Skirkle, we politics again tonight

[Kuya]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...ZjD_story.html

The list of liberal laments about President Obama keeps getting longer: He extended the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. Health-care reform didn’t include a public option. In the frantic final hours of the budget negotiations, instead of calling the GOP’s bluff, he agreed to historic cuts in progressive programs. And Wednesday, in response to conservatives’ focus on the deficit, Obama said that we have to “put everything on the table.”

What is the problem here? Is it a lack of leadership from the White House, a failure to out-mobilize the tea party or not enough long-term investment from liberal donors?

The real problem isn’t a liberal weakness. It’s something liberals have proudly seen as a strength — our deep-seated dedication to tolerance. In any given fight, tolerance is benevolent, while intolerance gets in the good punches. Tolerance plays by the rules, while intolerance fights dirty. The result is round after round of knockouts against liberals who think they’re high and mighty for being open-minded but who, politically and ideologically, are simply suckers.

Writing in 1945, philosopher Karl Popper called this the “paradox of tolerance” — that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance altogether. To put the current political climate in Popper’s terms, if liberals are not willing to defend against the rigid demands of their political opponents, who are emboldened by their own unwavering opinions, their full range of open-minded positions will be destroyed. Liberals are neutered by their own tolerance.

Yet, this is the essence of what Obama, the community organizer, came to Washington to do: not to push an agenda but to change the culture of the capital to be more inclusive, open-minded, civil and democratic. Unfortunately, there are no points for playing nice.

It’s as though Democrats think we’re at a polite tea party, while Republicans are fighting an ideological war.

In this context, liberals look increasingly less like open-minded statesmen and more like sanctimonious morons.

There is a time for tolerance and compromise, but if the GOP is always dictating when that time is, Democrats have already lost. Suckers.

Read all of it, i think it's a great article.

[Kuya]

:/

[Blarg]

wicked debate guys

[Kuya]

bluekuya 10:39 pm
lo

Cadsooaine 10:40 pm
yo

bluekuya 10:40 pm
i might have a good article that sums up my recent questions
give me a sec

Cadsooaine 10:40 pm
ok

bluekuya 10:47 pm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...ZjD_story.html

Cadsooaine 10:54 pm
mmmm...
I still don't think this has anything to do with a deep seated fact about liberal ideology
The very word means something different in the states, and it carries baggage with it, like this thing about liberal "tolerance" and political correctness and so on

Cadsooaine 10:56 pm
this and a million other things about the right-left thing are unique to the American political sphere
It has something to do with the systemic realities of being a washington politician, whatever they are
and the American political culture writ large
which is pretty fucked up
For example I like this author's comment here, lemme see if I can find it

Cadsooaine 10:58 pm
"Realistically, Obama seems to understand that, at least in the short term, liberals have lost control of the conversation and have to play by the rules that the extreme right has made up."
While at the same time I'm scratching my head since saying something like this seems to contradict the whole thesis
that things wouldn't be so bad if the democrats were more combative

Cadsooaine 11:00 pm
It's true that they're incorrigibly risk averse but all politicians are to a certain extent; getting into political office is a tremendously expensive endeavour and the more expensive it gets the more unlikely it is that politicians will put their investments in jeopardy
but that's not what enables the right in this case
alot of things enable the right
On the one hand it's an ideological perfect storm

Cadsooaine 11:02 pm
the Friedman toting monetarists, rabidly campaigning against entitlement programs and stabilization policy in defense of the free market, have been at it since the civil rights movement
The anarcho capitalists and libertarians are riding a wave of tea party inspired fantasy of yesteryear, generating a mountain of putrid literature in the process
The war on terror feeds the American exceptionalists and xenophobes which America has always had more than its fair share of

Cadsooaine 11:05 pm
Maybe it's a sense of cultural malaise that comes to all empires in decline
Maybe it's alot of things
but I don't think a strong left would solve all ails
All ails have perverted the right and marginalized the left
That's my idea anyway.

bluekuya 11:08 pm
so what you're saying is that the left's position in the US is less about it's inherent weaknesses but more about the historic context

Cadsooaine 11:08 pm
Yeah, pretty much.

bluekuya 11:09 pm
then in global terms, would you say the left has a problem at all?

Cadsooaine 11:09 pm
It's just how this moment in history is structured, so to speak.
MMmmmmaybe?
Things are nice here for the left, for example.
Certainly nice in most of Europe for the left as well.

Cadsooaine 11:10 pm
It might be banal to say that it's nice in China or Russia, for the left. It's alo nice for authoritarian regimes in China and it's nice for the mafia in Russia, so that's not such a huge deal.
But that's not saying anything about the direction that things are going in.

bluekuya 11:13 pm
you didn't really answer the question, so i assume you don't think there's a generalized problem with a so called left

Cadsooaine 11:14 pm
That's a bad assumption
I'm open to the idea
Though I find it dubious to call it a global problem when political cultures are still insular

bluekuya 11:15 pm
how insular

Cadsooaine 11:15 pm
To wit: Many european countries have a communist party, a pirate party, and a green party, that all garner seats in the house.

