“Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads.” -- Harry S. Truman
"You never soar so high as when you stoop down to help a child or an animal." -- Jewish Proverb
"Three-time Pro Bowler Eric Weddle the most versatile, and maybe most intelligent, safety in the game." -- SI, 9/7/15, p. 107.
“To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.” James Hatch, former Navy Seal and current Yale student.
Having heard English speakers massacre a lot of Spanish names and words in my time, I laughed when I saw this:
Dear TV News, Stop It
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I think there might be a pretty broad agreement here on this writer‘s main points.
The Contradictions of America’s New Left
A progressive consensus has worked in Europe and might work in the U.S., but not like this.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar..._medium=social
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
LA's one of the most congenial, informed conservatives I know. Venturing over to a site he references frequently, federalistsociety, reveals much more coarse conversation, like the endless warfare & personal attacks seen elsewhere, with a largely pro-Trump allegiance that discards everything else... at least among the comments.
My question: do conservatives more broadly view Rep. Matt Gaetz' threats on Cohen as normal & acceptable?
"It's not witness tampering, it's witness testing!" - Gaetz
Threatening to reveal & suggesting personal indiscretions seems a little "extra-judicial", "mobbish", coming from a Congressman.
Does either side have a leg to stand on when it comes to this kind of conduct?
Didn't we just have Feinstein a few months ago messing with evidence under the guise of protecting the witness?
Tomayto Tomahto.
When you stop believing that either side (in general) is operating on actual principle it is a lot easier to see and understand.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Ma’ake, I was shocked at that guy‘s tweets and later statements. It’s really unbecoming any member of Congress, and an embarrassment to the country. There is no excuse for it.
I do think, however, that we need to look at the whole picture. This tactic of personally destroying political opponents began a long time ago, perhaps during the Bork hearings, and was certainly followed up during the Thomas and Kavanaugh hearings. The whole Whitewater episode was disgraceful too. (Remember James Carville — “You drag a five dollar bill through a trailer park and there’s no telling what you’ll find.“) I think functioning at this gutter level started then, with progressives. I know that is quite an indictment, but that’s the way it looks to me.
The Republicans were generally pretty passive in their responses to that. Our current president has now decided to fight fire with fire, and he is much meaner at it, much more coarse, and generally more of a jerk about it than anyone who has held the office of the presidency in living memory. It’s awful.
Meanwhile, the far left is propagating a campaign of hatred towards America, towards our modified versions of capitalism, towards our history and shared culture, and so forth. (Yes, “make America great again“ might be a dumb slogan, but it is stupid to respond, “America was never great” unless you are a freshman in a political science course somewhere.) As the op-ed I posted somewhere here this morning notes, that is not the way socialist-democratic governments in Western Europe have functioned successfully. It’s not a good direction to go, and this is really not a good time for the country.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
I started reading the Bloomberg article, and need to get caught up on state of thinking among the left-of-liberal. When I was in Economics (in the 80s) I was more familiar with the debate then, which revolved around distinguishing "Socialism" from "Communism" from "Social Democracy", which is the model the Scandinavian nations use and is present in many/most other industrialized nations.
The 1980s were a far different time, when true Socialists were advocating more control of the "means of production" by labor unions, but by democratic means.
Today that debate has morphed into things like Finland experimenting with a true "minimum salary" without the requirement for work. Hopefully nobody thinks Finland is on course to becoming the next Venezuela. There's a big difference in definitions, and there has long been confusion sowed from the right about terms. Ted Kennedy wasn't a Socialist. He just wasn't.
The US has really never had a true left wing, so it's been easy to smear people who advocate for Medicaid expansion as trying to take us down the path of Venezuela (or the USSR, back in the day).
I get the sense that a lot of the energy & rhetoric coming from people like AOC is to defend this new political variant on the US scene that is common in just about every other industrialized democracy. (I'm not defending their tone & rhetoric, just guessing what is going on.)
