You know you're dealing with a Donk when the highest virtue you can hope for is hypocrisy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/1...2cooper.html?
hp
"30 million new jobs net" - sounds good on paper, do these jobs buy/keep homes?
"The denunciations of NAFTA and the votes against CAFTA and the pending FTAs are protests against what happened in Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh a quarter century ago" - ah, nope.
politics? owners want to pay less & workers want more. fundamentally? overall consequences to American economy when this relationship is out of whack (any direction).
'New jobs' always means somebody lost one and somebody else was directed to a new one (at best). It means that the laid-offer was sent to the Job Center and told 'to take any job.' This is good only if you are part of the ruling classes, because in the Rove stuff, Bush actually wanted to cut middle-class taxes instead of rich-people taxes a second time, but Rove talked him out of it, and Cheney fired O'Neill for refusing to get on board the Upper Class American Princess-Michael-worshipping Billionaires. No different from having a goddam Royal Family all these tax cuts for the super-rich. and more coming. NAFTA exactly the same. That's why only reason to cheer these sorts of things is if you can see it going straight into your own bank account, because it is nothing but demented deceit by the Old Upper Classes, and no 2 ways about it.
Hypocrisy is NEVER a virtue, but it is ALWAYS the ONLY thing you can ever hope for with ANYBODY. That's what makes the world go 'round. It's simply loserist idealism to think anything else.
"No different from having a goddam Royal Family all these tax cuts for the super-rich. and more coming."
-- holy crap that's f**ked up. No wonder populist lunacy gets such a grip.
Result, of course, that in a Donk-populist regime the super-rich (mostly Donk funders, as it happens) park their assets of-shore, which for them is extremely easy, and everyone pretends the 'problem' has been sorted out. Yippee, hypocrisy wins again! Blazing a path to the new Jerusalem!
"owners want to pay less & workers want more."
-- to which the obvious antidote (worker side) is a tight job market (i.e. growth, growth, growth (i.e. free trade and tax cuts for everybody)) and some tactical job-hopping. But I guess it's easier to just vote for some loserist Donk "bash China, redistribute the pie" innumerate BS while downing another beer.
"Hypocrisy is ... the ONLY thing you can ever hope for with ANYBODY. It's simply loserist idealism to think anything else."
-- somehow I don't think I'm going to see this on a lot of bumper stickers. Dangerous slide into nihilism going on around here recently ...
"-- somehow I don't think I'm going to see this on a lot of bumper stickers."
No, because people don't like to face reality.
"Dangerous slide into nihilism going on around here recently ...'
There is no such thing unless you're doing it. I just meant that without Purity, something gets tainted and that usuallly involves, if in the human sphere, people compromising, yeah, and being cynical. I can't see why on earth you'd think being pro-cynicism vis-a-vis capitalist exploitation would include 'NO HYPOCRISY.' But to each his own, believe me, we're 12 hours apart, so we can probably afford our own fucked-uppednesses a little longer without having to call out the Law. But you know now, dear Nick, that privacy is going away from citizens, so that even your own may be under threat!!!! Of course, total loss of privacy excepting bathroom privileges is okay in the vast God=War universe. Whatever turns ya on.
"'New jobs' always means somebody lost one and somebody else was directed to a new one (at best)."
-- uh, no. At best (and typically) it means a new job (i.e. one extra job in the economy).
That's called GROWTH -- it's worth trying to explain to all the Donks out there because it really is quite an important phenomenon and it's why sensible people vote Republican.
"privacy is going away from citizens"
-- I'm so looking forward to the 180 on this rhetoric that will happen within nanoseconds of Hillary entering the Whitehouse.
(not that I'm predicting a Donk victory '08 of course, but at least that disastrous prospect has a comic upside)
"{(not that I'm predicting a Donk victory '08 of course,"
Don't be ridicule, monsieur. Everybody else is predicting it, including all your Republicans. I'm sure everything in the whole world will blow up if anything happens to Speedy Gonzales, still in the hot seat and leaving all the dog work to any secretary he can find.
On the hypocrisy, cynicism issue -- becoming a staple -- problem IMHO is that once it is simply accepted, the message is being broadcast that people (voters, for starters) actually don't mind being insultingly lied to by populist demagogues and Edwards-style campaigns become the norm, rather than the grotesque outliers.
Of course pols lie all the time, but without a determination to punish them for it they'll just keep cranking it up. Unless they feel they're at least embarrassed to turn tail on all their promises, it will be increasingly impossible to get any idea at all what they will actually do in office.
Smashing Bush senior for "read my lips ..." is one of the great episodes in US political history, making it difficult for any subsequent President (while memory lasts) to renege on tax-cutting promises.
"OK, he lied, they all do, so what ..." might be 'realistic' in certain respects, but as a course of action it just leads to a completely unresponsive elite leadership saying whatever they need to get into office and then doing whatever they want: Socialism by the back door.
Fascinating we agree on absolutely everything except the proper names that fit your thesis placed immediately above...
without a determination to punish them for it they'll just keep cranking it up.
see: Gonzales hearings
but as a course of action it just leads to a completely unresponsive elite leadership saying whatever they need to get into office and then doing whatever they want
see: current admin
i really hate to lower the tone with more drive by snark but that is just too good!
a more on-topic response:
free-trade: great!
unions: also great! fully admit i'm a benighted liberal on this, but exactly how demanding a better deal, organizationally, is anti-capital, i don't get...
past, future & the afl-cio: note that barone doesn't mention the SEIU at all: the service workers union, which voted to exit from the afl-cio umbrella a year ago (or so). it a) covers workers actually doing post-Fordist work, b) has a much more racially mixed membership (hispanics = future of america), c. is growing!
of course, none of this argues against his central point (afl-cio tanking FTAs) which may well be true. but unions are not, in their entirety, trying to settle old scores or look backward.
bobie -- on your post no.1, it would have more impact if you'd specify exactly which pre-election promises were being trashed.
Then, believe it or not, I'd probably just concur -- Bush isn't exactly a Ronald Reagan figure on the right, you might have noticed.
In fact, the "hypocrisy's the best thing about them" line is far more appropriate to political enemies, after all, there probably are Edwards supporters so far gone they're actually looking forward to seeing the world trade system crashed and Laffer-losing punitive tax rates re-introduced in the name of class warfare.
