Becoming less interested in politics at times ...

First, it took me four years later than Mark Lause, but I too have reached the point that I see the Green Party nationally being past its best-by date. I was already having doubts in 2016 over Stein's second run; the nature of her recount only increased that.

Then, Hawkins 2020 actually got Russia more than half correct, angering some Greens. But, he went totally Aaron Maté, or should I say, totally Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, on Xi Jinping's China, and I just couldn't vote for him.

In Texas, that's followed by 2022 Green gubernatorial candidate Delilah Barrios being a Second Amendment absolutist and also playing footsie with COVID antivaxxers, and I saw more than enough antivaxxer footsie out of Stein.

Add in Twitter on politics becoming ever more #BlueAnon bullshit vs #MAGAts bullshit and I get tired of that.

Meanwhile, related to the first three paragraphs, or especially the second? Twitter is also ever more populated by non-skeptical leftists, or maybe we should just call them pseudoleftists. They sign blank checks for Xi on the Uyghur workers' camps, on the Chinese version of Coca-colonialism with the Belt and Road Initiative and more. Like Hawkins, Flowers and Zeese, they either can't, or won't, step out of the twosiderism box and accept that one can criticize both the US and China. Per LBJ on Jerry Ford, it's really no harder that farting and chewing gum, or farting and walking, at the same time.

That said, I suspect that some of the pseudoleftists on Twitter are paid to not step outside of the twosiderism box on China.

Whether paid shills or not, the one other problem I have is that there is just about NEVER any nuance with China. It's not that China is less wrong, or even a lot less wrong than the US says it is, or than the US is itself. It's that China is NEVER wrong. Of course, among the religion of Marxism, doctrinaire absolutism is part of the game. of course, doctrinaire Marxism is pseudoscience. Hegelian dialectic is crappy as a philosophy and by definition pseudoscientific when used as the basis of any scientific theory, especially economics, arguably in both Marx's time and ours the least scientific of the social sciences. (The replication problem and cheating in behavioral economics only underscore that.)

Add in that, in early August every year, non-skeptical lefists repeat the canard on August 6 and 9 that we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just as a warning shot across Stalin's bow. Surprisingly, neither city trended on Twitter this year. Maybe those willful lies or idiocies are starting to fade.

I'll still participate in snarking on Twitter, but, I'm working to move away from electoral and quasi-electoral politics to broader issues. And, that said, Twitter's infosec allegedly sucks donkey dongs.

Middle-class precariat pseudo-leftist?

I wrote the following poem last month, and posted it on my second blog, since I discuss issues of aesthetics there, including some of my own poems, as well as philosophy, critical religion and general critical thinking.

Middle-class precariat pseudo-leftist

I know that I am the first and the second
And that they are intertwined.
Does this make me a pseudo-leftist as well?
Am I too afraid
Of giving up the scraps of security
In a bank account and elsewhere
That I have scraped for
To put myself in that middle class
And to try to avoid that precariat
(Even in a precariat career)
To be a "real leftist"?

As I get older
Maybe I'll know the answer
Or at least know it in larger part than now,
And as I learn it,
Maybe I'll be honest with myself.

It's easy to make excuses
But, in a dysfunctional life,
It's also easy to blame oneself,
Or to use the vocabulary of blaming oneself
To avoid deeper thought in general.

At the same time, where is there a dictionary
That can authoritatively, and unambiguously,
Define the term "real leftist"?
"If it feels leftist, then do it"?

Per old Idries Shah, sometimes overquoted
If there are more than two sides to this issue,
There's also a continuum of some sort.
And, I'm on that, and not at the zero point.
Real leftist in progress, or simpatico fellow traveler.

But, I wanted to offer some comments on it, so I reposted it here, with comment to follow.

I'm not Noam Chomsky, who has said that every president since World War II, not exempting Jimmy Carter, would swing from the gibbet if they were given a Nuremberg war crimes trial, but then continues to vote Democrat-only instead of moving outside the box. Ditto for the Adolph Reeds and Doug Henwoods of the world, and even self-proclaimed communist Angela Davis.

At the same time, I acknowledge, as an ex-Green, that too many Greens not only accept the unlikelihood of major Green Party candidates being elected, but perceive the party's ultimate role as nudging the Democrats leftward.

