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neonvincentOne more to go before I have to get the laptop fixed.
My comment on Where Candidates Fear to Tread.
I agree with you that Trump is a clown who exposes the lack of seriousness among both the politicians and their constituents, although the latter are quite serious in their rage, if not in the policies they'd liked enacted to satisfy it. That's why I decided to have some fun with Drinks and drinking games for Donald Trump and the GOP debates. The viewers aren't going to get any serious responses to the issues you listed, so they may as well enjoy themselves getting blotto to the candidates.
Speaking of which, that's a good list of issues. The major party candidates, other than Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, who do care about a few of them--militarization of police for Paul, Citizens United for Sanders, and foreign intervention for both--won't care about any of them, as they benefit the insiders. Only the outsiders take the issues you raised seriously. For debates featuring candidates that address them, you might have to wait until the Free and Equal debates next fall. In 2012, he Libertarians, Greens, and Justice Party all agreed that it's urgent to rein in the military-industrial complex and reorient American foreign policy away from bellicose interventionism and that Civil liberties are being trampled on by Democrats and Republicans, both of which encompass topics in your essay today. They also agreed that the drug war was a failure. That's not one of your issues, but it might just be the one most likely to be resolved, as marijuana legalization is proceeding at the state level.
My comment on "The Suicide of the American Left"
"There’s Donald Trump, whose campaign is shaping up to be the loudest invocation of pure uninhibited führerprinzip since, oh, 1933 or so..."
And whose candidacy has been the best thing for a media driven by page views and clicks so far this campaign season. When my wife watched his announcement, she remarked that Trump looked and sounded like The Penguin running for Mayor. Both of them are cartoons of what a working stiff thinks a rich person should be. Then his campaign picked up steam and an article I wrote for Examiner.com about his coming in second in a Michigan poll has been the most read story for the past year. Now that he's in first, the best thing to do about him is to play a drinking game for his campaign appearances and the debates. Time to stock up on booze.
As for Clinton losing, you should take that to the Iowa Electronic Markets when the Democratic Nomination Market opens up. Right now, they just have the generic general election market running. When they do, I expect Clinton would be a heavy favorite, mirroring the conventional wisdom that she'll be the candidate and win the election. The latest polls have her beating Trump badly. Of course, it's early, and Trump might be the "Fred Halliot" you were predicting. In that case, you could make a lot of money with your prediction.
My comment on The Spectacle So Far.
"the Fox guarding the Trump house"
They're trying to, at least. However, in this case, they're more like Sir Robin against the Giant Chicken of Bristol. The smart move for Fox News would be to bravely run away!
Their audience has other options, one of which is to drink heavily, as Bluto in Animal House advised. To assist in that venture, I have Drinks for the candidates in tonight's debate to go with the drinks for Trump I listed last week. Most of these, along with the drinking game rules, can be re-used for future debates, although the latest polls indicate that I'll have to find rules and a recipe for Carly Fiorino. She appears to have won what is appropriately called the "Happy Hour" debate. The loser of last week? Chris Christie. Poor Fat Bastard fell out of the top 10 according to the latest NBC poll.
As for Trump's refusal to rule out an independent candidacy, he could run afoul of Michigan's sore loser law and end up ineligible for next year's general election ballot if he takes too long to decide. The resulting legal fireworks would be interesting to behold.
My comment on "The War Against Change"
I quite agree with you that the Democrats have become the true conservative party over the past 35-40 years as the defended the redistributionist status quo while Republicans have become the party of change. However, that doesn't mean that the Democrats haven't ceased being what passes for a Left party in the U.S. As I explained in the comments to your second essay on Fascism and elaborated on at my own blog, Left parties hold redistributionist ideologies, which the Democrats have consistently done over their history. That doesn't keep them from being conservative. After all, the Democrats were both the redistributionist party and the conservative party in the years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War, while the Republicans were the anti-redistributionist party of social change at the same time. In fact, the Republicans of Lincoln's time were the liberal party by two criteria that I employed when I earlier examined liberalism and conservatism: liberal policies increase participation in politics and society or improve the economic lot of the "common citizen" or average person and ideally do both, while conservative policies defend the power and wealth of those already powerful and wealthy. Emancipation and other policies of Reconstruction could be framed that way.