Cadsooaine 11:18 pm
You know as well as I do, that communists were persecuted in the United states by McCarthy and assassinated by the likes of Hoover, that the pirate movement is a joke when corporate interests rule so much, and politicians can't even publically acknowledge that climate change is a scientific reality.

bluekuya 11:20 pm
it's a token answer, but i think it's a bit of both, particular historical context and global tendencies
i doubt it's a very good idea to assume that there are no global tendencies involved in say, what happens in the US
at least as far as the international economic system is involved

Cadsooaine 11:21 pm
Probably not, no
But it's easier to say something like that about Sweden, or Canada, or Brazil
etc.

bluekuya 11:22 pm
if the problem, in the us, is not within the left, but rather because of historical facts, then what then do liberals do about it

Cadsooaine 11:24 pm
I'm not sure

Cadsooaine 11:25 pm
Keep campaigning for good policy I suppose
Write books about things
I really refuse to think of it as a game
politics doesn't have a strategy that anybody can see
I imagine that's an unsatisfying answer
I know it's not galvanizing and it doesn't justify any sort of action

bluekuya 11:28 pm
yea sames like the same sort of answer that someone who doesn't know as much as you would say, IE someone like zealot or olo
sounds*
so either
there's something you or I are missing
or we should just play vidgames adn forget about it
and*

Cadsooaine 11:29 pm
maybe
You're probably right that I'm being thick
obtuse

bluekuya 11:29 pm
well i'm not saying your thick
your answer sounds thick and obtuse though

Cadsooaine 11:29 pm
yeah

bluekuya 11:29 pm
but that doesn't mean it's wrong

Cadsooaine 11:30 pm
Eh
No it doesn't sound right enough

Cadsooaine 11:30 pm
I'm not sure

bluekuya 11:30 pm
well you did say
when arguing about anarcho capitalists and the like
that in trying to find some new, revolutionary answer to the world's problems
they come up with these ridiculous acts of mental masturbation

Cadsooaine 11:31 pm
yeah
maybe that's all I'm trying to avoid
That is a danger after all
We'll see this horrible problems and think it's time for desperate measures or some shit

bluekuya 11:33 pm
i've also heard that
due to the seeming failures of communism and the like, liberals now tend towards being defensive, being less ideological, tending towards indecisiveness
i don't know if indecisiveness is the right word

bluekuya 11:35 pm
but the meaning behind is that liberals do not want to marry ideas for fear of taking it too far or being wrong

bluekuya 11:38 pm
i think i can relate this by remember what happens to me when i overintellectualize or try to avoid being wrong

Cadsooaine 11:38 pm
Mmm... well.

bluekuya 11:38 pm
either i come up with these ridiculous answers that were better served with simpler more banal conclusions, or i avoid taking any position at all because i don't like being wrong

Cadsooaine 11:39 pm
The same is true of the right in places that have been ruled by fascist governments, so I guess this might be true?

bluekuya 11:39 pm
what do you mean
i don't think they care much about being wrong

Cadsooaine 11:39 pm
Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Germany god especially Germany
the right is very chastened in those places

bluekuya 11:40 pm
oh that's what you mean

bluekuya 11:40 pm
i don't know of right wing mentality in those states though
but the governmetns there are decidedly quite left wing
at least in terms of them calling themselves socialists i mean
in the party name

Cadsooaine 11:44 pm
Yes
That is true

bluekuya 11:45 pm
damn i got to do this homework for tuesday and i need to find info on the differences between developped regional blocks and underdevelopped regional blocks
but i don't know where to look

Cadsooaine 11:45 pm
It doesn't really change the fact though. In some places you have brash leftism and sober, chastened conservatives, elsewhere the opposite is the case

about sums it up

[Blarg]

I didn't picture you as a blue kuya, it's too demure of a colour

[Mertron]

learn my dick, faggot

[Mertron]

you have some serious boning up to do before we begin lecture

[Mertron]

comma faggot

[Kuya]

I may not be as sophisticated a political analyst as Cadsuane, sir, but I go in to every discussion aware of this shortcoming and with the desire to learn, not preach.

Well the idea is that you are like olo in as far as you're naïve, but you certainly aren't as preachy or as annoying as olo.

[Conrad]

I read it all, will try and find time to comment on it today if possible.

[Gwathuial]

Kuya did you watch that David Harvey lecture? Also you should read A Brief History of Neoliberalism (by him).

[Mertron]

You can't tell Kuya what to do.

[Alleya]

That cads.

He's a sharp tack.

[Blarg]

he could just be speaking nonsense but I don't know enough about politics to tell

[Conrad]

At a seder, will politic later

[Kuya]

Kuya did you watch that David Harvey lecture? Also you should read A Brief History of Neoliberalism (by him).

No, i'll probably have time to see it on wednesday.