Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2: Chewing over the News
537 Responses
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Rush Limbaugh billboard in Tucson
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Matthew Littlewood, in reply to
Paul Krugman has his own take on the political divide in the US House and Senate:
One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.
It's worth pointing out that in the current climate, a candidate with the socio-economic worldview of say, Eisenhower, or even Nixon (!), wouldn't stand a chance of winning the GOP nomination now.
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nzlemming, in reply to
Wow! Like water-boarding for chocolate. I’ve seen some suppositions in my time, but this is the whole suppository.
So awesome! :-D
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WashTimes doubles down on the blood libel business:
This is simply the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
WashTimes
Surprised to see it still going - The Rev. Sun announced he was closing it some time back.
update: I see it was sold for a token $1 which given its circulation figures seems about right.
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$1
That would be sad if it wasn't so funny.
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Angus Robertson, in reply to
Angus, you appear to have found a level of superb ideological balance where neither those alleging “war criminal” nor those alleging “secret Muslim” have more credibility than the other.
I am not asking you to compare their credibility, Sam. I agree with you, claims of torture are more credible than what the Birthers et al have.
What I'd like to know is who thinks calling someone a Muslim portrays more hatred of the individual than calling them a torturer & war criminal?
But if you'd like to try somethingelse more credible - socialist vs. torturer & war criminal - is also relevent.
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Simon Grigg, in reply to
But if you'd like to try somethingelse more credible - socialist vs. torturer & war criminal - is also relevent.
Why is that any different to the last comparison? We still have a baseless bit of ignorant name calling using a word that is only a slur if your narrow world defines it as such, whilst the second is a claim based on a fairly substantial body of legal opinion, albeit untested in court for reasons stated earlier.
I agree with you, claims of torture are more credible than what the Birthers et al have.
So why put the two next to each other as a point of direct like-on-like comparison and then spend the next page or two arguing that the war criminal claim has no credibility?
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Best line I have seen so far on the Tea Baggers/Sara Palin feelings
" Palin & crew are feeling unjustly blamed for the actions of an extremist. Maybe they can ask Muslims for advice on how to deal w/ that."
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
WashTimes doubles down on the blood libel business:
M’kay… I think the auditions for the Dixie Chicks are being held down the hall. Don’t you just love people like Palin and Coulter going on their book tours and bitching about how their dissent is being “suppressed” by the New York media elite? Sorry, when you've got book deals -- and hefty promotional budgets -- with the two largest publishing houses in the English-speaking world, I'm not going to order the kegs for the pity party.
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Steve Parks, in reply to
What I’d like to know is who thinks calling someone a Muslim portrays more hatred of the individual than calling them a torturer & war criminal?
Calling someone a Muslim with the intention of it being a slur is like when bigots try to insult someone by calling them a homo - it says more about the people making the claim than the target of their name calling.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
What I’d like to know is who thinks calling someone a Muslim portrays more hatred of the individual than calling them a torturer & war criminal?
Calling someone a Muslim with the intention of it being a slur is like when bigots try to insult someone by calling them a homo – it says more about the people making the claim than the target of their name calling.
It's also an (attempted) slur aimed at what and who a person is, rather than what they've done. The distinction is quite important.
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Kracklite, in reply to
That, I think is the crux of it, a point that Angus is missing. Perhaps, I might venture, he is doing this deliberately, considering his avoidance of directly answering questions that looks like bad faith. Does he deny that torture occurred, does he deny that the President of the United States enjoys the rank of Commander in Chief, does he deny that Harry Truman famously has a plaque on his desk reading “The buck stops here”, does he deny that…
…oh, sod it, the strange, postmodernistically recursive “he said so, but he didn’t mean it even if it did happen he didn’t order it because he said it for campaign purposes and didn’t mean it even if people did it after being told to do it in…” is giving me vertigo. Moebius, Rieman and Klein have nothing on that kind of inversion. God (even if it hates being called that) couldn’t sort it out. What a pity Jacques Derrida’s dead, I’d really like to know his interpretation of that line of argument, if only for amusement’s sake.
Ahem, anyway, indeed there has been hatred directed at GWB, just as there has been hatred directed at Obama, and maybe even the amounts have been comparable in degree, but not in quality. Condemnation of ethnicity and faith (and based on paranoid fantasy as well), thinly disguised as hatred of “terrorism” (yeah, like my Muslim students are constantly blowing themselves up – it really disrupts the tutorials to no end, I can tell you) is hardly justifiable, but the condemnation, even hatred of war crimes and their perpetrators is surely of a different order. To claim an equivalence is naive at best, and to aggressively pursue it as a point of argument looks a lot like disingenuousness and bigotry.
Is that extreme for me to say that? Well I do have to ask if being a Muslim is the same as being a war criminal. That equivalence has to be established if the comparison is to have any validity (also, proof that evidence of equivalent value supports these claims would also be nice). To me it doesn’t, and to attempt to do so is repulsive.
Sometimes moral condemnation is justified, sometimes it is not. That is the difference. Is that clear? Is that in a short enough sentence, with words of few enough syllables?
Oh, hang on, it’s “socialist” now. Right, well, I think we’ve come up with a new sport. It’s rather like rugby in that there’s a field and there are goalposts, but the difference is that the goalposts are running all over the place and you have to chase them.
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The Derrida defense. Dada da, dum dum, dada da, dum dum ...
Oh, sorry, that's Hugo Ball, not Murray.
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Zang tumb tumb!
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recordari, in reply to
That's just Propaganda.
(Hope that works. On iPhone)
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Oh, the eighties. I miss them. (OK, not the gelled mullets and bubble skirts, but...)
And where would we be without Max?
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Sacha, in reply to
those moments in love
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From the 1980s but brand new, re-polished just this week:
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And since we are a-videoing:
From Te Atatu's finest sons - quite grand in its understatement
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See your screaming la de das, and raise you another ZTT artist.
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Ok, if that's the way it's going:
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Then we go here, right?
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Might as well go all the way (the city may have changed but the sentiment is the same):
The downside to all this is that the likes of Deep Forest built a whole career from all these guys
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