In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On July 26 2017 04:03 Nevuk wrote: It's 50-50, Pence will break the tie and oepn the debate
What does opening the debate entail, exactly? How many steps are they from actually repealing the ACA and how many steps are they from actually passing a new healthcare bill?
20 hours of debate away at most from a final vote, where McConnell picks and chooses the amendments right before voting.
But considering senators already walked back refusal to back a motion to proceed on this, they seem to be open to concessions (or even just voting out of fear).
On July 26 2017 05:16 TheTenthDoc wrote: 20 hours away at most from a final vote.
I doubt this. There is no way there is a vote pre TI7. I mean there is the Seattle recess coming up for god sake!
They will vote on the final bill by tomorrow or the next day. This is what they promised, 10 hours to review the bill and offer amendments, then a final vote. The ACA could be dead before labor day.
It should come as a welcome development for people that thought the Trump Tower meeting was absolutely unethical.
Danglars appears to be stuck in some kind of loop. While "Trump" = president Print "but Hillary"
Does anyone know how to restore functionality to Danglars.exe?
Kwark seems to have gotten stuck on Trump-Russia hysteria. Do we have some way to restore his critical thinking on the breadth of topics, including current events from the chair of the Judiciary committee?
I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood the content of your post. It seemed to me that you were attempting to defend Trump's Russian meetings by pointing to the DNC and claiming that what other people who aren't President do somehow impacts whether what Trump did was ethical.
Was that not what you were doing?
Apologies, I just rather assumed that you'd consider further investigations into malfeasance in office/campaigns to be welcome in the fight against unethical (or others would say criminal) behavior. Not that everything not TrumpRussia = distraction from Trump Russia, that it seems to me you insinuate regularly. I'm a big fan of blind justice that doesn't matter if you're named Clinton or Trump, you'll be investigated. Here you see new allegations from the chairman of the judiciary committee and his recommendations, and if you've had a chance to read them, maybe you'll comment on the literal content of my post.
On July 26 2017 05:16 TheTenthDoc wrote: 20 hours away at most from a final vote.
I doubt this. There is no way there is a vote pre TI7. I mean there is the Seattle recess coming up for god sake!
They will vote on the final bill by tomorrow or the next day. This is what they promised, 10 hours to review the bill and offer amendments, then a final vote. The ACA could be dead before labor day.
On July 26 2017 05:16 TheTenthDoc wrote: 20 hours away at most from a final vote.
I doubt this. There is no way there is a vote pre TI7. I mean there is the Seattle recess coming up for god sake!
They will vote on the final bill by tomorrow or the next day. This is what they promised, 10 hours to review the bill and offer amendments, then a final vote. The ACA could be dead before labor day.
On July 26 2017 05:16 TheTenthDoc wrote: 20 hours away at most from a final vote.
I doubt this. There is no way there is a vote pre TI7. I mean there is the Seattle recess coming up for god sake!
They will vote on the final bill by tomorrow or the next day. This is what they promised, 10 hours to review the bill and offer amendments, then a final vote. The ACA could be dead before labor day.
So pretty much anything goes.
Ten hours from now 50 votes will be cast and pence will break the tie. Whatever garbage amendments are needed to pay off reluctant republicans will make it, democrat's amendments won't. They won. Obama care is going to be repealed and we are going back to pre 2010 healthcare. Don't get sick.
On July 25 2017 23:17 Gorsameth wrote: [quote] That is some damn impressive re-writing of history there. Obama's Russian reset? Are you for real? Last I checked Russia was hurting under economic sanctions put on by the EU and US under Obama.
One side complains that the US is hurtling headlong into a new war with Russia while the other complains they were not hard enough, right up to the point where they themselves got in charge and then they were best friends with Russia all along...
What do you think Obama should have done more? Should he have declared war? Should he have made sweeping moves to economically isolate Russia after the election so that everyone would complain he was 'abusing' his power like they already did? Because he can't do that before the crime is actually committed. What do you think the Democrats did not do enough of?
