This is why, in the style of Freuds kettle logic, both sides dismiss the cases with absolute contradictions: different parts of their divided party psyche are speaking:

I returned your kettle, it was already broken, besides, I never borrowed it.
he’s an anti PC hero, he didn’t say it, he didn’t mean it no big deal.
She playing 12d chess against Wall St, that’s unfortunately how politics work, she didn’t say anything questionable.

Howard, which posts in this thread represent this crowd in your view? Who called Hillary monstrous? Who said the parties are the same? Faustusnotes often makes up invisible opponents in his fanciful head who say such things, but if you examine posts besides his you rarely find them.

Again, I recommend a trigger warning at the beginning of all CT election threads:

“Everyone here agrees Trump is awful, including all the Hillary critics and even the one Trump supporter. Everyone here, except one or possibly two people, agrees that the democrats are not as bad as the republicans. Please consider those debates closed.”

C’mon engels, I’ve read my Weber. I don’t really see any significant difference between Clinton and Obama in Weberian terms.

js, maddening, isn’t it?

NBC News (@NBCNews) Bill Clinton responds after heckler calls him a “rapist” during rally in Wisconsin pic.twitter.com/eTJxMeKqOK

Rich Puchalsky,

Sorry, given the forest of tendentious misrepresentation you’ve put up, my feeble brain is unable to keep a database of the previous summaries of my views. (Oh, one sec, you mean the “dipshit” thing? SRSLY.)

Anyway, I think Lynne has it right. You’re clearly not interested in debate as a means to change your own perspective, so we don’t seem to share enough values to have a mutually agreeable exchange. Which is a pity, because you’re clearly a smart and thoughtful guy, and I have benefited from some of your stand-alone stuff. But once you interact, everything seems to be lines of attack or an avalanche of belittling. And that isn’t doing the topic justice. The question of how much of the opposition to Clinton (or toleration of Trump) is basically rationalised affect rooted in sexism is interesting, complicated, and IMHO important. (If you don’t think it’s important you’re doing a poor job of formulating an argument in this sense.) We are starting to have some data analysis that confirms that sexism has an inpact. (Hold the front page.)

The comment thread re: Trump tape in the AK papers are currently filled with both kinds of statements: those that consider his remarks completely disqualifying (some gloat, some are enraged against their party), and those that consider it regrettable but otherwise irrelevant (because men are pigs anyway, or because it’s not so bad in the greater picture, or…). Those two groups aren’t precisely equal in terms of gender distribution. Just like none of the non-white friends of mine or journalists I read ever went full-on Bernie bro, and even when they were strongly on Sander’s side against Clinton kept it respectful and considerate. Do you think these two phenomena are… just completely pure statistical flukes?

Complain at leisure if someone falsely attributes sexist motives to you (though even that can be quite unseemly: you’re unlikely to be any less sexist than I am, or than the average CT poster), but don’t expand it in a blanket rebuttal of sexism and misogyny as sources of anti-Clinton feeling. And for $DEITY’s sake don’t mash it up with racism and anti-Semitism in this cavalier way.

Look what you did with Lynne’s words. The first bit, from you, read “So of course not talking about the first one and focussing on the second one is suspect. It must mean that you support gropers!” She came back with “Or that you never worry about being groped yourself.” Which, incidentally, doesn’t even license the first bit, but even if it did, it was about simply not talking about the Trump statements while being effusive about Clinton’s Wall St. speech excerpt leak. Then you re-paraphrase the attitude as ““while HRC’s defenders are not willing to admit that quotes of actual statements to bankers confirm what we “already knew” because anyone who thinks that they did must approve of women being groped.”, which swaps out the first part for a completely different statement! No wonder you’re increasingly being considered as a dishonest and asshole debater.

Bruce 186,

Ah, I see it now. You qualified the claim so much I mistakenly thought you had basically qualified it away entirely and said she wasn’t: “Not especially a monster as an individual but a monstrous manifestation of a monstrous politics.”

Yan, I can’t see if you’re serious, but it’s not from Podesta. It was sent from some idiot with the email address orca100@upcmail.nl TO Podesta (podesta@law.georgetown.edu — expand the list of recipients) and a bunch of journalists.

And Bruce Wilder, I’m quite ok with the qualified version. It’s an apposite label that, in this form, applies to pretty much everyone in US national politics.

Thanks for clarifying that Merian. Engels’ link had Podesta’s name confusingly pasted next to that email address, suggesting it might be
From rather than to him.

That’s a relief, but I’d still like to know who is the creep that wrote it, and how chummy is he with campaign members if at all?

The following statements are logically independent. That is, any combination of them could be true.

1. Support of Sanders in the primaries in general was due mainly to sexism.
2. Support of Sanders in the primaries from the left was due mainly to sexism.
3. Support of Sanders in the primaries by men was due mainly to sexism.
4. Support of Sanders in the primaries by Rich Puchalsky (e.g.) was due mainly to sexism.
5. Rich Puchalsky is white and male.
6. Rich Puchalsky is sexist.
7. Trump is an awful human being who should not be president.
8. HRC has held some awful policy positions.
9. Criticism of HRC in general is due mainly to sexism.
10. Criticism of HRC by CT commenters is due mainly to sexism.
11. Criticism of HRC by Rich Puchalsky (e.g.) is due mainly to sexism.
12. HRC won a majority of women voters in the primaries.
13. Sanders won a majority of under-30 women voters in the primaries.

Some arguments here amount to claiming that they are tightly related. Often 1 and 2 are conflated. It’s often argued that 7 implies that 9 (or 10, or 11) is true, and/or that 8 is false. Another is that 5 implies 6 implies 11.

It’s true some of these might be considered as evidence regarding others, depending on the interpretation of “mainly”. I tend to think that 13 suggests that 3 is unlikely, at least among under-30 men, but both could be true.

merian seem to claim that Rich claims that 6 is false (Rich is not sexist), and that Rich is expanding a claim that 4 is false (his support of Sanders was not due to sexism) to a claim that 1 is false (support of Sanders was not mainly due to sexism), but I only see him claiming that 2 is false (suppose of Sanders *from the left* was not due to sexism), or indeed the weaker claim that not *all* support for Sanders was due to sexism.

I remember seeing some polling that i can’t find now which showed Sanders supporters had more enlightened views on gender than the hrc faction. The one thing Sanders supporters showed strong, consistent opinions on (in polling) was anti elitism. This easily enough explains the (hyperbolic, imo) opposition to Clinton. There’s a general dislike of the elite, which Clinton clearly personifies. I don’t mind her, personally, as I’m not particularly anti elite, but I can see the logic.

Kiwanda:

Merian claims nothing whatsoever about Rich’s motives. The only way in which I claim that 6 is (probably) false is that I think that sexism is something no one of us is likely to have escaped, male or female. I claim that a weaker version of 9: 9′. Criticism of HRC in general is due partly to sexism. And it’s debatable how large that part is, and how tied up it is with the propensity to subscribe to stances critical to HRC that are non-sexist. I guess I also claimed that Rich Puchalsky is expanding a claim that 10 is false into a claim that those that believe in 10 also must believe that 11 is true.

bruce wilder:

“Now”? Isn’t this the first time we’re talking about this here? I just don’t think that anyone can exercise power without ethical compromise. (I mean, “power corrupt” is a children’s literature kind of message — is it controversial?) It includes those I think of as personally admirable (Obama), or thoughtful and hardworking (Clinton). There is no voting that isn’t voting for evil. And yes, the US politics are monstrous. Similar to the other Western nations, but in many respects both quantitatively and qualitatively worse. (This said, few nations can look at themselves with pride.) Some of the stuff that’s discussed on CT is, ultimately, about making it less monstrous. But we’re many years away from it percolating up into the seats of power, as far as I can tell.

Proposal for new piece of software at CT:

Whenever the number (over some range) of new comments about other commenters, or about how to interpret comments of other commenters, exceeds the number of new comments about the topics in the OP, the thread automatically shuts down.

I use equality as the cutoff purely as an illustration. Depending on the patience of readers, one might want to use 0.5 or 0.25.

Ronan(rf): “The one thing Sanders supporters showed strong, consistent opinions on (in polling) was anti elitism. This easily enough explains the (hyperbolic, imo) opposition to Clinton. ”

Sanders beat HRC among young women by quite a bit, and I don’t believe that young women have suddenly become more sexist. But expanding the question into a general one about whether people in society are generally sexist in some way is beside the point — they are. This is about statements like — well, js referred to me by name above in a too-cute pretending not to way, so I’ll quote him:

From here:

Actually, once you realize that (at least) half the CT commenters give zero fucks about the lives of anyone other than white men, this all makes sense. And also that there’s no point in arguing with them. They know that they’ll be fine under a Trump presidency. And why should they care about anyone else?

This isn’t a matter of some vague and general “HRC is losing some voters because of sexism”. It’s the same line used by js, ,Val, RNB, faustusnotes etc. from the beginning of the election, and that other people sometimes chip in with because it fits a prevailing propaganda line used by the HRC campaign. It attempts to deflect all attacks on HRC as being what js describes above. (Sometimes it’s comical, of course, as when Bruce Wilder was supposed to be voting for Jill Stein instead of HRC because he didn’t like old women.)

So maybe some people believe it — that half the commenters here only care about white men, don’t care about Trump because they know they’ll be OK as white men, etc. If you do believe it, then I’m going to enjoy making fun of you and have no particular interest in arguing with you. But let’s get real: this is a propaganda line, used by the HRC campaign to discredit critics to her left, and picked up uncritically by people who should know better and who probably do know better.

@ 204 Hi Bruce. Robert Wright of the ‘Moral Animal’ and ‘Non-Zero’ is running a series of ongoing interviews with different figures on Trump and HRC. His work is among the best I’ve seen from elite media critics hostile to Trump, in that he asks questions and usually listens to the answers. The interviews are listed under ‘The Wright Show’, podcast or video. His latest with Murray Tracy is very good.

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/44086

F. Foundling@198

Yes, anti-fracking protests could be entirely domestic. Opinion on this breaks down about the way you’d expect it to. Do Orthodox priests in Bulgaria have a long history of getting involved in environmental issues? I would suspect not, but I don’t know.

Bruce Wilder @ 196

Reminds me of the moment, years ago, when I heard through the grapevine that someone I was interviewing for a position had gone to HR with the complaint that I was a racist. The back story: she claimed that she didn’t get the position because my boss and I were both Jewish — he was, I wasn’t, but I suspect my name sounded Jewish to her — and were therefore 0bviously prejudiced against Mexican Americans. As this was the University of California, such a complaint would have been at best a pain in the ass for me, and at worst a total nightmare, but for the fact that the person we’d already hired was named Gonzalez, and was also a woman. The complainant didn’t know that at the time, of course, as the unsuccessful candidates had been notified, but the successful one hadn’t yet been announced.

Any social norm — and this was and is a good one — can be weaponized by the needy, or unscrupulous. Something to think about, if in fact we want to think about such things, rather than simply taking advantage of whatever freebie is available to us. Old white men aren’t the only ones guilty of such practices.

Much of the ugliness on CT devolves from a feeling abroad that we’re dealing with perfidious allies, persons who though sharing our sources of information and beliefs make choices or elect means that we find odious.

Most commentators proceed from an assumption of a broadly shared worldview, with similar ethical precepts and commitments, taboos and hatreds. And then broken, raging hearts. The super-viability – as click-bait – of poking fun at/ attacking/ lamenting Tories/Republicans/conservatives/forthright racists gives us this false sense of solidarity but it should be clear now that the aspirations of the CT congregation are far from compatible. If even mild mannered, urgent shifts like Sanders or Corbyn incite such lively hatred from liberals, the permissive coalitions of the past are no longer tenable.

Imagine the emancipation of no longer being unevenly yoked under these old assumptions.

I am much less upset at the liberals on here, whether they call themselves right, left, social democrats or pragmatists, even with their support for and extenuation on behalf of the ugliest, most violent regimes possible now that it is clear to me just how alien their politics are.

There’s no planet on which CR, Rich or christian_h deserve what’s been thrown at them above.

Rich @ 203: (Sometimes it’s comical, of course, as when Bruce Wilder was supposed to be voting for Jill Stein instead of HRC because he didn’t like old women.)

Or when faustusnotes called Lupita (a woman from Mexico) a “brocialist”, then after Lupita pointed out to him the absurdity, tried to backtrack and claimed he wasn’t using the term to describe Lupita herself but only male commenters with the same position as Lupita’s.

Or, to pick a live ongoing example, the Twitter spectacle of Internet-famous male feminist and “Hillary man” Devin Faraci joining the current chorus of Trump criticism and promptly getting called out for doing literally the exact thing Trump was talking about. (And not even remembering it, to boot! Presumably getting it lost down the memory hole of all his other similar instances of behavior that haven’t been publicly called out!)

On a broader level, the “brocialist” and “Bernie bro” narratives are only a particularly headline example of left-liberals’ increasing fervor to rip up, trample, and burn any last trace the “fellow traveler” relationships with the radical left that originally allowed them to implement their vaunted 20th-century welfare states in the first place, even while performatively blaming the radical left for their own helplessness to defend the welfare state from the onslaught of market-centric neoliberalism. We can at least thank this US election cycle (with an assist from the “Chicken Coup” in UK Labour) for clarifying beyond a shadow of a doubt that liberals would ultimately rather surrender to the right than to the left.

@ 207, 208
I don’t know enough about the particpants in the protests in every separate Eastern European country. What is clear is that environmentalist opposition to fracking is a worldwide movement and not something invented by the Russians. There is no doubt that geostrategically, fracking in Eastern Europe would be bad for Russia and good for the US. This doesn’t mean that fracking is a good thing for the environment and the general population, and it should not make anyone more inclined to excuse Clinton’s pushing *for* fracking – no, not even if Putin is, indeed, proved to be pushing against it for his own selfish reasons.

Bruce @204
“How do we know that it is a propaganda line of the HRC campaign? Can it actually be traced back to known surrogates or coordinating organizations?”

There’s certainly some evidence that these are very specific strategies promoted by the campaign. For example, information from people who claim to have been paid “digital information specialists” or internet trolls with very clear directives about how to tar HRC opponents. I don’t know if any of these claims can be verified, but it wouldn’t be surprising.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/24/1519540/-Paid-Clinton-Troll-Speaks-out-I-was-aghast-at-what-I-saw

“Just to give you an idea, here are some of the guidelines for our posting in October:
1) Sexism. This was the biggest one we were supposed to push. We had to smear Bernie as misogynistic and out-of-touch with modern sensibilities. He was to be characterized as “an old white male relic that believed women enjoyed being gang raped”. Anyone who tried to object to this characterization would be repeatedly slammed as sexist until they went away or people lost interest.
2) Racism. We were instructed to hammer home how Bernie supporters were all privileged white students that had no idea how the world worked. We had to tout Hillary’s great record with “the blacks” (yes, that’s the actual way it was phrased), and generally use racial identity politics to attack Sanders and bolster Hillary as the only unifying figure.”

One more thing — I believe the rationale for making these speeches was that she needed to fill up her personal coffers to facilitate being able to run for president, right? (Yes, the fees are ridiculous. There’s a scandal in Germany right now about similar speaking fees — same ballpark — for the most high-ranking MPs before industry organizations, fwiw.) What makes you think she isn’t using the Wall Street guys the very same way you think she’s using the party left?

“What makes you think she isn’t using the Wall Street guys the very same way you think she’s using the party left?”

Her record of public actions in office.

How many times do we have to go around the same cycle? You write about people going on the street to remind of her promises, but we did that with Obama and it didn’t and doesn’t matter: outside the 4 year scareathon, not enough people care. And all of the excuses that people made for their behavior during this election (“we have to stop Trump!”) will not end with this election cycle, any more than than the bits about 12 dimensional chess, Green Lanternism, and so on stopped being used as excuses for Obama once his elections were over. Let’s get real, again: in 4 years there will be Trump 2.0 and all of the same people will be saying that we absolutely need to stop going on about HRC’s past broken promises in order to get rid of Trump 2.0 and that we’re racist and / or sexist if we don’t.

I’m OK with public cynicism that says that all politicians are lying and that none of their promises can be trusted. But how are people going to follow up on that? Is there any mechanism by which they plan to pressure them, in any realistic way? Note that Sanders supporters just did the time-honored “primary challenge to pull the party to the left” and got nothing.