No, Ted K. was not a socialist. (Orrin Hatch ran in 1976 on a promise to "go to Washington and fight Ted Kennedy." Didn't work out that way, did it?)
Here are some 'graphs that I found persuasive in the Bloomberg op-ed:
Reasonable people can disagree about the proper scale of government and who should pay the taxes to support it, but the European welfare-state model plainly works. Europe has shown that universal high-quality health care (delivered in a variety of ways) is affordable, that smart public spending can blunt poverty and promote economic mobility, and that taxes more progressive than America’s can lessen inequality without crushing effort and innovation. True, Europe’s economies have been struggling lately, held back partly by macroeconomic difficulties due to their half-baked single-currency system. Still, few Europeans would wish to adopt U.S.-style capitalism. As seen from the U.S., a progressive consensus prevails, and in many ways succeeds.
But this consensus rests on two things – especially in the countries that have applied it most successfully. One is respect for profit-driven competition. The other is a sufficient degree of social solidarity. The new American left doesn’t just fail to see that these matter; it has set itself up in opposition to both....The anti-capitalist tenor of the new American left – the reflexive denunciations of corporate greed, the celebrations when a major company recoils from investing and creating new jobs, the idea that private enterprise is out first and foremost to screw the workers – is at odds with the most successful variants of European progressivism.
To work well, the progressive consensus needs something else, besides respect for the private economic sphere: It demands a commitment to social solidarity....
Perhaps it’s too obvious to need saying, but a highly redistributive state, with a generous safety-net for the unfortunate, requires a strong sense of mutual obligation and common purpose. In Scandinavia, ethnic homogeneity has served to strengthen those bonds – which is why high levels of immigration have proved more contentious there than foreign admirers of Scandinavian liberalism might have expected. Germany’s post-1945 social-market values were allied to a revival of national pride and a sense of German exceptionalism – hence the country’s current suspicion of an EU “transfer union” that widens the circle of obligation to people who aren’t Germans.
They might be making a hash of it, but Europe’s governments at least grasp the need to create a shared European identity to underpin their economic union. The new American left is assaulting the very idea of a shared U.S. identity.
The greatest strength of the U.S. has been its civic purpose – its formal dedication to the common project laid down in the Constitution. Americans are enjoined to set ethnic and religious loyalties aside: If you’re a citizen, you’re part of this great undertaking, and that’s that. From the beginning, the application of the idea has been deeply flawed, to be sure, and the consequences aren’t to be waved away. But the ambition has been there, history has moved powerfully in the right direction, and as a result the U.S. has in fact been an astonishingly successful nation of immigrants.
The new left could build its appeal on that traditional promise to build a more perfect union. In doing that, it would be following the most successful progressive reformers in the country’s history. Instead, it champions a minutely divisive agenda that not only sets Americans against Americans, but also repudiates the idea that what America has built so far is valuable or cause for pride. The country’s record up to this point, it argues, is an object of shame. The U.S. is rooted in genocide, greed, embedded racism and monumental hypocrisy. These aren’t so much defects of the American model, the new left appears to say, as its very essence.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
There's a lot of truth and reason in that column.
AOC is clearly young, idealistic & naďve, but represents an energy - especially among millennials - that the system is hopelessly rigged against them being able to match their parents' level of economic achievement. I hear it here & there among folks with college degrees driving Uber, for example. It's reflected in the plummeting birth rate.
A Marxian analysis would say we're in a state of advanced and accelerating alienation... which Marx predicted would lead to the collapse of Capitalism. (Teddy Roosevelt saw what was happening with Russia moving toward Communism, saw the workplace violence and the brutality of the early part of the industrial age that we were going through here, and he came up with an innovative solution: "the Square Deal". Public libraries. Workplace safety laws. Child labor laws. Social Security came along, etc.)