Clearly nobody is actually, oh I don't know, READING the article I linked before commenting on it extensively.
Today’s liberal Russia hawks would have us believe that they’ve always been clear-sighted about Kremlin perfidy and mischief. They’re displaying amnesia not just over a single law but the entire foreign policy record of the Obama administration. From the reset, which it announced in early 2009 just months after Russia invaded Georgia, to its removal of missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland later that year, to its ignoring Russia’s violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (while simultaneously negotiating New START) and its ceding the ground in Syria to Russian military intervention, the Obama administration’s Russia policy was one, protracted, eight-year-long concession to Moscow. Throughout his two terms in office, Obama played down the threat Russia posed to America’s allies, interests and values, and ridiculed those who warned otherwise. “The traditional divisions between nations of the south and the north make no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War,” Obama lectured the United Nations General Assembly in 2009, a more florid and verbose way of making the exact same criticism of supposed NATO obsolescence that liberals would later excoriate Trump for bluntly declaring.
That's what I blame Obama for, helping get us into this mess. I'm not equating Obama to Trump, despite what reactionary partisan leftists here seem to think for no apparent reason.
And why would that even matter. No matter the mountain upon mountain of 'stuff' you think he should have done. None of it excuses the actions of the Republicans today.
I never said that. The article I quoted never said that. This is a total strawman.
Its the stupid notion that you cant criticize the fact that the President and his closest associates are in proven collusion with a foreign state that you yourself deem dangerous because they haven't kneeled before god and confessed their heinous crimes of not launching ww3 and ending the world in nuclear fire.
More strawmanning...
You might even conclude the "none of this excuses the actions of Republicans today" and "you can't criticize the fact that the President ..." means debaters are unwilling to shine a harsh light on Obama administration foreign policy and priorities. You must obviously be only examining his Russian action/inaction in light of wanting to excuse Trump and the GOP today ... lol.
Expect only a tepid one-line "don't worry fellas, I also blame Obama/Dems," when going on to detail all the ways Republicans share the blame and how the real story is the extent to which they dodged the blame or shared culpability.
It's all pretty transparent. US Reactive Partisanship Megathread.
You can discuss Obama's foreign policy in isolation just fine, and this thread has done so plenty. The problem arise with opening sentences of "We can't take the Democrats seriously on Russia because Obama".
You're intentionally misreading his point. You can't own up to past policy failures and it's only recently become highly apparent to everyone. The thread's response basically confirmed the article's point: you still can't examine Obama's past mistakes critically without dithering, equivocating, and trying to put it all on Trump (your double strawman response). I disagree sharply with TheLordOfAwesome on the import of Trump-Russia. You'd be foolish to ignore a bigger Trump critic than myself because you can't summarize his argument honestly.
Alright, lets talk about Obama without talking about Trump. Where did he go wrong with Russia, what should he have done differently and what sort of effect do you imaging it would have had?
You're getting closer. I basically agree with the author's perspective, but maybe that link got lost for you back in the previous pages, so I'll refresh it here.
Democrats are exasperated that Republicans don’t share their outrage over the ever-widening scandal surrounding Donald Trump and Russia. The president’s personal solicitousness toward Vladimir Putin, the alacrity of his son in welcoming potential assistance from Russians during the 2016 campaign, and mounting questions as to whether Trump associates colluded with Russia as part of its influence operation against Hillary Clinton are leading Democrats to speak of impeachment and even treason.
As a longtime Russia hawk who has spent most of the past decade covering Kremlin influence operations across the West, I share their exasperation. Over the past year, I have authored pieces with headlines like “How Putin plays Trump like a piano,” “How Trump got his party to love Russia,” and, most recently in this space, “How the GOP became the party of Putin.” As I see it, conservatives’ nonchalance about Russia’s attempt to disrupt and discredit our democracy ranks as one of the most appalling developments in recent American political history.