Unions? Well, I wouldn't want to see them banned, anymore than idiotic puppet-waving street protests, but nobody with any taste for markets is going to see them as anything other than a necessary evil. In the aggregate their consequences are overwhelmingly reactionary, because they represent established patterns of employment which they defend to the (edge of) death against the future.
Problems with your employer? --Job-hop.
"Problems with your employer? --Job-hop."
Tres typique and probably the only alternative in Old Shanghai. All of this is based on certain individuals having the reins of power and that being fine if one is one of them, and then if someone doesn't hold these reins, then he's getting in the way of the free market. It's all very 'I got mine', but most people won't admit to their own hypocrisy as the necessary evil to make the world go around the way I will. Nick, you have no reason to care about the 'future of man' within your scenarios than anyone else has to care about your personal welfare (unless they do), so we recognize here at Troll-Prime that you are spouting enormous amounts of Reactionary Propaganda which totally favours one class (the one that already HAS a lot of capital, which may or may not include yourself, believe me, I don't mind either way) over whichever ones are getting in the way. If you think people are going to buy this stuff as 'universal principles for the universal good', you're all wet, because they don't. You can't talk about being 'as cynical as possible about the idiocies and exploiting thereby with one's intelligence' and expect anybody to think your ideas are going to lead to anything for THEM--and that's what people who know their asses from holes in the ground are interested in. You know this, of course, but have interest in propagating the monied classes represented by Bush and Cheney. I have some of this interest myself, but I think Hillary and Edwards will also have at least a smidgen of what most people call humanity about them, and none of the Bushies have ever had any nor do they intend to. They do not want people to prosper even in their own country. They do not want decent health care, and do want corrupt and cushy posts for all their stupid cronies. Maybe you can get one. I'd like to see that. You'd find out what being smart was pretty quick--you'd be useless and fired in short order.
There are two aspects to the Classical Liberal critique of unions that might be worth mentioning. The first I'll pass over quickly, because it's a matter of values and thus no doubt supremely unpersuasive to anybody who's not already a committed quasi-libertarian, that is to say: (1) Unions are bad because they are based on coercive disrespect for property rights and foster socialist-criminal cultural patterns.
Number two, however, is cold, descriptive economics, and everybody needs to deal with it (meaning disagreement is facile without an argument).
(2) Unions are simply unable to shift working conditions out of the long-term equilibrium set by supply and demand for workers (labor markets) -- however desirable such an objective may be felt to be. If they do so locally and temporarily they destroy employment in the sector, industry or nation concerned, until equilibrium is restored. If they achieve conditions of global monopoly over the setting of working conditions (by a combination of national organizations/regulations + trade/migration restrictions) then the damage they do to the economy by exempting labor from rational economic pressures will offset any super-equilibrium advantages they attain for labor within the economy.
Of course, market-based economic theory might be wrong, but that would imply socialism could work, and at that point I'm happy to let the world exhibit itself as my laboratory.
T-p -- but the reason right-wing arguments prevail over those of the left isn't that they pander to a larger demographic -- clearly they don't. It's that they are consistent with economic growth, while the class-warriors demagogy leads only to universal immiserization.
job-hopping "probably the only alternative in Old Shanghai" -- hence hyper-growth and massive job creation, in Shanghai (Old and New) and (guess what?) not in Detroit
"It's that they are consistent with economic growth, while the class-warriors demagogy leads only to universal immiserization."
No use discussing. Don't believe a word of it, if I support Hillary I'm supporting capitalism and what Americans, at least, think of as quite right-wing. I am simply not going to pay any attention to the Bush propaganda. It is rotten to the core. There is the class-warriors no matter what. Anyway, you pay attention and argue with only what you can capitalize on, so we can both get into cynicalizing.
"hence hyper-growth and massive job creation"
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
t-p -- hope I'm not detecting an identification in your rhetoric between Bushite 'compassionate conservatism' (neo-Johnsonian, bleeding-heart domestic pork-festing) and a turbo-capitalist agenda, if so that's truly sad. Most everybody with even minimal attachment to capitalist principles
this guy for e.g.
http://www.townhall.com/columnis...t/
archive.shtml
have either bailed in disgust or are simply holding their noses because the Donks would be even worse
A broadly capitalist government in the United States would push for:
a) unilateral elimination of all trade restrictions
b) axing of 90%+ of regulatory constraints on business
c) a low, flat tax (incrementally switched to carbon?)
d) voucherization of all public services
e) privatization of social security
f) max aggregate public expenditure capped at 20% GDP (half on defense)
... also:
g) decriminalize all narcotics
h) rigorously defend the constitution (eliminate all laws and regulations in violation of 1st and 2nd amendments, appoint only strict constructionist judges ...)
i) sure there are a whole lot of paternalistic life-style restrictions that need zilching, since I'm not living there I won't pretend to understand the details
"That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"
-- keep it simple, that way the evil pols get less opportunity to sink their teeth in.
"h) rigorously defend the constitution (eliminate all laws and regulations in violation of 1st and 2nd amendments, appoint only strict constructionist judges ...)"
Please. You are not even in la-la land yet.
... does that mean we got down to point (h) without any objections?
No. I appreciate your hard work. Or should I call it labour?
Still waiting for the phone-call about the WH policy-guru position for some reason ...
Well, maybe you really would like those guys. Given that you now know a lot about China, I think that that should be a strong recommendation for your expertise on getting rid of health insurance for children (new children can always be re-made, and when they are, Gilles de Rais's soul will be redeemed incidentally..). Yes, indeed, I think expertise in China will indeed fit you out as an expert in Town Hall Meeting Audience Selection in Akron, Ohio.
"Dangerous slide into nihilism going on around here recently"
That's good though right? Who else is sliding that way other then me? Ah schucks, ur making me blush. t-p, great reply to Nick on this one, you hit it on the nail. Whatever floats your boat.
Lot's of good stuff in here, even though we're going headlong back into politics.
Nick great stuff..
"g) decriminalize all narcotics
h) rigorously defend the constitution (eliminate all laws and regulations in violation of 1st and 2nd amendments, appoint only strict constructionist judges ...)" and if you did live here you would find that apathy rules supreme, unlike China or Europe. I believe that Europe is leaps and bounds ahead of us socially.
