The Sexual Degenerates Are In Your Bathroom Mirror…Looking Back At You…
Jesus’ General (an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender) points us to a discussion about women wearing pants, which Thinking Housewife regards as a despicable feminist renunciation of feminine femininity, and quotes Thinking Housewife Contributor Jesse Powell thusly…
If there was a general societal norm that men wore pants while women wore dresses it would be very clear that there was a difference between the sexes.
To which my low key apologetic libido says…
Or a guy’s ass. Seriously…pants make it easier to tell a person’s sex. If both sexes are wearing pants it would not typically be very difficult to identify the sex of the person wearing them. I admit you can still occasionally be fooled. I once mistook a gal named Martha for a guy and no she was not big and ugly, she was lithe and handsome and very very cute. But she had small hips and butt for a gal, and she liked wearing big floppy jackets so I never got a good look at her breasts and it threw me. But that’s not the usual case. The usual case is it’s pretty obvious.
But you’d only know that if…you know…you ever looked carefully. In the A Coming Out Story episode above the joke is I was only looking at guys. Little teenage me grew up without much of an interest in girls and tons of interest in guys and it showed, to my embarrassment whenever it was pointed out to me, in my artwork. The joke here I suspect is we’re witnessing more firsthand evidence that a childhood drenched in right wing sexual mores result in grown adults with pitifully arrested sexual development. If you need gender restrictions in clothing and dress in order to tell the boys from the girls it isn’t society that’s sexually degenerate.
Oh I know…I know…it isn’t that they can’t tell the difference…it’s that clothing as a personal expression of beauty and sexuality is a symptom of evil taking of joy in life. The clothes you wear should remind you of your place and reenforce keeping you in it. More then a uniform, clothes must be a prison within which, hidden and contained, is the shameful flesh, within which is doubly imprisoned the damnable human soul. Else the person inside might escape and have a life of their own.
In the 1950s Evelyn Hooker realized that all extant studies of homosexuals were conducted on homosexuals who had been imprisoned for sex crimes, in therapy or committed to mental institutions, and so they were concluding homosexuals were sick because they only studied sick homosexuals. Her 1957 study, The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual was the first to systematically examine homosexual men who weren’t in prisons or mental institutions or undergoing therapy and, surprise, surprise, discovered that if you study gay men the same way you study straight men they look pretty much alike.
In 2012 Mark Regnerus studied broken families with gay people in them, compared them to intact families headed by heterosexuals, and concluded that gay people make lousy parents, thereby proving that the religious right wants social science and the view of gay people to stay back in the early 1950s.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…
We went through this yesterday, but it’s a stark reminder of where we are.
The deal, though, fails to address a fundamental issue that has been spooking markets: This is the worst possible time for Spain to borrow 100 billion euros. Under the agreement, any amount used to bail out Spain’s banks will be added to the country’s government debt, potentially pushing it to a net 70 percent of gross domestic product, from about 60 percent today.
According to Our Galtian Overlords, austerity is necessary. Except, of course, when it comes to massive failing companies known as banks. Just keep lighting billions of taxpayer money on fire, paying massive salaries to the people who are destroying the world. And nobody mention moral hazard, because that’s what happens when you give someone an extra $10/week in food stamps.
There are lots of reasons the banks are having problems, but one reason is that people have no jobs and no money. And the Galtian Overlords are determined to keep people broke and unemployed, while extracting everything possible from the economy to give to the banks.
There’s stupid, but also a whole lot of evil. Bad people run the world.
-Atrios
This has been another edition of What Atrios Said…
This post on his blog is apparently a talk he gave at the second Berkeley Faculty Club symposium on American Politics and Democracy. He begins by noting he is out of his comfort zone discussing these matters, being an economist and not a political scientist. You should read it anyway because he brings to it the same thoughtful, insightful thinking he brings to economics.
I want to quote some of its passages…
An economist is going to start thinking about democracy with Tony Downs’s economic theory of same. First-past-the-post electoral systems and office-seeking politicians should produce a two-party system. Office-seeking candidates simply won’t join any third party because their chances of election will be too small. Only those who want to make some ideological or demonstrative point rather than to actually win office and then make policy–cough, Ralph Nader, cough–will do so. Hence the stable configuration has two parties. And then the two parties hug the center and follow policies attractive to the median voter.
Ideology will matter–politicians do not run purely for love of office but rather to then make the country into what they regard as a better place. There will be swings to the left, to the right, to the up, to the down, to the forward, to the back. But the policy views of the median voter ought, according to Tony Downs, function as a strong attractor and we should not expect the policies implemented by the politicians who get elected to deviate far from them.
Now there are qualifications. It is the median voter, not the median citizen.George W. Bush became president not because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median person who voted on that Tuesday in November but because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor. Gerrymandering and misapportionment–cough, the Senate, cough–matter a lot. But these are qualifications. Tony Downs made a very strong case that first-past-the-post electoral systems will produce policies that the median voter likes. Thus in this sense the electorate gets the government it deserves. If there are problems, the problems are in the minds of the voters rather than in the Democratic system.