That precedent of the Democratic Party being both the redistributionist and conservative party prior to the Civil War is not a good one. Neither is the other example I can think of--the Communist parties of the Warsaw Pact immediately before the fall of the Iron Curtain and collapse of the USSR. That doesn't bode well, never mind that the Republican Party is the one using Soviet-era imagery. Oh, well, no analogy is perfect.
Speaking of analogies, if the Democrats are the conservative party, then Bernie Sanders would be the reactionary candidate. He wants to go backwards in economic policy to improve the lot of the common man. He's not as radical as you when you proposed going back to the technology of the 1950s to improve the economic lot of Americans. I guess he isn't reactionary enough.
Finally, "The War Against Change" was on full display in Michigan this week as Democrats protested Trump and the change they fear he represents while he campaigned in Michigan. I'm not sure that was more productive than getting drunk during the debate. It probably wasn't as much fun, either.
My comments on True Believers.
Michigan is getting a preview of the results of the process you describe, albeit for a different reason. A major BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, went down last week. The ensuing gas price spike prompted outrage. Regular jumped 60 cents at the pump in three days. Michigan's Attorney General says he will prosecute any instances of price gouging and a state senator pledged to hold hearings on how the loss of one refinery could have such an immediate and serious effect. I'm not optimistic he will figure out that's a problem with efficiency; it works against robustness and resiliency. Both the AG and the state senator belong to a party that's in favor of "market solutions" and it was the market that produced this efficient yet fragile system.
There is a double irony in the timing and effect of the refinery failure. The first and very local one was that prices spiked in time for Dream Cruise, metro Detroit's nostalgic celebration of happy motoring. Gas got more expensive just as all the gas guzzlers came out to be admired as they formed a slow parade up and down Woodward. The more global one is that the same refinery shutdown that made wholesale gasoline more expensive on the regional spot market has reduced demand for oil even more. Consequently, West Texas Intermediate is testing its lows for the year while prices are up at the pump. That combination is making people in the Midwest even more irked.
On to our host, who concluded his essay with "one option is to believe stories that have no basis in reality. As Tom McGuane wrote some forty years ago: “Life in the old USA gizzard had changed and only a clown could fail to notice. So being a clown was a possibility.”
My comment on "The Last Refuge of the Incompetent"
"What, after all, would be the result if some of the middle class intellectuals who make up the core of the climate change movement were to pick up some guns, assemble the raw materials for a few bombs, and try to use violence to make their point? They might well kill some people before the FBI guns them down or hauls them off to life-plus terms in Leavenworth..."
I can point you to an example of almost exactly that happening. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front documented what happened to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) when they pursued a campaign of property destruction against developers. For their pains, they were the subjects of the largest domestic terrorism investigation U.S. history. In terms of suspects, I can believe it. As far as stopping development, they were far less effective than the bursting of the housing bubble.
Other environmental activists were less violent, but they still ran afoul of the law. Two years ago, a group protested the construction of the Enbridge tar sands pipeline in Marshall, Michigan, a pipeline that had leaked into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. One of their number skateboarded in the pipe. He was arrested. He retained a good lawyer who got his charges dismissed. The stunt paid off for him, as the Green Party of Michigan nominated him as their candidate for U.S. Senate the next year. Others didn't fare so well, as eleven people in the next protest were arrested. I think they ended up getting convicted. As for stopping the Enbridge pipeline, it didn't work.
On the other hand, protests against the Keystone XL pipeline seem to have helped delay it. Four years after it became an issue, President vetoed legislation authorizing the part of Keystone XL that crosses into the U.S. from Canada. That was a bone handed out to a "captive constituency," even if it really doesn't mean much in the long run. Cheap oil will probably delay the pipeline even longer.