"owners want to pay less & workers want more."
north, great stuff. Ur special in a special way. What are u sticking out at me anyway? LOL..
"I believe that Europe is leaps and bounds ahead of us socially."
-- ???!!!#$%&***
"h) rigorously defend the constitution (eliminate all laws and regulations in violation of 1st and 2nd amendments, appoint only strict constructionist judges ...)" "
Er, um, Azazel, I think what Nick means is 'do with the Constitution what the Bushies have already done to it', viz., destroy it while claiming to protect it. In the meantime, you end up with a redneck king just like somebody in Old Angleterre--yes, somebody with all the power, and naturally that is in the blood of the old country types even when they think they've been exorcised by 10 billion Chinamen.
Plus, privatizing social security is so wonderful an idea that even the dictatorship of the Bushie-Roves couldn't get it through. All of these policies are so you can throw people to their deaths. What the exact clubs the people want to belong to who support this kind of barbarism is unknown to me, but hey, we all need a quiet time of peace and quiet and I just do this because it's easy. Nick is on the right exactly like the extremes on the left, but he doesn't know it. This is okay, he's sort of got some charm even though totally wacko, but it's good to test yourself with 9/11 truth idiots and then people who find Karl Rove and Dick Cheney worthy of bringing in a whole new era of sex symbols. I can just see the beauty of a world in which The New Centerfolds in Playgirl are Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. At least Dubya and Condi work out.
"All of these policies are so you can throw people to their deaths..."
-- but if you're going to take this nanny-state collectivist attitude, isn't it also right to stop them taking drugs and - while your at it - criminalize drinking, smoking, mountain climbing, hang-gliding, steak-knives, depressing literature, pre-marital sex and whatever else they might possibly hurt themselves with, otherwise you're "throwing people to their deaths" -- infantilizing leftoid silliness of course
t-p..Ohhh..I C...Thanks for the correction. Well you guy's r the experts, and know more then I do about the subject. I'll take ur word for it. Or should say respect your belief, and would like to understand it better. What do the Bushiest say? Should I use weight, or rule based logic? Have you read 'Republic'? Have you seen 'The Lathe of Heaven'? Sorry jus pickin at ya to develop an identity.
Nick..aw come on. Tell you what, you can come visit me. Then we can talk about the weather, get drunk and tip over sleeping cows. And laugh like retarded idiots, while we prance away from the farmer w/ a shotgun full of rock salt. Then we'll drive to New York and throw dead alkaline batteries at the Yankees, because we think people from New York are rude. No offense t-p. Have you seen 'Fargo'? You should, don't ya know. My oldest sister is a Cop in St. Louis. God you should talk to her! I won't let her near my kids, for fear ignorance is contagious. Abandon all hope, all ye who enter! We square bro?
"isn't it also right to stop them taking drugs and - while your at it - criminalize drinking, smoking, mountain climbing, hang-gliding, steak-knives, depressing literature, pre-marital sex and whatever else they might possibly hurt themselves with, otherwise you're "throwing people to their deaths" -- infantilizing leftoid silliness of course"
The problem, monsieur, is that is the situation in this country with your beloved Bushies. It's sort of like what gay men used to say about Lesbians: All of the pain, none of the pleasure.
Ok, so Bush, who is with 'a' republican party is a bad politician. Isn't he with that Skull and Bones party?
BTW, these 'bushies' I am not one of. Jus so you know..
"your beloved Bushies"
-- this is getting ridiculous
"this is getting ridiculous"
Maybe, but I enjoyed talking with you for awhile. You are extremely intolerant but have a kind of intelligence that is attractive from time to time, despite your natural cruelty. In fact, 'your beloved Bushies' is not at all 'ridiculous', you just don't like phrases like that, too ornamental or something. I've looked at the Neal Stephenson book you talked about, and it occurs to me you would find such results attractive, and that you might find the book well-written. I've read 100 + pages of it, and will now stop. We are too opposed to be able to be fully respectful of each other. In any case, to repeat "isn't it also right to stop them taking drugs and - while your at it - criminalize drinking, smoking, mountain climbing, hang-gliding, steak-knives, depressing literature, pre-marital sex and whatever else they might possibly hurt themselves with, otherwise you're "throwing people to their deaths" -- infantilizing leftoid silliness of course"
I thought you could navigate this without my having to point out that some of it is even literallly criminalized, and the rest is socially discouraged in a society which has until recently been heavily 'new-Christian' and largely still is. Of course, the 'steak knives' makes no sense, unless it is an in sort of thing. But the 'yes-men' of the Bush administration are something you understand, and apparently don't find this something you shouldn't yourself demand, given that it's likely you'd be more than willing to oblige such types if you found that they were in indisputably more powerful positions than you yourself. In any case, you are mostly left alone for some time now--at least here, and not nearly just by me--so we can go back to that.
Just because I may support capitalism as opposed to socialism does not mean that I think that is the only religion to be kept in view, nor that it dominates all facets of life. You demand this harsh view that you find the key to happiness. It is no such thing alone. Life is not so one-dimensional, so you'll see what you can make of it. You're not very Golden Rule, I'd say; underneath there is something that's always something specifically unsaid, and so people won't buy it. As for myself, I just liked your fine mind and writing style, but I am not in the business of supporting this 'no-frills-forever' sort of thing you seem to be advocating for those who don't have the 'all-frills' set-up. No sweat, as I've said before. If you want the last word, it doesn't matter to me, since I'm much more immune to this sort of thing, I suspect.
well I'm enjoying, but I guess you realize that. Of course, you're kind of obnoxious, but not beyond a point that's basically quite delightful, and to my way of thinking admirable.
Sorry if that's a bit embarrassingly huggy ...
Knowing you're something of a blog nomad and assuming that was a coded adieu, I'll be looking forward to a visitation from the next avatar
Actually, I went back to bed(Manhattan hedonism....)...and then...
(neither of these is embarassingly huggy, because they had nothing to do with the dream, but I'll do anything to go on about Broaaaaad--waaaay...as northanger knows well...)
'I Had a DREEEEEEAMMMMM..', as Martin Luther King said;
or (as I recently heard Patti Lupone, as the super-pushy stage mother, sing to Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Barbara Walters, and me):
"I Had A Dream..
