Stop Me Before I Vote Again

It's the Rat Pack. Vegas, baby, has a lot to answer for.

Dim and Barackie switching off on the Frank n' Sammy roles whenever it suits 'em, outta boredom more than anything else. Both Obama and Medvedev, being natural hams, envious of Berlusconi as Dean Martin, because even if Silvio wasn't Italian he's still menefreghista. Much much much much much much much much much much more menefreghista than Dimitry or Barack or any'un else in that room will e'er be, that's for damn sure...

Jintao as Peter Lawford. A Lawford 50 IQ points smarter and veddy Chinese...

rat pack III ??

BOTH TIMES BEFORE IT WAS PERSONAL

THIS TIME ITS POLITICAL

hardy my man

i'm not so sure

candid shot of hamy back row trio ????

looks like they hardly know each other
and of course they hardly do

this shot was taken
just seconds before
a formal photo
of the full membership board
of the orange county chamber of commerce

the unctuous shoulder squeeezer ???
sid berle of sid berle's pet shop

the guy on his right ???
a local fast rising divorce lawyer
and the jolly barney rubble type ??
he's about to declare chapter 11

front and center ??

modest mr hu
owner of
the 5 location
'chow down'
noodle stand operation
he's the honoree
as reigning
orange county
business man of the year

"See the shark with teeth like razors.
All can read his open face.
And Macheath has got a knife, but
Not in such an obvious place."---BB

Looking at this photo, it suddenly came to me.

Barack Obama is the American Medvedev (with the Clintons, of course, a two headed Putin).

But you lefties have to show some respect here. I noticed that there were two marches on Wall Street in NYC over the weekend and both were (to put it charitably) epic fails. I actually schlepped down to Wall Street to watch one of them. Best entertainment I've seen in awhile. The site of big, badass Marxists marching through lines of police barricades while teenagge French tourists stood alongside giggling and snapping photos with their little point and shoot cameras made my week.

At the same time, one wackjob in Pittsburg goes off the deep end and the entire lefty blogosphere is buzzing with the fear of brownshirts marching through the streets carrying torches. So much denial. Lefties don't have the balls to notice that Obama is just another corporate statist so they're trying to raise the specter of fascism to distract themselves. Glenn Beck goes from cable news buffoon to Godzilla tramping through the American political landscape.

But what nobody seems to get is that it's not about left or right. It's about isolation and alienation (to use two big lefty interlectural words). The loony-toon Gook up in Binghamton and the fruity tatooed goose stepping Pollack mommas boy in Pittsburg, what do they have in common?

Well, if you told most people that there were two massacres over the weekend, one that killed 13 immigrants and another one that killed three cops, and if you told them that one shooter was a Nazi and the other a Vietnamese social mutant, I bet 99% of the people you asked would say that the Nazi killed the immigrants and the Vietnamese looser killed the cops.

But instead, the Nazi killed the cops and the immigrant looser killed his fellow immigrants.

Where's the ideology here? In both cases they were crimes of convenience. The Nazi killed the cops because they conveniently provided delivery service, three gun grabbing jackbooted government thugs right to the front door. And in the other case, you had a guy who could barely speak English shoot up a place where people took English lessons. Too bad both of them didn't stick the gun in their own mouths and pull the trigger and leave the rest of us out of it.

But in the end, the problem is isolation, the fracturing of the political reality that had Bush as a unifying factor. Even you guys don't know what to make of it. And you guys generally think you know everything.

tkt

you and your mind scapes view of social reality
for some reason
remind me .. alas
of the late charles crumb
older wiser baby jane ish
brother of
below linked hi hippie era rascal
http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/080616/r-crumb_l.jpg

i share your largely unempathetic
periodically manic "nature"
but i've developed a certain distain
for my true speaking
over the years

cabinet sized shops
containing
one man oracles
--of whatever dark but flashing neon stripe--
come a dozen to the dime

this may already be up in one or other layer of father smiff's rubric of horrors
but i got odd non confirming screens after pressing post
so ...

