Questions for JMohegan

[rosco rathbone]

I'm about halfway through.

Audio's helpful. I've been taking out my disgust on dirty pans while I listen.

Nothing I didn't know in outline, but to hear it laid out like that left me feeling like we were fucked.

 

[JMohegan]

Nothing I didn't know in outline, but to hear it laid out like that left me feeling like we were fucked.

Yeah, he did a nice job laying it out. Though I have to say, his plan to spend the next 5 years in the Ivory Tower devising strategies doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

We do seem to be well and truly fucked.

One point of disagreement I had was at the part where he described Wall Street's recent behavior as "rational." I agree with his point about socialized losses and privatized gains, of course, but disagree strongly with the idea that behavior crippling the economy to this extent is in anybody's best long term interests. Not even theirs.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Yeah, he did a nice job laying it out. Though I have to say, his plan to spend the next 5 years in the Ivory Tower devising strategies doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

We do seem to be well and truly fucked.

One point of disagreement I had was at the part where he described Wall Street's recent behavior as "rational." I agree with his point about socialized losses and privatized gains, of course, but disagree strongly with the idea that behavior crippling the economy to this extent is in anybody's best long term interests. Not even theirs.

I'm starting to think that there's some turning-point where people have enough basic physical security, clean water, indoor plumbing, law and order, food and shelter, etc and after that, everything is gravy. Drop the masses beneath that line...1880? 1910? 1935? and you get productive chaos. Of course, a lot of this is relative. If you deprived me of my inet connection, I'd feel abused.

 

[JMohegan]

I'm starting to think that there's some turning-point where people have enough basic physical security, clean water, indoor plumbing, law and order, food and shelter, etc and after that, everything is gravy. Drop the masses beneath that line...1880? 1910? 1935? and you get productive chaos. Of course, a lot of this is relative. If you deprived me of my inet connection, I'd feel abused.

What I'm thinking is that the massive money flows he describes (from companies to lobbyists to congress to companies and so on) still requires money to come from somewhere. The system is propped up by the affluence of the average American, and when that goes away then the gravy train stops.

I agree with your characterization of "productive chaos," and often wonder whether we should have just refused to fund TARP, and just taken the consequences. But it's tough to get behind something with the potential to cause so much suffering - even if it's a desperately needed corrective measure.

 

[rosco rathbone]

What I'm thinking is that the massive money flows he describes (from companies to lobbyists to congress to companies and so on) still requires money to come from somewhere. The system is propped up by the affluence of the average American, and when that goes away then the gravy train stops.

I agree with your characterization of "productive chaos," and often wonder whether we should have just refused to fund TARP, and just taken the consequences. But it's tough to get behind something with the potential to cause so much suffering - even if it's a desperately needed corrective measure.

Here's some more doom/gloom. Gore Vidal interview:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gore-vidals-united-states-of-fury-1798601.html

"I was like everyone else when Obama was elected – optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated," he says, "but he's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It's a pity because he's the first intellectual president we've had in many years, but he can't hack it. He's not up to it. He's overwhelmed. And who wouldn't be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away – and we're being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense." The President "wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember – the Republican Party is not a political party. It's a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It's full of hatred. You're not going to get them aboard. Don't even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He's too delicate for that."

 

[Netzach]

Yeah, he did a nice job laying it out. Though I have to say, his plan to spend the next 5 years in the Ivory Tower devising strategies doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

We do seem to be well and truly fucked.

One point of disagreement I had was at the part where he described Wall Street's recent behavior as "rational." I agree with his point about socialized losses and privatized gains, of course, but disagree strongly with the idea that behavior crippling the economy to this extent is in anybody's best long term interests. Not even theirs.

Long term?

HAHAHAHAAHA.

A delightfully genteel concept of the past. See: enlightened self-interest.

These people can't think past the next quarter's smash and grab.

 

[JMohegan]

Here's some more doom/gloom. Gore Vidal interview:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/gore-vidals-united-states-of-fury-1798601.html

That was actually a fascinating portrait of Vidal himself.

I'm sure I should be more depressed by his observations, but at the moment I'm too busy chuckling over today's performance.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/29/president-holds-open-discussion-across-aisle

 

[rosco rathbone]

Good stuff:

http://wunderkammermag.com/politics-and-society/forgetting-fundamentals-conservatism

 

[JMohegan]

Good stuff:

http://wunderkammermag.com/politics-and-society/forgetting-fundamentals-conservatism

Damn, that kid has a gifted pen. I agree with his second point, more so than the first.

His discussion of Burkeanism leaves out what I consider to be the root of the issue - the welding of conservatism (defined in the allegiance to that which is traditional, resistant to social change, sense) with conservatism (in the limited government sense), and the attempt to impose the principles of the former on all Americans. The problem is not that they want to have their own coffee houses or colleges or whatever; the problem is that they want to restrict sex ed, gay marriage, etc., for everybody else. In attempting to do that, they embrace an intrusiveness of government that is directly at odds with conservatism in the limited government sense.

But his second point really is a bullseye, and summed up perfectly with this:

"To borrow a metaphor from John Updike, grievance becomes a mask that eats the face; it is not untrue to say that, at times, those within these groups come to believe in the essential truth "we are put down," and history becomes prophecy. What liberals insist, what I insist, is that there is one and only one way to transcend this dynamic, and that is removing people from their oppression. That is what both ethics and self-interest demand. All the same, the conservative message on the slow creep of grievance, the slow seeping of oppression into one's elementary makeup, has been among the best of the movement's insights. It is that message, not the child's mythologies of bootstrapping or deliverance through personal virtue, that should endure.

Instead, such a blanket condemnation of the politics of grievance has been swiftly and unceremoniously discarded, in the name of political expediency. Oh, that's not to say that the broad American right has much use for the claims of oppression from the usual suspects. I mean merely that conservatism, on the whole, has adopted the language and attitudes of the oppressed with a focus and zeal that not even the most practiced minority affinity groups could muster. Conservatism has become aggrieved, and to great effect, too. There is no message more central or insistent from the ordinary mouthpieces of movement conservatism (Fox News, talk radio) than that conservatives in America are a uniquely oppressed segment of the American populace."