That is the economist’s not theory, not analysis, but rather prejudice. theory. Political scientists will scorn it as hopelessly naïve. But it is the benchmark from which I start.
In a democracy…in a healthy functional democracy, the middle will act as a check on the extremes. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, like when the middle position still favors segregation of the races and the second class status of women as it did here in the 1950s. But the point is the voters generally get the government they asked for, or in H.L. Mencken’s lovely phrase, “Democracy is based on the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But the middle does not like republican policies. I could go on and on about that but it’s basically a fact that the polls show next to no public support for republican economic policies, which are generally understood to benefit only the richest of the rich. Yet those are the policies we get, often with lackluster democratic opposition, if any. So what happened?
Now let me shift and talk about our experience here in America since I got to Washington in early 1993, carrying spears for Alicia Munnell in Lloyd Benson’s Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.
Clinton was a centrist Democrat. The Clinton administration’s priorities were by and large, with exceptions–gays in the military–what you might call “Eisenhower Republican” priorities. Expand healthcare coverage so there were fewer uninsured and fewer people dumped by ambulances on the corners of the Tenderloin. But also control government healthcare cost which were then ballooning out of control–even though we didn’t know what “ballooning out of control” really meant. Balance the budget. End welfare as we know it–thus buying into the Republican critique of the Depression-era belief that raising children was real work–even if you were not married to a rich husband who was the chief executive of Bain Capital–and a socially-valuable task. Passing NAFTA. Creating the World Trade Organization. Strengthening Social Security through a combination of tax increases, benefit cuts, retirement=age increases, mandated private accounts requiring individuals to contribute their own money over and above Social Security (as an add-on but not a carve-out, as a supplement to and not a substitute for Roosevelt’s New Deal’s Social Security).
All of these seemed to us in the early 1990s to be bang-on the median voter’s preferences, Eisenhower Republicans. Clinton Democrats. We in the Bentsen Treasury at the start of 1993 looked forward to doing an awful lot of technocratic work–cranking out centrist legislation approved by large bipartisan majorities.
We found Republicans cooperative on NAFTA.
We found Republicans pushing for welfare reform–but only to the extent of passing things that were so highly punitive that they could not believe any Democratic president could in good conscience sign them. But Clinton fooled them. He signed welfare reform–and then spent some time in 1996 campaigning on the message: “re-elect me because only I can undo some of the damage that I have done to the welfare system”. Which was true. And which he did.
Otherwise…
That was the old game. Hammer out compromise legislation and move on because at the end of the day what was important to both sides was keeping the country strong and prosperous, even if they had different ideas of how to go about that, even if it meant their individual constituencies didn’t get everything they wanted. Everyone agreed at the end of the day that the government still had to function and it’s work needed to get done.
But notice how the center as defined by Bill Clinton was by then way further to the right on economic policy then it was at any time since The New Deal. What was happening was since Watergate the republicans had become more radicalized and the democrats just kept playing the old game of Find The Center. And over a span of just a few elections that had moved the center way to the right. What happened next was the logical outcome of that.
Otherwise the Republicans when I got to Washington at the start of 1993 decided that they were going to adopt the Gingrich strategy: oppose everything the Democratic president proposes, especially if it had previously been a Republican proposal and priority. That is not a strategy that would ever be adopted by anybody who wants to see their name written in the Book of Life.
But Gingrich found followers.
And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen’s chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole’s chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.
That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment out of his years in Congress. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I now remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994 but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan, and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins.
As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice’s book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second…
Exactly. He goes on to give an account of this just getting worse and worse, first with Clinton and the impeachment circus, then, massively so, with president Obama.
Then came Obama in 2009 and 2010. My friends–Christina Romer, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and company–headed off to Washington to plan a Recovery Act that they thought would get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It was a squarely bipartisan fiscal stimulus: this tax cut to make the Republicans stand up and applaud, this infrastructure increase to make the Democrats applaud, this increase in aid to the states to make the governors and state legislators applaud.
It didn’t get 25 Republican votes in the Senate. It got 3.
On healthcare reform, Barrack Obama’s opening bid was the highly-Republican Heritage Foundation plan, the plan that George Romney had chosen for Massachusetts.
RomneyCare got zero republican votes.
On budget balance Obama’s proposals have not been the one-to-one equal amounts of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget of Clinton 1993 or Bush 1990. Obama’s proposals have been more along the lines of $1 of tax increases for every $5 of spending cuts.
And the Republicans rejected them
And so on… DeLong starts the time of the breaking of our democracy with Gingrich. That’s likely because he saw it first hand there in Washington. But Gingrich was the next logical outcome down a course the republicans have been relentlessly following since Nixon and the Southern Strategy.
In the years after the civil war and the first and second world wars, we thought of ourselves as one country. Regardless of where people stood on the left/right spectrum there was this general sense that at the end of the day we were all Americans and there was a love of country that moderated all but the lunatic fringe. Nixon understood that this e pluribus unum mindset would leave a party that by then existed simply to represent the interests of big business, the rich and the powerful in a permanent minority status.
