Why is the far right of the Republican party called the "conservative base" while the liberal end of the spectrum for Democrats is called the "left wing?" If supporters of single-payer were continually labeled the "liberal base" of the party, their ideas would command more respect in the media and the minds of the public.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Obama Our Chamberlain?
Today the headline on HuffPo is "Leaderless" and refers to the White House's lobbying against a robust public option in the Senate in the name of bipartisan cover to the Blue Dog Democrats for their upcoming election. This at a time when Republican identification is at an all-time low. The President and his cabinet are at risk of making the word "bipartisan" as contemptible a word as "appeasement" has been since WWII.
"Appeasement" became a dirty words in diplomacy because it described the policies of Neville Chamberlain toward Hitler, a policy of ceding the Nazis territory and power in the name of keeping the peace. Appeasement ignored the clearly imperialist plans of the Nazis. Appeasement was motivated by the highest principles, principles the Nobel Peace Committee would approve of. Our own Secretary of State at the time, Henry Stimson, holding the torch of the excellent principle that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail," would not spy on this rising bellicose nation but instead treated the Germans with the cookies and milk of honorable dealings even after the Nazis had shown their contempt for such girlie behavior by taking advantage of it to advance their plans for domination and defeat ours for compromise.
Nazi comparisons are easy because they are seen as so extreme. But the situation today is extreme, and like Chamberlain, our administration is pooh-poohing the risk, holding to its lofty principles of making nice with the Republicans long after they have publicly announced and publicly demonstrated their own obstructionism to the welfare of the citizens of this country. People are dying. This is war. And the President is letting his ego attachment to the idea that he can win over these guys with reason, along with his Chief of Staff's maneuvers to give cover to the Blue Dogs he recruited and owns, sell the rest of us down the river to the actuarial ovens of the insurance companies.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Constitutional Right to Twitter?
I'll tell you a story and you guess who did it. A bunch of politicians signed up for Twitter accounts under the names of their political opponents and began sending obnoxious tweets under those false identities. When they were found out and suspended from Twitter (the act is a breach of the user agreement you must check before joining) these same guys complained that their right to free speech was being blocked.
Okay, now guess. Democrats or Republicans? The answer below the fold.
Before I answer, think about which party has a long history of spreading false information under false identity. The scales are not balanced in the least here. Oh, I'm sure you can find one or two examples on the other side, but this wholesale defrauding the voters has been the tactic of only one major party in the last twenty years: Republicans.
Or as I call them now: twits.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Past Watch - Know Them By Their Tactics
So it turns out that above ground nuclear testing of the Cold War is directly linked to increased cancer in Baby Boomers. A discovery of 85,000 baby teeth donated for a St. Louis study back in the 50's has provided the means, measuring them for the fallout element, Strontium 90, and correlating that to the lifetime cancer rates of those children. The suprise is not in the findings that, yes, the fallout traveled east and contaminated the food chain especially for formula fed babies - air to grass to cow to formula - and that higher Strontium 90 meant more cancer and death for those children in adulthood. The shock is in the way radiation dangers were ignored at the time, sidelined by the establishment and lobbied against in the media. You don't have to imagine the arguments. All you have to do is take the global warming deniers, change a few words here and there, and voilà. Same dog, new bone.
As Walter Shapiro writes in his column Cold War Remnant: Cancer for Baby Boomers:What fascinates me, however, is that 50 years ago, the angry scientists and the ban-the-bomb protesters were right – nuclear testing was dangerous for children and other living things. "Maybe at the beginning of bomb testing, people weren't sure how much this would spread across the globe," Mangano said. "But by the mid-1950s, after dozens of bombs had been tested, they noticed the radiation levels going up and up in the milk and the water. They knew that this was trouble."
