Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Obama set the flying monkeys loose in 2008, and they very effectively stopped any sane discussion of the issues.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

I missed that. Out on the left fringe, we get very little interest from the mainstream "cognitive interventionists". It seems they've given up on us, which may be the only decent thing they've ever done or will do.

Congratulations, you missed out on some really awful stuff.

Joe Cannon has catalogued a lot of it. Here's one example.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

Here's another example. And another.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

That's really something. Carolyn, I had no idea they went so far. The vitriol and crap-flooding are the same as wingnut tactics -- same organized disruption and provocation, same authoritarian psychic assault.

Ah, memories. Shorter OFB: Shut the fuck up and send Obama more money! That riff drove 'em nuts, and had the great merit of being true.

I had written the whole election off well before any of this took place, but the details of what amounts to a corporate putsch, and a much slicker one than Baby Doc Bush's, are very revealing. Obama can certainly lay claim to "better management" than the Republicans offer, but not in a way any reasonably decent person would approve.

The purpose of the interventions seems to have quickly gotten lost in spite and rage. But the effect didn't. The "legacy party", another fine term, got rid of all its potential troublemakers, right down to people who would have been grudgingly cooperative. What's left is a solid block of highly obedient wingnuts. They can rule that way, given the present lack of alternatives. But it seems risky to me. What if a broader left got its shit together?

Upon further reflection, they purged the party. I have to say, I find that something close to hilarious. I dare say the well-meaning, nose-holding people are considerably less amused than those of us on the deep red left. Although there's probably some room for a shared chuckle or two given, you know... At any rate, the feeling is usually the same on the receiving end of these things even if there are a few differences here and there.

Cass Sunstein is a perfect person for the present era of Glorious Donkey Meritocracy. His resume is impeccable, his equivocational skills exemplary, his reputation transcends the realm of humanity and enters that of a legal god.

But he always reminds me of the Grifters song "Boho/Alt" --

"...oh to be the sunstein on your cass..."

Al writes, "They purged the party." They did indeed. A lot of "the detail" is seared into the memory of a lot of people, too, especially the misogyny, the false charges of racism, and the caucus fraud. And revenge being a dish best served very, very cold. One lesson of the Bush years is that a President can rule, if not govern, with about 30% of the population behind him. No doubt the "Obama Fan Base" will try for that. However, the stage set seems a good deal more flimsier, and the audience a great deal more restive, than during the Bush years, so a purged Democratic Party made up of Obama loyalists may not be strong enough to carry the Democrats through. That would be nice. Plus, it would make my Obama commemorative plates real collector's items.

CF, Sunstein is indeed an exemplar. In a different time and place, he could be offering expert testimony on the mental health of people who simply refuse to see the ponies.

Lambert, your analysis looks pretty sound. I'm tempted to question the aesthetic value of those plates. But that would involve looking at them and my sensitive nature is not up to it. I can, however, offer a wish that they become worth a large sum. The least those assholes can do is provide indirect compensation.

"The vitriol and crap-flooding are the same as wingnut tactics"

Exactly. The Obots were EXACTLY like the Busbots that I fought against so hard in 2000.

And when I realized that is when I became unalterably opposed to Obama and refused to vote for him.

No good can come of such vicious treatment of fellow citizens.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

See also David Brooks opining that what Haiti needs is "Intrusive Paternalism."

There seems to be a surfeit of folks at the top of the economic/political ladder who think they're so far superior to us poor, unwashed masses that they actually are doing us a favor by manipulating our behavior.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

"folks at the top of the economic/political ladder who think they're so far superior to us poor, unwashed masses that they actually are doing us a favor by manipulating our behavior"

in my case it is a favor
http://www.omnitv.ca/ontario/tv/docs/episodes/gulag113/gulag113.jpg

as a unrecovered 7th day stalinist

i need merithulu's
non terminator brand
of virtual tenticle squeeze
if just to counter
the rogue nkvd goon
still free lancing up there
in my head quarters

see my soon to be drafted draft
of my provisional unofficial memoirs:

"darkness at lunch
or
i lived three lies
and how i learned to love
them all
and my shuttlecock existenz "

Al, on my Obama commemorative plate collection: I treat them as the semiotic hazmat they are, and handle them only with remote manipulators (which chimes, oddly, with the subject of this post). So I'm in no danger of actually looking at them.

Al, on my Obama commemorative plate collection: I treat them as the semiotic hazmat they are, and handle them only with remote manipulators (which chimes, oddly, with the subject of this post). So I'm in no danger of actually looking at them.

Owen, if I recall correctly, Darkness At Brunch was the title of Chester Agrippa Koestler's badminton memoirs. If you write Darkness At Lunch, people will think you're making fun of him.