Working Americans were fine with The New Deal. As long as the prosperity of the working class was rising the tide for the upper classes too the republican establishment was fine with just tinkering around the edges. But it couldn’t last. Eisenhower was conservative on many social issues, weak on civil rights and civil liberties, but not overtly hostile as the Nixon/McCarty branch of the party was. He was the last of the moderate republicans who believed that a healthy middle class was necessary to the vitality of the economy and the security of the United States.
Nixon hated the elites, the intellectuals, the liberals. He positioned himself as the champion of the common man against the elites. But it was those elites who had improved the status of the common man, and now threatened to do the same for women and minorities. Nixon was no great friend to the rich and powerful either, but as they would decades later in a man called Dubya they saw in Nixon’s paranoia and bottomless hatred someone who might just break the New Deal coalition of labor, rural and urban voters. And then they could go back to what they were doing back in Hoover’s Day…getting rich quick in the Wall Street casino.
Divide the country and we’ll have the bigger half Pat Buchanan told Nixon. But without a doubt Nixon took that advice because he was already considering it. Divisive pit American against American campaigning had been his method of winning elections since his first run for congress. They simply scaled the Nixon technique up and made it a permanent American against American cold war. Very deliberately they sought to replace in the working class voter love of country with love of tribe. No more of this e pluribus unum communist socialist nonsense. And like Gingrich would decades later, they found allies. White blue collar workers who hated black people. Males resentful toward independent women. Rural voters who loathed big city people with their big city morals and ideas. Poor people jealous of union workers with their union paychecks. Christian fundamentalists who loath the people in the church across the street.
When you got right down to it, America was a country of the imagination only. It wasn’t a nation by blood and ancestry. Our shared history is very brief compared to what the peoples of Europe, Asia and South America see as their own. The United States is a nation based on a political ideal of liberty and justice for all. The social contract was simply that we had each others backs when it came to that liberty and justice for all thing. Your freedom in the pursuit of happiness is as dear to me as my own. We are all Americans. As long as that held true a party of the rich and powerful would never win very many elections or wield enough power to impose its will on the majority. But the New Deal majority was a coalition of many diverse parts of working America and the republicans became expert at playing them against each other, that they might rule over all.
When Scott Walker was caught talking about using a divide and conquer strategy he wasn’t just talking about himself or just breaking the unions: this has been the essential republican strategy for gaining and keeping power since Nixon. Divide the country, set working American against working American, and in the end the rich and powerful take all. And it’s worked.
One thing I have learned from watching the Wall Street boys run the country is they’re not very good at it, and at some level they might even know they’re not very good at it. But they don’t care about running the country, they just want to get it out of their way so they can chase some more money. It’s all about the money chase with them. When the economy tanks, when the stock market goes bust, when banks and businesses go bankrupt right and left, they blame everyone but themselves. They’re like a bunch of drunk drivers convinced they’re fit to drive because they haven’t killed anyone yet, and when they do it was an accident and it was dark and that pedestrian just jumped right out in front of them and they didn’t mean to do it so stop treating them like criminals. Once upon a time the nation had laws against their sort of drunk driving. Those laws were there to protect the rest of us. But those law got in their way. Who are you to tell me I can’t drink and drive…it’s my car and my taxes paid for the highway and if I can’t drink and drive then it’s not a free country and all you other drivers on the road are socialists.
The money chase is all they care about. The New Deal coalition got in their way so they set about busting it apart. If in the process of doing that they ripped America apart too and put the nation at risk of catastrophic social upheaval that isn’t important. If once the brakes are off their reckless driving crashes the economy to smithereens and the lives of honest hard working Americans are destroyed and the future strength and security of the nation is placed in jeopardy that isn’t important. They don’t care about America. They are citizens of the stock market.
If you didn’t catch “Meet the Press” yesterday, you missed a lively conversation about, among other things, women’s votes in 2012 and the policy controversies that have put women’s issues at the forefront of the political landscape.
As you’ll see in this clip, around the 5:20 mark, Rachel noted the pay disparity between men and women in this country, which prompted some unexpected pushback (and incessant interruptions) from Republican strategist Alex Castellanos.
Unexpected? Like the incessant interruptions? Golly it’s almost as if they wanted to just shut you up woman…
The angle to this to keep in mind is that the Republicans on the panel, Castellanos and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), simply reject the available facts on the wage gap. Despite ampleevidence that shows women make less than men for the same work, Castellanos chooses to believe his own version of reality in which that’s not the case.
…
There’s simply no shared foundation of reality, which in turn shapes the policy debate in unproductive ways. The left sees gender-based pay disparity and looks for mechanisms to address the problem; the right rejects the existence of the disparity and sees no use for the solutions because, to them, there is no problem.
If I may…no. Just…no. You’re giving the right way too much credit for making a good faith argument here.
