I went on DK about a year ago. It was love at first read because I loved the front page and diary format. I am not so crazy about the comments, the relative conservatism of the prevailing politics, the herd mentality there and the way people treat each other. I read the philosophy of Kos and fully agreed with his propositions about a Democratic forum.
I will tell someone that they are crazy or call them names or tell them that they are wrong in short shrift if I know them very well, if we have had a long standing discussion and if I know their other positions but people, for the most part, have little restraint here. I have always been a potty mouth, a comedian and recondite but this was a different unmeasured, unrehearsed, wild thing.
So far, I have not fallen into that too easy anonymous familiarity. If I was going to start posting, I believed that I had to have my shit together, my positions thought out, and I had to re-evaluate my Left leaning politics. I even worked to integrate that with my spiritual and emotional feelings.
In the process of experimenting with diary styles, reading, following disagreements and sometimes joining in, I came to believe that the function of politics does not serve a noble utilitarian purpose in this democracy anymore. I do not believe in CT; I do, however, think that the overwhelming concentration of Establishment power, Corporate Oligarchy and conservatism, as a state of mind competing with progressivism, creates a critical mass of cynicism that has a gravity of its own and shreds every idea and word that is drawn into it.
Politics does not work anymore. Evolution has provided the ability to think. It is about as far as we can come through natural selection. We have to input evolution with new behaviors. One more war and we will slowly climb back in the trees with only our computers to keep us warm.
It is important to reframe everything. We have to decentralize authority and commerce, we have to realize that real progressivism is apolitical and does not rely on words or promises; it does not rely on brand politics. It relies on concrete action by individuals despite all hardships.
Start thinking, I command you. This is not war, even metaphorically; it is a struggle for evolution, human rights and social justice.
Get it right, get it done and the politics will follow.
Politics has followed MSM and sports into the entertainment business; all of the arguing is entertainment fodder. All of politics, including the so-called progressive democrats are in the entertainment business and clamoring for political dominance in order to boost ratings.
The following are things that have to happen in your back yard while you are complaining about whether or not Obama should have the Tonite Show.
In the process of experimenting with diary styles, reading, following disagreements and sometimes joining in, I came to believe that the function of politics does not serve a noble utilitarian purpose in this democracy anymore. I do not believe in CT; I do, however, think that the overwhelming concentration of Establishment power, Corporate Oligarchy and conservatism, as a state of mind competing with progressivism, creates a critical mass of cynicism that has a gravity of its own and shreds every idea and word that is drawn into it.
Politics itself is disarticulated and the very act of political action is a co-opted activity. People who quote Saul Alinsky as an authority are engaging in a fallacy of logic. That strategy no longer applies to this reality. We have to learn to function outside of the media, political, corporate merry-go-round. Here is how, ask your mother for permission to read this.
Progressive intentions and stated goals, reasoned and fact-based arguments are on a par with untruthful destructive rhetoric because it is so much free ammunition in a 'just war' fought by cynics. The Left, instead of assessing this, are flummoxed and flabbergasted and their only recourse is name calling a population that would never feel comfortable in seeking refuge with them. How exactly is that progressive?
The reactions of the Left are used against them and the strategy of 'progressive' campaigns is either misguided and outdated or worse. In the end, they are fighting for political dominance; the evolution of such movements is always bad. They conflate the verb 'progressive' with a noun or pronoun 'progressive'. They are doing as much damage to meaning as anyone else.
For a noble cause, I imagine the answer would be. I do not agree.
The only antidote, as I see it so far, is to do what the 1.5 million nonprofit organizations big and small that provide social justice and relief are already doing. I believe energy and resources ought to be directed their way to support, lobby and expand their activities. Rhetoric withers in the face of actual benefits and achievements.
Is word not getting around about a local issue; there is a nonprofit for that, not necessarily in your community, why not?
Do students from households that are struggling need educational help and encouragement in order to break into the middle class, there is a nonprofit for that. Not necessarily in your community, why not?
Is there a person who cannot coordinate her medical care, transportation and home care because social services are overwhelmed, there is a nonprofit for that, not necessarily in your community, why not?
Is your favorite nonprofit struggling with management and fundraising, there is a nonprofit for that, not necessarily in your community, why not?
How does this compete with, ‘'There’s an app for that?”
Conservatives would take this as an opportunity to further downsize government but this is an adjunct to government in order to 'round off the edges'.
A comprehensive agreement to support nonprofit organization needs to be similar in nature to nonprofit organizations. It needs to be local, have decentralized authority and therefore flexible, support democracy, be apolitical, generous to all comers and offer comprehensive services. In most cases, this already exists and progressives are largely ignoring this opportunity in favor of getting into a war that they cannot win and in which the very fact of engaging in this war furthers the cause that the claim to be against.
Alliances between nonprofits/ unions and local governments could compete with corporate monopolies and remain community focused to aid unemployment and compete directly and progressively with centralized hegemonic regressives. The LEEDS model of nonprofit/public/private cooperation on wind power in NE Ohio can serve as a large scale model for incubating projects and by-passing the legislative bottlenecks to funding.
This is not just supporting your favorite nonprofit. This is depending on the nonprofit system to change society.
Nonprofits accounted for a little over 8% of wages and salaries in 2006; are politicians going to be anxious to wreck a government program that their constituents may be administering and saving money for the government?
This is not the same dynamic as de-funding a government program.