Yet there were still scientists who scoffed, scientists who had a political agenda. So you get someone as respected as Edward Teller scoffing at the suggesting that nuclear testing could have long-term effects. "The living organism is so complicated and the intertwining of cause and effect is so intricate that we may never know the biological effect of so small a cause as worldwide radiation." He was a physicist, not a biologist, but he was eminent, so people touted his views about the effects of radiation on living organisms the same way they now tout a once-eminent hurricane expert about current global warming evidence. The same superior dismissal, the same reasonable sneer, the same lemming road to death and loss of quality of life for all.
Statistics are abstract but let us not forget that real people suffered and continue to suffer along with their families. The powers that be knew it. They hid behind a few outliers who gave them cover by injecting specious, partisan doubt into the conversation. They poisoned us, themselves, and now like Pilate, wash their hands. That was then, this is now.
Well, my political views were formed then and confirmed by now. Patterns of rhetoric in relation to reality, patterns of action and effect in the public sphere, patterns of integrity and hypocrisy in politics and its coverage in the media. What shocks me is that the same discredited arguments against past efforts to rectify evils are being used today, even as the followers of that rhetoric enjoy and defend their right to enjoy the benefits they (or their doppelgangers) opposed in the past.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Liberals and Reactionaries
I don't see the political debate in the US being between liberals and conservatives anymore. It is becoming clear that what passes for conservatism today is pure reactionary negativism. "I don't like my life and it's all YOUR fault!" Reminds me of how I feel once a month just before my period. The once-conservative Republican party is now the party of perpetual PMS.
Conservatism in my mind is closely allied with caution, with maintaining a tradition in sober equilibrium, of doing nothing rather than doing harm. There are ways in which I, a lifelong wearer of the liberal label, am very conservative at times. To protect and "conserve."
Monday, October 05, 2009
The Chicken Little Henhouse and Fox News
I'm as troubled as most thinking people are about the yellow journalism style that has become respectable mainstream reporting. Fox News is the standard bearer, but by no means the only one. Calls for a return to the "Fairness Doctrine" reflect this growing unease among liberal intellectuals. The problem with those regulations is that they bump up hard against free speech, one of the liberal absolutes. It is an absolute that I hold to even as I want to muzzle or at least restrain the spew on cable. But lately, I have had the feeling that the fable of Chicken Little will prove once again that the wisdom of the ages is found in simple and timeless stories. Fox may have the highest ratings on cable, but I predict that their constant hysterical yammerings about insignificant side-issues and their twisting of fact to get a rise out of viewers will result in a loss of power for the network and put them back on the margins of the public discourse where such antics belong.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Storytelling Our Way to Happiness
While I was cleaning today, I accidentally ripped an old graying piece of paper stuck on the side of my refrigerator. Before throwing it away, I read it over. I kept it because of how it presented the ideas of the philosopher, Richard Rorty, on the need for storytellers. If you have a philosophical bent or a belief in the value of storytelling, read on.
In his ideal of self-creation ... Rorty's new twist is to stress language and literature. The task, as he sees it is to replace the descriptions and labels imposed on us by others – family, professions, culture – with our own descriptions, our own language. We create ourselves by telling our own story.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the question of women's happiness. I wrote about the recent study and my ideas on the subject in another blog here. As I said there, I think a big problem is that the narratives are still the same as they were 30 years ago when the world was much different. They do not serve us in thinking about ourselves or our lives today. The mismatch between the cultural narrative and the individual's life, for women especially, creates a friction that rubs raw those who live according to the mainstream narrative and leaves them unsatisfied with themselves and their lives. This quote by Rorty just reinforces my belief that it is more important than ever that women and men tell their stories, put them out on the internet in blogs and videos. I can hope that this grass roots avalanche of alternative narrative will nudge the mainstream entertainment leviathan. Even a miniscule change in course will take us to an entirely new place over time.
For Rorty, this isn't so much a matter of giving form to the accidental tangle of compulsions, desires and roles that we crudely refer to with the pronoun "I." It's a matter of self-enlargement and self-enrichment – of maximizing possibilities and experiences. "Do I contradict myself?" Whitman wrote. "Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)." This is the sort of picaresque story – full of richly diverse and dissonant impulses and adventures – that Rorty thinks we should be telling about ourselves. To help us do it, we won't have much use for traditional philosophers. What we need are storytellers whose writing gives examples of self-transformation, and poets and poetic philosophers who generate new metaphors for imagining ourselves.