But as much as Democrats may be correct in their diagnosis of Republican debasement, they are wholly lacking in self-awareness as to their own record regarding Russia. This helps explain why conservatives have so much trouble taking liberal outrage about Russia seriously: Most of the people lecturing them for being “Putin’s pawns” spent the better part of the past eight years blindly supporting a Democratic president, Barack Obama, whose default mode with Moscow was fecklessness. To Republicans, these latter-day Democratic Cold Warriors sound like partisan hysterics, a perception that’s not entirely wrong.
Consider the latest installment of the unfolding Trump-Russia saga: Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting last summer with a Russian lawyer promising dirt on Clinton. Before inexplicably publicizing his own email correspondence, which revealed him eager to accept information that would allegedly “incriminate” his father’s opponent, Trump Jr. claimed the confab concerned nothing more salacious than the issue of “adoption.” Democrats have rightly pointed out that this was a ruse: When the Russian government or its agents talk about international adoption, they’re really talking about the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 measure sanctioning Russian human rights abusers named after a Russian lawyer tortured to death after exposing a massive tax fraud scheme perpetrated by government officials. The law’s passage so infuriated Putin that he capriciously and cruelly retaliated by banning American adoption of Russian orphans. Five years after its enactment, the law continues to rankle Russia’s president. According to Trump himself, it was the ostensibly innocuous issue of “adoption” that Putin raised with him during a previously undisclosed dinner conversation at the G-20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month.
Yet for all the newfound righteous indignation in defense of the Magnitsky Act being expressed by former Obama officials and supporters, it wasn’t long ago that they tried to prevent its passage, fearing the measure would hamper their precious “reset” with Moscow. In 2012, as part of this effort, the Obama administration lobbied for repeal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a Cold War-era law tying enhanced trade relations with Russia to its human rights record. Some voices on Capitol Hill proposed replacing Jackson-Vanik with Magnitsky, a move the administration vociferously opposed. Shortly after his appointment as ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul (today one of the most widely cited critics on the subject of Trump and Russia) publicly stated that the Magnitsky Act would be “redundant” and that the administration specifically disagreed with its naming and shaming Russian human rights abusers as well as its imposition of financial sanctions. McFaul even invoked the beleaguered Russian opposition, which he said agreed with the administration’s position.
This was a mischaracterization of Russian civil society, the most prominent leaders of which supported repeal of Jackson-Vanik only on the express condition it be superseded by the Magnitsky Act. “Allowing [Jackson-Vanik] to disappear with nothing in its place … turns it into little more than a gift to Mr. Putin,” Russian dissidents Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov wrote for the Wall Street Journal days after McFaul’s remarks. (Nemtsov, one of Putin’s loudest and most visible critics, was assassinated in 2015 just a few hundred meters from the Kremlin walls). Anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, meanwhile, wrote that while he supported repealing Jackson-Vanik, “no doubt the majority of Russian citizens will be happy to see the U.S. Senate deny the most abusive and corrupt Russian officials the right of entry and participation in financial transactions in the U.S., which is the essence of the Magnitsky Bill.”
Nevertheless, the Obama administration not only persisted in opposing Magnitsky, but continued to claim that it had the support of the Russian opposition in this endeavor. “Leaders of Russia's political opposition,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, “have called on the U.S. to terminate Jackson-Vanik, despite their concerns about human rights and the Magnitsky case.” Despite administration protestations, Congress passed the Magnitsky Act and Obama reluctantly signed it into law. Reflecting on the legislative battle two years later, Bill Browder, the London-based investor for whom Magnitsky worked and the driving force behind the bill, told Foreign Policy, “The administration, starting with Hillary Clinton and then John Kerry, did everything they could do to stop the Magnitsky Act.”