"In both cases they were crimes of convenience"
my friend you fail to grasp the metaphoric motivations of the id

these actions express deep albeit scrambled
social models
emblematic??
indeed
your steel trap mind
with all its ahab insights
is an illusion of perception
and a perception of illusion
generated by a multitude
of inner imps
working deep within your brain's mind
--like a troop of santa-less elves--
to produce the bundle of tumbling contradictions
that is you

"the entire lefty blogosphere is buzzing with the fear of brownshirts marching through the streets carrying torches "

"entire "??

no
i greatly suspect i'm joined by many in this re-action
to brown shirt filled main streets

bring em on
after them ... it'll be
ME and my gang

err well maybe after a few more iterations that is
umh you know
come the day
that must come eh ??

tkt meets van dingo

steel cage texas bull rope
last man standing

right here on our sheeeew

GEEKLE MANIA XVII

why don't this ever happen

matter and anti matter ??

no

like quarks ???

as in you can push em
closer together
with ever greater and greater ease
but pull em apart only
with greater and greater effort

no

how do these hyper powers
avoid each others
orbitals

oh for a collision

i greatly suspect i'm joined by many in this re-action
to brown shirt filled main streets
bring em on

Genuine fascist brownshirts (ie street thugs backed up by the power of the state) would scare me. I suspect they'd scare you too.

But that is largely a thing of the past. Brownshirts are no more relevent than torchlit parades of socialists on Mayday down one of Baron Hausmann's grand boulevards in Paris.

Michelle Malkin's "Tea Party's" have about as much in common with Hitler's SA as International Answer's soporific peace rallies have in common with the Paris Commune.

Instead, we have a fractured political landscape of political imps and contradictions all shouting at one another their claims of respectability.

There is no right and no left. There is a state. There is a pro-state left and an anti-state left. There is a pro-state right and an anti-state right.

Poplowski, as repellent as his racist ideology is, is part of the anti-state right. The pro-state left (let us say "The Daily Kos") and the pro-state right (let us say "Instapundit") are both trying to pin Mr. Poplowski on each other in their claim to represent "the center".

But neither represents the center at all. There is no center. And the fact that there is no center means there is no left and no right, only the illusion of either.

There is a welfare warfare state and the large corporations and American herde of sheeple dependent on it. The goal of both the pro-state left and the pro-state right is to paint everybody who believes in liberty as a future Poplowski.

I suspect you and I agree on this point. Where we disagree is in your desire to transform a timid capitalist welfare state into full blown communism. History gives too many examples of why that's a bad idea.

Anyone who dares to dispute the Gospel According to Opie (whatever the hell that might be--I doubt even he knows)--whether from left or right--is consigned to the the Heretics Dungeon (SMBIVA's version of Uncle Joe's psychiatric hospital). No need for Opie to distinguish a critic from the right from one from the left--such basic intellectual honesty is beneath (in actuality, beyond) the pontifical quack Opie. You either cower before the Wizard of Ooze, or you don't: that's the whole point of his presence here--politics and economics is just a flimsy pretext for purveying his cubby-hole megalomania.

You must understand that all Opie's posts are about OPIE--amid all the static of overweening pretension, the garbled sense of the posts might SEEM to have some kind of bearing on economics, politics, etc., but the reference is Opie himself: his polysyllabic grandeur, his serene supremacy over the class of bumbling fools known as the rest of humanity, whom he fondly demeans, just Bush II-style, with his puerile frat-house nicknames, which make for a bracing contrast with his strenuous stylistic exertions to achieve the feeling-tone of an Olympian savant.

Let's be blunt: TKT is a right-wing crank, and Opie is a left-wing crank, but with a better vocabulary. Those two are locked in death-match to a well-earned oblivion.

And so your conception of truth comes down to a distinction between right and left.

(That's not my opinion. That's the conclusion your post is set up to make with the "let's be blunt" substituting for the "ergo.")

"TKT is a right-wing crank, and Opie is a left-wing crank, but with a better vocabulary."

But I suspect this has more to do with the nature of electronic communications then with what is actually going on in your mind.

Left vs. Right is binary. Your brain is not. Voluntarily you have transformed yourself into a reflection of a machine.

May I suggest the book "Against the Machine" by Lee Siegel.

And once you've graduated from that perhaps "The Myth of the Machine" by Lewis Mumford (I think that he is "left" enough for anybody).

Left-right is not binary anything: it's shorthand to describe, roughly, people who mostly favor a human community based on solidarity and compassion, and morally atrophied jerks like you who think the prevalent barbarism and chaos of the world is just fine, even inevitable.

Now--in return for your reading tips, I'd like to return the favor with some unsolicited advice of my own. May I suggest that you push your head even farther up your ass than it is already, the better to deter you from ever posting on this blog again.

Left-right is not binary anything: it's shorthand to describe, roughly, people who mostly favor a human community based on solidarity and compassion, and morally atrophied jerks like you who think the prevalent barbarism and chaos of the world is just fine, even inevitable.