BTW, I think the quote is from an article in the New York Times Magazine from 1990 called "Every Man a Philosopher" but I'm not sure. All I can find are phrases quoted that match the bit of paper I clipped out. The bibliography for one such quote lists: Klepp, L.S. (1990). Every man a philosopher. The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 2, 1990. So we'll go with that unless somebody tells me otherwise.
Monday, September 07, 2009
Self-Improvement's Killer Instinct
Self-help is big business because so many of us want to improve our lives. I see this as good, but there is a dark side to the self-improvement world that can hurt most those who need the most help.
I'm bothered by a tendency I see over and over in the self-help world to label and blame critics of any creed or system for their failure to be helped by that system. "Negative attitude" or "self-sabotage" or an unconscious something residing in the critic damns him or her to failure. The flaw resides with the critic, not the advice and its promised results. I find this pervasive, pernicious, evidence of the dark shadow inhabiting the kind of good people who strive to help others. To mix metaphors, they kill the messenger to save the holy grail. I don't say this to damn them back, but to caution those of us who work on ourselves with the hope of improving our lives.
My take on the frustration of people who challenge pathways to change while wishing their lives were different rests in the approach to those paths. Any recipe for change that says "follow these steps" guaranteeing transformation usually has a dark side. When people who try and fail to transform in the promised way and then have the temerity to complain, the easiest thing is to blame them for the failure. After all, they are the ones who are unhappy, they are the ones with the problem, and the many positive results from others "proves" the system works. It must be the fault of their negativity, their self-sabotage, their whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
The problem as I see it is not whether that the system works or not, but in the mind-set toward the suggested steps. If I surrender to the "guru" in the hope of transformation, I return to a child-like state of dependency, with all of a child's emotions, both the joyful highs and the whiny disappointments. I used to be one of those people. Even now, I have a hair-trigger response to any speech or writing that implies following a life prescription promises results because that is a promise the speaker or writer cannot keep. Because I did the work, many times, and did not reap the rewards, at least not the promised rewards.
The problem as I see it is not whether that the system works or not, but in the mind-set toward the suggested steps. If I surrender to the "guru" in the hope of transformation, I return to a child-like state of dependency, with all of a child's emotions, both the joyful highs and the whiny disappointments. I used to be one of those people. Even now, I have a hair-trigger response to any speech or writing that implies following a life prescription promises results because that is a promise the speaker or writer cannot keep. Because I did the work, many times, and did not reap the rewards, at least not the promised rewards.
I understand why people make such grand promises; they want to help people and they want to sell books. Paths to transformation sell through grand promises. So does snake oil. But formulas for changing your inner life are not the same as formulas for making water. Two hydrogen atoms combined with one oxygen atom will always make water. Purveyors of self-help books present their findings with the same certainty, and they are wrong to do so. That is not to say their books are useless, only that you should not follow their paths hoping for buried treasure that will make you rich all your days. Follow the path knowing that there will be a few coins of value dropped along the way and the coins will someday add up to quite a nest egg. A nest egg that is all rightfully yours.
It is not all about the money. Most of the people writing these books truly want to help others. Yet no one approach will work 100% for all people. When it doesn't work, the author who has invested so much time and emotional energy and yes, love, into their "baby" cannot help but defend it with the zeal of any parent.
The problem with self-help books and programs is the way people in pain are asked to approach them. People looking for a system to "fix" themselves and want guarantees to motivate themselves are doomed to failure. People taking a more empirical attitude, who say "let me try this and see what happens" experience incremental improvements that evolve into a transformed life. It's like losing weight. We want to drop 20 pounds fast, even though we know that to lose weight and keep it off, we must change our eating habits and drop the pounds slowly. Otherwise it comes back. Hence the problem of obesity in America. The same with losing the weight of our unhappy mind-set.
