Well, I was just quoting Trump, but yeah.
Also,
FTFY
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I assume the comment you’re referring to is this one:
In that case a right-leaning Democrat was probably the most progressive person that the Alabama DNC could get their own voters to support, so it still fits the guideline “support the most progressive candidate available in each race.”
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Let’s start with avoiding all caps & bold in a reasonable discussion.
Practically, we need to suport adn vote for progressive candidates locally and starve out the blue dogs in the party leadership. Dismantling the party functionally turns a two-party system into a one-party system.
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Support and vote for the most progressive candidate who has a realistic chance of winning the election. If we do that, the Democratic party gets more progressive and wins more seats.
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It arguably boils down to the really ugly correllaries of the Just World hypothesis(which is both very popular and often seen as morally superior to the allegedly nihilistic alternatives):
Having a universe of moral causality and justice sounds like a nice idea; but the only methods of squaring it with observed reality are handwaving or asserting that, yes, the people with bad things happening to them must deserve it.
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Leibnitz said this is the highest happiness arrangement possible in a physical universe where men can exist. If you’re brilliant but you take the Judeo-Xian allfather as an axiom, you’ll end up with that sort of thing (and then you’ll get ridiculed by Voltaire.)
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i often choose to be broke, because i prefer my own kind of dignity.
basically, i agree with your point but the problem is that in a capitalist society you have to make constant choices between ethics and money. not least, what you buy ( the cheapest product, or the product from the company with the best labor practices ), but also how much of your soul your willing to sell ( long hours without complaining, not seeing your family, just to stay employed. )
think about businesses cutting long standing ties with communities and moving overseas; think about bane capital buying up functional businesses and loading them with debt.
more often than not, as far as i can tell, the pursuit of money for money’s sake and being an ethical person – a person with dignity – are related. they’re polar opposites.
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Ah, so democrats want something thermodynamically possible, while republicans want something that would literally destroy their beloved capitalism.
If everyone is very rich and there’s no very poor to cause essentially a gradient, then capitalism can’t work. It’s like an economic heat engine where the difference in temperature is the fact that there’s haves who want money and have-nots who want stuff.
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I agree with all of that. I also do want to make the distinction between someone who is choosing to make less money, and someone who is truly broke.
So yes, I do agree it is important to make these choices when we can - and also, of course, some people have much less room to make these choices.
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The Leibnitz types certainly let their premises drawn them into all sorts of peculiar corners; but there seems to be something else(I’d say ‘something more’; but that might imply that it is greater; which is far from the case) behind the ones who aren’t just edged into a dry, theoretical, best-of-all-possible-worlds; but who actively relish the deserved misery of the people who clearly exist to reassure all the good and deserving members of the just world which side of the fence they are on.
It’s not like Leibnitz has a “On consideration of simple and composite substances and also fuck the wretched inhabitants of the workhouses why don’t we just kill the deadweight scum?” chapter; nor is it generally the case that the perps behind the latest opportunistic-kicking-a-homeless-guy-to-death or smirking Paul Ryan larvae became what they are through an unflinching dedication to deduction from first principles.
(That said, there are some who see to combine these elements; most notably Thomas “I wrote this and they still made me a saint, do you feel lucky?” Aquinas of “Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.” fame.)
I don’t think the equivalency is false, and that’s basically why the Democrats lost the election. I’m in good company, too: piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2018PoliticalConflict.pdf
I guess it would be extraordinary if any did. Representation is about participation, not about meeting demands made in absentia.
It’s just, well, I get a lot of this:
This is exactly what needs doing, but I get this a lot from people who complain about Democrats and their policies yet never seem to make it to any of the meetings. As frustrated with Sanders as I often get, at least he showed up and made a difference. If that isn’t proof of how effective participation is, what more would anyone need? I get that we’re all busy and it’s hard and we’re very tired, but democracy on demand isn’t actually a thing, and until it is, work still remains to be done. If they don’t want to be Democrats, fine, but complaints about outcomes they don’t like are unhelpful vapor.
I get it. People are angry. Some of it is even reasonable. But unless they also pitch in, that anger will probably not go towards anything helpful. Like one of my favorite bloggers often says, if you want a better nation, you need to be better citizens.
It’s a group effort. (It’s not original, but it benefits from rephrasing if it helps keep the spirit alive.)
Actually, I think it would be reasonable rendering this in all caps.
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Yes, I think it’s a commitment to individualism, in the absolute. As in, you bear 100% responsibility for your situation, right back to how you were born. It’s a paradox, but screw them anyway for being poor!
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Although if you were born rich, white and male then you are automatically absolved of any responsibility for things like decades-long patterns of sexual misconduct because nobody’s perfect, right?
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Longer than that.
The early-20th century Klan didn’t just hunt Black people; they were also quite fond of murdering union organisers.
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It’s not so much a paradox but part of the perverse US strain of Calvanism/Pentecostalism. Wealth is a divine blessing (indicating moral rectitude) and poverty is therefore a sign of moral dissolution; this holds true even when one’s economic position was set before one was born. It infects the Republican party pretty badly, and it’s behind a lot of their thinking and approaches, even when they don’t outright admit it.
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And by “undeserving poor” they mean … well, you know … them.
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Sure, but their commitment to individualism is mostly a fantasy. It’s very strict when it comes to others, and pretty much an illusion when they apply it to themselves. The whole “self-made man” bullshit.
And the “Party of Personal Responsibility” is very good at explaining how their fuck-ups are other folks’ personally responsibility. It’s Obama’s fault, it’s Clinton’s fault, it’s libruls’ fault, it’s “illegals’” fault, it’s teh gays’ fault, etc, etc.
Never mind that Right controls the Presidency, both houses of Congress, many state legislatures, an entire news network and large chunks of the rest of the so-called liberal media. Everything bad is because Dems, I dunno, breathed cooties on them or something.
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Maybe they are getting honest because they are spreading their form of toxoplasmosis, who knows.
I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree on that point, but as far as our current investment banking system, it doesn’t really “fit” anywhere, even in the present implementation of capitalism it creates numerous enormous problems that undermine the functionality of other parts of the system.
@mindfu
I believe Trump’s victory is worse than a matter of merely being reflective of the overall policy goals of the republican party, he does to some extent, but the main reason he won is because the Republican party has been rigging the system by taking small state seats, which lead to bigger ones, which ultimately lead to gerrymandering that makes it almost impossible for Republicans to lose.
They didn’t squash him because he had a populist movement behind him, and he’s corrupt and stupid enough that they intended to use him as a pawn, or at least a direct money-to-legislation machine. I think what they didn’t count on was their inability to control him. Trump will say literally anything to please the crowd, and that’s creating some significant problems for them that they weren’t counting on. I hope, albeit only dimly, that this will end up being a turning point in specifically American history where people finally realize that politics isn’t a television show or a game.
As far as Trump is concerned, he is literally “the boss of the world.” Almost all of the conflicts within his administration stem from the simple fact that Trump appears to misunderstand the role of the president and that the United States is not a unilateral dictatorship. He’s signaled to the rest of the world that he wants it to be, but at present that is now how the US works and he keeps running into his boundaries and throwing temper tantrums.
All that said, I completely agree with you that the Republican party is objectively worse than the Democratic party, I’m more trying to say “the fight doesn’t end if we flip congress or boot Trump and his cronies out of office, this is just a battle, not the whole war.”
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