A Dream about Youuuuu, nick-EEEEEE...
It's gonna come truuuuueee, Nick-EEEEEEE...
they Think-- That-- We're Throuuuuuugh, Nick-EEEEEEE...
but Nick-EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE..
YOU'LL--- BE--- SWELL!!!
You'll be great
Gonna have the whole world on a plate
Startin' here, startin' now
Nickee, Every. thing's. comin'. up. roses...
Clear the decks!
Clear the tracks!
You got nothing to do but relax!
Blow a kiss..take a bow
Nickeeee every-- thing's-- comin'-- up-- roses!
Now's you're inning
Stand the world on its ear
Set-It-Spinnnnnniiinnnnng
That'll be just the beginnnnning
Curtain up, Light the Lights!!!
You got nothin' to hit but the heights
You'll be swell, you'll be great,
I can tell, just you wait,
That lucky star they talk about is YOUUUUUU!!!
Nickee everything's comin' up roses for me and for you...
You can do it
All you need is a hand
You can doooo it
TROLL-PRIME is gonna see toooo it!
Curtain up! Light the lights!
We got nothing to hit but the heights!
I can tell, wait and see.
There's the bell! Follow me!
And nothing's gonna stop us 'til we're through!
Nicky, everything's coming up roses and daffodils!
Everything's coming up sunshine and Santa Claus!
Everything's gonna be bright lights and lollipops!
Everything's coming up roses for me and for you!"
Nick finally becomes an Honorary New Yorker courtesy of Troll-Prime and North, despite thinking drugs are legal here, and that, although sex is rampant, is because teenagers are told to teetotal half the time and then fall into porno without knowing how to keep control of the management...use avatar only when people know who I am, but there are incestuous problems here so that I let you give me this name in slight likelihood I wouldn't be re-harassed by personages who appear from time to time...
Anyway, you came to visit me in some place I was just getting kicked out of. I don't know what you look like, but you were very New York Jewish in the dream, sort of like that one in 'Norma Rae'--oh yeah, Ron Liebman--and had the gravelly voice of the long-time Garment District Sweatshop Manager, but nevertheless tried to be as nice as you knew how. Said something I can't quite remember, but then your wife appeared and I met her outside the place, so that she could smile and tell me she was pretty. I guess you'd left the kids with cheap Chinese labour... Then I lost my sneakers, which I never wear, but because all obsessive-compulsive about finding them, and was running into nothing but obstacles in this place I was leaving. You had sped off in a car and no longer had relevance in terms of sneakers.
Okay, that's all right, I wanted to finish the book anyway. I like some of the compactors myself--except that when one ascends, one gets to read the daily paper on one of 100 copies printed on ancient machines--so that by 2020, there should be much envy of having to buy the richest capitalists their newspapers and read your own on terrible paper or atrophied machine screens. It's just hard to get used to some of this kind of writing where the best part of it comes from non-fiction things they know, and once in a while Stephenson comes up with a really good image, but it is somewhat hard going since it reads often like a manual. It is a little like reading Clarke's book 'Breakpoint', and one does it because he knows something. But it is not beautiful prose (ever, in either Clarke or Stephenson). You see, I think as much as you decry (and rightly so) much of it, you learned to write from the dread liberal academy, or it wouldn't sound like that. These scientist types never are able to get the silvery sounds that we lit'r'ry types do.
You do seem to be trying to combine some things from a system you basically support with some much more liberal ideas that are really not encouraged in the U.S., and should be. Anyway, one of Stephenson's few really good phrases was 'socially discouraged behaviour' when talking about a room full of 'all sorts of organic things'--and he didn't mean dried figs, he just meant old Macs, etc., at that point.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/1...&hp&
oref=slogin
you probably saw this.
Glenn Reynolds exposed:
http://www.classicalvalues.com/
a..._of_the_lo.html
My last bedtime paragraph:
"Dinosaur, who was the fiercest of them all, mounted a campaign to stamp out the trolls, and within a few days they had all been driven away. Thereafter Nell was no longer troubled in her sleep, for she knew that the scary trolls, who had once given her bad dreams, had bene replaced by her frou night friends."
Some of the time I can concentrate on the book, the problem is I always have some sort of visual accompaniment to everything I read, no matter what, just springs up, and this book makes me see nothing but wall-to-wall Thomas Kincaid paintings in walnut frames in close living rooms.
Gawd--he looks just like my butcher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tho.../
Thomas_Kincaid
Thos. Kinkade!
wiki doesn't mention him getting thoroughly shitfaced at disney world, pissing all over a statue of Winnie the Pooh shouting "This one's for you, Walt!" A late-career turn into serrano/finley/negativland territory, maybe?
(fully intend response re: gonzales. just, like, not now.)
Karen Finley? She's one of the funniest people on earth, and the only 'professional performance artist' I admire. She did a hot-sheet motel evening with George W. Bush and Martha Stewart, wore no clothes but had Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie painted black on her. At end did outrageous 'speech-belting', in alphabetical order, of all the things she had as Martha Stewart--went on for 10 minutes, and was just like 'Rose's Turn' from same show as song I transcribed for Nick and he probably acted like House of Lords about it. I bet is stick-in-the-mud! and thinks that entering middle-age means you have to get cautious! Well, no, not if you hire reliable Chinese au pairs for your babies, don't let them bring any foods in that are Made in China...NO Chinese Marmite, it's bad enough from Angleterre...
Anyway, she screamed, totally naked 'I GOT BREAKFAST AND AH GOT BRUNCH! and I GOT CALCIUM AND I GOT CABBAGE! I GOT DOORS AND I GOT DOORMEN!" not as funny when you're reading it, but this woman is mad, and I had to physically control myself because I began to get internal pains from laughing. Mostly, I don't like this group. The 'George Bush' was 'nekkid' too, and that was not a bonus, as he was this puny little thing, but I saw it the night before Ms. Stewart started her Prison Reeducation Program, so therefore I felt a special poignancy occurred in that particular performance...
something (completely off-topic) for Nick:
BBC's flagrant hypocrisy over Wiki edits
http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/
sd - that's out beautifully coherent thread ruined :)
... anyway, while I enjoyed (and learnt from the link), as you can guess my loathing of the news and opinion side of the Beeb is so intense this kind of thing is just water off a duck's back.
yep, but it's always nice to catch 'em red-handed.
trouble is, the adjective that best sums up the BBC is 'smug' -- and with that comes a complete insensitivity to rational criticism
Mark Humphrys reckons this is the most offensive article ever published by the Guardian. I think he's got a point.
http://
commentisfree.guardian.co...slings_out.html
Some strange attitudes upthread... surely job creation (and economic growth) is positive-sum under capitalism? and free trade is morally right?