Ain't happening, and you're AccommoGreens, as I have called you, the Green equivalent of ConservaDems.

I also note the GP is not necessarily a "left" political party, unlike, say, the Socialist Party USA. Sorry, Greens, but the amount of "libertarian Greens" in the party, many "libertarian" on US terms, not European ones, and the anarchist Greens to somewhat lesser but not insignificant degree, negate the leftist claims for the party. (As if AccommoGreens don't.)

So, no, ultimately, I'm not a pseudo-leftist. I'm not a radical leftist, and I'm not an anarchist, but, in American terms (always a qualifier) per my header, I am a leftist. And more than some who are part of the problem, not solution, if they're voting Democrat only.

What I also am, as an ex-Green for now and probably through 2024, at least, someone who becomes ever more tired of electoral politics, even as I know the duopolists like seeing people like me drop out.

The rise of the nones and politics as the new religion

The rise of the "Nones" in America doesn't mean a decline in belief, per this from the Atlantic:

"(W)hat was once religious belief has now been channeled into political belief."

That said, there is no "god-shaped hole." There IS, rather, a "god-belief-shaped hole." The idea of a "god-shaped hole" is Augustinian bullshit.

The "nones" may indeed, per the SJW division of liberals (who are NOT leftists) may act in ways the second link states. But, with people acting like there is one, that may happen.

On the right, as the Religious Right had made the church politics in a way that the Black church really had not (and, in some ways, was forced to), with tied with the rise of Trumpism. So, they're already prepared for that.

What this will mean for the future? SJWs versus a more secularized version of the Religious Right, or the Religious White? A (non-lethal, we hope?) version of the Thirty Years War?

 

What the Atlantic really misses is that politics and religion in America both smack too much of tribalism in many cases, and that the Nones are just bringing a liberal tribalism to the political table. 

It also misses, per this great Politico piece about political activism in the Gilded Age, that politics as ersatz religion ain't necessarily new.

Two lawsuit fails — one good, one bad

First, Sarah Palin lost her lawsuit with the New York Times, over a piece it did about her "gun targets" for certain Democratic congressional candidates shortly before Gabby Giffords (one of the targeted Dems) was actually shot.

Palin's a public figure, which makes the bar high, even in a news story. (Having blogged about Wendy Davis losing a similar lawsuit to the StartleGram, over op-eds, when she was on Fort Worth city council, I knew this would happen, contra "Cowfefe Owl Doctor" on Twitter.)

The second? Not so good.

Showing how much the American jurisprudence system is in the tank for the duopoly, the DNC fraud lawsuit was also dismissed. Some Sandernistas are rightfully appealing. If they lose, will they continue with their independent third party idea, ignoring the existence of the Greens?

Philosophy in politics cuts both ways

Gary Gutting, one of the New York Times' "Stone" philosophy column opiners, has a half-good column about how philosophy could better political discourse.

It's only half-good because he only talks about how Democrats, using philosophical principles, could more charitably interpret the ideas driving GOP conservativism. He offers nary an example of how Republicans could, and should, do the same.

It's "insight" like this which, on the intellectual side, continues to stimulate the drift, or whatever, from liberalism to neoliberalism, along with many other factors.

I'm really, really disappointed.

We'll see if he does a follow-up column looking the other way, but, I doubt it.

U.S. Chamber - as stupid as the tea partiers it backed

Yes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is economically stupid, as well as greedy and clueless. Here's the proof.

Business has already blown several chances. In mid-July, nearly 500 executives (including the chamber’s) wrote a letter to the White House and Congress saying the obvious: default would be ruinous and long-term deficits should be reduced. The Washington Post reported that the signers could not reach agreement on whether Republicans should accept the president’s proposed compromises on taxes, which offered to cut spending in exchange for much smaller revenue increases. As a result, the letter said nothing about revenue. A similar letter was sent two weeks later by the Financial Services Forum, which includes the big banks and investment firms.

Last week, the chamber wrote a letter to the Congressional “supercommittee” demanding that it “address entitlements” — meaning cut the benefits of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — and restructure the tax code. But it said nothing about raising revenues or asking for greater shared sacrifice through higher income and estate taxes for the wealthy.