The problem isn’t that they don’t think gender pay disparity exists. They know damn well it exists. They don’t think that’s a problem. It is instead but a simple The Way God And Nature Intended Things To Be truth. Women just don’t belong in the workplace, let alone the family planning clinic. Giving them equal pay diminishes the rightful status of men and encourages women to abandon their role as child bearers and housekeepers. That said, the right also knows that in this day and age, at least here in the decadent west if not in many areas of the righteous middle east, people are generally sickened by caveman attitudes toward women. This is part of what they see as the decline of civilization. It’s getting so men can’t drag their women around by the hair anymore! So rather then give people their honest reasons why discrimination against women is a good thing they’re spreading a line of propaganda to the effect that there is no discrimination.
Wage discrimination? No such thing! So nothing to see here people….move along…move along…
Dan Savage offended some Christian teens when he told them “We can learn to ignore the bull—t in the Bible about gay people.”
…
After many students walked out of the speech, one of whom appeared to be crying, Savage said, “It’s funny, as someone who’s on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.”
Right on cue the usual suspects wing up the noise machine…
Fox News reports that Savage’s comments upset the executive director of GOProud, a gay conservative group.
“Dan Savage should apologize for his comments and should apologize to the high school students in attendance whom he called ‘pansy-asses,’” Jimmy LaSalvia told Fox. “It is ironic that someone whose claim to fame is fighting bullying would resort to bullying tactics in attacking high school students who were offended by his outrageous remarks.”
There is so much to unpack here. Firstly, the headline. This is that right wing propaganda everyone has bought into over the years, that the only authentic Christians are the right wing bigots and everyone else is just faking it. How many of the kids who stayed to hear what Savage had to say, regardless of what they thought of it, also identified as Christian? We don’t get that information in any of the mainstream news stories I’ve seen on this. No, no…it was Christians, capital ‘C’ who walked out and who Savage tossed a going away insult at. Those were the only Christians in that auditorium that day.
Secondly, Savage didn’t stir up anything…that bubbling open sewer that calls itself the moral majority needs no stirring, it is always on the boil. This incident wouldn’t look more like the usual case of right wing manufactured outrage if those kids were wearing t-shirts that said “We Are Here To Take Offense At Anything You Have To Say”. I am expected to believe that none of the kids in that group who walked out knew who Dan Savage was or what his positions were on sex, gay sex, and the bible am I? Right. Pull the other one.
Suddenly it’s We’re Not The Bullies, Dan Savage Is The Bully, Because He Insulted Us!!! Yes. Yes he did. And a well earned insult it was too. In the Twitter fury that followed, LOLGOP Tweeted: “I’ve not yet met one conservative Christian who is considering suicide because of bullying as thousands of LGBT youth do every day.” Just so. It is grotesque to watch the right wing noise machine compare Dan Savage’s crack about the kids walking out of his talk to what gay kids deal with every day of their lives, usually at the hands of kids like the ones who walked out. This from The Christian Post:
The 17-year-old California student, whose name was not given, told CitizenLink’s Karla Dial that Savage said people using the Bible to justify their views on homosexuality being a sin often cite Leviticus and Romans in saying that “being gay is wrong.”
“Right after that, he said we can ignore all the ‘B.S.’ in the Bible,” the student told CitizenLink, which is affiliated with faith-based organization Focus on the Family.
The student said she suddenly reacted by blurting out “That’s bull!” before storming out of the auditorium along with several other students. Savage reportedly called the students pansies upon noticing their exit.
That passage in Leviticus Savage was telling them was BS, and which the student there is righteously affirming, calls for homosexuals to be put to death, adding “Their blood is upon them”. Yes, we can throw death threats at our classmates and we’re just quoting the bible, but if you call us pansies you’re a bully.
Look at what this tells you about the mindset here. It was a rash of gay kids killing themselves at the beginning of the previous school year that prompted Savage to start his “It Get’s Better” campaign, which has never gotten anything but raspberries from the wingers. Yet now they rise in a righteous howl of anger at a small group of fundamentalist kids being called pansies. Look at it. No…really look at it. These are people who just can’t figure out why tormenting gay kids to death would be such a big deal with anyone other then it’s some kind of political posturing. The way they see it we’re posturing so they get to posture too. That gay kids are being made so miserable by the torrent of hatred being directed at them that they want to kill themselves just doesn’t seem like it should be such a big deal to the wingers.
And the reason for that is simple, obvious, and sickening. The way the right wing sees it, if the kid is gay then being treated like human garbage is what they should expect. Because they are.
Think I’m engaging in hyperbole there? When did you ever see the kind of outrage on the right toward the tormenting of gay kids that you are seeing now being directed at Dan Savage after he called the fundamentalists who walked out of his talk “pansies”. When have you ever heard a winger get upset at gay kids being called that? Cut me a break. They call gay people that and worse all the fucking time and they don’t particularly care if gay kids get called names or not. Who is fighting tooth and nail to prevent anti-bullying campaigns from specifically protecting gay kids from being bullied? The same people who are bellyaching about what Dan Savage said to a group of fundamentalists, that’s who.