My comment on Where Candidates Fear to Tread.
I agree with you that Trump is a clown who exposes the lack of seriousness among both the politicians and their constituents, although the latter are quite serious in their rage, if not in the policies they'd liked enacted to satisfy it. That's why I decided to have some fun with Drinks and drinking games for Donald Trump and the GOP debates. The viewers aren't going to get any serious responses to the issues you listed, so they may as well enjoy themselves getting blotto to the candidates.
Speaking of which, that's a good list of issues. The major party candidates, other than Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders, who do care about a few of them--militarization of police for Paul, Citizens United for Sanders, and foreign intervention for both--won't care about any of them, as they benefit the insiders. Only the outsiders take the issues you raised seriously. For debates featuring candidates that address them, you might have to wait until the Free and Equal debates next fall. In 2012, he Libertarians, Greens, and Justice Party all agreed that it's urgent to rein in the military-industrial complex and reorient American foreign policy away from bellicose interventionism and that Civil liberties are being trampled on by Democrats and Republicans, both of which encompass topics in your essay today. They also agreed that the drug war was a failure. That's not one of your issues, but it might just be the one most likely to be resolved, as marijuana legalization is proceeding at the state level.
My comment on "The Suicide of the American Left"
"There’s Donald Trump, whose campaign is shaping up to be the loudest invocation of pure uninhibited führerprinzip since, oh, 1933 or so..."
And whose candidacy has been the best thing for a media driven by page views and clicks so far this campaign season. When my wife watched his announcement, she remarked that Trump looked and sounded like The Penguin running for Mayor. Both of them are cartoons of what a working stiff thinks a rich person should be. Then his campaign picked up steam and an article I wrote for Examiner.com about his coming in second in a Michigan poll has been the most read story for the past year. Now that he's in first, the best thing to do about him is to play a drinking game for his campaign appearances and the debates. Time to stock up on booze.
As for Clinton losing, you should take that to the Iowa Electronic Markets when the Democratic Nomination Market opens up. Right now, they just have the generic general election market running. When they do, I expect Clinton would be a heavy favorite, mirroring the conventional wisdom that she'll be the candidate and win the election. The latest polls have her beating Trump badly. Of course, it's early, and Trump might be the "Fred Halliot" you were predicting. In that case, you could make a lot of money with your prediction.
My comment on The Spectacle So Far.
"the Fox guarding the Trump house"
They're trying to, at least. However, in this case, they're more like Sir Robin against the Giant Chicken of Bristol. The smart move for Fox News would be to bravely run away!
Their audience has other options, one of which is to drink heavily, as Bluto in Animal House advised. To assist in that venture, I have Drinks for the candidates in tonight's debate to go with the drinks for Trump I listed last week. Most of these, along with the drinking game rules, can be re-used for future debates, although the latest polls indicate that I'll have to find rules and a recipe for Carly Fiorino. She appears to have won what is appropriately called the "Happy Hour" debate. The loser of last week? Chris Christie. Poor Fat Bastard fell out of the top 10 according to the latest NBC poll.
As for Trump's refusal to rule out an independent candidacy, he could run afoul of Michigan's sore loser law and end up ineligible for next year's general election ballot if he takes too long to decide. The resulting legal fireworks would be interesting to behold.
My comment on "The War Against Change"
I quite agree with you that the Democrats have become the true conservative party over the past 35-40 years as the defended the redistributionist status quo while Republicans have become the party of change. However, that doesn't mean that the Democrats haven't ceased being what passes for a Left party in the U.S. As I explained in the comments to your second essay on Fascism and elaborated on at my own blog, Left parties hold redistributionist ideologies, which the Democrats have consistently done over their history. That doesn't keep them from being conservative. After all, the Democrats were both the redistributionist party and the conservative party in the years before, during, and immediately after the Civil War, while the Republicans were the anti-redistributionist party of social change at the same time. In fact, the Republicans of Lincoln's time were the liberal party by two criteria that I employed when I earlier examined liberalism and conservatism: liberal policies increase participation in politics and society or improve the economic lot of the "common citizen" or average person and ideally do both, while conservative policies defend the power and wealth of those already powerful and wealthy. Emancipation and other policies of Reconstruction could be framed that way.