The chamber, along with the Business Roundtable and others, has urged greater government spending on rebuilding roads, bridges and the power grid. The chamber joined with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in supporting the creation of an infrastructure bank, one of the White House’s top priorities to help kick-start the economy. We hope they back it up with real lobbying in Republican offices.

That's just part of the Sunday political follies.

Add in that George Pataki is now considering a GOP presidential run. I guess Rudy's busy?

And Al Sharpton shows, or feigns, or a bit of both, penitence over Crown Heights

The NYT, a few weeks late, actually starts looking at Tricky Ricky Perry's shakedown of campaign contributors.

America 130 years ago and today

We have many of the same political situations, though for totally different reasons.

Starting with the 1876 presidential election, we had five consecutive elections where the winner failed to get a majority of the popular vote. Hayes and Harrison failed to get even a plurality; Garfield and Cleveland, both presidencies, got a plurality but not a majority.

Clinton won on plurality twice, thanks to Ross Perot. George W. Bush was a minority president his first election, then won a narrow majority. Obama had a bigger majority, but, if he is re-elected, it won't be by that margin, in all likelihood.

There was also the fact that many people felt the two main parties were neglecting them. But, it wasn't over a call for "centrism." Rather, radical (white) populism, prohibition, and other people-based special interest parties arose.

At the same time, relative to those days, both mainstream parties were "money heavy" in their politics.

But, eventually, third parties then forced transformation in the Democrats, to nominate Bryan in 1896, which led to TR getting the GOP's Veep nod four years later. Maybe there are slivers of hope for today.

Governing while drunk

That’s what all those 18-hour days, seven days a week, add up to for White House staff.

Seriously. A British medical study of Members of Parliament showed workaholic political grinding caused mental impairment equivalent to being legally drunk at 0.10 blood alcohol.

A century-old reality check for progressives

Way back in 1908, Arthur Fisher Bentley was arguing Progressives needed to apply Realpolitik to politics.

Now, in the linked New Yorker story, Nicholas Lemann argues today’s progressive theoreticians such as Thomas Frank need to re-read Bentley and apply his ideas to today.

First, Bentley’s bona fides. A Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, then taken not into academia, but Chicago journalism. As for politics, he worked on Robert La Follette’s 1924 Progressive Party presidential run.

Second, a thumbnail sketch, to whet your appetite.

Bentley says there is no “public interest,” just the interest of different, well, interest groups within the public interest.

Lobbying groups serve these interests; reach for your wallet when they claim to serve the “public interest.”

There’s two forms of political groups — lobbying-type groups and talking-type groups. The CFR, let alone many other folks, wasn’t around a century ago, but it seems clear this is the type of folks Bentley meant.

Third, contra Frank in “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” Lemann says that Bentley, were he alive today, would say that Kansas social conservatives believe they have a perceived interest in pulling the GOP lever. Maybe not all of them have thought about the financial side of voting for a GOP that also includes Grover Norquist. Maybe, in many cases, they have, and have determined the fiscal GOP isn’t that big a deal, or that maybe they’ll get lucky and get their extra slice of financial pie soon, or that, on idealistic grounds, they actually agree with Norquist as well as wanting to criminalize abortion.

Lemann also ties this to how McCain, and perhaps especially Obama, now seem to be disappointing followers, but I think he’s weak here.

Personally, I wouldn’t have any problem if Obama were in medias politicas res more when it’s time to compromise. But, when you don’t actually stake out that many positions in the first place, content to be an empty vessel or a mirrored blank slate, then, when you do stake out principles, it’s what progressives might accept after the work of compromise is done, whereas there’s been no negotiation to a compromise on Obama’s part, it’s a point Lemann misses.

That aside, I think it’s also a great insight on why post-World War II third parties in America have never gained traction. Today’s Greens and Libertarians are too idealistic to muck it up. The Reform Party, as founded, had no interest group, just an interest person, Ross Perot. And, its failure, between Perot’s two runs, let alone afterward, to define itself led to its essential demise.

The second millennium

Hit post 1,000 last night. Obviously, I feel I have a lot to say. On national politics, too bad bigger voices weren’t saying more of it 3-4 years ago.