Now--in return for your reading tips, I'd like to return the favor with some unsolicited advice of my own. May I suggest that you push your head even farther up your ass than it is already, the better to deter you from ever posting on this blog again.

Nunc dimittis Domine. Oh how I've prayed for this day.

I may regret saying this, but TKT's outlook appeals to me more than Van's. TKT has a tendency to go off the rails and lose himself in a wilderness of reified abstractions -- but then, so do I.

TKT observes:

The goal of both the pro-state left and the pro-state right is to paint everybody who believes in liberty as a future Poplowski.

MJS is monumentally confused. It's true that liberals are not leftists in any sense, so he obviously is not talking about the same people that TKT is. I'm not sure what he's talking about, and I don't think he does in this case either.

The classic right-wing trope is that all leftists are "statists"--a good joke because all known forms of industrial capitalism are essentially state capitalism--in fact, the corporation itself is an entirely reified construct of the state that could not function without an elaborate panoply of state functions: courts, police, military, government regulations, civil and criminal law, etc.

It's actually socialists who envision something like a diminution or transcendence of state power through mass social and workplace democracy (literal social democracy, not the compromised historical something called "social democracy," which is now a synonym for liberalism).

Should I really be having to make such elementary distinctions, even for the leader of this blog to help him see that he shouldn't really be signing on to the agenda of a far-right-winger?

Now let's see what kind of elaborate pretzel logic MJS will deploy to defend his pop front with a procapitalist (none too surprising a tack for a Stalinist, by the way).

Left-right is not binary anything: it's shorthand to describe, roughly, people who mostly favor a human community based on solidarity and compassion, and morally atrophied jerks like you who think the prevalent barbarism and chaos of the world is just fine, even inevitable.

You clearly don't understand the history of the "left" vs. "right" distinction. It comes from the French Revolution.

To quote Wikipedia:

"In politics the term left wing derives from the French Revolution, when radical Montagnard deputies from the Third Estate generally sat to the left of the president's chair, a habit which began in the Estates General of 1789. The moderate Feuillants generally sat to the right."

Why are you basing a world view around an old French seating chart?

Personally I think it's a form of political cowardnice. The term "socialist" is unpopular in American politics so people who would like to call themselves "socialists" fall back on calling themselves "leftists".

It's a bit like using the term "single payer" instead of "universal" health care.

Wait. No. Actually, it's worse. "Socialism" (a political philosphy I'm passionately opposed to) describes a worldview that you can argue for or against. So does "Marxism" or "Communism."

"Left" is just a relational term. Hillary Clinton is to the "left" of John McCain. But Abe Foxman is to the "left" of Ron Paul. Ask the Iranians who's less likely to "obliterate" them.

And if you need another example, Lenin used the term "left" as an insult (as in "Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder"). Lenin or Marx would have puked at the pallid description of themselves as "leftists". It's the "Communist Manifest" not the "Left Manifesto."

And "right?" Well it can mean anything from Michael Harrington (who was, after all, a right wing socialist) to Ronald Reagan to Sam Nunn to Adolf Hitler.

I think TKT is onto something here. For his phrase "pro-state left" I would substitute the term "liberals" -- because I don't see these people as being "left" in any meaningful sense.

Traditionally in a European Parliament, the more junior MPs would sit to the "left" of the speaker and the more powerful MPs to the right of the speaker.

The distinction still holds. I actually like a distinction Michael Parenti (a lefty if there ever was one) uses between "the deep state" and the "elected government".

It doesn't really matter if Obama is "left or "right". He's taking orders from the bankers and the national security honchos. He could stack his desk in the oval office with copies of Kropotkin and he'd still say yassir when the bankers call his to the carpet.

Same with Congress.

Let's take the Senate. Sure there are some lefties in the Senate. But do you think any of them will ever get put on a committe where they have any real power? Do you think Bernie Sanders will ever become chairman of the foreign relations committee? Do you think Kucinich will ever become Speaker of the House?

BWAHAHAHA

Part of the reason Obama jacked John Kerry out of the Secretary of State job and gave it to Madame Hillary was because the honchos in the permanent state couldn't even deal with a pallid, establishment liberal like Russ Feingold as chairman of the foreign relations committee. Only skull and bonesmen need apply.

It's actually socialists who envision something like a diminution or transcendence of state power through mass social and workplace democracy (literal social democracy, not the compromised historical something called "social democracy," which is now a synonym for liberalism).

OK then. I challenge you. Name me one, even one place in history where socialists, liberals, social democrats, whatever the hell you want to call them, have done anything to diminish state power.

