if nothing else it undercuts potential voter worries that Ford is a goodie-two-shoes or -- post-Foleygate, a risk for any unmarried male member of Congress -- gay, which would seem to do his campaign more good than harm.
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 16 October 2006 20:31 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 16 October 2006 22:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― PPlains (PPlains), Monday, 16 October 2006 22:43 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 16 October 2006 22:51 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 16 October 2006 22:53 (eighteen years ago) link
― bohren un der club of gear, Monday, 16 October 2006 22:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 16 October 2006 22:59 (eighteen years ago) link
― jergins (jergins), Monday, 16 October 2006 23:16 (eighteen years ago) link
You post some good links, kf. And we think along the same lines politically. But if I wanted to read metafilter.com, I'd go to metafilter.com.
You're a good guy who probably has much more to add than blue hyperlinks. More zombie pictures and stomach ulcer stories, thnx.
― PPlains (PPlains), Wednesday, 18 October 2006 15:38 (eighteen years ago) link
And no stomach ulcer stories from me, tho i will have zombie pics at the end of the week.
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 23 October 2006 21:17 (eighteen years ago) link
― PPlains (PPlains), Friday, 27 October 2006 20:26 (eighteen years ago) link
lol
― lol, Sunday, 29 October 2006 13:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Sunday, 29 October 2006 19:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Sunday, 29 October 2006 23:50 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 30 October 2006 00:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― weanmile, Monday, 30 October 2006 03:32 (eighteen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Monday, 30 October 2006 04:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― teeny (teeny), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 12:05 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 15:59 (seventeen years ago) link
KLESTADT said that there is a "significant amount of interest" in the network, which has been given until NOVEMBER 22 to find a buyer, although no potential buyers were identified. The court approved the network's temporary financing plan that requires a deal to be in place by NOVEMBER 22 to allow the financing to continue past then.
Meanwhile, a "no-buy" list of advertisers who have instructed ABC RADIO NETWORKS that their ads not run on AIR AMERICA RADIO is rapidly circulating in the liberal blogosphere. The list of about 100 advertisers is similar to much longer "no-buy" lists for other talk programming, including most top conservative talkers and "shock jocks." MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA and THINKPROGRESS.ORG are among the liberal websites circulating the list.
― teeny (teeny), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 16:05 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 16:07 (seventeen years ago) link
― Kenneth Branagh (gcannon), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 18:28 (seventeen years ago) link
former WH speechwriter finally lets it all out. Ned linked to that one before, but it's fun to actually read the entire thing, where the guy goes on about his self-proclaimed hatred for Harry Belafonte, et al.
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 18:37 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 19:09 (seventeen years ago) link
The trouble is that public opinion is often ignorant, confused and contradictory; and so the policies it produces are often ignorant, confused and contradictory
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 20:12 (seventeen years ago) link
that thing I quoted above was from allaccess.com, a subscription radio website.
― teeny (teeny), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 21:13 (seventeen years ago) link
― teeny (teeny), Wednesday, 1 November 2006 21:15 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 16:28 (seventeen years ago) link
The list of about 100 advertisers is similar to much longer "no-buy" lists for other talk programming, including most top conservative talkers and "shock jocks."
and includes an advertiser or two, like REI, that donates 100% to Democrats
― nuneb (nuneb), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 17:08 (seventeen years ago) link
― nuneb (nuneb), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 17:10 (seventeen years ago) link
xp
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 17:10 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 17:14 (seventeen years ago) link
― nuneb (nuneb), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 17:18 (seventeen years ago) link
― Nu-Edward III (edward iii), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 17:22 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 17:29 (seventeen years ago) link
― nuneb (nuneb), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 18:04 (seventeen years ago) link
http://www.observer.com/data/articleimages/photoimages/120406_article_horowitz.jpg
― step hen faps (Curt1s Stephens), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 18:12 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 18:49 (seventeen years ago) link
TESTOSTERONE: IT'S NOT JUST FOR MEN
― Nu-Edward III (edward iii), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 18:55 (seventeen years ago) link
― nuneb (nuneb), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 19:21 (seventeen years ago) link
I think he left for San Diego to go work for IBM.