How often do I have to see this before I’m allowed to call it what it is? The way the right wing sees it, the way fundamentalist bigots see it, it is only natural to treat gay kids like human garbage. Because they are. God hates them. My bible tells me so and if yours doesn’t you are not a Christian. Make no mistake, the outrage here isn’t entirely manufactured, but if you think it’s out of sympathy for the kids Savage insulted you are still not getting it. The problem isn’t that Dan Savage insulted a group of fundamentalist kids. It’s that he told them to leave their gay peers alone, using language they routinely use against their gay peers. He stood up for the gay kids. There’s where the anger is coming from.
Brutalizing gay people is one of their most cherished religious sacraments. You mess with that and you will hear the gutter scream like they are being crucified.
[Update…] “Theirs was not an act born of suffering. It was a proud show of disdain.” – Christian author John Shore.
The so-called “license to bully” bill…would allow students to share any “religious, philosophical, or political views” that are “unpopular,” regardless of their consequences to the learning environment, and limits educators’ ability to curb such harassment.
Equality advocates lodged an email protest campaign against the measure, but were particularly surprised by the reaction of state Rep. John Ragan (R). In a long letter to one opponent of the bill, Ragan replied that gay “feelings” can be controlled by “mentally healthy adult human beings,” and concluded by stating, “Should society avoid disapproving of pedophilia, prostitution, murder, etc., because practitioners of those behaviors may commit suicide at higher rates?”
(Emphasis mine) What you have to understand about the human gutter is it has no bottom. Here is a man who wants to enable the very bullying that causes gay kids to kill themselves, saying the fact that gays are more likely to commit suicide is proof that there’s something wrong with them. Nice way to prove a point huh?
No bigot, there’s something wrong with you. Something profoundly, terribly wrong with you. Mentally healthy adult human beings? I’m laughing in your face. What do you call an adult who can abuse kids, can create a climate where kids can be easily abused, and does not see anything wrong with what they’re doing?
In the current issue of the center-right policy journal, National Affairs, former Bush domestic policy adviser Tevi Troy worries about the decline of Washington think tanks into partisan messaging operations.
Stop…stop…you’re killing me. Seriously, on what planet were most beltway think tanks, and especially AEI and Heritage, ever not partisan messaging operations?
Yes, yes, liberal “think tanks” exist, but how many global corporations and multi-billionaires are going to fund a think tank that starts from an ideologically liberal economic position? Right wing and conservative “think tanks” basically rule the beltway discourse and you always know what their conclusions will be, and which party will happily benefit from them. Their non-partisanship is a farce. They are think tanks like Intelligent Design is science.
There’s a rule of thumb about think tanks: If you already know what the conclusion is before you pick up the paper and read it, it is not a think tank. Rand is a think tank. Let me explain by this example from Wiki:
In 1958, Democratic Senator Stuart Symington accused the RAND Corporation of defeatism for studying how the United States might strategically surrender to an enemy power. This led to the passage of a prohibition on the spending of tax dollars on the study of defeat or surrender of any kind. However, the senator had apparently misunderstood, as the report was a survey of past cases in which the U.S. had demanded unconditional surrender of its enemies, asking whether or not this had been a more favorable outcome to U.S. interests than an earlier, negotiated surrender would have been.
See how that works. They asked a question they didn’t already know the answer to and set about to answer it. No ideology, just answers. AEI and Heritage, to name two, begin with the answer in the form of an ideological position (unconditional surrender is always the most favorable outcome) and try to figure out a way to message that for the benefits of republicans.
What these organizations do is tactical rhetoric, not thinking. Thinking is where you search for answers, not fashion attractive political battle flags. Thinking takes you into undiscovered places. That’s not allowed in organization like AEI, which Frum found out when he got the boot for not towing the line. These are party instruments, nothing more nothing less. They exist precisely to discourage thinking. You are told what to think. Or at any rate, what to say that you think.
Witness the decline in American governance. We can’t confront the real problems that exist because our institutions of government are mired in ideologies which demand fealty over everything else. Facts don’t matter, only the party matters, and free thinking is treason to the party. And so our ability as a nation to grow and prosper into the 21st century is limited to what the ideologies in power will allow, and that isn’t much. We were promised a shining city on a hill. What we got were factories closed, wages devastated, pensions lost, entire neighborhoods in foreclosure and state and local governments teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Yet the ideologies that promised us that shining city are never held to account. For all the think tanks in Washington, not a whole lot of thinking is actually going on.
Behold Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders…beset upon by socialist moochers, second-handers and looters…
…not. Let’s be real here…no welfare queen ever had a larger sense of entitlement then the tea partiers.
Its easy to point and laugh at signs like the one above…and this one…
But it isn’t just the crazies who’ve been taken in and lit up by the right wing noise machine. To one degree or another, the nation as a whole has accepted a disastrously false economic construct: that the economy is driven by businesses, banks and wealthy investors. Producers produce wealth, consumers consume it. Producers build factories, establish businesses, engage in commerce and thereby create jobs…almost as a side effect of their economic vitality. It’s their world, they built it, these Atlases of commerce. The rest of us just live in it. Without the Atlases the rest of us would have nothing.
