Open Left

Withholding body armor? Methinks not. (4.00 / 1)

I see your point, but I disagree about holding soldiers hostage to make a point. That's a GOP-WH-ConservaDem tactic: look at how they are using the supplemental to give $100B to Euro banks and totally trash FOIA. Very Bush-like and Jane Hamsher has been doing a bang-up job fighting that nonsense over at Firedoglake... go sign up to make some calls if you can.

But the power center in DC can get away with it, because they control the bulk of the corporate media. We can't, for obvious reasons. A progressive gets a parking ticket and it becomes an act of "treason" or moral turpitude. So we have to keep it reasonably clean. But moral and intellectual superiority has advantages too.

As to what I think is your broader point, being politically aggressive, I very much agree. Take the issue of this thread, Anthropogenic Global Warming. The progressive coalition doesn't even have the backing of the big enviro groups.

This issue in particular doesn't really allow much horse trading early on, because it will always devolve into the current cesspool dealing we are seeing on Waxman-Markey.

AGW is a life threatening issue. Fate Of The Nation stuff. It's easily the only issue besides healthcare in which making the most forceful stand for the National Interest is the only way to get anything done. But right now, far too many people are willing to piss our collective future away just to make some deals for profit. Progressives aren't to blame for this. They're merely bystanders in all this at the moment. It's the pseudo-centrists that are the problem, as they are too busy making money to do the right thing.

We need public opinion. We need real debate. We need to WIN said debate. We need ad buys, opeds, public events, organizing and so on. We need the Big Enviros to get off their hypocritical asses and start thinking outside the proverbial box. We need POTUS to keep his (bleeping) promise, if just this once!

This is one issue that has to be gotten right rather soon. It's a huge project, getting people to appreciate their own peril, or more properly their children's peril. We have the simultaneous problems of Peak Oil and AGW. Both represent mountainous challenges as well as opportunities and it will take a couple decades to make the changes we need to make to avoid catastrophe.

So when I see all this horse trading, I'm seeing waste, fraud and corruption. It's just business as usual when it's the last thing we should be tolerating. Indeed, it's the same thing as doing nothing, but with a much higher price tag to the taxpayer.

There are lots of issues where the normal processes are okay, to some extent.

This isn't one of them. Healthcare too, when you consider the mere possibility of the Swine Flu coming back next fall with 1918 Flu Pandemic qualities.

Some things are just too important to be left to such slimy devices.

"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State" -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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by: Emocrat @ Fri Jun 12, 2009 at 19:15:30 PM CDT

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I'm probably being overdramatic (0.00 / 0)

When I talk about withholding body armor, although if it guarantees passage of a good health care plan or strong environmental protection, then doing so would result in a net saving of lives, if you care about utilitarian calculus.

There was a time when I was studying to be an engineer before I decided I didn't like it.  The important lesson I learned is that 100% efficiency is a pointless goal.  There's always going to be waste, fraud, and corruption, and the goal is to get those down to manageable levels and possibly to redirect such things to where they do the least harm.

If we lived in a multi-party parliamentary system, my advice to progressives would be to cave in to social conservatives to buy their votes on things like climate change because I think that fighting global warming is that much more important.  Unfortunately, we can't do that sort of horse trading, so I think the most useful bribe that progressives have is military spending.  I'm even willing to pass such things with some NRA pandering amendment or a Lieberman torture photo amendment as a compromise.  I'm just pessimistic about the left being able to even countenance such compromises.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Fri Jun 12, 2009 at 19:57:36 PM CDT

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You lost me at your proposed compromises (0.00 / 0)

I too spent three semesters in physics before I gave it up--I didn't want to go make nuclear weapons, bombs and missiles, which was what everyone else, save a handful, were doing in the early '80s. I've also been an efficiency freak for my whole life and still am, if rather toned down with experience.

But the very idea of selling out several very important positions to get a watered down awful compromise on something else that's absolutely crucial... well, that's not even worth discussing.

To be blunt about this, simply assuming a huge amount of corruption and then buying into it with some silly idea of maybe accomplishing 10% of one set out to do is the height of laziness. Both intellectual and philosophical.

To address your two items, unregulated guns in national parks will result in: 1) poaching and 2), dead rangers who encroach on poachers and that's just for starters. Violent crime will skyrocket in national parks that already can't deal with the amount of law enforcement duties they already have. That, of course, is the NRA's real point in that item. Crime scares people and encourages them to buy more guns. Fear is their operating principle as a business model. You should be smart enough to see that, especially as one who studied engineering for any amount of time. Physics is easier than engineering, if I recall correctly. Until grad school, anyway.

As for Graham-Lieberman, if you really consider yourself a progressive in any real sense, you should know damn well that amendment is an obvious attempt at vastly increasing government secrecy, especially as it applies to covering up blatant criminal activities. It's inherently anti-democratic and authoritarian in nature and intent... and transparently so. American progressivism stands completely opposed to such ideas and rightly so.

So how can any real progressive reconcile these things? One can't.

There is a reason why some people are drawn to progressivism. They are rational, logical, reasonably aware people who have principles that aren't necessarily easy to live by. Honesty matters. Integrity matters. Reason matters. We like democracy and want it to actually work. What you propose is to pretend it works and act like that's somehow progress. That's the DLC/Third Way/New Dem position on everything, as it turns out.

We aren't so quick to sell out everything just to score one quick goal and call it a day.  

That's what centrists are for. Indeed, that's their raison d'etre. Selling out for profit and then celebrating the "victory."

You seem well intentioned, but I just don't think you get what being a progressive is.

"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State" -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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by: Emocrat @ Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 01:26:44 AM CDT

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