Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular uprising of the white working class against the status quo
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andin, in reply to
Whatever happens
Well Bill Burr will keep them laughing at their own stupidity for a while, and him laughing all the way to the bank.
But its early days... and there's pressing local problems so fuck 'em. -
BenWilson, in reply to
She & Bill no doubt assumed middle-class folk are too stupid to understand the relation between cause & effect
She was not wrong. Trump also assumed this, and was also not wrong. His own personal conduct has not been that of a champion of the working man, and the women under him seem to work pretty hard too. But that does not matter. You can do anything when you're a star, he said this himself.
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Kirk Serpes, in reply to
Hi Denis, yeah I agree with you for the most part. The cozyness of the mainstream left with neoliberals who created the economic crisis def did not help - and Clinton was the worst possible candidate to put forward. She alienated the base and didn't pull votes from the other side either - worst of both worlds. In think we need to do more research on the midwest to see if it was whitelash or neoliblash.
There's actually a pretty steady trend of the loss of WWC votes in over last few decades from the Dems. The thing is over that same time both sides followed the same economic ideology (for the most part), but only one side became very socially liberal. Which kinda leads me to think that is election was more a reaction against the culture war. Would having a more economically left candidate help? Absolutely!! That would have probably shaved of a 1-2% of Trump's lead in some key states in the rust belt and gained like 5% with the left.
I guess my message is that liberals need to tell the whitelash movement to fuck themselves and to expect non-cooperation on every single thing they propose just like they did when Obama was elected in an actual fucking landslide (twice). And next time we find some socialist gay Latino Muslim to run because that would probably fire up the Dem base/coalition again.
The US is too polarised to meet the other side halfway. It's become very clear from the last few cycles that centrist establishment candidates don't win and that you need to throw red meat/vegan patties to your base rather than try to extend olive branches to the other side.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
The US is too polarised to meet the other side halfway. It's become very clear from the last few cycles that centrist establishment candidates don't win and that you need to throw red meat/vegan patties to your base rather than try to extend olive branches to the other side.
I'd also agree that Third Wayism has done its dash, as the centre ground has been knocked out by the Great Recession. What chance of a Second American Civil War, or an extra-big Troubles?
I suspect also that the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" mirage remains embedded in the American psyche. When temporarily embarrassed millionaires become permanently embarrassed ones, they'll blame everyone below them in a desperate attempt to push themselves up, instead of blaming the system they want to become part of.
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Seems to me we're looking at a failure of the social contract. From our perspective here in kiwiland we're fortunately somewhat insulated (neoliberalism creating less victims) currently but that may not last much longer.
Rousseau's notion strikes me as a conceptual take on mass psychology, which can be restated simply via `trickle-down' (myth or theory) generating enough mutual benefits to prevent mayhem & anarchy. You have a class that creates employment and a class of employees dependent on them for survival. Is the relation between these two classes parasitical or symbiotic? Obviously a true symbiosis would be sustainable in perpetuity (green political ideology).
Harmony would be generated as a social norm from the bipolar balance. We ain't got that! Therefore it must be parasitical. Corporations suck the economic life-blood out of consumers & workers, the left tries to get into power to suck tax dollars out of everyone (would rather just suck the rich but the rich are too clever to become victims).
To finesse the current impasse we need a new social contract. Unfortunately that means people using their brains: never gonna happen. Too addled by chemicals in the food injected by capitalists & a cocktail of designer drugs to alchemise the result. Ignoring reality becomes the default stance of most people - even those potentially capable of solving the problem. In the early years of the green movement Mondragon seemed a good model for a mutual-benefit alternative economy. I'm still puzzled that the left preferred dependency on the capitalists and chose to reject such clever innovation.
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I'm not really seeing a need to search souls quite so hard as what a lot of people have been doing. It's not the first time that a prick has been elected to a major democracy. It's not even the first time this century. It's not even the first time, this century, in the USA.
A President of the USA was elected not so long ago, pretty much on a platform of waging massive full scale war on a country on completely made up pretexts. He then went ahead and did it, and hundreds of thousands of people got killed, and the country is pretty much destroyed, and the region destabilized, and we're seeing cascading effects of it today. He had the help of a bunch of other pricks who also got elected in other major democracies. One of the major backers, Berlusconi, is even as much of an outright seedy, dirty rich bastard as Trump is. They've probably had orgies together, when Trump could drag himself away from putting out to Putin.
That doesn't automatically mean that I should consider what Berlusconi's supporters think is a good idea to be one myself. It doesn't make me reconsider my position and wonder if perhaps I should be grabbing more pussies myself on a daily basis.
It just makes me realize that you have to fight for things you believe in, and not give up just because you have a setback. Sure, during a setback, the winner is likely to do all sorts of lording and trying to make me doubt myself. But for fucks sake, if there's one thing I can fucking do, it's stick to my goddamned guns, when my own beliefs are at stake. And I will continue to do that. I don't care if they elect Satan himself in the USA, I'm not going to fall to my knees and worship the bastard and all his followers.
And for most people, the guns they can really productively stick to are still their little assault rifless that footsoldiers are given. Yeah it would be nice to be a fly boy and drop some serious munitions when you're in a war, and it's always fun to speculate about what those fly boys did right or wrong. But at the end of the day your contribution is likely to be some little hole you have to defend. So do it. If you can't do that, you're not a soldier, you're a civilian, and the best you can hope to ever be is not a casualty, but don't count on it.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
A President of the USA was elected not so long ago, pretty much on a platform of waging massive full scale war on a country on completely made up pretexts.