I say this as someone who used to suffer from severe depressive episodes lasting 2-3 days about twice a month. I read books and applied their techniques. For example, I did the 12- week Artists Way diligently. I took mood drugs briefly. I went to therapy for a while, until the therapist and I agreed I had done the work I needed to do. I changed my diet. None of them "worked." And yet, somewhere around age 40, the depressive moods stopped. Just stopped. That was 13 years ago. Oh, I still get sad over sad things like the death of my father. I even get depressed over my failures. But none of these feels like that hopeless, helpless bleak misery of self-loathing I used to go through, weeping on the couch for a solid day or two. Gone.
If I had been taking a mood drug at the time, or been going through some program, or fallen in love, I would have become a true believer. But the fact is, at that time, I was simply getting exercise, eating pretty well, and trying some new things in my work. And as I look back, what I see is all those "failed" transformative paths and books "that really didn't do anything" all fertilized the soil of my happiness.
I still don't have the mega-success of my young dreams. But boy, is my life aligned with my heart. I have work I enjoy. I give back to my community. I feel whole. Not perfect. Me.
If you want to improve your life, go ahead and read self-help books. Try the advice that sounds right to you. Don't blame the author or yourself if you can't see the change. Think more long term about your transformation, about your life improving, about wholeness coming not whole-cloth but quilt-like, one self-help book or transformative path per square. Try to see the quilt, so you have hope to keep going, adding squares, and heading to what could be a joyful life in the fullness of years.
Friday, March 13, 2009
What's Your Solution?
Thinking about the news of the day, from Madoff, to the Stewart-CNBC dustup, to my personal financial situation, I was struck by this quote of Teddy Roosevelt:
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.Roosevelt took on the monopolies and created our National Park System. Actions that countered the destructive trends. And I think, "What can I take on or create?"
Thursday, March 12, 2009
The Balanced in Power
All the hoo-ha about Obama signing the spending bill despite the dreaded earmarks...
Imagine your truck needs 99 $1 repairs to get back on the road to deliver your load and get paid, but the shop does 100. You think the 100th was unneccessary, but you're no mechanic. Should you refuse the repair, send the truck back to the shop and twiddle your thumbs for days to save a dollar?
A veto of all for a problematic 1% would be stupidity or political grandstanding, and neither describes Obama's style.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Will and Faith in Global Warming Denial
The Washington Post is still trying to contain the read-rage of its subscribers over George Will’s denial of global warming. The furor has centered on some arcane bits of data from 1978. The Post is hiding behind its claim that many fact-checkers misread the data summary. The question in the debate should not focus on whether George Will or the Washington Post misrepresented the facts, but on whether they are debating science with faith-disguised-as-science in a nay-sayers exercise in anti-intellectualism.
I am concerned about how science is discussed in the public arena when it intersects with politics, how it seems that the volatile emotions of the civic debate - since emotional appeals do change people's minds - have made it fine to color scientific debate in the same manner. I am thinking of global warming and of evolution, where the science may have question marks within it and could someday undergo a radical shift, but that shift would still include the facts as we know them today. Evolution is not going to be completely overthrown, nor is global warming. There is too much data.
People get confused because science does undergo enormous theoretical shifts when new information arrives. I can remember in my life being scoffed at by a geography teacher for my belief that surely Africa and South America must have broken off from each other. Once satellites went up and the movement of land masses was recorded, science tossed out the old model of geophysics and came up with plate tectonics.
This does not mean I can toss aside all science when it contradicts my beliefs. This instead shows the resilience and trustworthiness of science because of its fundamental divergence from belief systems like religion; science admits of disproof. Science actively looks for ways to disprove its most cherished theories. If fact contradicts theory, then theory falls, not fact. I could imagine a number of ways to test the theory of gravity, and if any of them worked, the relevant theories would have to change.