@Hyperstitional protectionist lobby - remember this?
http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html
Bastiat's famous petition for the candle makers
tim - "surely job creation (and economic growth) is positive-sum under capitalism? and free trade is morally right?"
-- if we had agreement on those patently obvious truths the world's prospects would be looking a whole lot brighter
Sowell on Loserism:
http://
article.nationalreview.co...WZhYjU5ZjEzNDE=
nick. must we mangle marx so early in the morning?
nick. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing, Schweitzer? The Queer Marx Loved to Hate?
northanger -- great to see you doing some in depth marxology, but not entirely sure I'm getting the point: doesn't this material validate Sowell's conclusion?
nick. i love the smell of depth marxology in the morning!
what's Sowell's conclusion anwyay? Whatever does not advance the Left agenda is “nothing”?
yes, if we're talking about the GON-istic sense of things.
This is magnificent (visualization of world economic and demographic trends):
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92
Highly relevant to the Sowell argument -- could be subtitled, How the world got up and walked away from leftoid talking points.
This is more a salt-in-the-wounds thing by Bruce Bawer:
http://www.city-journal.org/
html...ace_racket.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/2...gin&
oref=slogin
This is yet one more of millions of examples of how 'growth' is for 'growth' and the 'thrill of growth'. You cannot get around the fact that 'growth' that throws people out of jobs was 'beneficial' to those individuals.
Tim's and Nick's talk:
"tim - "surely job creation (and economic growth) is positive-sum under capitalism? and free trade is morally right?"
-- if we had agreement on those patently obvious truths the world's prospects would be looking a whole lot brighter"
It doesn't have anything to do with 'morally right'. If you want to talk about 'cynically taking advantage of idiocy' in the capitalist project, then it is impossible to get around the fact that no economic systems are 'morally right'. I support capitalism and not socialism, but I can't believe the desire to pretend that it's based on something other than real exploitation of any numbers of individuals and groups of individuals. It's like you want either to have a 'softie feeling' to go with your cynicism (and God forbid, cynicism would include hypocrisy. I mean--is anybody adult enough to go on and admit that hypocrisy is, in fact, as necessary as simple lying, if the world is to go around?) If you want to be a real capitalist, you have to be tough, or is the especial exploitating better effected by conjoining a bunch of moral clauses to every new commercial transaction, whether or not spoken. There is not a thing 'patently obvious' about the 'morality' of any system. It's entirely according to where you're sitting in the hierarchy of things. The most successful capitalists are not the least bit concerned with 'morality', and they are never going to be. They say things about it, though, so I gather that what you mean here is that it is important to 'sound moral and interested in brighter worlds' if one is to get the full thrill of capitalism. Actually, 'world brightness' also doesn't have anything to do with anything but where you are sitting. Rumsfeld himself said that the U.S. casualties in Iraq were totally worth it, and referred to his then rock-star moment of older-guy unusual heat as 'it depends on where you are sitting.' At least he was putting it where it was at: He was Secretary of Defense and the soldiers noted were dead. Talk of this sort is rare, though, and probably usually quickly corrected by any and all systems.
"You cannot get around the fact that 'growth' that throws people out of jobs was 'beneficial' to those individuals. "
should have read:
"you cannot get around the fact that 'growth' that throws people out of jobs was not beneficial to those individuals."
And this means that the welfare of those individuals is a very subsidiary and unimportant concern. You can do the 'tough love' stuff and talk about how 'well, you're fired, but the growth in the economy should make your happy new job search a lot more promising.' Nevermind that you are fired from something you know how to do and then expected to 'job hop' as if that were not a major breach in any person's life. Tough love is not enough, and this becomes increasingly clear. It is not even working. Socialism is not an antidote to anything, but only people interested in Termite Living are going to develop 'positive attitudes' to the new scraped-plain esthetic and prescription for way of life governed by other such tough-love litanies like 'it's a tough world out there. Now learn calculus.'
Who says the world isn't bright? It's quite possible not to be involved in giant world-movements for very long periods of time, even endlessly. Economic growth only for more economic growth becomes truly problematic when people tell you it's boring. People are not interested in being bored by the tedium of either capitalistic or socialist systems.
Admittedly to get what you want takes cleverness and effort, but I don't see that there are any 'patently obvious truths', nor that they give any proof of being ever anything but temporarily successful, just like anything else.
"'it's a tough world out there. Now learn calculus.'"
-- that's my new bumper-sticker (well, it would be if I had a bumper)
(Actually, I agree the 'moral' stuff is basically rhetoric, I just take it as useful shorthand for robust property rights)
nick. AQ 235 = HANS ROSLING = GAPMINDER.ORG.
that's neat
(trusting you on the sums, being too lazy and check and given we've lost the nummificator (sob! (only benefit there is it sure demonstrates the importance of robust property rights)))
This is probably right:
http://
article.nationalreview.co...2NiMzA1Zjc5YWU=
first came across Armstrong w/ Axial Age, just saw her on tv recently.
AQ 300 = KAREN ARMSTRONG = 238 EL SEGUNDO BLUES = BUTTERFLY LOVE.
AQ 378 = FREELANCE MONOTHEIST = [SIGMA] MANAGEMENT LEVEL (Cryptonomicon, Chapter 61, Neal Stephenson).
AQ 465 = THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION = DESERT AUTONOMOUS ZONE.
AQ 1222 = THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: THE BEGINNING OF OUR RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS = WHAT IS BEING REACHED FOR IS A PRELAPSARIAN LOST PRESENT, THE PAST AS SUCH.
AQ 293 = THE BATTLE FOR GOD = A NINE-SIGMA EVENT = PELAGIA NOCTILUCA.