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 19:28 (seventeen years ago) link
― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 19:29 (seventeen years ago) link
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 19:34 (seventeen years ago) link
― M.V. (M.V.), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 19:39 (seventeen years ago) link
i forgot how far Frist had his dick into that whole SchaivoGate thing until reading that CNN peice.
― grady (grady), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 20:01 (seventeen years ago) link
that's not how it works - the Hussein thing will be brought out here and there to reinforce other things more relevant to people who don't have their minds made up.
but anyway, I think some other parts of the world might think differently about us if we elect a guy with Hussein in his name.
― nuneb (nuneb), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 20:17 (seventeen years ago) link
― grady (grady), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 22:11 (seventeen years ago) link
― jhoshea (jhoshea), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 22:18 (seventeen years ago) link
The thing is an interesting read, but it's a forced reg site, so here goes. I
The New Republic Online THE UNSPOKEN TRUTH ABOUT THE GOP.Southern Discomfort by Rick Perlstein Only at TNR Online Post date: 11.29.06 In the days after the 2004 election, the same CNN exit poll was on every pundit's lips: Asked about their most important issue, a plurality of voters cited "moral values." Eighty percent of that plurality voted for George W. Bush--no matter that cooler heads soon demonstrated these findings to be statistically meaningless. For "most of the last 100 years, politics has been defined by economic interests," Bill Clinton's former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, pronounced on MSNBC. "That's no longer true." And so, a refrain developed: Without making significant inroads among churchgoing Southerners, Democrats could never hope to win a governing majority. But this month's election yielded data that, unlike CNN's exit poll, was irrefutable: For the first time since 1953, the party that dominates the South is the minority party in Congress. November 7, 2006, may well go down in history as the day the modern Republican Party became a mere Southern faction. There's only one problem: No one's talking about it on TV. Instead, Heath Shuler became the cable news bookers' new favorite guest, as if the election of a pro-life Democrat from North Carolina was the election's most important trend: As Bob Schieffer announced, "These Democrats that were elected last night are conservative Democrats." Meanwhile, the one man whose book predicted the election's actual revelation--that the South and its conservative ways were irrelevant to the Democrats' victory--has been shut out. "I managed to squeeze onto Chris Matthews once," says Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, "but we didn't even talk about the book." Schaller's book is Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Published this October, it argues, "The South is likely to become more Republican in the decades ahead," that Democrats can make and keep the Republicans a mere regional party, and that the best shot at a Democratic majority "in the immediate term is to consolidate electoral control over the Northeast and Pacific Coast blue states, expand the party's Midwestern margins, and cultivate the new-growth areas of the interior West." That's exactly how it went down November 7. The last prognosticator of structural shifts in American politics this accurate--Kevin Phillips, in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority--became a household name. But, because he is a friend, it pains me to have to make a prognostication of my own: Tom Schaller will never become a household name. The reasons are ideological. The people who have paid most attention to Schaller have been hysterics. Former Representative Glen Browder, a founder of the Blue Dog Democrats, was asked in the Anniston Star what he thought of Whistling Past Dixie. Browder, also a Ph.D. in political science, replied that Schaller was spouting "foolishness," but that "fortunately, most national leaders today understand that the road to the magic 218 number inevitably runs through this region." He said this oblivious to the fact that Schaller's "foolishness" had, in fact, just come true. Still, Browder will always have an easier time winning a seat alongside Schieffer on Face the Nation than Schaller. TV punditry is not a meritocracy. Points aren't awarded for being right. (If they were, how many talking heads who saw only rosy things ahead in Iraq would still be on air?) It is an ideological system, with perverse ideological rules. And Browder has just honored one of them: Glorify what the French call l'Amerique profunde--the "heartland," of which the South is the sacred center. Schaller speaks ill of the South. The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can't (and shouldn't) compete. But, among scholars, this is hardly news. Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South," by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a "conservative," controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely--again controlling for racial attitudes--than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees "If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," or choosing whether blacks are "lazy" or "hardworking"), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller's writes: "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters ... the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past." What's more, if Republicans have succeeded by openly baiting a region of the country not really American (the latte-swilling Northeast), Schaller says, "The Democrats need their own 'them,' and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of Southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' neck." Democrats should cite "Southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century." There's just one problem: You can't do that on TV. Once upon a time, of course, pundits used to say what Schaller says: The South, sometimes, is backward. Since the late '60s, however--not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame--a new, unspoken set of rules evolved. It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten." Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn't imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite's show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: "Many of them are hippies themselves. They're part of this movement." Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, "Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America." That air of alienation--that helpless feeling that we have no idea what's going on out there--has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what "the great mass of ordinary Americans" supposedly believes--much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically--became reified. Pundits like Kraft--a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway--learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them--say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics--they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether. It can produce in today's TV talking head a twisted kind of neurosis: an instinctual distrust of the political appeal of anything that can be categorized as liberal, even in defiance of the actual data; and an inability to call a spade a spade--say, that people shouldn't have been beaten indiscriminately in the streets of Chicago in 1968. That's why nobody on TV says Democrats can't win in the South in the short-term--and Schaller, it has to be said, is optimistic about Democrats winning Southern gains in the long term--without playing to white voters' inclinations to see blacks as lazy. It's much easier to say that Heath Shuler represents a trend. That offends nothing but the facts. RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.