@201,203,209,211,213

I suppose that a large part of the unproductive parts of the discussions that we’ve been seeing recently might be avoided if there were a CT rule that one may only discuss another person’s comments on their own merits, and that one may *not* discuss who this person is in real life and speculate about the ways in which that might influence his comments and make him biased. If a position is wrong, it should be possible to prove that without discussing the background of the person who espouses it. I normally observe this rule anyway, admittedly with some exceptions in cases of utter exasperation, but for some commenters, this type of ad hominem seems to have become the argument of choice.

I’m not sure the split about HRC is so much ideological in the sense of specific policy preferences; I have the feeling that it is more about a degree of emotional and tribal identification with the (liberal-left side of the) mainstream and the status quo. The regular ‘dissidents’ are a riff-raff of fringe types that share little besides an alienation and detachment from this status quo – off the top of my hat, I can think of an anarchist or two, an old-school New Deal liberal (I think?), a Marxist or two, a non-Marxist socialist (if I’m not mistaken), and a global south nationalist. (I suppose I could mention myself as some sort of vague libertarian socialist, too, although my being a non-Westerner seems to have been more important in this context.) Forget ideology – there doesn’t even seem to be any shared opinion about what people should do as a voters in the coming election. The joke about herding cats comes to mind.

Bruce Wilder: “4,5,6, 11 name “Rich Puchalsky” and attribute motives to him. That’s insulting. Given the difficulties of mind-reading, such statements need textual support. ”

You seem to be suggesting that I am making such statements. I’m not.

F. Foundling @223
>off the top of my hat
Head.

F Foundling @ 223
I suppose that a large part of the unproductive parts of the discussions that we’ve been seeing recently might be avoided if there were a CT rule that one may only discuss another person’s comments on their own merits, and that one may *not* discuss who this person is in real life and speculate about the ways in which that might influence his comments and make him biased.

F Foundling, when I (a non-Indigenous, middle class person) proposed to do research involving people of Indigenous backgrounds, and people who have experienced homelessness and serious mental illness, the Ethics Committee of my university made me do a whole lot of reading and jump through many hoops to get ethics approval. You might like to think about why they did this.

It might help to explain why, for example, a white man may not have a perfect understanding of the position or experiences of women or people of colour, and that his misunderstandings and biases may be detectable to those people in a way that they are not necessarily apparent to those who are like him.

basil @ 230
who are the “all the anti-racists who support/extenuate …cages for immigrants …”?

I think it is fine to talk about people’s identity in so far as that reflects their lived experience and position in structures of power and privilege. However the thing I would like to ban is ‘imaged examples’ like this one. If you can’t give examples of anti-racists who support cages for immigrants, don’t bring them up as some sort of evidence for something. And if you can give examples, but they are not people commenting on this thread, don’t use them to imply things about other commenters.

Presumably Barack Obama isn’t an imagined example, nor are the liberals who make excuses for his behavior…

F. Foundling: “I have the feeling that it is more about a degree of emotional and tribal identification with the (liberal-left side of the) mainstream and the status quo.”

The relevant philosophical/psychological term here is fetish. Left-liberals have fetishized the idea that their engagement in electoral circus shows (however marginal and low-level this engagement may be) is some sort of effective means of changing the world for the better, in order to avoid the ideologically traumatic realization of just how disempowered they are to do anything to actually change the world for the better. Most honest radical leftists of any stripe will admit that there’s at least some crucial aspect of how to effectively change the world for the better (read: how to replace capitalism with socialism/communism) that they haven’t figured out yet, which is part of why there are so many disagreements among us and part of why political theory is still so important to hash these disagreements out. For liberals, the way to fix everything is fundamentally just to do what liberals are already doing but more so, which implies that political theory is fundamentally just mental masturbation.

Jesus, ZM, you liberals never cease to amaze me with your commitment to taking noncommittal, unenforceable, feel-good PR fluff at face value…

Oh, FFS, Kiwanda, I was replying to your statement “merian seem to claim that Rich claims that 6 is false (Rich is not sexist)”. The context clearly was your 14 points. Nothing else.

Of course I’ve otherwise made conjectures about Rich Puchalsky’s motives, but that doesn’t mean you get to misrepresent mine. I was annoyed. I take back the words “nothing whatsoever”.

Will G-R,

“Rich @ 203: (Sometimes it’s comical, of course, as when Bruce Wilder was supposed to be voting for Jill Stein instead of HRC because he didn’t like old women.)

Or when faustusnotes called Lupita (a woman from Mexico) a “brocialist”, then after Lupita pointed out to him the absurdity, tried to backtrack and claimed he wasn’t using the term to describe Lupita herself but only male commenters with the same position as Lupita’s.”

Faustus notes did not call Lupita a “brocialist” — he called YOU a brocialist and you deflected his criticism of you by repeatedly inaccurately claiming he was calling Lupita a brocialist.

Whoever said Bruce Wilder didn’t want to vote for Hilary Clinton since he didn’t like old women was unlikely to have said that in context of Bruce Wilder saying he was voting for Jill Stein since they would sound absurd making that claim in that context, and they may not have known at the time that Bruce Wilder was voting for Jill Stein.

You are needlessly attacking other commenters with deliberately inaccurate claims here!

Will G-R,

“Jesus, ZM, you liberals never cease to amaze me with your commitment to taking noncommittal, unenforceable, feel-good PR fluff at face value…”

I am Australian I think its been explained to you before that in Australia the Liberal party is the major right wing party in Parliament.

I am sure you have a fantastic policy to fully solve the global refugee and displaced person problem as long as we immediately install a socialist world government according to your plans which you fail to ever specify ;-)

Good one ZM!

Meaningless data point: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/10/09/savings-study/91083712/

7/10 in US have less than 1k in savings.

No connection between this practice and election fears.

@ 240
Thank you basil for acknowledging that, but I still have questions. You’ve said this in the context of a debate about commenters on CT, so it looks as if you are trying to make some relevant point. For example, one of the prominent anti-racist commenters here is js. who has also (I think my memory is correct) sometimes made remarks about ‘white dudes’ or similar on CT not understanding issues around Trump’s anti-Muslim stance (I strongly support his position btw).

But I feel very certain that js. would never excuse or support immigrants being locked up in cages. The point is you (we all) need to think carefully about the points we are trying to make in these debates on CT and especially be very careful to resist the temptation to throw in a whole lot of unrelated stuff in an apparent attempt to strengthen our points.

In your case I’d be pretty sure you don’t (even unconsciously) mean to suggest that js. or anyone with similar views to js. here, supports or excuses locking people up in cages. But the question then is, what are you talking about? Are you talking about debates on CT and specific commenters here? Are you talking about ‘liberals’ in the broader community, and if so, why did you raise them in the context of a discussion about commenters on CT? (And do you realise that the term ‘liberals’ has different meanings in countries outside the US, so that it is not even clear who you are talking about?)

I think there is a problem in the discussions here. There’s a lot of vague claims, guilt by association, straw-wo/manning, and contemptuous dismissals. For example, look at the discussion between ZM and Will G-R on refugees. Anyone who has read ZM’s comments for a while would know that she has been very involved in activism on refugees and is strongly in favour of international solutions (again I strongly agree with her on this). Will G-R dismisses her quite contemptuously as a “liberal” (which isn’t relevant in Australia), but doesn’t offer any reasoned critique, any discussion of why international/UN-mediated solutions won’t or can’t work, what the alternatives could be, etc.

So you have one person here who is doing as much as she can to address the awful problems around asylum seekers in Australia, and refugees in a world wide context, and another person who offers basically nothing – and yet he feels entitled to treat her with contempt, on the grounds that she is a “liberal”, which is a largely meaningless and empty term of abuse in this context. It really is a problem.

ZM:

Faustus notes did not call Lupita a “brocialist” — he called YOU a brocialist and you deflected his criticism of you by repeatedly inaccurately claiming he was calling Lupita a brocialist.

Lupita and I were articulating the same position, which Faustusnotes characterized to Lupita as being articulated by “brocialists”. After being called out, he inexplicably claimed to have been making two different accusations against two different groups of leftists: the (presumably) white/male “brocialists” were propagating “nihilism”, and the nonwhite/nonmale socialists like Lupita were propagating “fatalism”. How these two positions were allegedly supposed to be different, in order to justify the claim that he hadn’t accused Lupita of being a “brocialist”, he never even tried to explain.

And the broader issue is that aside from Faustusnotes’ brief foray into the rooting out of sub-brocialist tendencies in the nonwhite/female population, nobody else in that thread who talked unironically about anti-liberal leftism as a white/male phenomenon (notably js and Val) deigned to acknowledge Lupita’s existence in this regard at all. Since this is the same point Rich tried to explain to Val @ #90 (with some truly Job-like patience in dealing with her thick-headedness), here are a few easy questions for you or for any other liberal who’s staked themselves to the “brocialist” critique. (1) Do you acknowledge that (e.g.) Lupita is a leftist who believes that collaborating with the faction of the ruling class represented by (e.g.) Hillary Clinton is not in the interests of the oppressed? (2) If you do acknowledge this, do you think she believes this because she is white and male? (3) If you don’t think she’s white and male, can you think of any other reasons (presumably not connected to her own individual racism/misogyny) she might have for believing this? (4) If you can think of any other reasons, can you think of any reason why white/male leftists like myself might not reject collaboration with (e.g.) Hillary Clinton for equivalent (again presumably not racist/misogynist) reasons?

I think its been explained to you before that in Australia the Liberal party is the major right wing party in Parliament.

I think it has been explained to you before what the term “liberal” means in political philosophy, and if it hasn’t, you may need some remedial education.

awareness raising and letter writing … mayors and communities affirm their commitment … you never know how just something like talking about things and sharing information can influence things

My God!

@ 251
Since this is the same point Rich tried to explain to Val @ #90 (with some truly Job-like patience in dealing with her thick-headedness)

I think you have no answer for the criticisms I have made of you, Will G-R.

You continue to think that insults are a substitute for argument.

@251
Obviously, being “thick-headed”, I too need some “remedial education”, so I am interested in your definition of “liberal”. What is the definition you are using?

Will G-R,

“I think it has been explained to you before what the term “liberal” means in political philosophy, and if it hasn’t, you may need some remedial education.”

You don’t really understand I am sorry so I will try to explain:

In Australia our major right wing political party is called the Liberal Party after the UK “liberal” political tradition.

The right wing Liberal Party instituted the beginnings of the post-war welfare state in Australia under the Menzies governments.

The left wing party in Australia is the Labor Party.

The Liberal party was the successor of the Commonwealth Liberal Party in Australia , which united the 2 anti-Labor political parties.

Australian politics pits right liberals against the left Labor parties, although the Liberal party in Australia is somewhat different from the American Republican Party — for instance it supports Australian universal healthcare through our Medicare system, and supports federal government involvement in education policy nationwide.

The American usage of “liberal” to mean the left wing side of politics is completely opposite to the Australian case, and AFAICT is the result of anti-Union and anti-Labor politics in America generally which has meant you have no Labor party and a small union movement compared to other countries like Australia and the UK.

If people in Australia are talking about American style liberalism we sometimes use the colloquial term “small l liberal”, although that can also refer to the liberal political tradition generally if and when people want to distinguish the Liberal Party from the liberal political tradition.

Also part of the reason for this is that the Australian Labor Party had a socialist policy based on Trade Union votes in the early 20th C, although since the Whitlam leadership in the 70s there have been 2 main factions in the ALP — the Labor Right and Socialist Left. The Whitlam government did a lot for healthcare and education and the arts, but it also tried to modernise Labor and I think moved the party away from socialism as part of this since it had proven unelectable. A bit like an early 70s more left wing version of the UK Blair government if you get what I mean.

I mean, I doubt they’re unaware of that fact.

Will G-R,

“Lupita and I were articulating the same position, which Faustusnotes characterized to Lupita as being articulated by “brocialists”. After being called out, he inexplicably claimed to have been making two different accusations against two different groups of leftists: the (presumably) white/male “brocialists” were propagating “nihilism”, and the nonwhite/nonmale socialists like Lupita were propagating “fatalism”. How these two positions were allegedly supposed to be different, in order to justify the claim that he hadn’t accused Lupita of being a “brocialist”, he never even tried to explain.”

Well I can explain for you — faustusnotes was insulting you and your position and trying to convince and win over Lupita

“(1) Do you acknowledge that (e.g.) Lupita is a leftist who believes that collaborating with the faction of the ruling class represented by (e.g.) Hillary Clinton is not in the interests of the oppressed?”

Why, yes I do Will G-R

” (2) If you do acknowledge this, do you think she believes this because she is white and male? ”

Um, no, I think I recall Lupita identifying as a female from Mexico actually. Where is this going exactly?

“(3) If you don’t think she’s white and male, can you think of any other reasons (presumably not connected to her own individual racism/misogyny) she might have for believing this? ”

Well for instance she is from Mexico even though she is an expat at the moment, so I think she identifies with the interests of Mexico in many ways and finds USA policies that affect Mexico such as NAFTA generally objectionable and sees damaging effects on Mexico such as draining the young working population from rural areas

Hilary Clinton is not really offering any policy for Mexico which addresses Lupita’s concerns, and in fact Lupita’s particular concerns about the population draining would be positively addressed by Trump’s anti-immigration policies to some extent

“(4) If you can think of any other reasons, can you think of any reason why white/male leftists like myself might not reject collaboration with (e.g.) Hillary Clinton for equivalent (again presumably not racist/misogynist) reasons?”

Well, you are not from Mexico I am pretty sure you are from the USA, is that right?

So, no, I don’t think you really have any equivalent reasons to Lupita’s reasons as someone from Mexico who finds current USA policy towards Mexico as negative

I also don’t know what you mean about “collaboration” with Hilary Clinton exactly here. You should like you are accusing people who are saying they will vote for Hilary Clinton as “collaborating with the enemy” or something TBH

If you explain your actual reasons for rejecting “collaboration with Hilary Clinton” I could evaluate whether or not they are racist or misogynistic, but its kind of hard when you don’t specify what they are.

I have no idea what your reasons are, for all I know you are from a Right Wing think tank pretending to be a socialist to try and discourage people from voting Democrat in this election or something

ZM, I didn’t think it was possible to be quite so naïve. As far as liberalism, stop embarrassing yourself and at least read “>a Wikipedia entry or something. Here’s a hint, when leftists in either the US or Australia (or in one of the many other countries in which leftists exist!) use the term “liberal”, we’re generally not referring to the ways in which groups like Aussie Labour and/or US Democrats (the people we call “welfare liberals” or “left-liberals”) are different from groups like Aussie Liberals and/or US Republicans (the people we call “classical liberals” or “right-liberals”) — we’re referring to the ways in which they’re not different. That any of this needs to be explained in a setting where folks are allegedly supposed to have some baseline level of philosophical literacy is staggering.

As far as Lupita’s and my political commitments, she can correct me if I’ve misread her but both of us are internationalists, and as such neither of us “identify with the interests of” any nation-state, be it Mexico or the US; we identify with the interests of people, regardless of which nation-state happens to have enclosed the piece of ground on which they reside and bethought itself of saying “this is mine”. For anybody who ascribes to any remotely leftist critique of capitalism and imperialism on a global level, we’re all evaluating the same basic facts about how this system works and coming to the same basic conclusions about why we’ll never consider the people who administer it to be other than monsters. (Leftists often can and do disagree on some of the particulars, especially when it comes to proposed practical responses for leftist movements, but regarding someone like Hillary Clinton as an irredeemable enemy of the oppressed is probably one of the closest things to a universally agreed upon sentiment for all of us.)

Aside from that, I’d prefer not to complement your baseless, insulting speculation about my motives with too much just-as-insulting but far less baseless speculation about your philosophical literacy, so I’ll stop there.

We’ll that was 10 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

christian_h

At the risk of being condescending, my generation, too, thought that our parents’ generation was responsible for how screwed up the world was, and that once we were in charge things would be different. But actually, that’s just a pat no-cost way to explain things, requiring no analysis and no humility. Not that we did very well. But maybe that’s why.