Is waging a progressive political campaign going to produce better citizens and promote the general welfare when compared to maybe electing a better candidate or sending a message to an incumbent that was recently vilified, because she did not bend to your wishes. How does that keep money out of politics? Does it not it take money to do so little, money that can be used in a more concrete way than paying a strategist, a pollster, and a pundit to reinforce a losing strategy?
Frankly, I think it is as jingoistic as anything I have seen the government do.
This diary about reframing is not directly about Obama. I am simply grateful that McCain was not elected. McCain is a severely damaged person and his running mate was simply unacceptable.
All rhetoric has been weaponized in the phony virtual political war between Left and Right for the benefit of the political industry, words have no meaning because there is no universal moral force behind them. Everything is part of an industry, democracy has been commercialized, people have been reduced to consumers by the corporate oligarchy and in a deeper analysis of that, they are literally slaves.
It is not a notion or an abstract idea. No one thinks of himself or herself as a slave, not Right, Left, Independent or Center. It is unthinkable, but it is so. I think that merits a little more attention than a maybe progressive candidate. Unthinkable is what got us here.
Reframing everything is needed because that is what is needed to save democracy, evolution, and meaning and to discredit conservatism, the establishment and the corporate oligarchy. I say discredit because trying to destroy these things will only be a pyrrhic victory. They will destroy you in the process. I have to control my anger at them and realize that anger is not my deepest feeling and those calling for anger are wrong or have a self serving agenda.
The only way progressivism can compete with this huge massive, cynical force is to provide and go beyond words with action to put moral force behind the meaning of words. A sustainable, livable lifestyle that is materially and morally superior is the only competition that progressivism can possibly offer to these forces. It has to be peaceful, not passive.
Too many of the progressive Democrats are ready to fight political battles. They are pitifully outnumbered in every possible category. If need be, the fight will become violent. They think that fighting is a metaphorical reference; it is not. There is nothing; there never was anything; that has kept violence from happening, except violence and that violence is usually visited upon innocents.
Who has the courage to live with ambivalence and uncertainty? That is the one step further that Liberals will not go and that keeps them from walking the talk. Uncertainty is what happens when thought is allowed to occur. One's heart is important because it can contain any thought and we need to use it to make moral decisions about our thoughts but thinking is the ball game for humans. That is the limit of spontaneous human evolution; the rest is up to us.
Perhaps because I am an existentialist, I am able to formulate these ideas. I eschew the god debate as a useless distraction, either for or against. It is unworthy of human thought at best and constraining at worst.
Now that we are aware of evolution, we can change it by inputting new behavior into it.
Next to the god colloquies are all of the divisive 'isms' discussions that are not always explicated through the prism of democracy. If I were to find any failing to them, that would be it. Even then, they really belong debated in academia. The virulence arising from discussions of 'isms' only leads back to my arguments concerning a lack of meaning and a surfeit of anger.
As far as I can tell, conservatism is the only system of beliefs that is transparently hypocritical immediately; most others have to wind down to some logical but absurd conclusion.
Economic and social Darwinism is a lie but that cannot be transmitted by rhetoric, the challenge is to provide a sustainable and just living materially and spiritually; conversely, Liberal ideas cannot change a person’s mind by themselves.
It is what it is. It is important to reframe everything. We have to decentralize authority and commerce, we have to realize that real progressivism is apolitical and does not rely on words or promises; it does not rely on brand politics. It relies on concrete action by individuals despite all hardships.
This is the second revolution I have been through in my life, make it peaceful, make it about helping your community in a concrete way, make it competitive to the extent it can provide a sustainable living. A lot of it is already in place and working. duh.
This is not war, even metaphorically; it is a struggle for evolution, human rights and social justice.
Get it right, get it done and the politics will follow. Most of this is already occurring on a community level. I do not think that anyone will adapt readily to this idea, it is so 'out of the box'. (I hate that phrase. Sheesh) Just promote civics over politics. Young people get it.
I was not able to follow the hippies in the 60's because I was supporting my family at a tender age; that was my 'drop out' experience. When I sold my business in 1970, I became embroiled in the political side of the revolution. We lost, and now I see why. I was too inexperienced to evaluate the rhetoric of protest and too pissed off to realize why we were so easily coopted by people who were essentially inept morons.
We fucked ourselves but enjoyed the fighting. It was short-sighted. We were young, naive, angry and righteously motivated; perfect for manipulation and misdirection. Blood lust and power lust are stronger than financial greed, even at that level; we were not as conscious of what we were doing as we thought.
People keep falling for scams, people keep working against their own best interest, people keep getting addicted. People are not going away, but there is a way. Critical mass. It can be computed, really. As bad as environmental problems have grown, it would only take incredibly small changes to begin to stabilize. Know how people behave, industry learned this in the 60's, you can't change attitudes but you can change behavior. Credit cards, bottled water, fast food, autos, 24/7 service/ news that is mostly shit only a lot of it.
Politics has followed MSM and sports into the entertainment business, all of the arguing is entertainment fodder.
All of politics, including the so-called progressive Democrats are in the entertainment business and clamoring for political dominance in order to boost ratings. The gravity that dragged them into this is as strong as any black hole. The metaphor of war has no coherence, the metaphors of physics do.
I am saying what has to happen in your back yard and people are complaining about the equivalent of whether or not Obama should have the Tonite Show.
There is not much more to say about this, I can only repeat it differently, patiently and repeatedly.