Pointing out flaws in current theories is a healthy way to challenge scientific orthodoxy. But when the challenge arises out of an opposing orthodoxy, then that opposition must submit to the same rigor. However, when one is a theory and the other is an a priori position simply denying the validity of the theory, the fundamental battle between science and faith falls right into our laps.
I ask George Will to conceive of any evidence that would disprove his belief that global warming is natural. If his viewpoint is not faith-based, then he must envision a way to surrender his theory. Then it can be tested. As it is, he is simply saying "That's not true" and we all know it is impossible to disprove a negative statement.
This kind of anti-science ignorance is not something the Post should be defending, even if presented by an eminent commentator. Fact-checking is not the same as intellectual honesty. Even if the facts supported his claims of flaws in the global warming arguments, what is the overarching viewpoint that is driving his belief that the scientists are wrong. Is it scientific, and thus does it contain arguments that he himself would accept as undoing his position? Or is it something he just "knows" and so remains impenetrable to evidence?
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The O’Reilly Tool - How to write with no substance, just abuse
I was listening to O’Reilly spin about the Helen Thomas kerfuffle that resulted from his tasteless remarks. His rhetoric was a wonderful template for insult and propaganda. To prove there is no substance but just abuse, I took out the key words and made a kind of mad-libs game with it. I have supplied some suggestions for each category, but feel free to substitute your own mad-as-hell-libs to get a real feel for how simple and powerful the O’Reilly tool really is.
First read O'Reilly's original item, transcribed from his broadcast, with a few ellipses to make it mangeable.
Political correctness gone mad, that is the subject of this evenings talking points memo. Let me introduce you to the players. First we have the far-left Media Matters website which routinely assassinates the characters of conservatives and Republicans . These guttersnipes distort the public record hoping to harm people with whom they disagree. They never scrutinize liberals. Then we have a group called the WMC which was started by Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinham among others. ...
Last week I was a racist for supporting responsible immigration reform. This week I’m a sexist ageist for poking fun at Helen Thomas. ...And please remember this. Saturday Night Live can mock Sarah Palin all day long but I can’t mock Helen Thomas. The New York Times can brand people any vile name they want but I can’t make fun of an absurd question at a Presidential press conference? That’s some system isn’t it?
Now you try it.
(Hated ideology) gone mad, that is the subject of this evenings talking points memo. Let me introduce you to the players. First we have the (extreme position) (hated organization) website which routinely assassinates the characters of (people we like) and (more people we like). These (denigrating name) distort the public record hoping to harm people with whom they disagree. They NEVER scrutinize (people we despise). Then we have a group called (another hated org.) which (show connection to) (despised opposition leader) among others.
Last week I was a (insulting label) for supporting responsible (hot-button issue). This week I’m a (insulting label) for poking fun at (opposition leader). And please remember this. (Hated organization) can mock (people we like) all day long but I can’t mock (respected person). (Loudmouth opposition tool) can brand people any vile name they want but I can’t make fun of (liberal-leaning respectable person)? That’s some system isn’t it?
You can watch the video clip and follow along at the Women's Media Center website here.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Basketbal is Not Baseball: the government game has changed
The GOP “ideas” about the economy and the country have nothing to do with governing in a post 11/4 world. The country voted to change the game, and the Republican Congress keeps arguing that we must adhere to the rules of the old one. It’s as if Bush had a baseball team, and the people voted for Obama because he promised them basketball, and the GOP is still insisting that we enforce the infield fly rule.
Baseball is all about guys like Righty Rumsfeld, the slugger who swings for the fence and so what if he strikes out more than he connects. Or catcher Alberto “Swifty” Gonzales, who hunkers down behind home plate, changing his signals until the pitcher sees one he likes. All the players who we have gotten to know over the past eight excruciating losing seasons. No wonder people decided they prefer the quick and deft game of Obama, where teamwork, passing the ball and running over to the other guy’s court are all how you win. Oh, I could extend this metaphor, but you get the picture.
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