But the question wasn’t condescension. I was commenting on the perception of some people here that the “center-left” hates Sanders. I’ve never seen it. Possibly people who think that are projecting their own hatred of Clinton onto her supporters. I put “center-left” in quotes, because I don’t think it means much. At the Nevada caucuses, one (completely non-existent) Bernie Bro called Barbara Boxer, who by most measures is about as far left as Bernie, a “neo-lib bitch.”

The right condemned Obama for easing Mubarak out. Do you think Clinton was opposed to this? I think we should stop personalizing everything… there are a lot of dictators in the world (though fewer) and diplomats have to deal with them. I think even if Clinton didn’t care at all about democracy and only cared about US strategic interests (which was, in fact, her job) she would have supported the Arab Spring.

Will G-R @265

I take it, then, that you don’t regard Bernie Sanders as an irredeemable enemy of the oppressed. Why not? Because he uses the S-word? Because he wants to bring back Glass-Steagall? Because he proposed a single-payer health plan? Those all seem, obviously, pretty thin. How about Obama? Irredeemable?

The joke about herding cats comes to mind.

Part of that’s endemic to the left, part of it is a feature of the political crazytown that is the US of A but mostly it’s the USP of the CT comments section. The ratio of bullshitters, cranks and grandstanding know-it-alls to anyone with much interest in or connection to left-wing/working class politics (esp. outside US) is unusually small.

James Carville before debate: “Trump is going to have to quit.”

James Carville post debate: “I didn’t see her get rattled.” It’s a train wreck from beginning to end. She got stomped, she looked scared shit-less to be standing in the same room with the women who claim Hillary helped Bill cover his pecker tracks, and the first thing she did when she took the stage was sit down. Both moderators tried to spin for her during the debate. But Carville actually performed worse than his candidate. Can’t even keep his glasses on straight.

It was supposed to be over tonight. It isn’t.

Rachel Maddow and Chris Mathews:”Trump may not be the GOP candidate next week.”

Informed commentary from the it’s over for Trump can’t do it. Guess we’ll have to wait for another “last straw” right up until he’s sworn in.

Then it’ll be how long till Trump is impeached, or quits. One year? 18 months. He won’t finish his first term?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/09/carville_i_did_not_see_her_get_rattled.html

Bruce Wilder #252: “Did he [Bob Schieffer] reflect on America’s descent into Banana Republic status when if was revealed that the U.S. had tortured prisoners?… You can see Donald Trump as an isolated nutcase, but it is hard to do that when one of the great political Parties has made him their nominee. This is America’s Id being exposed.”

I’m not sure what Bob Schieffer’s playing golf with Republicans has to do with this, but the answers are:

1. Yes, to my best recollection Schieffer is one of the earliest who spoke against torture and about its numbing effect on the US’s psyche, and

2. No, I do not think Trump is a nutcase, isolated. I think that around 15% of the US population are nutcases along with him, and they think he is their saviour. Another 25% of the population hates Hillary so bad that they are willing to hope that Trump is merely a reality show carney barker who will divert his attentions from sex and somehow Do the Right Thing, whatever in hell that is (perhaps he will be reined-in by those geniuses in the Senate). The parallels to public psychology of pre-fascist eras in other countries should be apparent, all the way back to the origin of the fasces.

Will G-R, you still don’t understand the concept of the brocialist, and you still don’t understand the limits of the term “liberal”. It’s been explained to you twice now – the people from outside the USA who are criticizing the brocialists here are not liberals. We are social democrats, mostly. Your US “liberal” is our “far right kook”. You might want to note that a large part of the international order you’re criticizing as feel good was created by non-US non-liberals, and maybe we have a different way of thinking about it and its efficacies than you.

Rich, F. Foundling at 107 dissected carefully Gaddafi’s statement that his forces would find the rebels “in their closets.” He’s clearly trying to say, on the basis only of a regime statement, that Gaddafi wasn’t causing any harm to civilians, only to rebels. This is patently not true, and it’s really disappointing to find leftists defending a murderer simply because he’s not HRC.

You might also like to note I opposed the 2003 Iraq war (you can ask Sean Hannity), even though Saddam Hussein was bad, and thought it would be better to drop the sanctions and no fly zones and let his country normalize relations with the world. I am well used to being accused of supporting evil dictators. But thinking a particular policy is good or bad for the people of a country doesn’t require that the leader of that country be exonerated for their obvious and heinous crimes – I never did and I would expect better of you.

Once again, it’s sad to see people revising history just so they can have a pure fire of Hilary hatred in their bellies. This corruption of far left intellectual effort really needs to go – though I suppose you think it can be dealt with after the revolution, which you have a concrete plan for bringing about that you are ready to share with us any day now, right?

Here’s what milx wrote: “US targets = Gaddafi? I understand why you anonymize it – it’s not so bad when she’s talking about a guy who just said: “We are coming tonight. You will come out from inside. Prepare yourselves from tonight. We will find you in your closets.””

Here is exactly what F. Foundling wrote up at #107 about Gaddafi in response, in full:

“What exactly was he supposed to tell armed rebels? ‘We will cuddle with you?’ This wasn’t addressed to the entire civilian population. From the Reuters article reporting on the speech: ‘Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear.’ http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE72G7SB20110317”

You characterize this as:
“He’s clearly trying to say, on the basis only of a regime statement, that Gaddafi wasn’t causing any harm to civilians, only to rebels.”

Do you have reading comprehension problems? Dyslexia is a serious problem: I won’t make fun of you if it’s something like that. I’ve noticed you seem to be most certain of your comments when they’re about statistics, and I wouldn’t try to tell you what kind of regression was best for a particular data set or something, but really — if you don’t at some level know this already — the above exchange does not say what you confidently and insultingly say that it does.

“Do you have reading comprehension problems? Dyslexia is a serious problem: I won’t make fun of you if it’s something like that.”

Rich P responds to a distressing deficit of smarm in this thread.

And, I should add, this is exactly what happened around the Iraq War. Whenever people said that Saddam actually hadn’t done or said whatever atrocity was claimed, the response was “Why are you defending Saddam, you Saddam lover.” I bring up as an example Saddam’s shredder.

I really have trouble believing that you don’t know this, and could uncritically use phrases like “gaddafi lover” above.

The first small problem with your rant, Rich, is that if you read the “propaganda” F. Foundling linked to, it doesn’t offer any critical reinterpretation of his speech, simply reports on it. The second problem is that Gaddafi had already lost one battle of Benghazi, during which his forces had killed civilians (opening fire on protesters and funerals, and killing soldiers who refused to fire on civilians). At the same time as the New York Times was reporting the speech Foundling links to, it also reports Libyan jets were bombing the town.

We never got to find out whether or not Gaddafi’s intentions were only to kill those he called “traitors” and “mercenaries”, because the intervention stopped his troops from dragging people from their closets.

That is, of course, without going into detail about what, exactly, constitutes a civilian in a conflict that pits protesters against the military.

I look forward to your greeting future US statements that they only kill soldiers with the same uncritical approval that you have given to Gaddafi’s threats. It’ll be refreshing to see you so naive and pure in your assessment of Hillary Clinton’s motives!

It’s not unuseful so much as unflattering and inconvenient.

Yup. I knew there was a current of liberal punditry that wanted to stop people using the word ‘neoliberal’ for this reason but ‘liberal’—that’s a new one.

It is absurd to pose as a critic of Clinton’s warmongering while passing on criticism of Obama’s warmongering. Since Obama may be preparing an imminent open assault on the Syrian government and Russia, the fraudulence of the leftist pose is extraordinary, and extraordinarily shameless. When you have no problem with that, you are a right winger.

(And again, there so called peaceful demonstrators resorted to organized armed violence within mere weeks, and persistently refused all efforts by the government to negotiate. Also, the notion that the US simultaneously supporting and fighting with Islamic State and theKurds somehow makes it impossible to assign responsibility to the US would be crazy, were it not so useful for avoiding unpleasant conclusions.)

The notion that Clinton’s landslide election will be a realignment election that wipes out the Republican Party was always incoherent as well as preposterous. The notion that Clinton will win in a landslide ignores the question of turn out, resting firm in the assumption that these are good times, just because the US government stats, Ben Casselman at fivethirtyeight and such ilk say so.

ZM, I thought prefacing that joke with a statement that he’s not using the American sense would be sufficient, without adding “[SARCASM]”. Indeed, just the phrase “fine American Patriots” on CT should make that unnecessary.

I’m not sure why you think my definitional claims about Will G-R’s use of liberalism commit me to any political views whatsoever, much less straw man revolutionary ones.

@292, The central feature was also, like the sarcasm warning, pretty clear: a prioritizing of rights over class equality or just distribution of wealth (which aren’t unvalued, but constrained by that prioritization). In the most right wing versions, it’s property rights and the rights of the market. In left versions, the emphasis is on other human rights, but they’re often intertwined with property rights and market freedom, and even on their own can be obstacles to class equality or redistributive measures.

Well he isn’t using the Australian sense of liberal, and he was calling me a liberal and I can’t see how I fit the definition of liberal in the English sense either which is where the Australian term comes from

AFAICT Will G-R was using the American sense of liberal when he called me a liberal for commenting about the United Nation’s refugee summit

John Locke was English but I don’t see how calling him an American Patriot is sarcasm since I never even brought up John Locke and anyone can google me complaining about John Locke on previous CT threads, so why would Will G-R be saying I was like John Locke? and how is it sarcastic saying John Locke is an American Patriot when no one even brought John Locke up?

Yes classical liberal philosophers are not necessarily American Patriots — but I never said they were Yan

“I’m not sure why you think my definitional claims about Will G-R’s use of liberalism commit me to any political views whatsoever, much less straw man revolutionary ones.”

Since you said Hilary Clinton was a “Far Right Kook”, and you said liberalism “indicates a prioritizing of rights (often property rights) that is basically in tension with any left political project of class struggle or substantial wealth redistribution” and you said liberal political parties — by which you mean all the major political parties as per Will G-R’s definition — “on some level basically resist a central feature of left politics”

These all sound like you must be a leftist revolutionary, or else you are just saying these things for effect and have no plans for revolution at all

“@292, The central feature was also, like the sarcasm warning, pretty clear: a prioritizing of rights over class equality or just distribution of wealth (which aren’t unvalued, but constrained by that prioritisation).

In the most right wing versions, it’s property rights and the rights of the market.

In left versions, the emphasis is on other human rights, but they’re often intertwined with property rights and market freedom, and even on their own can be obstacles to class equality or redistributive measures.”

Okay, you’re saying property rights and human rights get in the way of class equality and redistribution of wealth.

So you want a classless society with equal distribution of wealth without property rights or human rights, is that it?

ZM, the standard social-scientific definition of “liberal” wouldn’t be the standard definition if it wasn’t quite useful. Yes, it denotes essentially all major electoral factions within the space of what we call “liberal democracy” (other terms for which might include “capitalist politics” or “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”) potentially excluding those factions we might call “illiberal” because their demonstrated objective is to gain power over liberal democracy in order to abolish and replace it. To be fair, one source of confusion here is that while in many countries terms like “social democracy” and “labor” originally denoted independent working-class movements that indeed sought to abolish and replace liberalism, the institutionalization of welfare states within a liberal framework in the late 19th through mid 20th centuries involved integrating these parties into the liberal political order, such that today’s mainstream political parties under “labor”, “social democratic”, or even “socialist” labels do not in fact seek to abolish liberal democracy.

That said, the above should be utterly basic stuff in any remotely literate understanding of modern political history, and acting as if it’s somehow news is absurdly anti-intellectual if not outright disingenuous. But if it truly does escape your comprehension, ZM, then Yan and I are doing you a disservice by trying to do your secondary-school homework for you. So hit the books!

engels,

Yan hasn’t defined liberal at all though apart from saying

1. liberalism prioritises property rights and human rights over class equality and redistribution of wealth

and

2. agreeing with Will G-R’s definition of liberal which was just liberal is all the major political parties in the US and Australia

The whole argument I had with Will G-R started when I commented about the United Nations summit on refugees and he said “Jesus, ZM, you liberals never cease to amaze me with your commitment to taking noncommittal, unenforceable, feel-good PR fluff at face value…”

My comment didn’t have anything to do with capitalism it was about refugees — and human rights are important for refugees

Annoying people will start to write things like “CT threads are so much worse now”.

In case that’s directed at me, I don’t think they’re getting worse (I’m not sure that’s possible), just longer.

ZM, I was referring to 1. (I haven’t followed your argument with Will about the UN but it seems possible to me someone could be in favour of action on refugees while thinking the UN’s claims to promote this are mostly just talk).

Will G-R @ 297-298

Clarity. It’s a bit daunting, watching all these folks tramping through 200+ years of western political and economic history with their bullhorns and books of chastisements, but given that a) the shit finally seems to have hit the fan, and b) Hillary Clinton is considered credible as a representative of the center left, how could we realistically expect anything else?

“In case that’s directed at me”

No, it wasn’t, but it is a general trope around the election. I don’t know why people think that it is a bad sign that around contested elections arguments get longer and more heated.

People should probably just give their own short definitions of “liberalism” instead of coyly laying claim to its historical periods. In 50 words or less.

I think “liberalism” should be strictly confined to its earliest and shortest definition: the early modern defense of individual liberty and equality, as against the whims of monarchy, aristocracy, priesthood. This included strong property law against unjust seizure.

Thus, liberalism is an historical episode.

Stevenjohnson #219: “The notion that Clinton’s landslide election will be a realignment election that wipes out the Republican Party was always incoherent as well as preposterous.”

I don’t know what “wipes out” means here, but I think that this misreads what is going on. The crackup doesn’t need a landslide, nor even Hillary Clinton.

The Republican Party already looks like it will split into two (more like, 1/3 vs. 2/3), and a victory by any Democrat against “TeaPartyTrumpism” might do it.

This split within the GOP has been in the cards since Reagan.

Trump merely accelerated the process by his pure opportunism. He openly attacked the party leaders in the primaries, ran toward the fascist right, and returned to that “burn-the-house-down” style at last night’s debate (Oct. 10 – perhaps signaling that he no longer expects to win the election).

It looks like even Republican Party strategists finally understand that a crackup is a high possibility. Although they still don’t trace it all the way back, to the fantasy-promise of smaller gov’t, reduced taxes on the “job creators”, and deregulation, all to create economic growth.

Anyway, if Trump loses, then what? Well, it is possible that his ego — and his commercial interests — are likely to lead the TrumpTeas to split-off into a third party, founded upon a cable TV & social media network.

Or do you think that, instead, Trump will go gentle into that good night?

And, if the TrumpTeas absquatulate, then at that very moment the “moderate” Republicans, who have been stringing the Teas & their predecessors along for years, won’t have enough remaining voters to be elected dogcatcher.

So then, what do the moderates do?

Well, a lot of the immediate answer to that depends on whether the Republicans have held the Senate and the House. If they hold Congress, then can oppose President Hillary the way they opposed Obama.

But then, there is another new wrinkle. The obstructionists are going to run into the changed media landscape. Mainstream reporters had been their enablers — until now.

Reporters have realized that the GOP has played them for suckers, (or, for the most part, they realize it), and the lack of investigative reportage in their standard “he said, she said” format has led to an uninformed electorate — and indeed has led us all right to Candidate Trump, a circumstance which really ought not be repeated.

The reporters will find validation among most of the voters, who are going to be very weary of further obstructionism, at least for a while. (Most of the voters, except the TrumpTeas.)

So, the moderate Republicans are going to be trapped. Thus, I don’t see an easy course correction for the GOP.

Point taken re: charitability. Most of us here who consider ourselves to the left of liberalism were liberals once (by some people’s definitions we’re still liberals until we throw our full material weight behind some Maoist party mounting a protracted people’s war) and I like to think that at least the more naïve forms of liberalism are at least in some way redeemable. As Žižek puts it:

Apropos liberal egalitarianism, it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that effectively sustain it — as is so common amongst politically-correct critics on the Left. The counter-argument that the form is never a “mere form,” but involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces in the materiality of social life, made by theoreticians such as Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière, is fully valid — it was the bourgeois “formal freedom” which set in motion the process of altogether “material” political demands and practices, from trade unions to feminism. One should resist the cynical temptation of reducing it to a mere illusion that conceals a different actuality. That would be to fall into the trap of the old Stalinist hypocrisy which mocked “merely formal” bourgeois freedom: if it was so merely formal and didn’t disturb the true relations of power, why, then, didn’t the Stalinist regime allow it? Why was it so afraid of it?