Peters gets why Iraq is worth doing:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/0825...awal.htm?
page=0
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/0...riedman.html?
hp
Friedman came up with something original. Once in a while he surprises me.
Thanks for the Peters. He gets nothing.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Co...14/
016tnyms.asp
If you like the Peters, you're bound to worship this.
Actually, Friedman is just squishy and fucked up, but there was an interesting sweep in this one as he slowly loses his mind. He's a billionaire journalist, maybe the only one accepted in the elite journals, so therefore interesting to read because of that. He changes gears all the time, but mainly is interested in Israel.
I think people want another terrorist attack in the U.S., because that way they can turn the U.S. into a police state full-time, and have a good excuse for it. A lot of people would think this would solve all problems, then we could have endless WWIV. The Republicans definitely would love it. I know, because Hillary said so.
People who support the Bush-Cheney administration indisputably think the American people are stupid, because the American people now hate Bush. This means that people who like Bush/Cheney don't have any affection or any understanding of the U.S. at all, because Bush/Cheney are not the American people. At least Friedman used the by-now-new-term 'Swift-Boating' for what the Bushies did to Kerry, a war hero, the exact opposite of what Bush and Cheney were, draft dodgers and cowards. This means that the only people who can fight super-tough wars are cowards who can stay in their insulated bubbles at all times. Even Giuliani went to funerals of the dead firefighters after 9/11. Bush/Cheney couldn't give a shit who's killed or what happens to the wounded, went to no funerals, and now the Govt. is diagnosing all shell-shocked soldiers as Anti-Social Personality Disorders so they don't have to pay for it.
Friedman seems to be having a psychotic break. He secretly is lying all the time about how he'd like to be able to go on and on senilely like Billy Kristol, but he really doesn't believe it, so he hopes they will be right, but he can still seem to be a little more swinging..
No importance to blame leftoids on anti-Iraq sentiment. They're supposed to be weaklings, you know. In fact, they are, but they aren't the same thing as Democrats.
Anyway, thanks for Neal Stephenson. It's useful stuff, he writes something that is a sort of fantasy non-fiction sci-fi, in that it is a good 'how-to book,' as Gore Vidal used to call early sex books. One learns to skim it, because to read it closely is unbearable. It's clever, and he thinks of things you wouldn't think of yourself, so it's worth the horror of having to read writing that has one or two flashes of wit and a writing style of no discernible grace by any traditional standard. I'm going to read more, though. He's singularly unattractive, but he's full of warnings, whether or not that's his purpose. His colour scheme is so hideous you'd think he'd lived in Disney World his whole life. The long 'Primer passages' are truly ghastly, but the basic plot and some of the images, like the ractives and the total surveillance--which all war hawks presumably want as if it is either that or Islamic terrorist attacks at all times, in either case you get something you hate--is good. Also, the 'phyles' are interesting, and the weird juxtaposition of 'real things' and all the mediatronic things, but basically the book makes it so you get a sort of technique of seeing more and more a smooth oscillation between the two worlds; it also makes it easier to get out of the media-controlled one, because surveillance is not nearly as all-encompassing as the Republicans in particular want it to be. They have no interest in the rule of law or the Constitution, and are merely adventurers of the cowardly sort. Democrats are less cowardly and mostly non-adventurous, but they're not all that sharp too. There's lots in the NYT about the filth and pollution in China, but to be sure, the U.S. is going down the drain, and this will be to the great happiness of all Chinese.
Also have Gibson's 'Spook Country' now. It will be interesting to see if he is a better writer than Stephenson, and I pray he is. I put some other recent Stephenson on hold--purely out of superstition do I read this kind of book, thinking it will make me more secure in this absurd world which breeds only greater and more infinitely cruel artificers, artificers forever!--but if the Gibson is in a league of prose well beyond Stephenson I'll be able to leave it off after this one book. The Leased Territories are interesting, but it also doesn't make any sense. It's mainly for reading a sort of fictionalized Kurzweil. I'm going to be interested to see if this sort of thing can be written in elegant prose, because this is merely a parti-colored, more intricate version of the way Richard Clarke's Breakpoint is written.
Don't take offense. I can understand that you are a British Chinese, and therefore would want to use the U.S. for cynical purposes. I'd probably do the same things.
American Pie. are we becoming military, or have we always been that way?
Frontline: INSIDE THE INSURGENCY
The Truth About Iraq - Michael Ware-1 (Part 1 of 6 - CNN Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware explains the situation on the ground in Iraq)
[+] And as the National Intelligence Estimate report clearly shows, what's really going on right now is that everyone is jockeying for position in the expectation that American troops are going to draw down. Everyone's planning on what they're going to do once America leaves. And honestly, none of it's pretty, and none of is it going to serve U.S. interests. So pulling a few thousand troops out is just going to be a signal to all these militias to keep the pressure up on America. And, as the report says, it's going to be a clear message to Iran to keep the foot on the accelerator and maximize its advantage during this crisis of American foreign policy.
hmm. IRAQI GUN-FU!
"The White House says Mr. Bush stands by the prime minister and that those decisions are best left to the Iraqi people."
I have rarely heard anything so totally sincere. What's he gonna say next? Let Mrs. Maliki help Laura do a Red Room Makeover?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/1...serland&
emc=rss
This bears repeating, since most didn't read it to begin with.
working like a dog to get the monumental Shanghai guidebook finished, so I'm going to be even crappier at blogging than usual
quickly on the timeless iraq/politics issues: the Peters and VDHs are going to get their way on the matter, because the Dems know if they pull another Vietnam-style implosion they'll be out of power for most of another generation. Some of them might even understand that the islamofreaks will just keep coming (unlike the Vietnamese) so we might as well keep killing them in Mesopotamia, where expensively acquired Arab allies and intelligence networks are there to help -- my guess is that Hillary probably gets all this, so even if she wrecks the US economy with loopy socialist policies, at least she'll be a bitch-from-hell against the foreign enemies of the free world
... and for something completely different, Belgium, please break up:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2369
("Belgium is a perversion" but that's the only thing to be said in its favor)
I don't care too about nation-states, Belgium produced Jacques Brel, that's enough for me. 'Bruges-et-Ghent' and 'Les Marquises'. I wouldn't care it they made Toulon a separate state because Gilbert Becaud came from there and wrote 'Marianne de ma Jeunesse' and 'Miserere' and 'C'Etait Moi'.