I *think* the rhetoric of AOC and the new American Left just might be a case of the timeless progression of Thesis > Anti-thesis > Synthesis. The Thesis is unbridled Capitalism with increasing inequalities. The antithesis is the New Left rhetoric.
So, what is the Synthesis? Is there a new Square Deal to be found? I would submit the Bloomberg column is an early part of a move toward a new consensus. But would it have been written without the brash rhetoric from the New Left? Without the loud & angry voices, we wouldn't have wasted a breath talking about the social democracies of Europe.
I don't think Capitalism is anywhere close to being dead. But I think there's a new opportunity to temper it and stabilize society better for a couple more generations, to prove Marx wrong... again.
Until then we'll see more anger and decay, good kids who conclude the American Dream is a farce.
Last edited by Ma'ake; 02-27-2019 at 08:05 PM.
Looking at politics during yours and my lifetime, I'm not sure I agree with you as far as the beginnings of personally attacking political opponents goes. My memory of the Bork hearings was that he was attacked on his legal theories, not personal issues.
If you consider attacks that weren't public, then you can include Nixon's use of the FBI to get dirt on opponents.
Of course, if you go back a little before our time you run into the McCarthy hearings, against which everything you mention pales in comparison.
Fair points, especially about McCarthy. What I’m talking about is a little different: Efforts to destroy someone’s life as a means of gaining political advantage. Bork probably wasn’t an extreme example of that, but I do recall efforts to gain access to his video rentals and such. Also, one of the senators on Judiciary called his personal habits “strange,” which was catnip to the mess media. The Dems turned Bork into the Other, and his once-eminent reputation as a jurist and legal scholar was destroyed.
Clarence Thomas and Matt Kavanaugh are more egregious examples.
Whitewater unleashed the dogs too. All the rules changed for presidential personal behavior and for political attacks. The Clintons were smeared (and provided lots of fodder for the smear machine). Carville (and Hillary) smeared the female witnesses against Clinton. And so on. All of that set the stage for Trump, who repeatedly seemed escaped attacks on his behavior that would have ended any other campaign in the last. Ugh.
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
--Yeats
“True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures - unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men's burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state.”
--John W. Davis, founder of Davis Polk & Wardwell
“To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.” James Hatch, former Navy Seal and current Yale student.
I mean, you can say that she appeals to liberals like Trump appeals to racists, I guess. Beyond that, I'm not buying this comparison at all, and I think it normalizes Trump in an unhealthy way to compare him to regular politicians that you dislike.
Take away the sexual assault, the racism, and the boorishness, and what do you have with Trump? Money and celebrity, and that's about it. So far, no one I know has been able to list any positive character traits or abilities for him.
AOC may be a socialist or whatever, but she has plenty going for her. She's intelligent and well spoken. She prepares for things. She explains things relatively clearly. She's media savy. I do believe she still genuinely cares about her causes.
I think people should be able to separate some of her positive qualities from some of the politics they dislike.
Last edited by sancho; 02-28-2019 at 05:39 PM.
Well she lies and exaggerate a lot, her policies are crazy enough her own party won't get behind her, and the end of the world prophecies etc... yeah I stand by what I say. It's a matter of time before the honeymoon is over and things start blowing up in her face.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
That may all be true, but to compare her to Trump is ludicrous. It's like the democrats who say "I'd love to impeach Trump, but then we'd have Pence, who might be worse." Ridiculous. Pence is nobody's hero, but at least he's a normal politician instead of a child clown tyrant.
Lies a lot, crazy policies..this is normal politician crap. Racism, insults, fake news, etc...this is Trump stuff. It's completely different.
I never heard any of these prophesies. I probably should quit this conversation because I really don't follow her as closely as the rest of you. I personally have some end of world prophesies that I believe in, though, much to the amusement of the non-believing world. Maybe I can cut her slack on that. Someday, one of us apocalyptists is going to be right...or not.