The interpretive demystification is thus here relatively easy, since it mobilizes the tension between form and content: to be consequent, an “honest” liberal democrat will have to admit that the content of his ideological premises belies its form, and thus radicalize the form (the egalitarian axiom) by way of implementing it more thoroughly onto the content. (The main alternative is the retreat into cynicism: “we know egalitarianism is an impossible dream, so let us pretend that we are egalitarians, while silently accepting necessary limitations…”).

So OK, ZM… if you’ll go back and read what I wrote, your characterization that I’m not “making any distinctions between different political parties and different political actors and different policies and different historical periods” is 100% incorrect. I actually did try to explain to you an important distinction between different policies and historical periods of liberalism: what various people in various countries call “welfare liberalism”, “the welfare state”, “social liberalism”, or “social democracy” is liberalism’s adaptation to the demands of leftist movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is especially evident in liberal rhetoric of the 1930s about the potential for economic dislocation to drive workers into the arms of the radical left, stressing the need for liberals to incorporate some concessions to leftist demands into the liberal framework in order to prevent a revolution. The (maximally simplified) periodization of liberal political trends would thus run “classical liberalism” –> “welfare liberalism” –> “neoliberalism”, with neoliberalism denoting our current era of ever-more-defanged leftist movements and ever-more-dismantled welfare states. But yes, if we’re determined to maintain our intellectual rigor in the face of propagandistic bastardizations (from the American to the Australian), all of these trends still fall under the rubric of liberalism.

As far as refugees, my favored policy would be absolute free movement of people, with a global political apparatus empowered to ensure that this is able to occur with a minimum of human misery, i.e. organized and legitimate flows of safe mass transportation as opposed to illegitimized and deliberately life-threatening human trafficking operations. My favored policy would also be to end the various destructive Western political and economic interventions that lead to global flows of refugees and/or economic migrants (a distinction I consider illegitimate) fleeing unsafe/destitute regions for safe/affluent ones in the first place. On a broader level, my favored policy would be to end the fragmentation of the global working class by nation-state, and to treat nobody’s claims to political or economic security as any more legitimate than anybody else’s on account of their nation-state of origin. Unfortunately, for reasons the radical critique of capitalism make quite clear, the politics of global capitalism (a liberal politics) will not allow any of this to happen, which is why we need something else.

Will G-R

OK, here’s what I’ve got so far:

Liberals prioritize human rights over class equality.
Clinton is a liberal.
Sanders is not a liberal.

Do the people who voted for Sanders know this? I don’t think so.

Now that we’ve got this established, can we at least refrain from broadening the term “neoliberal” so it loses its original intended meaning of reviving an extreme free-market ideology? We’ve got the term “liberal” covering the entire US political spectrum except Sanders; we don’t really need another term covering the entire US political spectrum except Sanders. Instead of calling Barbara Boxer a “neolib bitch” we could just call her a “liberal bitch”. That would at least not leave people scratching their heads.

The willpower it takes not to be snarky here could singlehandedly solve the Earth’s dependence on fossil fuels, but no, Howard, nowhere did I claim that Bernie Sanders is not a liberal. This is the second CT thread now in which you’ve brought up Bernie Sanders to me completely out of the blue, without my having mentioned him at all, as if any American with a left critique of Hillary Clinton must naturally be a supporter of Bernie Sanders. (In the previous thread, after I incredulously denied having staked my political position to Bernie Sanders, your reaction was even to assume that this logically implies I’m not actually an American.) If you’ll read what I actually wrote, you might note that I described “social democracy” and “the welfare state” as terms describing a particular form of liberalism, and Sanders’ stated agenda embodies this form of liberalism quite well.

From the 1980s, neoliberal came from multiple origins to represent an evolution of liberal and European socialist in Third Way politics and technocratic speak in a global ideology of the executive and managerial classes (as RP has argued).

Repeatedly and quite mistakenly imho

And in other news—in perhaps another blow for the Puchalsky-Wilder thesis that neoliberalism, classical liberalism and libertarianism are greatly different phenomena: the Adam Smith Institute just declared itself to be a ‘neoliberal’ think tank.

https://twitter.com/asi/status/785519509864153088

It was interesting, and a step forward, to read people clarifying what they think ‘liberal’ means, but the remaining weakness is the apparent conflation of human rights and property rights. Sure, as someone above (I think it was Bruce Wilder in his historical exegesis) explained, the idea of individual property rights may have been asserted as part of the assertion of individual rights, as a defence against the overweening sovereign or lord, but there is a danger in confusing them.

John Quiggin has talked at length about what are property rights, and the answer may vary from my right to ‘own’ my toothbrush, to the elaborate schemes of wealth accumulation under high capitalism. It’s not simple.

A suggestion that because ZM believes in the human rights of refugees, she is somehow a ‘liberal’ in the same sense as the Australian Liberal Party, (or the American Republicans), who are committed to extending the wealth and income gap, in the name of trickle down economics, is clearly wrong.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=equaliberty

@321
That book looks interesting, although I don’t think I have the time or stamina to wade through any more books by French social theorists right now :) Perhaps you could give us the potted version?

On a related point about human rights and property rights (which has also been debated here), as a feminist, I believe that assertion of the right of married women to own property in the 19thC (as well as have guardianship of their children) was a good thing. That doesn’t mean I support capitalism though.

Val, to the extent that the UN and international institutions like it have enshrined liberal democracy as their ideal form of government through founding statements like the UDHR, and to the extent that they themselves operate as procedural, rules-governed, formally egalitarian institutions in imitation of liberal democratic governments (albeit poor imitations, since in practice, state and nonstate actors allegedly subject to international law are nonetheless empowered to behave in all sorts of highly illiberal ways), it seems mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly, brain-deadeningly uncontroversial to characterize these institutions as “liberal” institutions and proposed solutions within the frameworks of these institutions as “liberal” solutions. But if this is really the rhetorical hill you and ZM want to die on, I won’t stop you.

Aside from this, the constant demand by liberals that radicals provide their complete blueprints for a future society as a baseline cost of admission for bringing the topic up at all never ceases to be disingenuous. Your proposed liberal solutions to the problems you set out to solve will not work. The fact that radicals who understand this generally don’t claim to know what solutions will work doesn’t change this.

The other way of looking at it, Will, is that the UN is the first attempt at an international form of governance that is not based on violence (in Weber’s sense) It is not an Empire, but at least partially democratic.. In that sense it is a step forward. A lot of this is about perspective and gradualism, versus radical change. If you want to make an argument for radical change, fine, but you have to persuade people how it can be done, (unless you propose to use violence).

(And please don’t tell me that the UN sanctions violence, and even the peacekeeping forces ‘use’ violence, or the threat of violence, in the same way that state police forces do, I know that. Even I, as an ardent pacifist, haven’t worked out how we can do without that form of policing yet.)

Can you (and others here) please stop using insults. I know, we all tend to do it, I’ve done it myself, but it doesn’t help the discussion.

I am not a liberal as I have told you before so please stop calling me one.

Shorter 328: There are areas of overlap betw ‘liberalism’ and ‘radicalism’, but it wd be hard to glean that from most of Will G-R’s comments.

Will G-R #325: “Aside from this, the constant demand by liberals that radicals provide their complete blueprints for a future society as a baseline cost of admission for bringing the topic up at all never ceases to be disingenuous. Your proposed liberal solutions to the problems you set out to solve will not work.”

This is nonsense, on both counts.

You have freedom of speech — and you have it right here, on an astonishingly advanced technological development — and so “liberalism” works, at least a little.

Nor do we need a complete blueprint. Just answer the question, “What do radicals think should happen in practice, next?” This is to ask ingenuously.

Again, you appear to be a quasi-religious believer in your own abstractions, abstractions reified as actors, having agency in the world.

Rich Puchalsky, back at #two-twenty-something:

And all of the excuses that people made for their behavior during this election (“we have to stop Trump!”) will not end with this election cycle,

True.

any more than than the bits about 12 dimensional chess, Green Lanternism, and so on stopped being used as excuses for Obama once his elections were over.

Probably true, too.

Let’s get real, again: in 4 years there will be Trump 2.0

Unfortunately pretty much a certainty.

and all of the same people will be saying that we absolutely need to stop going on about HRC’s past broken promises in order to get rid of Trump 2.0 and that we’re racist and / or sexist if we don’t.

Well, possibly, but I can’t speak for those. I don’t support this as a matter of general principle.

Maybe these points of agreement illuminate why I’m resisting being shoehorned into your system that seems to suppose that anyone who brings up sexism or racism/Islamophobia must must do it out of allegiance to Clinton or the Democratic party establishment. I thought that having no dog in the fight for the success of the Democratic party, per se, would help me escape this sterotype, but no. I also don’t think I’m a crypt-neoliberal; ok, pragmatism looks better than idealism these days.

I wonder how much of what you say is about Clinton in the first place. Would your attitude be any different if the person standing there was — just for a random list of potential options — Joe Biden, Martin O’Malley, Harry Reid? (Couldn’t quickly come up with a female option, but well, Clinton’s the first that made it that far for a reason.) Even Bernie Sanders, though the soundwaves would probably more hopey-changey, and the Trum-attack-caused bloodsplatters would have a different pattern.

Your position sounds so oddly anachronistic (not in the sense of outdated, but ahistorical, decontextualized) to me.

I’m OK with public cynicism that says that all politicians are lying and that none of their promises can be trusted. But how are people going to follow up on that? Is there any mechanism by which they plan to pressure them, in any realistic way? Note that Sanders supporters just did the time-honored “primary challenge to pull the party to the left” and got nothing.

How do you know they got nothing? And don’t say her past behavior — the invoice would have to be presented after the election after all, and for her program they DID get stuff. So what mechanism would you suggest? This is the 4th Western democratic country I’ve lived in as an adult, and I am confused why people aren’t following up. It would be obvious how this could look like, so why do you think this isn’t happening? (I’m still new enough to it, and think times have shifted, to hope and half expect that it will. But if it doesn’t, what’s standing in the way? Surely not some nobody like me and others saying that I’m ok with Clinton focussing of winning the election against the would-be dictator at the moment…)

And Howard Frant, you’re speaking to my heart. I find that staying on topic would be so much easier if commenters read for content and abstained from litigating every slightly sub-optimal adverbial phrase.

>>Our solutions will never work!
Strewth! Love you for owning them.

No, I ain’t got cash
I ain’t got cash
But I got you baby

I don’t need no money
As long as I can feel the beat
I don’t need no money
As long as I keep dancing*

*Not a Rosa quote.

hix @ 334

Last I checked, it wasn’t clear that the person sending these mails was a Democrat at all or that the Democrat that received them liked their content. Could have been some strange spam for all we know – correct me if I’m wrong.

Faustusnotes @ 330
>Am I to assume that from now on you and foundling will be equally uncritical in your interpretation of American military assurances that they only target militants? … Perhaps you could clarify why you and foundling trust gaddafi’s public assurances (made just weeks after his forces opened fire on demonstrators!) more than you trust clintons?

Sigh. I wouldn’t blame RP if he didn’t respond to that, but I’m going to be the masochist one last time. I *didn’t* say I believed his assurances that he wouldn’t. I said he *hadn’t* given an assurance that he *would*, which is what was claimed at the time and what milx again implied here. I also mentioned, as an aside, that there seemed to be little evidence to prove that he was about to perpetrate some sort of slaughter of genocidal proportions in Benghazi, as was claimed at the time, and I linked to a summary of a Parliament report including statements of Middle East experts arguing that there was, in fact, little reason to believe that. As for the double standard you postulate, I am more than even-handed; I’m fully prepared to oppose an operation to arm and aid Christian fundamentalist rebels in the US in order to overthrow the US government, and I would deplore rather than welcome the news that either Obama or Clinton were killed extrajudicially, lynched, or sodomised with a bayonet, in spite of the targeting of civilians that you have mentioned. This is the last of your misreadings of my posts on this subject that I intend to repond to in this thread, even though I have no doubt that you can and will come up with ever more inventive ways to misread them.

Howard Frant @269
>The right condemned Obama for easing Mubarak out. Do you think Clinton was opposed to this?

Actually, as an interesting detail, it seems that she was among the more ‘neoconny’ people in the administration even in this respect. Not all that important, but still: NYT: ‘Mrs. Clinton had cultivated a close relationship with Mr. Gates. Both tended to be more hawkish than the president. They had raised concerns about how rapidly he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. More recently, they had argued that Mr. Obama should not be too hasty in dropping support for Hosni Mubarak, the embattled Egyptian leader, whom Mrs. Clinton had known since her years as the first lady.’

bruce wilder @264
>There are multiple layers and more than two sides.

You are, of course, right that this was a major simplification on my part, although it doesn’t affect the main point I was making about the USA’s involvement. Still, Iran and Russia have been made de facto allies by the logic of things at least in Syria, and the Yemen war is part of the same conflict between Sunni and Shia (the Saudis and Iran). The greatest deviation from the overall pattern is in Iraq, where the US is collaborating with the Shia side.

>Scruples about international law seem superfluous in a conflict this complex and international in its character already.

I don’t follow the logic, and I disagree with the sentiment. Since it’s already an international conflict … international law doesn’t matter? Again, I don’t see adherence to international law as a minor optional nicety for the overly conscientious, as quite a few Americans seem to do.

We should definitely take his assurances at face value!! I mean he hasn’t openly said he will kill civilians, and we all know we can trust this dudes word!!

We?

Not responding to Fn and won’t be discussing anymore, but still, for anyone interested, in addition to the Salon summary I linked to above:

1. A link to the Independent, citing Amnesty International and the International Crisis Group:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html:

‘Nato leaders, opposition groups and the media have produced a stream of stories since the start of the insurrection on 15 February, claiming the Gaddafi regime has ordered mass rapes, used foreign mercenaries and employed helicopters against civilian protesters. An investigation by Amnesty International has failed to find evidence for these human rights violations and in many cases has discredited or cast doubt on them. It also found indications that on several occasions the rebels in Benghazi appeared to have knowingly made false claims or manufactured evidence. … There is no evidence that aircraft or heavy anti-aircraft machine guns were used against crowds.’

2. A link to the most relevant part of the Parliament report, with testimonies by experts:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/119/11905.htm#_idTextAnchor020

This sort of thing among others makes me a bit … cautious on the subject of humanitarian interventions.

Interesting that you cite the independent rather than going directly to the source. Amnesty international reports on a campaign of murder and intimidation in misratah and forced disappearances of prisoners of the regime in march to may 2011. Yet here you are believing the regimes claim it won’t hurt anyone in another city it is already bombing and about to attack.

If this isn’t an attempt to exonerate gaddafi of crimes, what exactly is it? It appears to be of a piece with your unwillingness to accept facts about Syria…

Val @ 229

> It might help to explain why, for example, a white man may not have a perfect understanding of the position or experiences of women or people of colour, and that his misunderstandings and biases may be detectable to those people in a way that they are not necessarily apparent to those who are like him.

Maybe, but after having detected these misunderstandings and biases, you should still be able to demonstrate them in ways other than merely appealing to your authority (say, as a woman or a POC). Arguments like ‘I’m right because I’m an X (in real life)’, even more so ‘You’re wrong because you’re a Y (in real life)’, and especially ‘You’re only saying this because you’re a Y (in real life)’ are generally antithetical to reasoned discussion. They are especially ridiculous online, where you usually can’t even prove who is X and who is Y in real life in the first place.

So what are you trying to say? Because you certainly seem to be implying that the regime never hurt anyone, or that any harm they cause was simply incidental to a war. You sem to be implying we should trust that their actions and their statements match. You seem to be implying that any exaggeration or fabrication by rebels immediately invalidates all claims of abuse, and you seem to think Amnesty agree with you that nothing bad happened when in fact they presented long lists of atrocities.

You, Bruce Wilder, and Rich (perhaps a few others) have this common strategy of presenting statements that certainly lead to a strong implication, but when challenged on what you appear to be trying to say, denying that and accusing your reader of deliberate misreading; but then consistently refuse to give any alternative conclusion that could give a purpose to the statements you have made. It makes it easy for you to sow doubt and confusion without ever having to actually admit to a position that would probably, if dragged out into the light of day, be an embarrassment to you.

