All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

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.

I'm reading Wodehouse now and am thinking that a world run by Jeeves would be very close to the society in Mein Kampf.

it's that Auden line re how any society run by artists would be the worst sort of fascism.

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.

it's called, chillingly, "bertie changes his mind".

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.

I'm talking about something different, though, I imagine.

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

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

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.

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

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?

We're all talking about Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia aren't we

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

the visionary is protecting the nation and the executioner is just following orders.

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?"

(don rumsfeld in general a pretty rich seam for this sort of thing)

rumsfeld is a psychopath