Lambert, you've anticipated all my fussing and concerns. There's a lovely joke in the use of the remote manipulators, which to my delight are called Master-Slave Manipulator Mk. 8. Indeed. Very much the mindset behind the semiotic hazmat.

Carolyn, some years ago I read very funny description of Brooks on an access-blogger blog. They were tut-tutting over the machinations of paranoid billionaires, gatherings of the crackpot elite and the idiocies of pseudo-intellectual sycophants. I can't find the original article, but my memory gave me enough clues for a quick google. I found the quote I wanted.

"David Brooks is like a miniature man. Seriously, maybe five feet tall. Two days in a row Brooks is wearing a yellow shirt. I suspect someone told him that it makes him look taller. It doesn't. He looks like an Easter egg with legs."

As nasty as these people can be, they're ridiculous individually and collectively. They're petty, spiteful, insecure and for some ungodly reason they can always find followers. It'll take years, decades at least, to knock them down to proper size and it's not going to happen in our lifetimes. Nevertheless, yeah, as you say, making them accountable is still worth trying.

Al --

CF, Sunstein is indeed an exemplar. In a different time and place, he could be offering expert testimony on the mental health of people who simply refuse to see the ponies.

And who's to say he's not already engaged in that, eh? Here's part of his bio-psyop-psychobiopsy at his current position with OIRA (noting the bold text):

............

A specialist in administrative law, regulatory policy, and behavioral economics, Mr. Sunstein is author of many articles and a number of books, including After the Rights Revolution (1990), Risk and Reason (2002), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Worst-Case Scenarios (2007), and Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008).
............

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg_administrator/

>>They're petty, spiteful, insecure and for some ungodly reason they can always find followers.

The terms Village and Versailles come to mind. These are people to whom the privilege to tell the rest of us how to live our lives is a right.

They're enti'led.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

CF, I find poetry in "bio-psyop-psychobiopsy". His fascination with stirring psyches looks like late-stage liberal crackpot realism. I've read some of his articles. He sees that there's a real problem with traumatized, low information consumers who are trapped in circumstances where an admission of ignorance will draw punishment and predators. This is accurate so far. His solution is a low-rent systemic Skinner Box, with plenty of galling and apparently pointless stimuli, and without any serious effort to provide protection from predators. The consumers' grievances can however be articulated on a case by individual case basis, once they figure out how to do that on their libertarian paternalist treadmills.

A previous generation of paternalist liberals saw the same problem. They enacted protections against predators and mandated disclosure of relevant information. Not a bad start, all things considered, even if it was never properly funded nor adequately staffed. It was still that rarest of capitalist things: a "lesser evil" that was, in fact, less evil.

I think Sunstein is the one in need of a "cognitive infiltration". What a sick, sad joke he is.

Al, I think each of the 20th century's waves of government breadth- and depth-increase was a bad response to legitimate social problems. In each one I've thought about I've seen more bureaucracy and more opportunity for pseudo-economies to grow, and less solution of real problems.

All of alcohol and drug prohibition strikes me this way. Environmental laws and regulations strike me the same. Corporate and commercial law uniformity efforts are likewise. Commercial regulation very often does the same.

Instead of tackling problems, most times the government solutions tend to be expensive ways of conducting feel-good charades that make people think the govt is trying to help.

I don't think a total absence of govt is feasible for a nation of the size of the USA, but I also don't think the present federal system has much to recommend it.

And I think this especially true concerning the Fed Govt as constructed since the elections of Nov 2000. I'd wonder if there's a precedent in US history for this broad sweep of cronyist fascist looting.

ah for the good old days
when men were brothers
and
mentoring was mentoring

remember this famous memorial
to full contact mentoring ??

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_qz8ZgdPk2Lc/R9bd4Hk2T0I/AAAAAAAAAUY/JALkJrlBEyw/Honeymoon+570.jpg

okay
when's the last time u recall
actually seeing it flash up
as say back drop to some
pwog pol ed-tv think piece

can't recall can ya..

well its been a full decade at least
and oh ya by the way
if it seems
oddly out of place to you

it is

little know fact:
this bold realization
of the old socratic ideal
"merited "
its present removal from front lawn status
to this tucked away venue
on the hind end grounds
of DNC headquarters
in december 2000

shortly after an egg throwing outrage
by an oxymoronic mob
of nudge-ite troll commandos

ya ya the usual
they'd run amok thanking ralph
in absentia

the iconoclastic myrmidons
turned their wrath
on this then readily at hand
but utterly helpless
statuary

what punks these digital sophists be