Howard @345,

Sanders is very much a border case, so I don’t find Will’s view strange or unreasonable. As Rich points out, the case can be made that he is indeed a variety of socialist, though for many that’s stretching the definition too far. Such terms have utility only in broad usage, so there’s not much point in bickering about the fine edges of the concepts.

“When you talk about prioritizing equality, are you talking about as a political strategy, or as an actual ranking of ends?”

I think ranking of ends is probably more useful, but I must admit my classification of Sanders as left of liberal was about practice. I suspect if you asked Sanders, he’d say he gives equality and rights equal weight or rights greater weight, even though in practice he gives more time and voice to equality. If so, that explicit set of ends would be a good reason to call him a liberal. I think his choice of the name democratic socialist is a rejection of a strong dividing line, an attempt to carve out a third option between socialist and liberal.

“Because prioritizing class equality over human rights should make anyone acquainted with the twentieth century very uncomfortable. ”

Yes, which is why I twice went out of my way to stress prioritizing doesn’t mean disvaluing the second priority. However, I think that discomfort proves nothing. People who grossly violate rights in the name of equality do so for the same reason as people who profess to prioritize rights grossly violate them: because they don’t truly value rights, not because they value them less than equality. No moral monsters wait for permission from a political ideology to be monsters, they borrow them to cover their monstrosity after the fact. They are, as you say, excuses, precisely because they’re not causes.

But that’s a debate for another thread. As I’ve said, I think that way of thinking about liberalism is inexact, since equality and rights are interdependent: one must try to give them equal priority, even if in practice we must sometimes focus on one or the other first.

Val: “Yes but have I (or anyone else here) ever done that? It seems that the imagined examples are making an appearance again.”

You’re asking us to Google pretty much your entire prior set of comments here? In addition to the usual bits about how people are disagreeing with you because you’re a women, and how they don’t have the opinions that you think they should have because they are men, you also have a sideline in appeals to authority based on your status as a grad student — as if the vast majority of people here don’t have academic degrees or positions. This would be a very interesting blog if every time one of the OPs wrote something, they responded to the inevitable instant disagreement in comments with outraged verbiage about how they’ve studied this and they’re an expert and if people don’t respect their theories they’re being sexist. It’s an interesting attempted manipulation that you also blame people who don’t respond to your nonsense for trying to freeze you out of the conversation.

Yan@352

No moral monsters wait for permission from a political ideology to be monsters, they borrow them to cover their monstrosity after the fact. They are, as you say, excuses, precisely because they’re not causes.

No, but it makes a difference in how easy it is to be a successful monster. Dictators are dependent on lots of people to carry out their plans, and to carry them out enthusiastically rather than in a perfunctory way. That’s a lot easier when you can tell them that building socialism is more important than a bourgeois concept like human rights.

But that’s a debate for another thread.

F. Foundling #348

Maybe, but after having detected these misunderstandings and biases, you should still be able to demonstrate them in ways other than merely appealing to your authority (say, as a woman or a POC). Arguments like ‘I’m right because I’m an X (in real life)’, even more so ‘You’re wrong because you’re a Y (in real life)’, and especially ‘You’re only saying this because you’re a Y (in real life)’ are generally antithetical to reasoned discussion. They are especially ridiculous online, where you usually can’t even prove who is X and who is Y in real life in the first place.

There is no authority vested in merely being a woman or POC. It’s not a simple thing, like being a chemist or a police chief. How it works is that whatever gender or sex, race or ethnicity, etc. etc. we are, modulated by the particular environment we have lived our lives in, will grosso modo enable or disable certain pathways of experiences, which enable understanding what’s going on in terms informed by these attributes. And as long as there is one particular set of attributes whose lucky or unlucky owners just quite nonchalantly thinks of themselves as the universally applicable normal case, conflict will remain inevitable.

I don’t think there is a woman[1] who hasn’t looked into the condescendingly smiling face of a male asshole interlocutor and thought “you wouldn’t say this if I was male”, or a LGBT person who wasn’t utterly convinced the straight person who thinks of themselves as their friend wouldn’t have said what they said to another straight person. From the stories that my POC or disabled friends tell, the same applies to them. And in 99% of cases we bite our tongues hard and don’t say it. Because you can’t prove a negative, and you can’t even prove a positive causality from a single incident, however often we’ve seen the same single isolated incident play out the same way. In 1% we may crack. Maybe we’re playing to a friendly crowd and enjoy some jerk getting laughed at, or maybe we just can’t take the humiliation and let the anger have its way. Both times we end up with a scar of some fashion. Being considered unfit for “reasoned discussion” for example.

Now to avoid that you are telling Val that she “should still be able to demonstrate them in ways other than merely appealing to your authority”. Well, I guess she could. We could. But why, in the name of all that is fucking great and good, would the onus to do that fall on us, and on us alone? Why isn’t it you who thinks it’s your duty in a “reasoned discussion” to listen out for discrepancies that may have arisen from the experiences of those of us who aren’t white, male, staight and able-bodied (etc.)? To take the slightly more laborious step of testing your argument against hypotheticals outside your own personal identity happenstance? I don’t claim that I’m great at that, but I do it all the bloody time: how would X feel if I wasn’t female? how does Y sound to someone who’s [insert ethnicity]? is the agreement I’m getting to Z only coming from able-bodied / white [whatever…] people, and if yes, what’s going wrong here?

Now I don’t know Val. I know I’ve disagreed with her in the past. She’s invited to disagree with every single thing of my opinions. But what I’m seeing when she points to the hoops her institution’s ethical review people make her jump through is not an appeal to “authority as a grad student” (ha, ha) or academic, but simply a practical everyday example of what this extra work looks like in a more structured environment.

And one last thing. And I’ll be leaning myself out of the window here, because I’ll affirm this without proof. That this extra work is placed entirely on the shoulders of the more marginal community members is I believe why this space remains so overwhelmingly populated by contributors who are white and male. Of all the online spaces I frequent for serious exchanges, this one is by far the one most lacking POC, female, queer, disabled voices. You may not have noticed that, but it stands out like a sore thumb to me. Despite the great things our esteemed hosts are doing with CT. Hostility can be embedded in community norms — it doesn’t require a single sexist or racist thought to darken your brow.

PS: My conception of “left” or “radical” if you will includes a notion of equality where everyone is responsible in seeking out the competencies for communicating equitably in this cross-identity, cross-cultural environment. And that, finally, is the reason I added this comment.

[1] insert minor hyperbole marker in this paragraph as appropriate; there are of course people like that; also, the figures in this post aren’t supposed to be taken literally

There are voices in the world, even here, that direct attention to their peculiar experience to say ‘you haven’t a full understanding of what this implies, how it feels to be on the receiving end of this particular violation or exclusion, how it feels to suffer even as you celebrate that reform’. Such voices remind us of the consequences of our elisions, and of the limits of our experience and assumptions. They expand the horizons of our politics, and chastise our lazy imagination of solidarity to say, ‘our shared principles demand that you support this campaign, that you value these lives here, that you don’t turn your face away from this suffering’. Speaking from lived experience, they insist that those who suffer can’t/ won’t to put up with X oppression, its justifications and the excuses made for slow progress any longer.

The liberal voices here don’t ever do that.

What they do instead is to say, ‘this left idea goes too far, this challenge to the bosses is irresponsible, this restraint on power is too strict, you show great disrespect/mistrust/impatience to this important institution or custom, you are ignoring this aspiration of this beloved, well-meaning office-holder. They insist, in a very revealing depiction of their limited association, ‘you are only choosing the bolder, more far-reaching option because you are a privileged white male performing a politics of purity.’

This is the standard form here, IRL, on the TV and across the internets.

Draped in a love blanket for Blair, the Clintons, Obama, Gillard and similars across the planet, gesturing towards liberal, legal expansions for LGBTI, women and swartherners, this politics is infused with an identitarianism that applauds the expansion of access in managerial roles, the participation of darker-skinned, differently gendered bodies in the very structures of violence it pretends to want to change. It is obsessed with governing, with winning office, money, privilege and friends in high places. It is intensely relaxed about occupying the plush palaces.

Not one of the voices it recruits says, ‘as a person with relatives in X country, I warn you of the horrible consequences of a bombing campaign there, or this extraction, or this invasion or this noxious trade pact.’ Not one of them says ‘as a single parent/immigrant at the sharp end of this policy, I say $15 isn’t enough to live on, bring that fence/wall down, stop this violent Labour campaign against immigrants.’ Not one of them has an emancipatory politics beyond that handed down by the bosses. Not one has a vision of the future that is bolder or more capacious than a trust in the mercies of the institutions of the status quo to carry out necessary repairs to a badly leaking boat.

I’ve learned a lot from the tangling of this tendency with feminist, queer, indigenous, Latin American, Middle-Eastern, African, Native American, Southern European, and African-American voices that are on the sharp end of the worst abuse from the global economic and political system. You often see this playing out on social media, subalterns refusing the fake allegiance of those who insist they Lean In and participate, that all comers play by the rules. This tendency approaches campaigns for justice as allies, masquerading as angels of light, but by the passion of their allegiance to the bosses, the bills, the bombs and the ballot they makes their true preference known. It isn’t just that they prefer to work inside of the prevailing system and its limitations, it is that they denounce everyone who won’t.

Val,
You say above that you are an ardent pacifist. Your close associations with Aus Labor/Gillard aside, you insist that you aren’t a liberal. You shouldn’t be standing there then, not with the war party, not with the market champions, not with those who mock the idea of revolution.

Here is a direct quote from about two months ago:

Val 08.11.16 at 8:39 am
J-D you clearly have a problem with taking things very literally, and I think you may possibly also like to find fault with people (possibly particularly with women). …

(If anybody wants to check the full text of the comment, or of the entire exchange of which it formed part, the title of the blog post was ‘Nauru, Australia’s shame’.)

It stuck in my mind and was fairly easy for me to find because of the direct reference to me personally.

I couldn’t (and still can’t) understand what led Val to make the suggestion that I might possibly have a particular liking for finding fault with women, but I wasn’t interested in following up on the point at the time (there were other comments then which dealt with what seemed to me to be the substantive point at issue, so I responded to them).

However, it occurs to me in the context of the present discussion that it might be enlightening if Val could enlarge on that point.

On the other hand, maybe that’s all an irrelevance and I’m barking up the wrong tree, in which case I can only apologise.

J-D I was assuming you are the same J-D who comments on John Quiggin’s Australian blog? Apologies if I’m wrong, but if that is you, I’ve seen you nitpick a lot, particularly against Julie who comments there.

That’s why I said it.

Val 10.11.16 at 10:48 am
J-D I was assuming you are the same J-D who comments on John Quiggin’s Australian blog? Apologies if I’m wrong, but if that is you, I’ve seen you nitpick a lot, particularly against Julie who comments there.

That’s why I said it.

Yes, I am the same J-D who comments on John Quiggin’s blog.

I’m afraid I have no distinct recollection of my interactions with Julie, but I do recollect interactions with other commenters there which could be interpreted as antagonistic (which might be my fault or might be theirs, or might be nobody’s fault). In particular I recollect that John Quiggin specifically requested (or directed) that Ivor and I stop responding to each other.

I have no recollection of my own to put against yours that I tangled with Julie more than anybody else. But there are certainly other people I have tangled with. Did you not notice when, for example, I tangled with Ivor? Even if you’re right that I found fault particularly with Julie, how does that lead to the suggestion that (maybe) I find fault particularly with women? It seems to me, if that’s the evidence you were going on, that your singling out the gender category as a potentially significant explanatory variable is suggestive of something about your approach which might be connected with the points that F Foundling and Rich Puchalsky were trying to make earlier.

I don’t want to harp on the point (I understand if you don’t feel it’s worth pursuing), but you did (and with some degree of justice) object that F Foundling and Rich Puchalsky had given no specific actual examples of any actual comment by you, which is why it seemed possibly worthwhile bringing up the one I did know of, and your explanation of it so far seems to me (on the basis just explained)) incomplete.

Also: regarding this comment, Henry James just called to say he wants that sentence back. You can even borrow his pick-up if it doesn’t fit in the trunk of your own car.

(Bar fight status) Stage where people are coming in off the street just to throw a quick punch (/bar fight status)

Anarcissie @320
“freedom and equality were necessary to each other, because if people are unequal in any significant way some must have more freedom than others. (Freedom being the space in which one can work one’s will)”

Just remembered I never responded to this. Yes, I had something like this in mind by the interdependency of equality and rights. I think your freedom/rights distinction is similar to my distinction between concrete/abstract rights, where legal recognition is not enough, there must also be equality to make the exercise of recognize rights possible.

I’d add however that in addition to “space” to act, a metaphor that evokes a negative freedom from, equality above all enables “ground” upon which to act, our freedom for. In the language of Nussbaum and Sen, to be meaningful, rights require capabilities, and inequality limits access to capabilities.

Howard @356,

Not to entirely break my promise to save this topic for another day, but I think one utility of the definition at issue is it allows us to identity positions of very different degrees, with a radical libertarianism than borders on indifference to equality on one side (not coincidentally, given their interdependency, dramatically reducing the number of forms of rights) and a radical egalitarianism that borders on indifference to rights on the other.

My general view is that your worries are justified for any ideology that falls too far toward either end, but that there is a lot of ground and many degrees that are far from both and far from any slippery slopes. And I’d note that those who prioritize rights should should show some of the same discomfort for how such a view can excuse or enable gross violations of equality.

Opposing liberty to equality (as liberals tend to) is a category error. Liberty is a good, equality is a pattern according to which goods (including liberty) are distributed. An unequal society is one in which liberty (among other things) is possessed unequally.

@366
Yes J-D I do remember that you had long interchanges with Ivor. I thought you two were rather similar and found your exchanges very boring, as I think you would by now have realised they were for others, if not for you. My memory however is that you did, at least for a time, target Julie, and that you appeared condescending.

Women may be ‘over-sensitive’ to this kind of thing, but there is a wealth of empirical evidence that we do get targeted and discriminated against, so perhaps you (and basil) should pay a bit more heed to that.

I am trying to be patient, it’s probably not my natural tendency, but I’m doing my best. I hope others will also do their best, particularly to stop using straw -wo/manning and insults as debating tactics.

Val: “Remember how you described my feminist theories, Rich? In case you’ve forgotten, it was “dopey”.”

Yeah, I wrote that because you’re a woman, not because you’re trying to revive an essentialist version of 1970s feminism in contrast to everything that people have learned about intersectionality.

Rich, seriously, you don’t know what you are talking about. All this stuff around ‘essentialism’ tends to be very shallow and serious scholars in this area are very sceptical of it. And I am a serious scholar of feminist theory, and I haven’t seen any evidence that you are.

It could of course be that you’re not treating me particularly badly because I’m a woman, you’re ‘equal opportunity’ rude. But surely you can see that men explaining feminism to women is problematic.

I mean seriously. I think that’s enough for now, because this conversation is honestly a bit ridiculous.

ZM and Val,

For what it’s worth, Will’s charge of liberalism–whether or not it’s accurate in application to your views–is an indirect complement to Australian politics. As Will probably uses it, an alternate definition of liberal is: “bad, because too much like America’s feeble version of progressive politics.”

Basically, liberal means: better, but not good enough, because not really socialism.

If you (as I do) think that revolutionary socialism is a mistake and that a compromised incremental progressivism is our only option, I don’t see any reason to take being called a liberal in this sense as an insult, just as a drawing of lines of disagreement. Sanders, for example, is arguably a liberal in this sense.

I don’t think of myself as a liberal, but I’m fine with those on the furthest end of the left seeing me that way, it’s a bit of a fuzzy line, a matter of degree.

faustusnotes @ 350: You, Bruce Wilder, and Rich (perhaps a few others) have this common strategy of presenting statements that certainly lead to a strong implication, but when challenged on what you appear to be trying to say, denying that and accusing your reader of deliberate misreading; but then consistently refuse to give any alternative conclusion that could give a purpose to the statements you have made. It makes it easy for you to sow doubt and confusion without ever having to actually admit to a position that would probably, if dragged out into the light of day, be an embarrassment to you.

The above seems a remarkably clear statement of an argumentative style bound to provoke hostility. There is a risk attached to challenging someone on what they appear to you to say: it is that they may feel you have misread them deliberately in order to raise your objection. And, feeling deliberately misread, they may think their original statement, read plainly and correctly, was sufficient, and needs no alternative justification.