Hence the bellyaching about going Galt. It’s like the constantly nagging and entitled parent or grandparent who keeps warning You’ll be sorry when I’m gone and after so many years of it you’ve begun planning a party to celebrate the event. There’s a scene in Atlas Shrugged where the worthless playboy Francisco d’Anconia (secretly an agent of the Galt’s Gulch strikers) talks with industrialist Hank Rearden, owner of Rearden Steel and inventor of Rearden Metal. They are at a party at Readen’s magnificent mansion. They stand at a window as a storm rages in the night outside…
“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.”
Rearden did not answer for a moment; then he said, as if in answer to himself, a tone of wonder in his voice, “Funny…”
“What?”
“You told me what I was thinking just a while ago…”
“You were?”
“…only I didn’t have the words for it.”
“Shall I tell you the rest of the words?”
“Go ahead.”
“You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel – because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.”
…and just never you mind the people who designed and engineered that house, who mined its marble floors and brass and gold for its fixtures, who felled and milled the trees and laid the bricks and stones. See…they don’t even exist in the right winger frame of mind, let alone the world of Ayn Rand, except as looters, moochers and second-handers, leaching off the vitality of the world’s Atlases like vampires. But without all those looters, those second-handers, those moochers paying rents for their own modest apartments, or buying their own modest homes, purchasing their own little economy cars and appliances, patronizing various merchants, making the building of all those things economically viable, Hank Rearden’s foundries would have nothing to do and his magnificent mansion would have never been built and he’d be shit out of luck on that open plain too.
Whose, really, is the motor of the world? Nick Hanauer, himself a venture capitalist, sees where it really is:
It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.
That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.
And that’s what has been happening in the U.S. for the last 30 years.
Since 1980, the share of the nation’s income for fat cats like me in the top 0.1 percent has increased a shocking 400 percent, while the share for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has declined 33 percent. At the same time, effective tax rates on the superwealthy fell to 16.6 percent in 2007, from 42 percent at the peak of U.S. productivity in the early 1960s, and about 30 percent during the expansion of the 1990s. In my case, that means that this year, I paid an 11 percent rate on an eight-figure income.
One reason this policy is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff…
I can’t buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can’t buy any new clothes or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the tens of millions of middle-class families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages…
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Middle-class consumers do, and when they thrive, U.S. businesses grow and profit…
So let’s give a break to the true job creators. Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth by putting purchasing power back in the hands of the middle class. And let’s remember that capitalists without customers are out of business…
The meme, the Randian dogma, the right wing spin the nation has bought into since Reagan sold us on it, that it is the rich industrialists who create jobs. No. Customers create jobs. The flow of money from employer to employee to employer again creates jobs. Building factories and office space where there is no demand for goods, simply because you suddenly have tons of money to do something with, is what happens in this thing they call a Bubble. Hey…let’s build a factory because we can! No demand, no sales. No sales: bankruptcy. The factory closes, the employees loose their paychecks, the money stops flowing, the motors…were…stopping…
We’ve seen how that works, time and time again in the past thirty years, yet the right wingers keep insisting if we just give more free money to the rich they’ll build factories, or offices space or something and then the rest of us will have jobs. But nobody sane builds a factory if it isn’t bloody likely to sell anything that it makes.
No. The super rich won’t build factories. Not if there is no money to be made doing that. And if they can plainly see there is an easier way to make money, they’ll do that instead. And for them these days, there is. It’s called Wall Street. So if the middle class is dying, how are the rich making money these days…?
A newly-released study from the Congressional Research Service bolsters claims that the nation’s largest banks profited off the Federal Reserve’s financial crisis-era programs by borrowing cash for next to nothing, then lending it back to the federal government at substantially higher rates.
The report reinforces long-held beliefs that the banking system in essence engaged in taxpayer-financed arbitrage: They got money for free, then lent it back to Uncle Sam while collecting juicy returns.
They make paper profits by moving money back and forth among each other, and then when that blows up in their faces, they take it from the taxpayers…the middle class and the poor. Obviously they’re fine with that system and don’t want it touched. But it is not sustainable and they are not just putting the economy at risk, but our very democracy.
You see, trickle down economics really does work…but only from the middle down. I grew up in the world Hanauer speaks of. I remember it well. I was raised by a single working mother back in a day when women made maybe 60 cents on the dollar a man made for doing the same work. I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothes mom got from the church, but I never went out the door in dirty clothes. We ate a simple, very bland English diet, but I never went to bed hungry. I got a decent education because back in the late 50s and early 60s we were in a cold war with the Soviet Union and public education was something the nation was keen to spend money on so we didn’t loose the technological race. There were good jobs (at least if you were white). And all those high paying union jobs went to families who spent that money on goods and services, not at the Wall Street casino. And that made it possible for poorer, service sector workers, even single mothers, to still earn a living wage and raise kids. I know this. I am one of those kids.