Can you clarify who you're talking about here?
Because Bush 1 was inaugurated in 1989, and had been in power for nearly two years when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and kicked off GW1, and Bush 2 won his election in November 2000, nearly a year before 9/11, and a few years before the 2003 Iraq War (which was before the subsequent 2004 election)
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Bush 2, Iraq, his second election.
But yes, you're right, I've obviously had a memory fail there. He was subsequently re-elected after doing that. So it wasn't a platform of invading Iraq. It was a platform of having already invaded Iraq. I'm not sure if that's better or worse, really.
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Rich Lock, in reply to
A bit pedantic of me, but I've read at least one account of people voting for Trump because Obama invaded Iraq (and therefore created the mess).
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BenWilson, in reply to
Pedantic is good. I wonder if I mentally blotted out that Americans re-elected Bush after all his lying them into war. Somehow the election of Obama colored my memory of their general righteousness. I just feel it has to be said that them electing some really nasty people who did really nasty things is not exactly new, so I can't get with the general feelings of shock about it all.
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Just a thought, given left leaning ideology is quite strongly correlated with youth perhaps it might be a smart idea to present a candidate to those slightly younger people who isn't 70!
And yes I know you have to be 35+ and it takes a while to build up political credit but 70?!?!
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BenWilson, in reply to
Youth is also unfortunately correlated with a lack of engagement, and not voting. But which comes first? The candidate that appeals to youth, that makes them vote? Or the youth voting, which encourages a candidate that might appeal to them?
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B Jones, in reply to
Too addled by chemicals in the food injected by capitalists
What? Which ones?
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High fructose corn syrup.
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
There's normally a list of them on the product label. In very small print, to deter consumers from reading it. Not that they need worry: just about nobody has time to do the research required to get an inkling about what function they are meant to perform. Nor are the producers legally bound to ensure that they are proven to be not harmful to health. Caveat emptor. So we all became willing volunteers for their biochemical experiments, and those of us who haven't died yet seem to be living proof that they aren't noticeably harmful, right?
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
But which comes first?
Yeah. When faced will old white guys (and a couple of old white gals) youth choose not to vote – therefore youth are disengaged.
I wonder how many younger voters decided to vote in the Auckland elections after Chloe Swarbrick entered the race for 2nd place in the mayoralty (even if they ended up not voting for her).
Wouldn’t it be fun to have a political party where old white guys were not allowed to stand – you could let them make cakes and fetch tea* so they could feel valued.
*Or bring red bull and vodka
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Noam Chomsky – he’s an old dude.
I'm not saying old white guys can't be bright/empathetic/thoughtful/considered/balanced but FFS we have enough already.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
they aren’t noticeably harmful, right?
Obesity is good , especially for GDP
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Farmer Green, in reply to
Speak for yourself. A lot more empathy, balance, consideration, thought, and intelligence would not go amiss in my view, but then I’m your problem, being an OWG.
Edit: Oops . I clicked the Chomsky link. Bollocks for mine but he obviously finds a market for it. -
BenWilson, in reply to
Wouldn’t it be fun to have a political party where old white guys were not allowed to stand
I'd never find out!
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B Jones, in reply to
There’s normally a list of them on the product label. In very small print, to deter consumers from reading it. Not that they need worry: just about nobody has time to do the research required to get an inkling about what function they are meant to perform.
You'll have to do better than that. That's a huge claim you've just handwaved away with an argument from ignorance - they're in tiny writing and people don't understand what they're for, therefore they're mind control chemicals. Which additives, and what function do they perform. Supported by links to reputable journals if you've got them.
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Sacha, in reply to
2nd place
3rd
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Sacha, in reply to
Americans re-elected Bush after all his lying them into war
and NZers re-elected the (only) Act govt in 1987.
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Actually, I don't have to. I really don't care how much you misinterpret what I wrote. Writing about such chemical experimenting on consumers, I actually referred to an addling of the brain. Old-fashioned language for people unable to think clearly - nothing to do with mind control. And it was a flippant surmise, not expecting any reader to assume it was more than partly true.
We don't know how such additives affect us. Neither the govt nor the manufacturers are even slightly interested in spending the money it takes to find out. When Muldoon was PM I was given the task of conducting a survey of lead pollution in Auckland city, which included writing in my report the primary finding from similar research overseas. The most interesting of those was that the populace in countries on western manufactured food diets already had blood lead levels substantially over the World Health Organisation safe level. Lead causes degeneration of the nervous system (of which the primary organ is the brain). I wondered how Muldoon would react to this news: he disestablished the Environmental Laboratory of the Health Dept (my employer) the following year - a subtle yet effective way of shooting the messenger.
Fortunately I had already moved on to running an alternative rock music venue, and the lead solder that was traditionally used to join the tin fruit cans (and poison everyone's blood) was phased out within a few years. Not all capitalists are evil - many are just lazy & delinquent - just as many are worthy citizens...
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Rich Lock, in reply to
it was a flippant surmise, not expecting any reader to assume it was more than partly true.
Given that we are currently in a situation where for every every one sober, considered summary of the current cold, methodical, peer-reviewed science as a signal, we have approximately one trillion graduates of google school and youtube university thinking they know better and drowning us with their noise, you can understand why some folk get a bit chippy, no?
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