Commenters by the act of commenting are exposing our positions, our opinions to the light of day with only exceptionally any sense of embarrassment. Having someone attribute a “hidden” and reprehensible position to us and argue against that reprehensible position isn’t embarrassing if we do not hold such a position and have not, by our own lights, expressed such. It may be experienced as annoying or frustrating, provocative of anger.

Criticism is expected in these threads, of both the original posts and the comments that follow. Restating an argument to highlight a shortcoming in the logic or the marshalling of evidence is part of the game. But, to be effective as a critic, you have to restate the argument accurately or draw an implication logically from the actual argument. It is not automatically bad faith on the part of a commenter, if he doesn’t regard the restatement as accurate or an alleged implication as logically entailed.

F Foundling has argued against the sufficiency of justification for the international international intervention in Libya that toppled Gaddafi, a policy supported by Clinton as Secretary of State. Faustusnotes has come back with “gaddafi loving leftists” and obdurate suggestions about rules we should follow in forming beliefs from government statements.

If F Foundling is in fact not a “gaddafi loving leftist” then the Faustusnotes assertion is a groundless insult and otherwise pointless. I believe this is the case.

Yan 10.11.16 at 12:32 pm @ 372 —
‘Ground’ might be a better term than ‘space’, but it’s the same idea. I was not thinking of negative freedoms only. Humans are obligate communitarians and the question is not whether they live in communities or not but what kind of communities they live in. I believe that the personal freedom of the individuals constituting a community is maximized in a social environment which includes not only radical negative freedom but also an equal distribution of at least basic goods (communism) because otherwise disparities in control of resources and production offer irresistible temptation, indeed, compulsion, to domination and exploitation (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, fascism).

The whole idea of human rights is that all humans have equal rights — human rights are about equality of rights

I’m not sure that’s true. If I believe in human rights I believe everyone has the right not to be tortured. I probably don’t believe everyone has the right to park in my garage… So it seems like I don’t believe that everyone has exactly the same rights.

More realistically, suppose some people think there’s a human right to choose how your children are educated (and to take them out of the state system if you feel that’s right.) And others think the only way to make society more equal is not to have separate systems if education for the rich and the poor. Then it seems to me you’ve got a conflict. What do you think?

Imo the fault line isn’t gradualism v. rupture (a revolution doesn’t have to be ruptural imo) but whether you believe capitalism can be replaced or only ‘improved’. If you don’t think it can be you’re a liberal. But it’s possible to argue that some people who claimed to be gradualists had really given up on systemic transformation.

F Foundling @ 341

That the there are not in fact two neatly opposed international alliances fighting a proxy war in Syria did seem to me relevant to your arguments about how international law ought to constrain the U.S. or other Powers. And, the fact that the Syrian civil war is part of a larger set of civil conflicts in the region implicating regional and global Powers is also relevant.

Your falsely oversimplified premise invoked the kind of situation in which the imperatives of international law are both clearest and most likely to lead directly to negotiated settlement.

A multifarious conflict in which formally recognized borders are not isolating the conflict poses challenges and international law does not have such clear rules with which to guide response.

For the U.S., the hazards of being sucked into supporting multiple, mutually conflicting sides, to no good effect and at great risk of depleting American material resources and credibility, would seem to me a better cautionary guide than international law that has little to say that is relevant.

Bruce Wilder: “Faustusnotes has come back with “gaddafi loving leftists” and obdurate suggestions about rules we should follow in forming beliefs from government statements. […] If F Foundling is in fact not a “gaddafi loving leftist” then the Faustusnotes assertion is a groundless insult and otherwise pointless. I believe this is the case.”

No, I don’t think that goes far enough. As I’ve written upthread, I’m talking about actual propaganda, not merely the insults of CT commenters. The “Saddam lover” thing was part of pro-war propaganda that lead to an estimated million Iraqis being killed. faustusnotes still being unable or unwilling to reject that kind of propaganda indicates that it still has a strong hold on people like him. Maybe ignorance might be a defense, but I painstakingly went through what F. Foundling was writing at every step, and you saw what faustusnotes’ reaction was. People like him are basically scum and not allies to the left in any way, and their agreement with him shows this at a political level, not merely a personal one.

Rich Puchalsky:

I thought I was writing about HRC supporters, and the two are not the same.

OK, HRC supporters then. Part of my question was what about your line of reasoning was HRC specific, so I fished a term out of the rest of the thread and put it in scare quotes. (Except that I’m not a HRC supporter, but may be ok being counted under liberal-in-scare-quotes.)

[For the record, for the last paragraph, my dice fall like this: Jewish experience is quite obviously relevant in the context of racism. It’s ludicrous to claim that Jews are white (some are, some aren’t, and for some it’s complicated or dependent on the country in which they would be considered white or not), and even more ludicrous to base any argument on this tendentious premise. I’m also quite sure that a lot of Jews reject the notion that they are non-white by virtue of being Jewish, and Jewish experience doesn’t convey a capacity to speak for, say, African-American experience.]

Rich Puchalsky @ 395

So Rich, I am a named and identifiable person on these threads, and my name can also be traced back to my professional occupation, through the link. Are you formally accusing me of anti-Semitism? I would appreciate if you would clarify this.

Lol @merian,
Looks like we’ve a serious communication problem. I didn’t intend to say that at all. I’ve clarified enough now though. I want to concede, we aren’t on the same side, and we don’t seem to want to be either.

No Val you aren’t antisemitic at all. I don’t think Rich has claimed that either.

Thanks ZM, you said it much better than I could!

Basil I think Rich needs to clarify that himself. I think there is an implication in #395 that I and others are anti-Semitic, and it’s not the first time Rich has made remarks like this.

Oh, get over yourself, Val. You’ve called me anti-feminist or sexist here a whole lot of times, and I’m an identifiable individual using my real name.

Here’s one of the many things you wrote: ( from here, to get the full context you have to go all the way back through RNB’s rant at Corey Robin for writing things that RNB didn’t like):

” js and RNB I support your attempts to stop this being a debate between white guys about issues that particularly affect POC”

Corey Robin and I were already identified Jews, and we’d already explained various aspects of how being a religious minority in America did actually bear on Islamophobia. In particular, I was trying to explain that us being white did not mean that we had a natural affinity for the Klan or other white nationalists, because of various inconvenient bits of history such as the Klan burning crosses on Jewish people’s lawns. You chipped in to support the effort to stop this from being a debate between white guys about issues that particularly affect POC.

I originally characterized this as “clueless”, but as my explanations mounted and you remained clueless, I started to wonder. People can draw their own conclusions.

401: If women’s experience and so feminism is absolutely and irrevocably incommensurable and incommunicable to men and men’s experience say in the military or workplace or schoolyard bullies or demonstrations or activism, everything really, provides zero opportunities or possibilities for empathy for women…if this is is the case, that feminism will always be incomprehensible then not only should men stop telling women what to do or how their form of feminism might be universally pernicious…they should also absolutely stop listening to women, paying attention, or giving a shit about women and and feminism. Since women apparently cannot be understood or communicated with, then women need to simply be managed.

I for one don’t believe the above is true. It is a miracle of language and media that experiences and feelings can be shared, unevenly, such that there may be men who understand women and feminism and have empathy for their cause, and be able to help, support, perhaps even offer advice based on their own unique histories and knowledge.

In this I apparently differ from feminists, who I think have simply applied the old hierarchal and anti-democratic forms (not substance) of patriarchy to use them for factional privilege and advantage, the claims of unique experience as source of privilege being not at all new from this perspective.

@ 408
there may be men who understand women and feminism and have empathy for their cause, and be able to help, support, perhaps even offer advice based on their own unique histories and knowledge

Not going to engage in detail here, but telling women that their ideas about feminism are “dopey”, doesn’t fit with this.

merian: “Except that I’m not a HRC supporter, but may be ok being counted under liberal-in-scare-quotes.”

To return to this bit, Bruce Wilder is obviously a liberal, but not an HRC supporter. I don’t think the distinction is that hard to make. I do wonder how people are using the term “supporter” though. My memory may be faulty, but didn’t you say that you would vote for HRC, that in fact you thought that there was a strong moral case for voting for HRC, and that you’d feel joy if HRC won? Then I think that by any reasonable definition you are an HRC supporter.

@ bob mcmanus

In this I apparently differ from feminists, who I think have simply applied the old hierarchal and anti-democratic forms (not substance) of patriarchy to use them for factional privilege and advantage, the claims of unique experience as source of privilege being not at all new from this perspective.

I was lectured on CT, by feminists, that poor women’s groups in Latin America that organize to bring water into their neighborhoods are not feminist, as we consider them around here, since they play into notions of patriarchy.

When I read a statement like ‘men explaining feminism to women is problematic’, I wonder whether that is supposed to mean something more like ‘it is a bad idea for men to express views about feminism to women’ or something more like ‘if men want to express views about feminism to women, it is important for them to exercise special caution and to take into account how men’s experiences and women’s experiences can differ’. If it’s something like the second I tend to agree, but if it’s something like the first I tend to disagree.

Well, there is ‘universalizing discourse versus minoritizing discourse’ which is apparently a thing, or at least a lot students have been commanded to write about it, and some of their work has permeated to the surface of Google, analyzing movies and so forth. I take it u.d. is supposed to be Good and m.d. is supposed to be Bad, but I have certainly gotten a lot of ‘You can’t understand X-type culture/problems/politics/activism because you’re not an X’ from a wide variety of people, and to some extent I think it’s valid. In any case, universalizing feminism would be quite different from minoritizing feminism. Males could lecture females on the first because it makes universal claims about the whole of society, whereas it would not seem appropriate for them to lecture on the second (unless specifically invited to).

People seem to have very reductive senses of “essentialist” and “problematic”.

Lupita:

I was lectured on CT, by feminists, that poor women’s groups in Latin America that organize to bring water into their neighborhoods are not feminist, as we consider them around here, since they play into notions of patriarchy.

Infuriating. This shouldn’t be happening, but I know it does.

Also the reason I portray brocialist types as privileged is because I was active in radical politics in oz and the people peddling the both sides do it wait for the revolution line were always privileged: inheritors of wealth, rich north shore kids slumming it with the radicals while they did their degree, public servants with job security and good salaries. The people sensitive to gradual change were from poor or working class backgrounds, union types. And the change our social democracies won was often not merely incremental. While the revolutionaries were in smoke filled rooms debating who was right over Czechoslovakia we got universal health coverage; while the dudes were telling black people to wait for the revolution because capitalism can’t be reformed, child removal policies ended; while the blokes were telling feminists not to use the capitalist state to protect themselves, prostitution was legalized.

I want change, not talk.

417: “Some say”: a universalizing discourse is in itself an attempt to assert privilege and gain hegemony.

I can’t say if it is a devolution or an elevation, but “Why are you saying that here now to me?” is always an interesting and important question, no matter the substance.

Which reminds me, I’d really rather read.

maybe I should just give up and change my nym to “essentialist anti-Semitic liberal dopey scum” rather than trying to defend myself

anyway I have to do some work too

Basil, really? As I have repeatedly said, I am Australian. The word “black” has a different meaning in Australian political discourse. Of course you don’t even know what I’m talking about when I refer to “child removal policies”. Yet people with this level of ignorance want to tell me how I should use the word “liberal ” to describe our politics…

Also I think there is some difficulties with the American commenters applying American terminology to Australian commenters — Australia already has a lot of things that are considered very left wing in America.

We have universal healthcare, we have federal involvement in education funding and policy, we have higher education funded by federal government loans that only have to be repaid if your income is over a certain amount, we have a stronger welfare safety net for people too — these are all things that only a very left wing candidate in America would propose, but in Australia they are mainstream and accepted by both major political parties.

ZM, as a fellow Australian, that is kind of amusing to me about the “anti-liberal” USian posters here. People like me, who would describe themselves as social democrats in favour of social transformation via feminism, environmentalism and such, are vilified as wishy-washy liberals who are holding up the Revolution, while the US can’t even get it together to build themselves a universal Medicare scheme.
On a more serious note, some of us wishy-washy liberals (if you insist on that nomenclature) distrust the idea of Glorious Revolution because it will probably, according to our historical knowledge, involve bros with guns and bros as Party cadres and Party officials, and probably a lot of opportunities for ultraviolence among those as likes that kind of thing. The idea that we should abandon feminism because a Glorious Revolution will flatten out society is for mugs.

ZM 10.12.16 at 3:06 am
…
Men shouldn’t really tell a woman what sort of feminism she should identify with, its not up to men.

This doesn’t mean men can’t discuss feminism with women, but its not right for a man to tell a woman what feminism is, since he isn’t even a woman.
…

If it’s not right for a man to tell a woman what feminism is, does that mean it could be right for a woman to tell a woman what feminism is? If it’s not up to men to tell a woman what sort of feminism she should identify with, does that mean it could be up to women to tell a woman what sort of feminism she should identify with?

If you don’t know my gender, how do you react if I tell you what feminism is?

Since many people have commented on the awfulness of this thread, I propose a new post called “Shock and D’awwww”, featuring baby otters or some such.

In regard to essentialism, I don’t really see it as a problem because I don’t think there is an essential anything (as I think ZM has suggested).

Everything is constructed, but not just socially constructed, socio-ecologically constructed.

Bodies and gender are both socio-ecologically constructed. ( I actually should reference this because I read some feminist thinker saying something like this the other day but can’t remember who)

ZM 10.12.16 at 3:45 am
…
I would think there are a few things women would agree are basic feminist principles — like gender equity, education and voting rights, things like that.
…

I don’t think that conclusion is reconcilable with observation of, for example, the Honey Badger Brigade.

ZM 10.12.16 at 5:28 am
Are they against gender equity, education and voting rights for women?

I don’t think they would agree that those are basic feminist principles.

Speaking of feminist icons:

http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/11/rape-victim-hillary-clinton-laughed-blamed-getting-raped/

In my State in Australia one of the Year 12 subjects is History Of Revolutions, I think this turned me off revolutions for life. A much younger girl I knew was studying it some years ago, and she had a similar reaction and couldn’t understand at all why the Russians didn’t just copy England with a constitutional monarchy.

ZM: “its okay to say you disagree with it, but Rich has implied at times that its not valid or its not real feminism, which is too strong I think.”

I can’t remember ever writing that. As with my comments above, what I’ve written is that it’s a kind of feminism that I think is essentialist. Val is the one who has written that people who disagree with her kind of feminism are anti-feminist and not real feminists at all. Val may in theory say that she believes in social construction, but in practice she always falls back on simplistic constructions like “white man”, where what matters to her is e.g whether a Jew physically has white skin and is therefore not a POC rather than whether they have experienced religious discrimination from the majority.

Also, I don’t identify with second wave feminism, although I’m old enough to have been active in activist movements that were pretty much second wave.

All of Lee A. Arnold’s opinions are universal truths and have nothing to do with his particular circumstances. Of course he doesn’t have to write a lot about them because he’s a boring, tendentious writer whose every comment revolves around the word “mood affiliation” or “knuckleheads” and no one really cares what he thinks.

Sorry fn, this is the post of yours I appreciated.

https://crookedtimber.org/2016/10/05/uber-menschen/#comment-694010

basil: “All of Twitter and Facebook, Common Rooms, and streets are filled with community organisers, scholars, activists who’re constructed this way who absolutely share the ‘brocialists’ politics. But the violence of the mainstream is to make invisible and inaudible.”

The responses to Lupita’s comments very often have this pattern of implicitly or explicitly denying that she’s a woman, because she’s expressed the wrong opinions.

Here’s pretty much the definitive article on the people who use the word “brocialist”. It’s by Freddie deBoer, who wrote some sexist comments once upon a time and who therefore should be ignored forever.

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/07/27/god-save-me-from-the-converted/

It has an absolutely typical Twitter exchange quoted in its opening;

I’m going to write something in response to engels because he seems bored (and because it will involve lots of “I” statements which will annoy certain annoying people):

engels: “Imo the fault line isn’t gradualism v. rupture (a revolution doesn’t have to be ruptural imo) but whether you believe capitalism can be replaced or only ‘improved’. If you don’t think it can be you’re a liberal. But it’s possible to argue that some people who claimed to be gradualists had really given up on systemic transformation.”