My point was less about her character and more about her politics, her style and positions and how they are as crazy as Trump's are to the right (and how it somehow appeals to their bases).
She says that the world will end in 10 years if we don't do something about climate change. She has stated (I'm paraphrasing on all of this) that it is immoral to bring children into the world. All pretty nutty if you ask me.
She makes pretty dubious and incorrect claims frequently which are readily dismissed by her base, and even her stories about her upbringing are dubious.
She's very loose with the facts and shoots from the hip in that regard. If you ever read her stream of consciousness style as well it is equally incoherent to Trump.
So Trump presses buttons and causes hysteria among his base with border walls and mass invasions of illegal immigrants who are all rapists and murders. AOC presses buttons and causes hysteria among her base by saying the world is going to end in 10 years unless we do something really drastic.
See what I mean?
Now I recognize that I've treaded in perilous water saying what I have because in today's political climate if you say something negative about the left you instantly become a bigoted and ignorant Trump supporter and if you say something negative about the right you are a condescending tree hugger with no grasp on reality, and my statements will trigger both sides.
So I will be clear, I think Trump is both a deplorable human being and the worst president of all time. I don't know if AOC is a deplorable person yet, and I don't really care either, she doesn't represent me. She may be a genuinely great person. But her politics and style are strangely Trumpesque, just for the other side.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I get it. I still think the comparison fails because AOC is defined by her wacky policies while Trump is defined by his lack of character. His policies are irrelevant, at least to him and I think to most of his supporters.
In that sense, she's just another politician to disagree with, something we've never had a shortage of. Trump, on the other hand, is a new kind vile little animal.
I'm surprised that her writings are incoherent. The few times I've heard her speak, she was very clear. I actually thought she would make a good teacher the last time I saw a clip of her on twitter. "Shame she went into politics instead," I thought.
Thanks for clarifying. You gave me the Rocker "okay" post, which you only give to crazy posters. It made me think I must be really off the rails or annoying.
Speaking of off the rails, I do believe in the end of the world, and I do think climate change will be one of the pieces of that pie.
“To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.” James Hatch, former Navy Seal and current Yale student.
I think Trump is defined to you (and me) by his character, but to his supporters he is defined by his policies. He is viewed by the as an outsider and a change agent. They want a wall, they don't like immigrants, they want economic prosperity, don't believe in climate change and environmental policy around it is a drag on the economy and a farce, taxation, weakened military and a need to drain the swamp. Facebook has taught me I am related to a lot of these people and they believe that the left is simply picking on Trump and won't let him do the things he wants to do for the little man. They are surprisingly able to look past his massive flaws and even think they are largely overstated.
For the life of me I don't understand it.
And I see an element of that on the left with AOC. They'll look past a lot of (what I view as) craziness because she is speaking to them about what THEY care about: Climate change, wealth distribution, entitlement programs, military spending, a need to bring in new and progressive blood, etc.
We both belong to a religion that believes in the end of times, but I think our faith is more of a "Don't Panic" variety.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
A quote I recently saw that makes me agree with this (and reminds me of the Trump stream of consciousness style) is this:
"This idea that if we just, you know, I’ve been working on this for X amount of years [sic] it’s like, not good enough. We need a universal sense of urgency. And people are trying to, like introduce watered-down proposals that are frankly going to kill us. A lack of urgency is going to kill us. It doesn’t matter if you agree that climate change is an important issue. At this point it doesn’t matter. If you believe climate change is a problem, that’s not even the issue. The issue is, how urgently you feel the need to fix it."
Anyway, my minor point has officially beaten a dead horse back to life.
Sancho, I think we largely agree on political stuff so I'm sorry my "okay" came off condescending to you.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I get my news by following the NYT, the WaPost, and the Atlantic on Twitter. So I don't know or see very much. I do follow a few liberal co-workers as well, and they retweet AOC stuff that they like. That may explain why I see the good but not the bad when it comes to speaking well.