I agree--Hillary as President of Iraq will make all the difference in the world. I never thought I'd like this kind of woman who can really play football--but she knows how to 'get feminine' too, maybe not like Jackie O, but I think is a little softer than Maggie, who I always thought attractive but not exactly up there with Michelle Pfeiffer--who is GREAT in 'Hairspray', steals the show in some ways. Ms. Latifah and Travolta are good too. Denis Thatcher very tedious, shows Maggie's bad taste in men, at least Hillary chose a womanizer she could hit over the head with a skillet--Dennis Thatcher probably uses warm milk and cookies at bars, if he has to go to them. I loved when they sent him to Harrod's once after an IRA bombing to prove he wouldn't be scared away by 'some damned Irishman.'
'working like a dog to get the monumental Shanghai guidebook finished,'
I bet this is going to be great! I didn't know you were doing it, had you been looking for a research assistant or something when you brought it up? I've just got another book project as of yesterday, but it will take 2 years for us to finish it, I've written 2 of 4 chapters, but the 2nd is still in state of chaos.
I'm going to want to read your book on Shanghai. Am sure it's better than Neal Stephenson writing, you don't know how to write that boringly.
let's pick on China! did you hear? Pixar's redoing Toy Story & Lightyear's out of a job. & the Olympic Committee's factoring in a Gasp Reflex for the 2008 Olympics.
"let's pick on China!"
http://www.boston.com/news/educa...ion_of_outlaws/
nick. i was going to say you didn't quite get the "let's pick on China!" plan— AQ 646 = COUNTERFEITERS AND CORNER-CUTTERS = REAP BIG PROFITS FROM SIMPLE TRUST, but then— AQ 338 = BOGUS CONCOCTIONS = CHINA'S ECONOMIC BOOM.
mmmmmm....that milk with chalk and sheep's brains really sounds delectable...
I'm so glad we found out that China is a juvenile delinquent just like America before her and Britain before her...China-advocates never cite the Yellow Peril, because America ate Britain and now China wants to eat the U.S. as well as Taiwan.
Almost finished 'The Diamond Age'. Definitely useful, and gives you a lot of energy with which to exploit and manipulate things for your own personal profit. I think I can find a corner for Stephenson in my home, even though it represents the decay of writing into Gaudi-inspired sentences. It is like being at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I am trying to get a painter friend to paint the glorious natural vistas of modern globalized department stores, because nobody has done it and this is the Twilight Zone. But we'll have to take photos before they put up too many surveillance cameras, because they don't let you set up an easel in a sheet-and-towel store. Oh Gawd, I just know it's the Yellow Peril, and people ought to go ahead and admit it. I can see more Patrick Keillor-type movies, this time all quiet and churchyard-like in parts of the Bronx and the South Side of Chicago and Lakewood, California. We'll all be fossils, while Nick is enjoying the pistons of capitalism turning and thrusting, but maybe this keeps one young. Does it 'take its toll' or does it give you such energy you are bursting with creativity and libido as you progress towards the Singularity?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/2...&hp&
oref=slogin
Oh, this is good. I think you should follow up on your Shanghai book with a novel about Macao. I'll come be your research assistant, and I won't even have to use the libraries or the net too much. I think it sounds better than Vegas, where I've never been--too vulgar, you know...
"But what is most surprising about the 3,000-suite project is that it is merely the first of 14 interconnected hotels being built here by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. When completed, the complex will include a St. Regis, a Shangri-la, a Raffles, a Conrad, an Intercontinental and a Sheraton, "
So we've descended into the realms of generic St. Regises as well...? They'll want a Hotel Pierre in all parking lots in a few years. And to think I don't have to remember back too many years when there was only one Saks Fifth Avenue and one Bloomie's. Oh, I think I'll go weep like a Miserablist. Nick, when you did your Shanghai book, did you report on the various Burger Kings and KFC's and Wal-Mart in the Pudong part? And is there a Filene's Basement in the Bund area? And did you interview gang members and thetes in wicked low-class places?
Nick, are you what they call a Vicky? Princess Nell knew all about them and then sold out to Mme. Ping and worked in one of her off-off-B'way theaters.
"Gavin Ho said that while S.J.M. might have to close a few of its oldest casinos, the Hotel Lisboa would probably survive because it is well known."
Damn! They've even got 'heritage appreciation' in the new Macao software. I bet there is all kinds of faked passport rackets going on there. Mmmmm....crime pays... has Ballard written a new novel in the last 5 years, since 'SuperCannes'. I'd like to read it, because he is always so unforgiving in all the amenities of life, what with so many luxuries, so little time, etc...but writes better than Mistah Stephenson, so I have to keep reading sci-fi primers in order to protect my Secret Life from the Republicans and Yellow Perilists...
Firefox is a disgrace, can't even remember one's vital statistics.
http://tpmelectioncentral.com/
20...in_new_york.php
Yeah, me too, even though I didn't vote in the poll. We New Yawk people da ones dat count in polls about WoT, and we choose Ms. Hillary, da bitch on wheels.
1933 American Putsch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus...i/
Business_Plot
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/
hist...nt_20070723.ram
It doesn't have anything to do with 'morally right'.
Oh, but it does. Less people dying of starvation = a moral good; falling infant mortality rates = a moral good; more education for women = a moral good; etc, etc. Surely that's not controversial?
[Tangent] Yudkowsky on cognitive biases:
http://www.singinst.org/upload/c...tive-
biases.pdf
"Surely that's not controversial?"
It's not only controversial, you've given absolutely no proof. This is so obvious it is not worth an argument.
Anyway, Tim, think what you want. I've already provided links to what you both know--that job creation and growth is only good for some abstract entity of economies, when a person or many persons lose jobs which are made up for by consolidating them into new jobs elsewhere, that has nothing to do with human beings. What you are talking about has the same relation to human beings as socialism does--which is to say, totally impersonal, without character and having only to do with statistics and numbers. More education for women and Iraqis will definitely enlighten the ones who are not first killed. This is another example of the wonders of the free market, which is worthless in itself if not conjoined with much that has some actual human texture, even emotion, and something other than just rejoicing in whether indices go up or down, and whether there's enough filth being produced in the air and water to provide new jobs for prole-objects. Of COURSE it's all rhetoric on both sides of these things. But the lines have been drawn, so if you want to moralize, go ahead. I'm voting for Hillary and you can support the totally CORRUPT and HYPOCRITICAL Republicans. The Democrats are also CORRUPT, but just less so.