I don’t understand a concept of revolution that isn’t ruptural. I certainly think that capitalism can be and should be replaced, but the whole question of gradualism vs revolutionary socialisms seems to me to hinge on this whole question of how it happens.

I tend to think that replacing capitalism involves long-term changes in both cultural values and modes of production, interrelated with each other, and that attempts to do this via rupture don’t seem to work. Basically, I think that state structures as such are part of the problem, and that you can’t have an anarchy without a society in which the large majority of people believe in a certain set of values. Ruptural conflict inherently makes people in society choose sides, and what you don’t want is for people to choose sides: you want values to change so that every “side” really accepts the same thing (e.g. as every side in contemporary politics thinks that chattel slavery is bad).

I also think that problems of scale have a lot to do with this, and that solutions to problems of scale are a large part of why we have both political problems and environmental problems.

faustusnotes: “Especially funny because I only figured out who he was digging at when that person replied”

Maybe boasting that you’re too stupid to figure out who’s saying what to whom isn’t such a great idea.

@ Layman

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a response which explicitly denies that Lupita is a woman. As for ‘implicitly’, perhaps the problem is in your mind?

There was RNB who called me a 3rd world poseur and wanted me to prove that I was posting from somewhere in Latin America. He then started using the pronoun “he” in reference to me.

I have also complained on several occasions of feeling excluded from the left-wing group of posters when we are referred to collectively as “white dudes”, as if I were not clearly taking the same positions.

merian @394

The qualification I offered above was: ” . . . to be effective as a critic, you have to restate the argument accurately or draw an implication logically from the actual argument. It is not automatically bad faith on the part of a commenter, if he doesn’t regard the restatement as accurate or an alleged implication as logically entailed.”

Faustusnotes presumes that I do not say what I mean. He isn’t saying that I try and fail, as we all do at times, to clearly express intended meaning. His presumption is that I am deliberately and strategically obscuring my meaning. He thinks I have a hidden position that would embarrass me and he makes it his mission to drag an admission from me into the light of day.

What is wrong with this is, yes, it is automatically insulting, but also because Faustusnotes licenses himself to both make up the argument he is going to argue against, attributing it to me without my assent, and to complain when I do not offer additional arguments to explain positions I do not hold.

Faustusnotes complains, “. . .[Bruce] and rich and foundling have a strategy of not saying what you mean. You put these “facts” out there (they never are facts) and then denying other people’s conclusions when we draw them, then refusing to state your real meaning.”

And more Faustusnotes: “You, Bruce Wilder, and Rich (perhaps a few others) have this common strategy of presenting statements that certainly lead to a strong implication, but when challenged on what you appear to be trying to say, denying that and accusing your reader of deliberate misreading; but then consistently refuse to give any alternative conclusion that could give a purpose to the statements you have made. It makes it easy for you to sow doubt and confusion without ever having to actually admit to a position that would probably, if dragged out into the light of day, be an embarrassment to you.”

Re: “anachronistic”, “ahistorical” juxtaposed with “And don’t say her past behavior . . .” in questioning Rich’s argument from experience, precedent and pattern.

I think “ahistorical” may not mean what you want it to mean, if it is intended to mean anything at all. Or you are arguing for an ergodicity in human affairs that would be extreme in its implications.

I think Americans sometimes use ‘white’ as a stand-on for ‘middle-class’ cf. ‘Stuff White People Like’ alongside various internet polemics against ‘white dudes’.Because officially class doesn’t exist in America and the middle-class are hard-working ordinary people who can not be criticised (or this was true until recently).

We have the power of futility on our side.

300 000 people in Britain just reelected an opposition leader who broadly shares my values and who’s holding the PM to account in parliament on a weekly basis.

Saying commenters don’t have anything in common is silly. Val is right to say it’s predominantly male. The centre of gravity is also (afaict) American, white, middle-class and middle-aged (nb. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that).

It’s wrong, of course

I agree up to a point, but I also think if you’re posting online without an identifiable name and making appeals to your real identity I don’t think you have a absolute right for people never to doubt you’re who say you are. It’s another reason I find the identity politics type discussions a little unproductive.

speaking only for my self, of course

For the record, I don’t doubt Lupita is who she says she is. And I’m going to go and do some work.

One sec, Rich Puchalsky, I think you may have just been answering my “debate culture” question while I was typing it. Are you saying that being a successful and happy CT commenter requires a healthy portion of nihilism?

Okay, Rich, as soon as I get a chance I’ll inform the ex-national-chair of Stop The War coalition “ you hold him responsible for Iraq. Enjoy your group therapy session.

Neither Washington, nor Moscow, nor London, nor Havana, nor New York, nor Berkeley, nor Ferguson, nor Athens, nor Cairo, nor Gaza, nor Delhi, nor Istanbul, nor Johannesburg, nor Aleppo, nor Caracas, nor Hong Kong, nor …, but GRADUALIST ANARCHISM!

Personally, I don’t have such a huge beef with the state, unlike RP (the ‘libertarian socialist’ label I used above was sloppy and chosen in haste, or with gradualism (I wish all manner of success to Corbyn), and strictly speaking, if it weren’t for the likely misunderstandings, I would even prefer to identify as a liberal and a socialist.* Really, when I argue with people here (including anything I’ve said against Clinton), I usually do it from what I see as a rather banal, moderate, broadly social-democratic, democratic or, yes, liberal perspective, all of which I do take seriously. There is nothing particularly radical or revolutionary about the principles that I am usually motivated by and refer to. That’s why, it seems to me that the source of the disagreements isn’t really ideology (which is the point I was making above). The way I see it, it’s about whether you’re trying to be part of the big comfy tribe or not. And whether you’re trying to be happy.

* ‘Democratic socialist with an anarcho-syndicalist deviation’ sounds about right. Not that it ever matters here.

(I meant Horkheimer!)

I always thought

“I was driven thence by foul winds for a space of 9 days upon the sea, but on the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flower. Here we landed to take in fresh water, and our crews got their mid-day meal on the shore near the ships. When they had eaten and drunk I sent two of my company to see what manner of men the people of the place might be, and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return; nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches. Then I told the rest to go on board at once, lest any of them should taste of the lotus and leave off wanting to get home, so they took their places and smote the grey sea with their oars”

Was apt.

Will you be our Odysseus, engels.

I’ve been wondering for a time why there is so much contempt and insider football going on between here and the Last Glacial Maximum. But now that I’ve figured it out: nah, that place has no John Quiggin, no John & Belle, no Chris B., no Maria Farrell etc.

I’ve increasingly come to value the form that content takes, the gardeners over the trolls (“happy”) and don’t really see the merit of a forum where people aren’t trying to – and actually do – figure stuff out (“successful”).

Beautiful stuff, Ronan. I tried to reply twice only for my Homer to disappear into the Charybdis of the CT spam filter.

Val: “If I have not included you in arguments I’m having with those ‘white dudes’, it’s because I don’t class you as one of them, not because I’m leaving you out.”

Aren’t you glad that you aren’t a real socialist, Lupita? Condescension: it’s how white women show other women that they don’t mean to include *them* in their critiques.

I don’t think Lupita is a “white dude”. Apparently you think “white dude” = “socialist”, which explains a lot.

In so far as people like RNB and js. (sorry to drag js. in again!) talked about “white dudes”, it wasn’t because they were attacking socialists, it was because they felt “white dudes” were not sufficiently aware of what a threat Trump is to Muslims and people of colour, afaict.

(And I know that you object to being classified as a “white dude” because you’re Jewish, and I respect your position, but I think how much a Jewish person could be included as “white” does depend on the context. If we were able to have reasonable discussions on this issue, without you calling me names, I’d be happy to do so).

Don’t worry about it val ; ) and I’m not trying to personalise any of my issues with liberalism to specific people. I’m just expressin a general objection . Just noting the ideological apparatus is rotting , and goin to collapse soon.

I can’t believe this thread has got to 500 comments on an argument that is literally about nothing.

In other news, Britain is going to start rationing Marmite

Helen: “I define a “brocialist”, according to what I’ve read over the past decade, as a person who espouses the fashionable idea that class inequality, and only class inequality, is responsible for every evil and movements like feminism and anti-racism are “identity politics” which detract from the main game of fixing class inequality.”

Good news — there are no brocialists here, then. Wouldn’t it be amusing if it turned out that the word was only a way of accusing other people of believing that as a way of discrediting them?

To be fair that was pretty much abb1’s position, as I recall. But I’m not sure I’d call it ‘fashionable’ ymmv

I used to avoid the I at all costs in the past. Not anymore, as I now think the I is just the proper way to acknowledge a level of subjectivty and limited transferability to other people that is often inherit to blog comments.

Okay, let me be as specific as I can, to avoid confusion, as I’m probably the only ‘brocialist’ here (though not actually a socialist)
(1) I think identity politics is poisonous (if at times necessary) whether built on class, race, nationality, gender, religion etc
(2) The biggest problems in the future (imo) are going to be based on economic inequality, different levels of educational attainment, different values (in part driven by 1 and 2)
(3) The issues with gender are real and important, but secondary, and mostly important where they interact with the issues raised in (2)
(4) Geography is important (where you are born) and in some places race. But these are more usefully thought of as economic problems.
(5) The wolves arent yet at your door. Theyre still congregating in the forest. This will get worse, and liberals have no ideological or practical mechanism to counter what awaits them.
(6)The backlash we’re seeing is economic AND political AND cultural(independently of ‘racial’) AND racial .
(7) The liberal response has been to dismiss the ‘very real concerns’ of the reactionaries, to skew data and arguments to fit their ideology, and to imagine all historical or political context as irrelevant when explaining what they’re living through. How can you have any respect for people so ignorant ?
(8) back to (2), where i differ from socialists etc is that I think, for the solution, the elite do matter. The right are already making these arguments (there a significant amount of stuff on this) whereas liberals are a joke. The egalitarians need a class to *lead* the defence of egalitarian norms. Large parts of the left think the defence will emerge from the bottom up. But it wont. It has to be top down. So I guess this is a reactionary sentiment.

yeah, in fairness to Bruce Wilder (whose perspective Ive been coming around to) he’s often made many of these points.

“In other news, Britain is going to start rationing Marmite.” –engels

Were I to be crowned ruler of the commonwealth–and, fyi, I am currently available–first order of business would be to ban Marmite production forthwith.

That stuff is gross.

500+ comments, I mean.

Effing i-Phone keyboard.

It is the oddest thing that this motley of rootless lefties, likely half of them queer gardeners and writers, is imagined as desiring a bloodbath. Useful as rhetoric but no one could possibly believe it.

—–
Racialists everywhere,

https://newleftreview.org/I/181/barbara-jeanne-fields-slavery-race-and-ideology-in-the-united-states-of-america

engels,
Smashing what Corbyn’s managed. A shining beacon in dark times. They are brave and constant, and unlike Sanders, a tried and true repudiation of liberalism, nationalism, militarism, racialism and all the toxic seductions that waylay left insurgencies. I wish them well but if you consider Trident, Syria, surveillance, rEUmain, and the polls as significant markers, you can perhaps sympathise with Rich’s or an anarchist’s attitude to participation in the institutions of liberal democracy?

just read this in the Guardian

The upper house of the parliament of the Australian state of New South Wales unanimously passed a motion this evening – well, this morning, in Australia – condemning “the misogynistic, hateful comments made by the Republican candidate for President of the United States of America, Mr. Donald Trump, about women and minorities, including the remarks revealed over the weekend that clearly describe sexual assault.”

The body affirmed that what it characterized as “hate speech from political candidates” has a “divisive, destructive impact” on the public, and stated that it agreed with “those who have described Mr. Trump as ‘a revolting slug’ unfit for public office.”

I still say we should try to avoid deliberately insulting each other on CT, but I have to admit I laughed at the “revolting slug” comments

Rich Puchalsky 10.12.16 at 11:34 pm @ 510 —
There is bottom-up, or at least middle-up stuff going on, however. For instance, http://www.geo.coop/ . Now, this web site will appear goofy and naïve to some, but some of the people involved are actually doing something.

Val 10.13.16 at 3:25 am @ 518 —
However, many people seem to believe their particular cause or issue or ideological framework has a universalizing priority.

As ever, anecdotes on request.

merian @ 359

I don’t think that you’re really responding to what I’ve said. I have not said that commenters with this or that life experience shouldn’t say ‘you’re failing to take into account this or that problem that I am aware of’. Nor have I said that commenters lacking this or that life experience shouldn’t try to take into account all relevant problems, without being prompted. What I *have* said is that commenters, regardless of their life experience, should use arguments that their interlocutors can assess rationally, and not just refer to who they are and who their interlocutors are and expect agreement because of that. Being a woman is not enough to give you the right to assert ‘you’re being a sexist’ and expect automatic agreement. Being a POC is not enough to give you the right to assert ‘you’re being a racist’ and expect automatic agreement. Just as I, as a non-American/non-Westerner, cannot just assert ‘you’re being an American/Western chauvinist’ and expect automatic agreement. It takes two to tango; you can’t just say ‘you’re wronging me here, fullstop’. An argument needs to be presented, and it will either convince or it will not; you are not guaranteed that it will.

What I see regularly here is a power play, where people are seeking to replace discussion based on rational arguments with discussion based on who they or their interlocutors are. A hypothetical counterpart to that power play on my part would be for me to make a blanket assertion that the reason why you are, from my perspective, blind to the occurrence of the power play in question is your own identity, which makes you automatically take the side of those practicing the power play; or, say, that the only reason you support HRC so fervently is because you yourself are a woman and want to see a woman in the WH at all costs, so this makes you blind to her faults. In fact, of course, I avoid such ad hominem speculations at all costs, since they are both offensive and unprovable; I just try to argue that my *claim* is correct – in these cases, that the power play or HRC’s faults exist. And yet, while ad hominems to that effect are rare to non-existent here, the opposite charges of male chauvinism are made all the time.

You claim that people lacking certain life experiences here are failing to take into account in advance some relevant problems (which those having said life experiences would). That in itself is not only unsurprising, but indeed inevitable and part of the human condition. You’re also claiming that the people lacking certain life experiences are so blatantly not even trying to take into account said problems that this by itself repels people who do have said life experiences. Well, I can no more prove that this is not the case than you can prove that it is. If it is true, CT is probably irredeemable. Nobody can repent unless his sin is demonstrated to him; and it’s certainly possible that he is such a hardened sinner that he can’t even be convinced by any demonstration, and is therefore doomed to wallow in his sin forever. Such is life. Just asserting it doesn’t help, though. I, too, regard myself as an alien here in many respects; yet I am trying to make my case.

I’m actually sympathetic to ZM’s claim about feminism (& labour, national liberation movements, etc) but I think it needs to br refined a little. Rational scrutiny is universal but having political standing to choose the direction of an emancipation movement for a particular oppressed group is not.

Or to put it slightly more pretentiously, acknowledging that certaib utterances about social movements are performative (Eg. those produced by their adherents about their direction) isn’t anti-enlightment subjectivism.

engels @527
> Or to put it slightly more pretentiously, acknowledging that certaib utterances about social movements are performative (Eg. those produced by their adherents about their direction) isn’t anti-enlightment subjectivism.

If one uses the concept of performative utterances in order to ban, discourage or delegitimise rational discussion of an issue by certain persons, then this is very much anti-Enlightment in my book.

If one uses the concept of performative utterances in order to ban, discourage or delegitimise rational discussion of an issue by certain persons, then this is very much anti-Enlightment in my book.

Of course, one of the big drivers behind the enlightenment was the realisation that accumulated current knowledge was such that the educated expert of the day actually knew more about all sorts of things than the legendary scholars of antiquity.

The application of this principle to modern techniques of arranging useful discourse is left as an exercise to the reader.

Anarcisissie @521
I accept Gerda Lerner’s theory that patriarchy was the original or ur form of oppression. That doesn’t mean other forms aren’t important. We should tackle them all together.

Maybe it’s because I trained as a historian, and am interested in what came first. It’s not claiming other forms of oppression aren’t important, just that we can understand them better if we see their origins, and the epistemology that has developed from that.

the same pressures that caused the Labour Party to become similar to vaguely Clintonite Third Way Democrats will happen again when they regain power.

Absolutely. And your better alternative is…?