Yes, when government sucks money out of the economy in the form of oppressive taxes, that will stifle economic growth and kill the middle class too. But taxation isn’t the only worry and big government isn’t the only threat to the economy. You can kill the middle class by sucking their wages out in the form of taxes, but you can also kill it, as we are clearly seeing now, by slashing wages in order to maintain astronomical profits that do nothing more then grease the roulette wheels of Wall Street. Big business can be every bit the threat to the economy and to democracy that big government can be.
There need to be brakes put on both. For the sake of our cherished freedoms, and our children’s and their children’s. Libertarianism, with its dogma of unregulated unfettered capitalism utterly removes the brakes on big business. Anyone with eyes to see and a mind not completely corrupted by ideology can see in the decades after Reagan sold us that shining city on a hill what comes of that. If the totalitarian police state is one side of a coin, Libertarianism is the other. Heads, power collects in the hands of the few, the people become their slaves, the economy grinds to a halt and the country tailspins into economic collapse. Tails: see heads.
Democracy gave the common man and woman, gave humanity as a whole, a level of prosperity that would have astonished the peasants who labored under the kings of old. To live, it needs a robust and energetic economy. And to have that, you need a stable and prosperous middle class. Because those people take their money and they spend it on Things…on goods and services that other people earn money making…and that keeps the money circulating and the economy humming along.
John Galt isn’t the motor of the world. John and Jane Doe are.
1943, Female Welder at Work in a Steel Mill by Margaret Bourke-White
At Saturday’s GOP presidential forum in Iowa, newly minted frontrunner Newt Gingrich tore into the Occupy Wall Street movement, pointing to it as a symbol of exactly what’s wrong with America. “All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything,” he explained. “That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, ‘Go get a job, right after you take a bath'”
There is an unpopular war going on, protestors are in the streets, cops fly into sickening displays of police brutality at every peaceful protest they show up at, and right wing politicians are telling the dirty fucking hippies to take a bath. When did 2011 turn into 1972 and can I at least have my eighteen year old body back?
When I Use A Word It Means Just What I Want You To Hate
I see from Jeremy at Good As You that NOM is doubling down on the Gay Rights = Pedophilia rhetoric. On the NOM Blog they’re pointing to a post by Joe Carter that babbles that same claptrap about the B4U-ACT Symposium happening in Baltimore Brian Brown was a couple days ago…
Back in June I outlined how to destroy a culture in 5 easy steps.
An academic symposium in Baltimore comprised of just such a cluster of professoriate and perverts is meeting today to shift the acceptance of pedophilia from “unthinkable” to merely “radical”…
With the euphemism “minor-attracted persons” they are also including Step #2: “From Radical to Acceptable — This shift requires the creation and employment of euphemism.”… Remember when conservatives were mocked and derided for claiming that Lawrence would lead to the normalization [of] polygamy and pedophilia? Now some of those same people who sneered at us are using the decision to promote . . . polygamy and pedophilia.
It looks like they’re fixating on the use of the term “minor-attracted persons” by a group of mental health professionals, but you need to understand while you read it that they know their audience. They are speaking to the kook pews…the ones who don’t know and don’t care what words mean so long as they help win the culture war. Words are weapons, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else. And science is the enemy that believes words have meaning. What Joe Carter and Brian Brown know perfectly well, is that “minor-attracted persons” is not intended to obfuscate that meaning, but clarify it. They know this. But they also know their audience.
There is ephebophilia, which is the sexual attraction to mid to late adolescents…teens 15 and up. There is hebephilia, which this symposium seems to view as the sexual attraction toward teens from post puberty to 14 years (I’ve seen this defined to a higher age range elsewhere). And then there is the ever popular (to the gay haters) pedophilia, which is the sexual attraction to children below the age of puberty. All these terms are used precisely and specifically by mental health professionals, whereas your usual right wing nutcase just says PEDOPHILE for all of it. And without a doubt that’s less because they are idiots with small vocabularies, smaller brains and even smaller regard for whether the words they do know mean anything, and more because they understand that screaming PEDOPHILE at gay people rouses passions and short circuits any possibility of mutual understanding. They don’t want understanding, they just want people to hate Teh Gay.
And that means science is the hated enemy. More even, then Teh Gay. It is the first enemy. The enemy that must be brought down before all others, or else the war is lost. Because the practice of science uses words for their actual meaning, not their tactical advantage. Because science lets the evidence speak for itself. Because science acknowledges no higher authority then the observable facts. Let’s take a look once more, at the part of this symposium brochure that the kook pews are screaming bloody murder about:
This day-long symposium will facilitate the exchange of ideas among researchers, scholars, mental health practitioners, and minor-attracted persons who have an interest in critical issues surrounding the entry for pedophilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. The symposium will address critical issues in the following areas:
Scientific and philosophical issues related to the DSM entry on pedophilia and/or hebephilia
Effects of the DSM entry on stigma, availability of mental health services, and research
Ways in which minor-attracted persons can be involved in the DSM 5 revision process
It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. This is especially true for the DSM entry on pedophilia; it has an enormous impact on the beliefs and practices of mental health professionals, the criminal justice system, the media, and the public. It also has a profound effect on adults and teenagers who are emotionally and sexually attracted to children or adolescents, on the availability of mental health services for them, and on relevant research.