And anyway, it looks like it's Republican men who need more moral instruction on how to use the friggin' men's rooms!
dino info
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/32386/
It's not only controversial, you've given absolutely no proof.
How can I "prove" that less infants dying is a good thing? By reminding you of your own children's value? By cost-benefit analysis?
T-P: Are you objecting to the fact that I used the word "moral", or are you objecting to the fact I'm claiming that that growth and its effects are a good thing?
Barnett on the Sino-US geostrategic realignment:
http://time-blog.com/china_blog/
...todays_pri.html
I'm objecting to both. 'Growth' is ONE KIND of good thing, and it includes great losses on the other side of itself. I already spelled that out in all the English that should be necessary, so I'm not going through that again.
And I didn't say you didn't prove that fewer infants dying is a good thing. I said that you did not prove that there ARE, in fact, fewer infants dying in your ideology. What your ideology of growth completely ignores is 'which infants die' and concentrates on 'how many infants die or don't'. In that, it is precisely as impersonal as Communism.
Actually, your ideology DOES focus on 'which infants die' perhaps more than Communism, it just doesn't say anything about it, as part of the cynical manipulation and hypocrisy we've been talking about in this thread. This is practical enough, and no worse and probably not as bad as the idiocies of Communism, but you needn't think people with brains can't see through the propaganda of both right and left with equal ease. Both sides lie, both sides are half-moral at best, and that is the way of the world, or at least of politics, unless politics just happens to be the place where there is 'all lying all the time.'
The right-wing's hypocrisy is more of an 'I got mine' sort of thing to begin with, the Socialists introduce it as policy a little later down the line. So that 'which babies live' is always what is important. Nobody short of the 10th-anniversary-celebrated Mother Teresa, currently receiving a lot of Mongoloid press, actually cares about 'how many babies'. That's like caring about 'how many Iraqi civilians kicked the bucket in the latest suicide bombing.' In that case, the Socialists claim to care about those, and also about the death-row inmates, but not about partial-birth abortion tabus, etc. Right-wingers tend to be 'right-to-life', so maybe they tend to want any babies at all born, just so long as there is a big enough over-population census to be taken and bandied about.
Objecting to the use of the term "moral" - whatever mate. It's semantics. It's obfuscatory. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman". Capitalism is superior to communism by every measure I can think of, and a don't see why we shouldn't "call a spade, a spade".
Are more infants dying in capitalist countries than have died or are dying in communist countries? That's a no-brainer. Think of the great famines of the 20th C. They didn't occur in liberal market economies. (Is Amartya Sen also a right-wing hypocrit)? Think of the really poor states in the world today. They're not liberal market economies. Do you really need stats to verify this? I can dig some up for you, if so.
Such as this, showing the inverse relationship between infant mortality and per capita GDP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ima...ortality_vs.jpg
"Are more infants dying in capitalist countries than have died or are dying in communist countries?"
Of course, including China among the Communists. But I don't just talk about the U.S. versus the USSR, but also Old Europe, with all of its socialized medicine--there's no question but that health care in Western Europe and Scandinavia comes from Socialist models, and that the richest, most educated nations--which ARE European and are not the U.S., where find education is a matter of far fewer, European commoners are obviously more educated than U.S. poorish people for the most part. So--if you want to look up stats, show me how Switzerland's health care system, light-years more enlightened than the U.S., has more babies die than the U.S. I'd like to see that, you can hold the other stuff. And I don't need to be told that capitalism is better than communism, which I've said a thousand times. And who said anybody has to see anything other than in black and white? If you want to do that, that's your trip. You seem to need some sort of reassurance that your way is the more moral and the most moral, whereas implementing it has merely to do with whether it works, a matter of the 'reason of the stronger' being always right.
'Are more infants dying in capitalist countries than have died or are dying in communist countries?'
I meant 'of course not', which may have been clear anyway. Of course in capitalist countries, things are better, as I went on to say that extremely capitalist countries like Switzerland which also have socialized medicine, things are infinitely better. I have seen the way the place works, and I know that we are in the Dark Ages here in that department. Maybe you don't think having fewer poor people is better? Well, they don't have any poor people to speak of in Switzerland, nor do I believe they put them in jail to make the place look good. In Canada, you don't see slums in Toronto in any way like you see in nearby Detroit.
What you are talking about has something to do with facts and a lot to do with a religious sort of ideology. You need not try to convince me, if this ideology is important to you, because I can see with my own eyes all my life what vile conditions exist in American cities. I don't need statistics to tell me that I don't know what I see every time I step outside the door.
naughty China!
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/
4f2594...00779fd2ac.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/
0c25ea...00779fd2ac.html
Thanks for recommending 'Spook Country', which I just finished. It's thoroughly admirable, but you'll like it a lot better than I did, because it fails as a novel in the sense that I see one. Most of the characters are barely there as such, and the extraordinarily precious detailing of all objects, actions, reactions is brilliant but describes one of several worlds one has to choose from, not the only one as it may wish to indicate. All things are so equalized that there are no highs and lows and no sense of anything really sinister for any sustained amount of time. I thought he was pulling off a real novel until shortly after page 200 or so, then things progressively weakened instead of thickened--and I don't think he was doing something so expressionistic as to actually want to convey a 'running out of steam' by doing it with the writing. As a result, after that amount of being so impressed with the beauty of detail, it begins to read like endless lists, very like serialized music in which all 12 tones are created and/or made equal. Nothing truly dramatic ever happens, although there is always the suggestion that there is about to be. His writing about locales like Manhattan are the best I've read outside Don DeLillo's, and I thought this was going to be a kind of relative, at least, to a DeLillo novel, so the inability to 'keep it up' can only be a bit disappointing, at least to me. It takes away pain, but doesn't quite offer anything to enjoy. In fact, it does reflect what possibly seems to be an inability to really enjoy.