F. Foundling: ‘So yes, ideally, both these remarks and pretty much *everything else* about Trump *should* have been disqualifying. Clinton, too, has enough characteristics that *should* have been disqualifying.’

They’re just the same!

Yes they ARE

Engels #539: “Yes they ARE”

No, that’s a declarative.

Come again?

F. Foundling @526 “This man has promised to kill entire families for what one member has done. That wasn’t disqualifying for the American public. He has promised to torture people. That wasn’t disqualifying for the American public.”

It seems to me this Trumpery is one of engels’ performative utterances, not a string of words with a meaningful content. It’s a vow: “We’ll do what it takes to win.” Coupled with the demand for a blank check a la Nixon, it would be mystifying how so many have managed to persuade themselves Trump is just business as usual, or that Clinton is the bigger warmonger. Or would be were it not the part of pretending that there is a real choice in mainstreams politics, between the “left” and the right. The US is the imperialist power that won WWII, a victory that will not be undone by the conveniently inevitable and effortless passage of time. The dollar is backed by blood, therefore there will be blood. This is not a lapse in judgment on the rulers’ part, nor is it an optional policy. It is their way of life. And their parties, and all their parties’ politicians, are guardians of their way of life on their behalf. There is no “left” in the mainstream, in the common sense, in the conventional, which is to say, there is no “left” in the defense (or restoration of) capitalism. None.

F. Foundling # 523

What I *have* said is that commenters, regardless of their life experience, should use arguments that their interlocutors can assess rationally

Oh, absolutely. But not everything is a fully-formed argument, with an underlying theory, a compendium of footnotes and an appendix of illustrative examples. Some things are observations, some things are counterexamples, some things are contextual or circumstantial conditions that need to be accounted for.

Here, we have observations. So let’s say someone — a woman — points to something with such an observation: “This has been tried, but each time in my experience the outcome was that men received the preferred treatment / job / advantage over women.” or “If you look at responses to this, you’ll see that women are much more likely than men to [come out on side X]” or whatever. So now you have a choice. One response might be to puff yourself up and say with force “How DARE you suggest that I am a sexist?! You haven’t shown any causality! Your rationality is lacking. (And also, no one respects women more than I do!”. Another is a pretty common one here; you might consider it acceptable and middle of the road (I don’t). It is to accept, cue avuncular condescension, that bless your heart, something is probably in need of explaining, and maybe the little woman can take over that part of theory-building and come back when she’s done with a fully worked-out argument. The third is to see it as a valuable contribution that points out a deficiency, which is everyone’s job to fix, whatever the gender. (And specifically the job of whoever proposed the original deficient argument in the first place, whatever THEIR gender.)

You don’t seem to have a problem considering it everyone’s task when it fits your ideological priorities, for example to fix the odious imperial foreign policy.

[A hypothetical counterpart to that power play on my part would be for me to make a blanket assertion that …] the only reason you support HRC so fervently is because you yourself are a woman

I do? That’s completely news to me. Fervently, to boot! You’re delivering a nice example of the kind of powerplay that has been driving me to frustration here: Begging the question, assuming the premise, and, as if by pure chance, in a way that belittles the other’s position. When did you stop beating your wife?

As for #524, are you just using my words as a jump-off point for your own stream of thoughts, or are we actually usefully engaging with each other? Because other than the bit about liberals I am mostly in agreement. Not that I think DT seems to require US citizenship for humiliating and groping women, but otherwise it’s fine. Actually, the skew by nationality you’d discover among critics of HRC’s foreign policy is another example for what I said.

But those who think Trump will be less warlike than Clinton would be in for a rude shock.

I meant to refer to #526 above, but now that I’ve looked at #524…

‘The Italian national liberation movement is a movement of Italians, and if an Italian say that the Italian national liberation movement is all about eating squirrels, a non-Italian may not dispute this.’

That’s a flashback. We used to discuss this as the “Sally Picketfence” argument for months at a time, back in the 90s on LGBT usenet. (Sally Picketfence being supposedly bisexual as per her own identification, married to a man and living the typical suburban American lifestyle.)

Anyhow, the answer is easy. The non-Italian cannot speak on behalf of the Italian liberation movement just by virtue of rational argument. In order to do this, she must be carrying authority conferred by the representatives of that movement. Without that, she can point to contradictions and other observations from the outside in, and if she doesn’t find the explanations satisfactory, may report on that. The outcome of the whole process is likely to be one of two things: a) the movement may state that as far as the role of squirrels is concerned, that particular Italian doesn’t speak for the movement or isn’t representative of it or b) that the movement does indeed have a role for squirrels, possibly a non-public one that isn’t being talked about, but meanwhile could we come back to the topic of Italian liberation?

Of course it can and will happen that non-Italians are in this situation and fulfill the criteria to represent the movement. Just as there exist non-POC scholars in Black history, or male specialists in feminist theory. Nonetheless, a random man lecturing a woman about feminism or a random white person spouting off about discrimination to an African-American are more likely than not to be talking out of their asses and would do better to switch to listening mode for the benefit of all.

“It is egoic, it is emotional, and it leads to shoddy thinking.”

Lee Arnold, by his disciplined refusal to use the word “I”, has transformed himself into a Vulcan.

(And don’t forget that every single of these email documents is something that can be manipulated with a text editor in a completely undetectable way…)

Then there’s Jill Stein, the candidate of all the good, Green party supporters, who incidentally happens to be a woman.

Stein, like me, is far more frightened of Hillary’s obscene actions and dissembling than the potty-mouth’s promises and video clips.

Unlike Hillary, she’s happy to talk to the press. Problem is she can’t get an audience for the most part.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/10/12/jill_stein_hillary_clintons_declared_syria_policy_could_start_a_nuclear_war.html

Yan: “If every event recurs an infinite number of times, then any strong sense of political progress, however defined, is impossible. That said, I didn’t see your point that way, which seemed a point about change under specific historical circumstances limited to the narrow means of electoral politics.”

Yes. In fact, I do have an idea of political progress, which I described in this thread right here. People seem to like to describe this as fatalist, nihilist, Nietzschean, or whatever, but I prefer terms like “informed by how large-scale change actually happens”. Political progress has to be accompanied by cultural change (related to changes in the actual economy — who knows what Marxists think “dialectical” means any more) and that is slow.

Now, there used to be a contrasting theory that lasting, meaningful change could come quickly, and that used to be termed something like “revolutionary”. Maybe people could debate how revolutions alternate with periods of slower change and say that no revolution is the final revolution. But when I’m apparently defending gradualism against the bold revolutionary politics of the UK Labour Party and the bandwagon argument that everyone else on the left is doing it then no, I tend to think that real revolutionary ideas are not involved.

So ‘large-scale political change actually happens’ without (a) revolutions and (b) parliament. An original historical perspective…

Rich P: “These are not actual quotes or an actual exchange…”

Which is to say, they’re your perception of the exchange.

So give an example of anarchist you approve of

Someone who supports the ‘large-scale political change doesn’t happen through the state or through revolution’ theory of history perhaps…

Stevejohnson #560: “… a meaningful commitment. The latter is exactly what Lee A. Arnold triumphantly claims to be the meaning of ‘performative utterance.’ Since he actually agrees with me on this point, his objections have no meaning nor merit. His post has meaning not in what it says, which is nonsense, but in its existence as an expression of rejection of what he thinks I stand for. Ironically, this makes it a performative utterance. Arnold certainly isn’t interest in the usage of ‘performative utterance’ though, or he would be addressing engels first.”

Nonsense, and compounded nonsense, at that. Performative utterances have meaning, but not all meaningful commitments are performative. None of my posts is a performative utterance. And if you missed the address: Engels’ definition is incorrect.

I am not sure I want to buy Yan’s argument that epistemic privilege cannot be proved to others.

Everyone has their own experience and point of view. My experience, in a sense, proves to me that others have an experience — not the content of their experience per se, but the fact of an experience which is personal and centered on the individual in a social context. That’s a fundamentally egalitarian argument though, a religion for a priesthood of all believers. You should not really call that a “privilege”; it is a right to your own.

The claim to an epistemic privilege qua privilege seems to carry with it an implication of license. The problem of proving your experience to others, to justify the claim of special license is reflected in your own limited capacity to examine the experience of others. The claim of epistemic privilege carries the hazard of self-important self-deception.

F. Foundling @ 530

I do not know that we disagree as fundamentally as you imply. I presume that we both think the U.S. is acting expediently, when both the U.S. and the world would be better served, if the U.S. acted with more deliberate and sincere reference to the framework of international law, which is to say, with principled self-restraint and an open consciousness of the effect of precedents and anticipation of consequences with reference to long-term goals and values.

In making the case that expedience is failing and will continue to fail, I think it is necessary to recognize just how chaotic the situation in the Arabian region including Syria has become. And, that the American deep state is being palsied by expedient leadership at the top. The U.S. is backing multiple players which have conflicts with each other as well as with the U.S. The Pentagon backs the Turks, the CIA backs the Kurds (or is it the other way around?); the U.S. arms the Saudis even as the Saudis fund belligerents in Syria inimical to U.S. interests.

The case for structuring policy to follow norms and conventions of an evolving international law is the same as the case that shameless and uncoordinated expedience in the administration of the state is destructive to the national and global welfare.

We may escape the cowardly bluster of Donald Trump in this election. I am not convinced that cowardly bluster, which is free to be isolationist and risk-averse in practice, is more dangerous than Clinton’s belligerent expedience, which calls for doubling-down with an intelligence surge and other efforts to get results from more arrogant expedience by increasing the material effort to apply destructive force to societies already reduced to rubble. But, hey the Ruskies stole her email.

No one can determine the definition or direction of feminism: there is no Feminist Central Coordinating Committee. Different people can decide who they are going to listen to and the whole concept can have some kind of cultural mainstream agreement along with various subcultures.

The immediate question isn’t the definition or direction of feminism: the immediate question is how we’re going to write here. On this blog the ultimate authorities are, of course, the blog owners / original posters. They have a commenting policy, and they also sometimes ban people either individually or from the blog as a whole. People are free to ask them to do something or other but from my observation (and for obvious reasons) they generally don’t seem to like it.

This blog in an era of Twitter is a lumbering dinosaur, a living fossil. Look at how often people refer to LGM as if it is The Only Other Blog. Where else are you going to go? Almost every blog from the era of blogs that talks about these subjects is dead. As such, I don’t think that fiddling with its argument culture is going to do much at this stage.

It is just, and strategically crucial, to centre the experience of those harmed, oppressed, marginalised and destroyed when addressing injustices such as racism, colonialism or misogyny. Not to do so extends and compounds that injustice, reproducing and entrenching the inequality that made human lives vulnerable to violation in the first place.

Still, a politics of global solidarity and community, with an understanding of ideology cannot be constructed around such notions as ‘feminism is a women’s issue’, or ‘anti-racism campaigning is for PoC, everyone else can only be an ally’. Feminism isn’t just a belief system, it is also practice and struggle to undo and unlearn, to refuse privilege and to subvert through such speech actions as queering.

If feminism is a campaign for the abolition of gender, and anti-racism has as its end goal the abolition of race, i.e. the work of depriving phenotypical difference of any social and political power, it boggles the mind that emancipation could be worked out through strategies that insist on the silence of some humans, that only the primary victims of the patriarchy or racial hierarchies may participate actively in bringing these structures down. Humans are responsible for each other.

Hegemonies like race/racialism and the patriarchy, both of them structures constructed for control and exploitation, recruit their support from both would be victims and perpetrators. In Phyllis Schlafly, any number of strikebreakers, any number of Uncle Toms, or collaborators with murderous genocidal and colonial enterprises is the evidence that identity isn’t politics. It is strange to imagine that the experience of hegemonic injustice excites the same insurrectionist urges in all its victims, that it doesn’t in fact become a seemingly unassailable nature.

It is useful to pay attention to the interconnectedness of these violations, and the variegated experience of targeted groups. Think of the relationship between racism and the patriarchy, how middle-class career women win concessions on the backs of their exploited immigrant househelps; or gender and nationalism, how suffragettes win concessions and public favour by supporting the war effort; or class and nationalism, how Europe’s put upon workers waged war against their co-suffering brothers in WWI for national glory; or how recruiting sections of the working class into ‘whiteness’ is an important feature of labour management in early 20th century USA; or the class fractures in the USian LGBTI population, etc.

I thought the universalizing versus minoritizing thing I mentioned in #419 might be a useful way of looking at the ‘epistemic privilege’ question — which is somewhat misnamed because there is more than the acquisition of knowledge going on.

I might as well write this here before it closes. It’s time for another short play. People should be warned that the levels of meaning and allusion in this play are exceptionally subtle and nuanced: I’m not sure that anyone will understand it immediately. But keep studying it and various symbol-systems may cohere.

Also: trigger warning for eyeball eating and other violence.

Happiness and Success!
A short three act play

Act I
(A WOMAN and A MAN are sitting at a picnic table).

A WOMEN: “I hate this election season. It’s so bitter this year. It’s like our whole civilization is under threat!” [She stabs a fork down into the tray in front of her, pulls out a human eyeball, and eats it.]

A MAN: “Yes, this election isn’t like any other one I’ve heard of. I’m really worried.”

A WOMAN: “I do my best to make things better… I even eat free range eyeballs. ”

A MAN: “Free range *people*, honey. It’s not really correct to objectify parts of people that way.”

A WOMAN: “Oh, yes, of course. That’s what that horrible SECOND CANDIDATE does! I can’t believe that for a moment I sounded like SECOND CANDIDATE!” [She eats another eyeball.]

A MAN: “FIRST CANDIDATE will win, if only those young people vote. I don’t know what their problem is, complaining that we ate their eyes and everything.”

A WOMAN: “And they’re so nasty. They even insulted Gloria Steinem!”

Act II
(A circle of GUARDS in standing in the middle of a crowd: each GUARD is holding a leveled automatic weapon. Throughout the scene the GUARDS keep up a low, menacing chant of “KILL! KILL! KILL! KILL!” A small group of NIHILISTS stands nearby holding various protest signs.)

A MAN: “He’s running away! KILL!” (A GUARD shoots a running man in the back.)

A WOMAN: “I want to feel safe! KILL!” (Another GUARD shoots three people in the crowd.)

ANOTHER MAN: “Our society is racist! We won’t protect people from dictators.”

ANOTHER WOMAN: “Eh, join in.”

ANOTHER MAN: “All right, I want to fully participate in our society! KILL! KILL!” (GUARDS mow down five more people).

ANOTHER WOMAN: “Law and order! KILL!”

ANOTHER MAN: “Responsibility 2 Protect! KILL!”

A NIHILIST (holding a placard which reads “Maybe we should kill fewer people”): “Um–”

GUARD: “Get back to the free speech zone, sir! Otherwise I will have to KILL!”

A NIHILIST: “Sorry! Going back now!”

ANOTHER MAN: “Racist!”

Act III
(the public square. There are happy people, balloons, etc.)

A MAN: “The votes are almost in. I think it’s going to go for FIRST CANDIDATE!”

A WOMAN: “I’m so happy! I love democracy!”

A MAN: “She’s going to win … I’m filled with hope!”

A WOMAN: “By working together we can all figure out how to succeed at whatever we want to do! I’m so happy and full of joy!”

A DIFFERENT MAN: “The votes are in! FIRST CANDIDATE wins!”

The CROWD cheers. FIRST CANDIDATE smilingly takes a machine gun from one of the guards and mows down ten people.

SECOND CANDIDATE: “Eh, she’s still a loser. I would have killed twenty people, because I’m a winner!”

THE CROWD boos SECOND CANDIDATE.

YET ANOTHER WOMAN: “I’m so proud that she’s shown our daughters that anything is possible. Now my little girl will know that she can grow up to kill lots of people just like any man!”

The crowd starts to sing. Even A NIHILIST is pulled in.

“We’re happy and we’re right”
“And oh so polite”
“We know we can succeed”
“And darkness recede”
“Because the killing future is so bright!”

(People are swirling around, laughing, munching on eyeballs, firing weapons into the crowd.)

“Now with this great leap”
“We’ve beaten that creep”
“The election is over”
“And we’re in clover”
“And now it’s time to sleep”

@ Rich Puchalsky

The song at the end of your play can kind of be sung to the music of “Everything is Awesome”.

Wake up, John Holbo! You have already overslept and hour and a half.