In the days after the 2004 election, the same CNN exit poll was on every pundit's lips: Asked about their most important issue, a plurality of voters cited "moral values." Eighty percent of that plurality voted for George W. Bush--no matter that cooler heads soon demonstrated these findings to be statistically meaningless. For "most of the last 100 years, politics has been defined by economic interests," Bill Clinton's former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, pronounced on MSNBC. "That's no longer true." And so, a refrain developed: Without making significant inroads among churchgoing Southerners, Democrats could never hope to win a governing majority.
But this month's election yielded data that, unlike CNN's exit poll, was irrefutable: For the first time since 1953, the party that dominates the South is the minority party in Congress. November 7, 2006, may well go down in history as the day the modern Republican Party became a mere Southern faction. There's only one problem: No one's talking about it on TV. Instead, Heath Shuler became the cable news bookers' new favorite guest, as if the election of a pro-life Democrat from North Carolina was the election's most important trend: As Bob Schieffer announced, "These Democrats that were elected last night are conservative Democrats." Meanwhile, the one man whose book predicted the election's actual revelation--that the South and its conservative ways were irrelevant to the Democrats' victory--has been shut out. "I managed to squeeze onto Chris Matthews once," says Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, "but we didn't even talk about the book."
Schaller's book is Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Published this October, it argues, "The South is likely to become more Republican in the decades ahead," that Democrats can make and keep the Republicans a mere regional party, and that the best shot at a Democratic majority "in the immediate term is to consolidate electoral control over the Northeast and Pacific Coast blue states, expand the party's Midwestern margins, and cultivate the new-growth areas of the interior West." That's exactly how it went down November 7. The last prognosticator of structural shifts in American politics this accurate--Kevin Phillips, in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority--became a household name. But, because he is a friend, it pains me to have to make a prognostication of my own: Tom Schaller will never become a household name. The reasons are ideological. The people who have paid most attention to Schaller have been hysterics. Former Representative Glen Browder, a founder of the Blue Dog Democrats, was asked in the Anniston Star what he thought of Whistling Past Dixie. Browder, also a Ph.D. in political science, replied that Schaller was spouting "foolishness," but that "fortunately, most national leaders today understand that the road to the magic 218 number inevitably runs through this region." He said this oblivious to the fact that Schaller's "foolishness" had, in fact, just come true.
Still, Browder will always have an easier time winning a seat alongside Schieffer on Face the Nation than Schaller. TV punditry is not a meritocracy. Points aren't awarded for being right. (If they were, how many talking heads who saw only rosy things ahead in Iraq would still be on air?) It is an ideological system, with perverse ideological rules. And Browder has just honored one of them: Glorify what the French call l'Amerique profunde--the "heartland," of which the South is the sacred center.
Schaller speaks ill of the South. The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can't (and shouldn't) compete.
But, among scholars, this is hardly news. Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South," by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a "conservative," controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely--again controlling for racial attitudes--than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees "If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," or choosing whether blacks are "lazy" or "hardworking"), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller's writes: "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters ... the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past."