The Progressive Movement? FDR and the New Deal? The Great Society?

Let's take Saint Franklin Roosevelt. I don't want to argue whether or not the New Deal was good or bad, only whether or not it increased state power.

Are you honestly going to argue that Saint Franklin did anything to weaken the state? Didn't he simply take Woodrow Wilson's war planning aparatus and rebuild it in the 1930s?

How about Kennedy and LBJ?

You lefties like to think the 1960s were some big lefty protest orgasm but you forget the fact that some of the biggest protests were organized by people who (racist or not) believed in state's rights.

MLK's whole strategy of non-violence was to provoke a reaction from the racists in the deep South and use it to morally blackmail RFK into sending in federal troops.

Hey, it worked in one way. But did it? Is America really any less racially segregated now than in 1960s. I mean, hell, half the reason clowns like Glenn Beck are even able to pose as rebels is the fact that "liberals" want to use the state to enforce racial equality. Forced bussing, affirmative action, all of it, good or bad, did it depend on increasing or decreasing state power?

My understanding is that this blog is a discussion forum for leftists/socialists of various stripes who agree that the Democratic Party is a black hole for achieving a radical transformation of society--even for a moderate tilt in a progressive direction.

TKT is in principle opposed to the basic ideas and goals of socialism (and/or communitarian anarchism). Moreover, his posts are so endlessly obtuse that it is pointless even to venture a reply.

That's the last time I will refer to TKT or the content of his comments. I encourage others to do the same. Doubtless there are others out here for blood sport alone who will want to poke a stick at the guy, but those who hope to animate this blog as a serious resource for serious political discussion--and, G-d forbid, action--should consider following suit.

That's the last time I will refer to TKT or the content of his comments. I encourage others to do the same. Doubtless there are others out here for blood sport alone who will want to poke a stick at the guy, but those who hope to animate this blog as a serious resource for serious political discussion--and, G-d forbid, action--should consider following suit.

A lefty Heather lifts her dainty chin, tosses her hair back and hisses "WHATEVER".

VM and TKT, I won't lay back and indifferently amuse myself with the sight of your fortuitous meeting. In fact, I'll shunt aside whatever contempt I've felt for both of you, and give you credit for shaking things up around here, to the extent that SMBIVA had settled into a comfortable staleness. If I'm not mistaken, one of the wags around here noted that despite your mutual antipathy, one thing you have in common is your purported anti-statism -- even though VM's is of the anarcho-communist variety (if I may deign to label), and TKT's is of the market libertarian variety (ditto).

But it's also worth commenting that you share at least one other trait. One, despite your ample referencing of historical examples to buttress your political positions, you're both guilty of -- what to call it, exactly? -- something like "ahistorical absolutism." That is, both of you call upon bloody episodes such as Stalin's agricultural collectivization and forced labor camps to illustrate the unalloyed evil of authoritarian domination, but neither of you come to grips with really vexing questions (such as those raised and answered by Weber) about the inevitability of the state in any society with a division of labor more complex than that of the hunting band. Yes, both of you appear to be drawing upon historical lessons to make your respective cases -- but in fact your method of argument is just a ruse, because of course the record is chock-full of sorrowful instances where your respective visions of perfect freedom did not obtain. Should not a realistic (and a truly historically informed) debate revolve around how best to subject the state to democratic accountability, fostering conditions under which other desired goals can be pursued? Of course, the latter is precisely where VM and TKT will sharply part company, and quickly betray their sectarian selves -- despite their contrived insistence that it is SMBIVA's regulars who are the real sectarians.

I could say more about another characteristic you two share, but I've already posted a wagonload, so I'll leave it to the imagination of the locals.

Gluelicker is another psychic--he has divined all manner of finely articulated detail about my political philosophy based on essentially . . . one or two comments deploring the excesses of Stalinism. From these one or two sketchy remarks he then obliges me by elaborating a fully developed political philosophy on my behalf.

It appears that gluelicker believes the following: if you are sytematically opposed to totalitarianism, whether of the left or right (essentially monopoly of state power and means of public expression by a single party), then you are by definition 100-percent anti-statist and some kind of anarcho-something-or other.

This is completely asinine, and the sure sign of an authoritarian political outlook that is at odds with any kind of Marxism or socialism (apart from totalitarian caricatures of socialism).

