Illuminatus Primus wrote:I'm sorry but if you take this drivel from Gingrich as a serious policy possibility, than the outcomes of America's laughingstock electoral system hardly matters. As I said, he's running his mouth, or we have a serious problem because the ruling class generally wants what he is saying (in which case elections will not control political outcomes, which they basically never do in any meaningful way, especially in the recent past).
My politics does not consist of scare-tactics regarding far-right mouthpieces who this time three years ago were sliding by on the bona fides of truck-driver talk-radio fans and bad historical fiction. Gingrich is a joke. His character or political philosophies as an individual is about...one of the least important variables regarding American welfare as a society in the next decade. Fact.
What makes you think anyone else's does? RR's point boils down to "Fuck, Gingrich actually makes Obama look good."
Now, if we wax conspiratorial, maybe that's the whole reason Gingrich is even running- his corporate masters need someone to make Obama look good by comparison, good cop bad cop sheeple sheeple sheeple why won't they all shut up and appoint me leader of the revolution waaaaah!
And yet Gingrich does, in point of fact, make Obama look good. Maybe in their hearts they're about identical, with the only difference being that Obama panders to a more pro-rights and pro-justice crowd than Gingrich. That doesn't mean the comparison can't be made.
As for the creative insults, I've posted on this board for nearly ten years. I am not exactly awestruck by the SDN-branded shit-talk you picked up. Maybe you could try refuting...I dunno, even one of my statements or claims?
What statements? What claims?
Your basic claims are, as I see:
1) Gingrich is probably unelectable.
2) Even if Gingrich were elected, he would have no power to do anything except the consensus opinion of the ruling class.
3) Because elections never settle anything.
4) Therefore, anything Gingrich says or does
personally is irrelevant, and should not distract us from our bitter condemnation of Obama for being another brick in the wall.
That seems to be what you've said here separate from your generic political opinions, which you've expressed on this board dozens of times and will no doubt express dozens more.
Now, (1) is largely irrefutable since it depends so heavily on variables we can't measure. Many people have predicted that the 2012 Republican candidate will lose almost by default because
they will come out looking worse than Obama. Which is the point- the rhetoric coming out of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign makes all the Republican contenders look worse than Obama.
(2) is unfalsifiable nonsense, mostly because neither you nor anyone else can accurately diagnose the full ambitions of the "ruling class," and indeed the very definition of the "ruling class" seems subject to change. Do they want to abolish government agencies responsible for protecting the masses? Or do they simply want to subjugate and co-opt those agencies, preserving them more or less intact? Do they want to enact economic policies that will leave us a corporate oligarchy quickly, or slowly? Do they want to lock down the American internet, or not, or are they indifferent to the question?
So what
would Gingrich do, should he be elected? Who can say? The same election that put him in office would likely fill Congress with a firm majority of people beholden to the Tea Party and the Koch wing of the American oligarchy. This might have different consequences from filling Congress with a firm majority of people beholden to Ohio center-right Democrats and the Buffett-Soros wing of the American oligarchy.
(3) strikes me as indistinguishable from paranoid ravings; I'm reluctant to touch it because I know
you won't be convinced, while no one else needs to be.
(4) strikes me as being a waste of time- I could vote for Obama over Gingrich (should those be the choices on the ballot) while still doing other things politically. I could, say, vote for Obama but give all my donations to local candidates whose political goals are in line with mine. Voting is not the
total of my political involvement, you see.
I am not going to vote. If it changed anything, they would make it illegal (and they sometimes do).
As far as American politicians are concerned, how does this make you different from a babbling illiterate, an 'idiot' in the Greek sense, who can't be bothered to remember there's a political system at all?
I'm sure you have other mechanisms for expressing your political opinions. But the fact that you reject voting as one of them because it won't give you what you want strikes me as profoundly short-sighted, the self-destructive act of a small and spiteful person.
Oh, and the Constitution was invented to restrain democratization and political participation by normal people (Madison's exact words in letters being that the aim was "divide and conquer"; by the elite against the multitude), was ratified contrary to the majority of the electorate's desire, and was accompanied by a massive move to the right and quashing of ultimately basic civil liberties by the Constitution's primary political supporters (Federalists and the Alien and Sedition Acts).
The ratification of the U.S. Constitution is more like the Thermidor of the American Revolution. Sorry.
This does not mean there should be no mass popular political challenge to the establishment's consistent erosion of the meager gains and procedural protections Americans may typically enjoy. But I don't think there's some past America, or the Constitution abstractly, etc. to 'save'. That's just romanticism.
Why do we care whether you think there is one or not? I didn't say there was. I just happen to have a lingering fondness for things like a right to privacy and a political ruling class which is
responsive, if not responsible, because they have some level of honest care and concern about the people they govern.
We did have that, now and then over the past two hundred years. Politicians who saw it to their advantage to improve the lot of the common man, or put an end to genuine injustices, or whose personal sense of honor and ethics remained more or less functional after achieving high office.
I don't expect to get that by voting for Obama, not really... but
damned if I can see how not voting will help.
Ah, I remember the days when this degrading portrayal of Obama supporters as mindless followers was something I saw mainly from the Right.
-- Asuka
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- PeZook