What's more, if Republicans have succeeded by openly baiting a region of the country not really American (the latte-swilling Northeast), Schaller says, "The Democrats need their own 'them,' and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of Southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' neck." Democrats should cite "Southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century." There's just one problem: You can't do that on TV. Once upon a time, of course, pundits used to say what Schaller says: The South, sometimes, is backward. Since the late '60s, however--not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame--a new, unspoken set of rules evolved.
It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten." Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn't imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite's show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: "Many of them are hippies themselves. They're part of this movement." Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, "Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America."
That air of alienation--that helpless feeling that we have no idea what's going on out there--has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what "the great mass of ordinary Americans" supposedly believes--much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically--became reified. Pundits like Kraft--a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway--learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them--say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics--they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.
It can produce in today's TV talking head a twisted kind of neurosis: an instinctual distrust of the political appeal of anything that can be categorized as liberal, even in defiance of the actual data; and an inability to call a spade a spade--say, that people shouldn't have been beaten indiscriminately in the streets of Chicago in 1968. That's why nobody on TV says Democrats can't win in the South in the short-term--and Schaller, it has to be said, is optimistic about Democrats winning Southern gains in the long term--without playing to white voters' inclinations to see blacks as lazy. It's much easier to say that Heath Shuler represents a trend. That offends nothing but the facts.
RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.
― kingfish in absentia (kingfish), Wednesday, 29 November 2006 23:21 (seventeen years ago) link
― nuneb (nuneb), Thursday, 30 November 2006 00:33 (seventeen years ago) link
dlh XPOST I hear you but NB I do not live in the thread-titular country here; which ones are the "institutions we trust to provide social good"?
― anatol_merklich, Friday, 30 December 2011 21:42 (twelve years ago) link
oh well to some extent this is global but in america many have decided to believe that The Market is the most efficient and trustworthy source of general prosperity and that the corporations (as the creatures born and evolved in The Market) are the institutions that are best at providing that prosperity and should to some extent actually be the organizational model for society -- the role that other cultures at other times have assigned to the State or the Church or the Party. which all had their problems too of course but at least they were theoretically capable of having values beyond profit and power.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 21:52 (twelve years ago) link
i read a kinda pulpy book about sociopathy/psychopathy the other day and it was ok but one of the weird things it kept implying was that the nazi gas chamber attendants were psychopaths, when it seems pretty clear that the lesson we should all be taking from the nazis is that it doesn't actually matter if you're a psychopath or not if the entire social system that employs and teaches you is itself irredeemably psychopathic
A circular argument, though: social systems are created by men who are...psychohpaths.
― Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 30 December 2011 21:53 (twelve years ago) link
right! but once you're in charge you can use your ability to construct the Normal to infect people who would otherwise just be hanging out taking care of their kids. milgram experiment n everything.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:00 (twelve years ago) link
so really the rule should just be, don't put psychopaths in charge? which is harder to enforce than you'd think! cuz they're pretty good at taking charge!
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:03 (twelve years ago) link
i get what dlh is saying and i don't think it's circular; i think it's just simplistic. that's why i have a problem with convenient labels like "psychopath" in the first place. i know there are definitely people who meet the theoretical criteria of "psychopath" pretty strongly but i think it works better as a description of a tendency or a pole than a state of being.
i want to say something about performativity here but i don't know enough about it other than to say that i think there is a complex sort of interplay going on here that magnetizes certain aspects of people in the context of organizational culture which is shaped by material realities and progress narratives etc etc.
― nuhnuhnuh, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:07 (twelve years ago) link
Much (not necessarily all) empiricism pretty clear that
i) you gotta find some *really* fucked-up people to torture other peopleii) people that *really* fucked-up aren't extremely hard to come by
:(
― anatol_merklich, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:07 (twelve years ago) link
xp oh i would agree re: "a tendency or a pole". what we're calling psychopaths here are really just the people in whom the standard human drive to Explore Expand Exploit Exterminate is at its purest -- and this drive has done a lot for us, has contributed hugely to our runaway success as a species, but as pretty much every prophet of every religion has now told us about 829579238592 times it will be what eventually destroys us if we can't give precedence to our concomitant drive, as social animals, to love and empathize and nurture and shepherd, which is the drive psychopaths don't have, or at least don't have much of. and if our social systems are built along psychopathic lines, that second drive withers in lots of normal non-pathological people.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:10 (twelve years ago) link
i dunno though i'm making this stuff up.
simplistic undoubtedly.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:11 (twelve years ago) link
I'm reading Wodehouse now and am thinking that a world run by Jeeves would be very close to the society in Mein Kampf.
― Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:11 (twelve years ago) link
it's that Auden line re how any society run by artists would be the worst sort of fascism.
― Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:12 (twelve years ago) link
there's a short story narrated by jeeves (bertie takes it into his head to marry and have children, jeeves arranges for a traumatic experience to "cure" this spell of irrationality) that's a really unsettling reading experience, because without any overt acknowledgement of what's happening, jeeves is unmasked as thoroughly evil.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:14 (twelve years ago) link
it's called, chillingly, "bertie changes his mind".
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:18 (twelve years ago) link
While it's an interesting idea, I think it's probably a little facile to call any single-minded focus psychopathy. And I also think that truly sociopathic traits often become apparent and problematic, whether in politics or business.
Somewhat relevant in more specific fashion to this discussion is Xgau('s conveniently responsibility-free, but not incorrect voice of objection) in an article today:
One advantage of my fluency is that it buttresses my right to voice my disdain for those who turn human beings into abstractions by making abstractions the substance of their private subcultural argot -- who think primarily in numbers. But it also buttresses my admiration for an economist like Chang, who takes care to deploy numbers humanistically.
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Rock-Roll/Dark-Night-of-the-Quants/ba-p/6525
With respect to vocabulary, I'd echo/respond that you can quantify lots of things in policymaking, but also recognize that some benefits and costs must be considered even if they are unquantifiable.
― illegal crew member (C.K. Dexter Holland), Friday, 30 December 2011 22:24 (twelve years ago) link
I'm talking about something different, though, I imagine.
― illegal crew member (C.K. Dexter Holland), Friday, 30 December 2011 22:27 (twelve years ago) link
or they have the desire to be non-pathological, to tell themselves that they're doing the right thing! but they've been led along a certain path. it's hard for them to go back, like it is for all of us. so they trick themselves into thinking that they're actually helping people when they aren't. people aren't that smart about themselves, looking at themselves in a larger context. confirmation bias and context create the illusion that a middle manager is doing his best and providing for those who are closest to him. hive mentality in the face of a harsh world. i think it's the same thing with someone directing a waterboarding, or the person following orders during a waterboarding. and i think it'll take some major material crash and burn before we start to 1) realize that we're eating ourselves alive and 2) face the hard-as-hell way out of it.
i guess what i'm saying is i don't think psychopathology/death drive/body without organs/whatever you want to call it can be isolated and quarantined, or i'm suspicious of the move to do that, or i even think that labeling/isolating/blaming can actually be a feature of psychopathology in the first place, or certainly abet it.
xposts
― nuhnuhnuh, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:28 (twelve years ago) link
btw i didn't mean simplistic as a jeer, i'm totally making all this up too and when it comes down to it i completely agree with you
― nuhnuhnuh, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:29 (twelve years ago) link
xposts it's not the single-minded focus, it's the literal inability to perceive other living things as anything except sources of profit -- like xgau says, thinking in numbers. to actual clinical sociopaths other people are just pieces to be manipulated in a search for personal pleasure/comfort/power. and like i (sort of) said, i think the majority of corporate executives, even the stereotypical gordon gekko cutthroat raider guys (and gals), are probably totally normal and loving w/ their families and neighbors and naturally value all kinds of things that don't have dollar signs on them. but the machines they serve don't.
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:32 (twelve years ago) link
so they trick themselves into thinking that they're actually helping people when they aren't. people aren't that smart about themselves, looking at themselves in a larger context. confirmation bias and context create the illusion that a middle manager is doing his best and providing for those who are closest to him.
yeah this is key i think.
making so much up lol. hay out of straw. call it whatever you want, that uhhhhhh "single-minded focus" is definitely fucked up. xxp
― nuhnuhnuh, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:35 (twelve years ago) link
a middle manager is doing his best and providing for those who are closest to him. hive mentality in the face of a harsh world. i think it's the same thing with someone directing a waterboarding
Outside of the rest of the discussion: I just don't get this part. The responsibility levels seem so different to me. Torture spoken of as somehow equivalent to the place of a middle manager, not, like, an executioner or something?