So Gluelicker may be just a second-rate psychic, but as a political philosopher, he's a lousy analyst and basically just another Stalinist hack and apologist for various forms of oppression that make a mockery of the socialist project, which is about shifting power from the few to the many (doesn't matter whether the few is a capitalist elite or a bureaucratic elite). Any "socialist" who fails to grasp this basic point is not really a socialist. And you needn't be an anarchist to appreciate or advocate this point of view--just a believer in the essential dignity of human beings and the idea that they should have more, not less control over their own lives.

There now--I've put this simply and plainly enough that even the oafish and clueless Gluelicker might have a clue.

Finally, the avowed premise of this blog is not that Stalinism was or is a wonderful political system--it is that the Democratic Party is a dead end for achieving just the kind of social and political empowerment of the majority that is the heart of the socialist project. If this idea seems essentially alien to Gluelicker or anyone else on this blog, that person is not a socialist--certainly not in the sense that Marx clearly intended, the Marx who prophesied and championed the withering away of the state under communism (not the permanent hypertrophy of the state as seen under Soviet-style regimes).

Yo, VM, I don't know why I give you the time of day... I guess I'm just a sucker for punishment.

I'll cop to extrapolating your political worldview, based on scattered comments you've made in this universe. You dubbed yourself a "libertarian socialist," did you not? [Yes, I understand that that does not equate to the total eradication of (democratically-constrained) state institutions. Yes, I'm familiar with the parliamentary socialists, the council communists, etc... you might extend your interlocutors the courtesy of not assuming they're blockheads.]

Anyway, that's an ideal for analysis and movements to aspire to. As a constructive starting point, however, I'd recommend curbing the habit of prematurely accusing all of your perceived antagonists as "Stalinists"... you are profoundly committed to constructive diagnosis and action, yes?

gluelicker--
Fine--you admit to putting words in my mouth that I never wrote or uttered. Thanks for that admission of polemical dishonesty. Takes a big man to admit he's a small man.

Second, you are still confusing your own imaginings with reality--I won't attempt a diagnosis here, but if that tendency persists, I would seek some counseling. To wit: I never wrote the words "libertarian socialist" anywhere on this blog, much less in relation to myself.

Third, I have not accused anyone of being a Stalinist who did not avow, explicitly or implicitly, that he is a Stalinist. Opie has been the most open about this; others' avowals have been more oblique but no less unmistakable.

Fourth, if you want to address any of the many political points I have made, please do so. If you just want to keep scoring points with the Politburo by flinging mud at people they don't like, then you just continue to slop around in that wallow and have yourself a great old time. Just don't expect anyone to take you seriously.

Van Mungo, maybe most or nearly all of SMBIVA's denizens have written you off altogether, but I haven't. Some may regard you as a crusading "decent" by nature, but I don't. I re-read the 139-post thread where the wheels first came off, and what I detect is a series of self-perpetuating and intensifying misreadings on all sides. (Yes, of course, this is a vast over-simplification, but there's no sense in fine-tooth combing the grainier and uglier details).

OK, you didn't self-describe as a "libertarian socialist." But surely it is not ludicrous of me to place you somewhere within that general camp, based on the amalgamation of comments you've made here. And it's not an orientation I'm unsympathetic to! Please stop nitpicking for excuses to continue squabbles that should have cooled out long ago.

On numerous occasions you have implied that those who "toady" to the "Stalinists" (me, among others) are the functional equivalents of "Stalinists" themselves. Guilt by association is bad enough: the archives will show that I have actually taken issue with MJS, OP (especially OP!) or AS when I thought the situation merited it. But if you revisit the thread with a sense of even-handedness, you will discover that more than once the so-called "Stalinists" explained (explicitly or implicitly, as you say) that they were hardening their own resumes and taking you for a ride, since you seemed so hell-bent on presiding over a kangaroo court of your own making.

[And who appointed you judge, jury, and executioner, anyway? And what is the ultimate point of this cleansing of the ranks, anyway? Are we consolidating a movement or forming a party?]

Why don't we just bury the hatchet and let go of one-sided caricatures? I'm willing to allow that you've got a lot of valuable insights to offer, once you get past the fog that descended in late March. At that stage we can converse about "political points"... because in this more-heat-than-light madness we've both been caught up in, everything but real "political points" have been made.

By the way, we're ALL small men.

gluelicker writes,

"Van Mungo, maybe most or nearly all of SMBIVA's denizens have written you off altogether. . . ."

Here is a prize specimen of what Nietzsche called a herd animal.

Moooooo... Baaaaaa... MooBaa, oh ubermensch, oh overman, oh superciliating, oh overman, what is the over/under on how many days before he gets his last word in?