It is crucial that the DSM be based on the most accurate and complete scientific information available, and on careful consideration of effects on the welfare of patients and society. No shit Sherlock. The problem is anything that tells us something real and useful about the human condition is almost certain to drive the kook pews into babbling hysterical fits. Darwin anyone?
It is staringly obvious that the term “minor-attracted persons” in the context of this symposium is clearly intended to be an all-encompassing term for pedophilia and hebephilia together. To the world outside the anti-gay industrial complex, but especially the mental health profession, using the term pedophilia to describe all adults who are sexually attracted to minors is illiterate. And to anyone who has followed the ravings of the gay-fixated kook pews, and especially crackpot wholesale warehouses like NOM and FRC, it would be easy to assume that illiteracy is the functional norm in there. But it isn’t. Not at the top. Not where the money is being collected. Not where the votes are being counted. When Brian Brown and Joe Carter tell their readers that the term “minor attracted adults” is a euphemism signaling a desire to normalize pedophilia they know Exactly what they are doing. They are rousing the mob. And not just because the mob is the only tool they have left, to win the culture war.
The mob is their kinfolk, their kingdom, their shining city on the hill; cleansed completely of the hated Other, where no one rises above the prejudices of the many to remind them of the gutter they’ve turned America into, and which they are all living in.
Letter To Fred Haitt’s Pathetic Excuse For An Ombudsman…
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 17:12:57 -0400
From: Bruce Garrett
To: ombudsman@washpost.com
Subject: The furor
You write…
Liberals and conservatives don’t talk to each other much anymore; they exist in parallel online universes, only crossing over to grab some explosive anti-matter from the other side to stoke the rage in their own blogosphere.
Followed almost immediately by…
Rubin was hired by Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Post, to be an opinion blogger who would appeal to conservatives and people who want to follow conservative politics. She does.
He hired her in other words, to do for the Post readership what you are bellyaching that blogs are doing to their readers. You’d think that the newspaper of record in the nation’s capital would set a higher standard for itself. You’d think.
Maybe your publication should consider the possible consequences of enabling political echo chamber vitriol itself. You are giving it a legitimacy the blogs could never hope to accomplish.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
Haitt hired Rubin because he knew she’d stoke right wing vitriol. And he hired you because he knew you’d make excuses for that.
Now You Know The Reason They Seemed So Vulnerable To You
Details of the horrific events in Norway will continue to unfold no doubt for weeks, if not months to come. So it is well that we all just take a deep breath and wait for solid information to come out. I understand the impulse to think it was radical Islamic terrorism when the news first hit; it was my first reaction too. But I remembered Oklahoma City and held my peace and waited. And now it seems from the facts coming to light, that this was indeed more Oklahoma City then 9/11…
She did not think the order was strange at the time because the suspect has a farm, but after Friday’s explosion in Norway’s capital, Oslo, she called police because she knew the material can be used to make bombs.
“We are very shocked that this man was connected to our company,” said Estenstad. “We are very sad about what happened.”
That sounds vaguely familiar. But bear in mind there is still an investigation going on and we really still don’t know much. This passage from the suspect’s postings to an anti-Muslim website struck me though…
I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years.
….Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.
This from a man who (it is said) methodically killed 80 kids at a youth camp, some while they were swimming away for their lives. Always, the monster the bigot sees in others is themselves. And they are right to fear that monster.
In 1997, the state of Florida made it a felony for someone who is HIV positive to have sexual intercourse without telling their partner. Now…what do you think that means in a state that very specifically defines sexual intercourse only as vaginal sex between a man and a woman.
Last month, the court of appeal overturned a Bradenton woman’s conviction for exposing her female partner to HIV because the sexual acts were between two women. The law “does not apply to her actions,” the 2nd District Court of Appeal said.
The ruling applies statewide, meaning gays and lesbians cannot be convicted of hiding their HIV status from their sex partners, at least for now. Neither can anyone who only engages in sexual acts that do not fit the state’s legal definition of intercourse — “the penetration of the female sex organ by the male sex organ.”
So when Sarasota County authorities arrested an HIV-positive man this week on charges he had anal and oral sex with a 14-year-old boy, the sexual battery charge may stick, but the HIV charge will not…
This reminds me of another case, I think it was also in Florida, where it turned out a man could either not be charged by the state or not be sued by his estranged wife for adultery, because his sexual dalliance was committed with another man not another woman. In this case the oversight was, as the article notes, “…a glitch in the statute that nobody noticed before…” I can’t imagine why.
Well…yes I can. The thinking here clearly is that if we’re written out of the law then they don’t have to worry about some activist judge finding that we have these things called “rights”. So as far as the law is concerned in Florida, only heterosexuals have this thing called sex, and for that matter only when one man’s penis is entering one woman’s vagina. At some point they may also want to specify the missionary position for further clarity.
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