― anatol_merklich, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:37 (twelve years ago) link
We're all talking about Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia aren't we
― Lord Sotosyn, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:40 (twelve years ago) link
well torture, at least as far as i understand how it works currently in the us military, is just as bureaucratically entrenched, with a shared responsibility among many people and policies (some more than others), as fucking people out of their mortgages is. xp
― nuhnuhnuh, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:42 (twelve years ago) link
the visionary is protecting the nation and the executioner is just following orders.
― nuhnuhnuh, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:44 (twelve years ago) link
best illustration of how distant people can get from other people w/r/t u.s. military torture is still don rumsfeld's scribbled margin note next to the authorization request for "stress positions" at guantanamo: "i stand for eight hours a day! why only four?"
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:46 (twelve years ago) link
(don rumsfeld in general a pretty rich seam for this sort of thing)
― difficult listening hour, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:47 (twelve years ago) link
rumsfeld is a psychopath
― Mordy, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:47 (twelve years ago) link
haha otm
― nuhnuhnuh, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:49 (twelve years ago) link
yah butbutgnnh
― anatol_merklich, Friday, 30 December 2011 22:50 (twelve years ago) link
welcome to Indefinite Detention Land btw
(with "serious reservations" of course)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/politics/obama-signs-military-spending-bill.html?_r=1&hp
― Dr Morbius, Sunday, 1 January 2012 09:33 (twelve years ago) link
Happy New Year!!!
― Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, 1 January 2012 13:35 (twelve years ago) link
dexneb can tell us how it was politically necessary.
― Dr Morbius, Sunday, 1 January 2012 16:02 (twelve years ago) link
http://news.yahoo.com/republican-candidate-romney-veto-immigration-dream-act-023856783.html
To be fair, his defense of it is pretty sound:
"If I'm the president of the United States I want to end illegal immigration so that we can protect legal immigration. I like legal immigration."
smh
― if you ain't gonna wash it, i ain't gonna eat it, Sunday, 1 January 2012 16:24 (twelve years ago) link
pandering at its best
― if you ain't gonna wash it, i ain't gonna eat it, Sunday, 1 January 2012 16:27 (twelve years ago) link
I mean you'd think even the most hardened anti-illegal people would see the 'serve military' caveat in lieu of school and at least appreciate that but noooooo
there's a GOP thread
― k3vin k., Sunday, 1 January 2012 18:30 (twelve years ago) link
nothing like starting the new year off with a nice hit piece: http://exiledonline.com/failing-up-with-joshua-foust-meet-the-evil-genius-massacre-denier-who-shills-for-war-profiteers/
calling a dude who was bullied a twerp and making fun of his height maybe not the best look but other than that
― k3vin k., Sunday, 1 January 2012 18:32 (twelve years ago) link
ive been seeing that feud play out on twitter over the last couple weeks... really hard to take any of these people seriously when they are all so bad at zinging
― max max max max, Sunday, 1 January 2012 20:03 (twelve years ago) link
yeah that dude is trying so hard to be taibbi
― k3vin k., Sunday, 1 January 2012 20:04 (twelve years ago) link
foust is a dick though i remember him being all "occupy wall street should get a job" stick to foreign policy bro
― max max max max, Sunday, 1 January 2012 20:05 (twelve years ago) link
yeah he def seems like an idiot
― k3vin k., Sunday, 1 January 2012 20:06 (twelve years ago) link
heh kev you know that ames and taibbi co-edited the exile for years
― max max max max, Sunday, 1 January 2012 20:07 (twelve years ago) link
no! that explains so much though seriously
― k3vin k., Sunday, 1 January 2012 20:08 (twelve years ago) link
that actual signing statement is like unabashedly evil. "I personally won't use these powers, think they're wrong, but let me sign them into law in case somebody more bloodthirsty than me becomes President at some point"
― undervalued aerosmith tchotchkes sold in bulk, Sunday, 1 January 2012 20:36 (twelve years ago) link
otm
― k3vin k., Sunday, 1 January 2012 21:53 (twelve years ago) link