tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post122590978446758050..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Where Oh Where Is My Inner Mouseketeer?Dale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-18522473472275446912010-11-27T14:22:30.770-08:002010-11-27T14:22:30.770-08:00If you are actively engaged in revolutionary strug...If you are actively engaged in revolutionary struggle (commenting on blogs and doing poetry readings and so on don't count) then you occupy a vantage from which you conceivably have earned your bold declaration of Republican/Democratic equivalence. Otherwise, you are not only flabbergastingly obviously wrong but also a worthless hypocrite at best and at worst actively and stupidly facilitating literal fascism all the while braying that you're god's gift to the world with nothing to show for it. Not impressed so far, but eager to be.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-28219068096037368392010-11-27T12:53:01.156-08:002010-11-27T12:53:01.156-08:00You're a very smart guy, Dale, and you write v...You're a very smart guy, Dale, and you write very engagingly, and you are correct about most things. But your endless shilling for the worthless and failed Democratic Party, your interpretation of Obama as representing some sort of progressive reform (?!), your suggestion that the bailouts were anything other than a fraud and a theft, etc., is really an embarrassment. At this moment, the DP is worse than the Republicans, in part because it keeps bottled-up and directed into futile cycles of waste the energies of very smart and otherwise potentially effective people like you. Time to take the plunge and abandon that old flannel DP security blanket, my friend. It is FAKE security, believe me.Alan2102https://www.blogger.com/profile/03077725184637352859noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-54280468716870271892010-11-15T10:53:42.538-08:002010-11-15T10:53:42.538-08:00Churchill once said "America always does the ...<i>Churchill once said "America always does the right thing, after exhausting all the alternatives." So it may just be a case of waiting for the moment of exhaustion. Not a happy thought.</i><br /><br />I do think our institutions, though flawed, contain countervailing resources out of which repairs and progressive reform would indeed eventually assert themselves to the good. But the long run of theory, as Keynes crucially reminded us, is one we may not live to see -- and no theory worth anything is indifferent to the terms in which the actually living actually live. Climate change and resource descent have a time-table our institutional checks and balances are not equal to. <br /><br />I don't think we can afford America going crazy and throwing a tantrum right now, but that's what is happening. Arms proliferation and mass-mediation (of which panoptic surveillance is a part) exacerbate the ways in which the instabilities and violences born of climate change and resource change are likely to be exacerbated beyond healing. <br /><br />Had America seen sense and shifted the ship of state decisively in the direction of secular sustainable social democracy with Obama, and decisively marginalized our white-racist theocratic bullying impulses (always there, from the very beginning of our story) we might have deployed our shored up authority and immense resources in the service of social justice and sustainability on a planetary scale. But that's a receding dream, probably not in the cards anymore.<br /><br />What is needed is good sense, and though there wasn't enough of it in the class of 2008-2010 it did seem the US might have turned the tide toward sense. But we have failed. It's not true that you really get infinitely many chances to screw up. People really do die. Civilizations really do fall. My inner Mouseketeer fears we may have arrived at such a point, I suppose. <br /><br />At such a point, the only viable check on America is for the rest of the world to marginalize us into comparative irrelevance and get to work on real planetary problems without us as we feast idiotically on one another in the aftermath.<br /><br />As an American, I can't say that prospect is particularly cheering, so it's something of a hopeless hope... A hope for a planet that survives the technoscientific forces we unleashed, and for an educated critical convivial consensual commonwealth that tames those forces in the service of equity-in-diversity. The US may not be capable of partnership in that planetary project after all.<br /><br />The post-WW2 eyeblink Empire of the US that fancied itself the planet's hard-cock, policeman of the world, can be reduced to the Germania of an EU/UK Commonwealth/South American Global Rome, an unruly embarrassing backwater whose miserable unwashed uneducated masses cheerfully provide the dispensable cannon fodder for civilization's ongoing skirmishes. China can play Parthia, the eternal specter of antagonism, but too preoccupied with its own internal social struggles and ecological crises ever really to do much more than bark. Maybe a sustainable equitable diverse planetary polity can emerge out of that dynamic in the long run. If it does, you can be sure that it's a long run in which we will all be dead.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-33840993797907821682010-11-15T10:15:00.595-08:002010-11-15T10:15:00.595-08:00I can't deny what you're saying really. Yo...I can't deny what you're saying really. You're probably right, the republicans need to be sent behind the woodshed for a decade. It's worked to a limited extent to the Tories in the UK (although I'd still prefer they weren't in power). However it's hard to see that happening in the US. I think the best we can hope for is a critical mass of big corporations getting behind a Green New Deal. That would be a good thing for the world but wouldn't in and of itself solve Americas social problems.<br /><br />Unfortunately those social problems are going to get worse if the economic news continues to be weak. People can get mean spirited and stupid in lean times. I can even see that even here in ultra progressive Brighton,UK. I can imagine it's much worse in redneckistan.<br /><br />America does seem to be run by big corporations more than most western democracies. And the power of the rural voter is a serious flaw. We've got the same problem in my home country of Canada too.<br /><br />Winston Churchill once said "America always does the right thing, after exhausting all the alternatives." <br /><br />So it may just be a case of waiting for the moment of exhaustion. Not a happy thought.<br /><br />I'm not a fan of the Tea Party crowd btw. I have been studying them hoping to gain some useful insight and really struggling to do so. Whenever somebody tells me that they are new I tell them about the moral majority and more recently the most recent rebranding excersize the "Young Guns (tm)". I do think they may have satiated their triumphalist urges (after all two foreign occupations might be enough) and might content themselvs to behave like neo nazis to inappropriate brown people at home. Not nice, but maybe it's an improvement over mass murder. <br /><br />I wish all Randians had watched Grave of the Fireflies instead, the world would be a much better place.<br /><br /><br />Josejollyspaniardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10999141103840765243noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-52858119652159987012010-11-15T05:47:36.829-08:002010-11-15T05:47:36.829-08:00> I am not cheerful right about now and my inne...> I am not cheerful right about now and my inner Mouseketeer<br />> has not yet asserted itself. . .<br /><br />Frustrated Democratic constituent: "who's the leader of<br />the club that's made for you and me?"<br /><br />(The word "constituent" just struck me as funny. Sounds<br />like the introduction to a recipe, e.g., for stinky air:<br />"Constituents: mostly nitrogen. . . traces of hydrogen<br />sulfide. . .")<br /><br />http://stirredstraightup.blogspot.com/search/label/Mouseketeersjimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.com