That precedent of the Democratic Party being both the redistributionist and conservative party prior to the Civil War is not a good one. Neither is the other example I can think of--the Communist parties of the Warsaw Pact immediately before the fall of the Iron Curtain and collapse of the USSR. That doesn't bode well, never mind that the Republican Party is the one using Soviet-era imagery. Oh, well, no analogy is perfect.
Speaking of analogies, if the Democrats are the conservative party, then Bernie Sanders would be the reactionary candidate. He wants to go backwards in economic policy to improve the lot of the common man. He's not as radical as you when you proposed going back to the technology of the 1950s to improve the economic lot of Americans. I guess he isn't reactionary enough.
Finally, "The War Against Change" was on full display in Michigan this week as Democrats protested Trump and the change they fear he represents while he campaigned in Michigan. I'm not sure that was more productive than getting drunk during the debate. It probably wasn't as much fun, either.
My comments on True Believers.
Michigan is getting a preview of the results of the process you describe, albeit for a different reason. A major BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, went down last week. The ensuing gas price spike prompted outrage. Regular jumped 60 cents at the pump in three days. Michigan's Attorney General says he will prosecute any instances of price gouging and a state senator pledged to hold hearings on how the loss of one refinery could have such an immediate and serious effect. I'm not optimistic he will figure out that's a problem with efficiency; it works against robustness and resiliency. Both the AG and the state senator belong to a party that's in favor of "market solutions" and it was the market that produced this efficient yet fragile system.
There is a double irony in the timing and effect of the refinery failure. The first and very local one was that prices spiked in time for Dream Cruise, metro Detroit's nostalgic celebration of happy motoring. Gas got more expensive just as all the gas guzzlers came out to be admired as they formed a slow parade up and down Woodward. The more global one is that the same refinery shutdown that made wholesale gasoline more expensive on the regional spot market has reduced demand for oil even more. Consequently, West Texas Intermediate is testing its lows for the year while prices are up at the pump. That combination is making people in the Midwest even more irked.
On to our host, who concluded his essay with "one option is to believe stories that have no basis in reality. As Tom McGuane wrote some forty years ago: “Life in the old USA gizzard had changed and only a clown could fail to notice. So being a clown was a possibility.”
My comment on "The Last Refuge of the Incompetent"
"What, after all, would be the result if some of the middle class intellectuals who make up the core of the climate change movement were to pick up some guns, assemble the raw materials for a few bombs, and try to use violence to make their point? They might well kill some people before the FBI guns them down or hauls them off to life-plus terms in Leavenworth..."
I can point you to an example of almost exactly that happening. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front documented what happened to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) when they pursued a campaign of property destruction against developers. For their pains, they were the subjects of the largest domestic terrorism investigation U.S. history. In terms of suspects, I can believe it. As far as stopping development, they were far less effective than the bursting of the housing bubble.
Other environmental activists were less violent, but they still ran afoul of the law. Two years ago, a group protested the construction of the Enbridge tar sands pipeline in Marshall, Michigan, a pipeline that had leaked into the Kalamazoo River in 2010. One of their number skateboarded in the pipe. He was arrested. He retained a good lawyer who got his charges dismissed. The stunt paid off for him, as the Green Party of Michigan nominated him as their candidate for U.S. Senate the next year. Others didn't fare so well, as eleven people in the next protest were arrested. I think they ended up getting convicted. As for stopping the Enbridge pipeline, it didn't work.
On the other hand, protests against the Keystone XL pipeline seem to have helped delay it. Four years after it became an issue, President vetoed legislation authorizing the part of Keystone XL that crosses into the U.S. from Canada. That was a bone handed out to a "captive constituency," even if it really doesn't mean much in the long run. Cheap oil will probably delay the pipeline even longer.
