All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

(xpost) If you track the numbers on that chart going back a year, when they often showed repeal up in the high-50 and into the 60% range, there does seem to be some improvement. I also assume there's some overstatement in general, being a Rasmussen poll.

Jesus God Almighty, you people are literally posting my old jokes.

this is a dirty lie.

got this one from dennis perrin.

The WH should have fought back against the Tea Party attacks on health care better, but the DNC and others should have also.

One and the same, really, but you're right on both scores.

The problem with selling HCR to the public is that the one provision that everyone knows about and thinks they understand is the requirement to be covered, which most people perceive as negative. The only positive provision that most people know about and understand is the elimination of exclsusions for pre-existing conditions.

As far as I can tell, the other 98% of the bill is too technical for most people to understand or too marginal for them to care about - so that even when they hear about those parts they forget about them an hour later.

The problem with selling HCR to the public is quite possibly that the administration hasn't spent much time doing it, or doing it well. That's understandable from the perspective that they had other agenda items to work on, but less so, perhaps, from a political perspective.

does dennis perrin know he's a meme on ilx?

I always forget that obama passed "universal health care" lol

I just looked at his site for--yes--the very first time, and what do you know, I've read his book on Michael O'Donoghue.

I always forget that if Obama had just been a cagier negotiator--if he'd started out by demanding an outright ban on guns, dismantling of the Pentagon, and free gay marriage for everyone--he could have then worked his way back to a much better deal.

c'mon clemenza - gabbnab is back. u can just be the wild gossipy political horserace fiend you've always wanted to be and leave the obama apologetics to him.

Duly shamed, I shall skulk away.

And to think, I defended you on that thread about which words were permissible and which weren't...I want a refund!

:(

Maddow really "killing it" tonight.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/5519/top_2011_religion_stories_that_weren%E2%80%99t

all pretty interesting in a political sense

6 is the most directly worrying, 3 is the most scary to me personally, based on where i grew up, and i had absolutely no cognizance of 2!

we should poll the five points

i guess total depravity is kind of the clear winner

we have enough metal poll threads i think

hehee

2. Judaism and Real Estate

No one to my knowledge has written authoritatively in mainstream publications lately on the intensity of internal conversations about the essence of Judaism at a time when more and more Jewish leaders appear willing to follow the ultra-Orthodox in sacralizing the possession of land. There's an argument going back decades—back at least to Richard Rubenstein’s 1966 After Auschwitz—on the theological/ethical problems relating to land possession. Mainstream media show us the fanatics, of course, but they don’t show us the extent of Jewish unease with land mania.

I don't think this is real, unless he is trying to obliquely refer to settlements in Israel w/out explicitly discussing it.

yeah i wondered. i really doubt a writer for this magazine would use the phrase "land mania" to stand in obliquely for (settler) zionism, but who knows. has there been a real estate crisis in israel as well? those protests in the summer were about the stagnant economy but like i said i am unaware of anything like this at all.

It's also kinda weird to talk about Jews + the ultra-Orthodox w/out saying that you're referring to Israel. Huge communities in the United States + France that this seems to have nothing to do with. Unless you see Kiryas Yoel as somehow being related to this theme (and maybe it is? it's certainly the only example of this I can think of outside Israel).

my landlord is jewish

i am kiryas yoel

Maddow really "killing it" tonight.

oh, I bet. Clooney-style clucking about what a "success" Bam has been?

do you think gabbneb painted his torso the night Obama slayed Osama?

http://robertreich.org/post/14932718385

I'm Bill Clinton, and I approved this message.

oh, I bet. Clooney-style clucking about what a "success" Bam has been?

Hello?

IF there's a switch, Biden will just be put out to pasture and Petraeus or somebody will be the new SoS.

Petraeus as SoS? Makes sense in a way, because our army is now the diplomatic arm of our government.

Has been since 1945.

Wrong thread probably, but there isn't an economy shitbin here, is there? Related to CORPORATIONS, so I'll chance it.

Anyway, my old old, in Norwegian terms pretty rightwing stepfather loves his Dictums (Dicta?) gathered from a long life, repeated to anyone who will hear at any time. One of them is: "Everyone leading a major corporation seems to have – not necessarily strong, but very clear – psychopathic features".

I've heard this for at least 15 years.

So it's nice to see it Proven By Science, or at least somewhat corroborated. Part of the recruiting process, woah.

you don't have to be a psychopath to work here but it helps

also helps your prison guarding if you're a "bad apple" but it has nothing to do with why prisons are a problem.

that article is pretty terrible by the way? completely anecdotal, no definition of psychopathology, then pinning a massive systemic problem on it. uhhh

Yah, agreed. There are sources mentioned, so I guess I should.

the problem isn't really that the corporations are run by psychopaths although i'm sure plenty of them are; it's that they are psychopaths and their worldview and value system is totally psychopathic, which would be fine if we hadn't made them the defining institution of our whole socioeconomic system, whoops

(This being the *sole cause* of anything is obv a massive overreach; the need for attenuated sense of empathy in heads of major corporations seems to me a tautology, sort of.)

if there is indeed a preponderance of psychopaths working at corporations it shouldn't be taken as the source of the problem but just as evidence that the institutions we trust to provide social good are totally fucked in the head

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

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"?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Much (not necessarily all) empiricism pretty clear that

i) you gotta find some *really* fucked-up people to torture other people
ii) people that *really* fucked-up aren't extremely hard to come by

:(

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.

i dunno though i'm making this stuff up.

simplistic undoubtedly.