Today’s liberal Russia hawks would have us believe that they’ve always been clear-sighted about Kremlin perfidy and mischief. They’re displaying amnesia not just over a single law but the entire foreign policy record of the Obama administration. From the reset, which it announced in early 2009 just months after Russia invaded Georgia, to its removal of missile defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland later that year, to its ignoring Russia’s violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (while simultaneously negotiating New START) and its ceding the ground in Syria to Russian military intervention, the Obama administration’s Russia policy was one, protracted, eight-year-long concession to Moscow. Throughout his two terms in office, Obama played down the threat Russia posed to America’s allies, interests and values, and ridiculed those who warned otherwise. “The traditional divisions between nations of the south and the north make no sense in an interconnected world nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War,” Obama lectured the United Nations General Assembly in 2009, a more florid and verbose way of making the exact same criticism of supposed NATO obsolescence that liberals would later excoriate Trump for bluntly declaring.
When it abandoned missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic that same year—announcing the decision on the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland, no less—the Obama administration insisted that the move wasn’t about kowtowing to Moscow but rather more robustly preparing for the looming Iranian threat. Notwithstanding the merits of that argument, perception matters in foreign policy, and the perception in Central and Eastern Europe was that America was abandoning its friends in order to satiate an adversary. That characterizes the feelings of many American allies during the Obama years, whether Israelis and Sunni Arabs upset about a perceived tilt to Iran, or Japanese concerned about unwillingness to confront a revisionist China. Liberals are absolutely right to criticize the Trump administration for its alienation of allies. But they seem to have forgotten the record of the man who served as president for the eight years prior.
Three years later, in the midst of what he thought was a private conversation about arms control with then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama was famously caught on an open microphone promising that he would have “more flexibility” (that is, be able to make even more concessions to Moscow) after the presidential election that fall. (Imagine the uproar if Trump had a similar hot mic moment with Putin.) Later that year, after Mitt Romney suggested Russia was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Obama ridiculed his Republican challenger. “The 1980s are now calling and they want their foreign policy back,” Obama retorted, in a line that has come back to haunt Democrats. An entire procession of Democratic politicians, foreign policy hands and sympathetic journalists followed Obama’s lead and repeated the critique. According to soon-to-be secretary of state John Kerry, Romney’s warning about Russia was a “preposterous notion.” His predecessor Madeleine Albright said Romney possessed “little understanding of what is actually going on in the 21st century.”
This wasn’t merely a debate talking point. Downplaying both the nature and degree of the Russian menace constituted a major component of mainstream liberal foreign policy doctrine until about a year ago—that is, when it became clear that Russia was intervening in the American presidential race against a Democrat. It provided justification for Obama’s humiliating acceptance in 2013 of Russia’s cynical offer to help remove Syrian chemical weapons after he failed to endorse his own “red line” against their deployment. Not only did that deal fail to ensure the complete removal of Bashar Assad’s stockpiles (as evidenced by the regime’s repeated use of such weapons long after they were supposedly eliminated), it essentially opened the door to Russian military intervention two years later.
Even after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, the first violent seizure of territory on the European continent since World War II, Obama continued to understate the severity of the Russian threat. Just a few weeks after the annexation was formalized, asked by a reporter if Romney’s 2012 statement had been proven correct, Obama stubbornly dismissed Russia as “a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors not out of strength but out of weakness.” Truly. Russia is such a “regional power” that it reached across the Atlantic Ocean and intervened in the American presidential election, carrying out what Democrats today rightly claim was the most successful influence operation in history. “It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend,” a senior Obama official, speaking of the administration’s halfhearted response to Russia’s intrusion, told the Washington Post. “I feel like we sort of choked.”
Yet rarely in the course of accusing Trump of being a Kremlin agent have liberals—least of all the president they so admire—reflected upon their hypocrisy and apologized to Romney, whose prescience about Russia, had he been elected in 2012, may very well have dissuaded Putin from doing what he did on Obama’s watch. In Obama, Putin rightly saw a weak and indecisive leader and wagered that applying the sort of tactics Russia uses in its post-imperial backyard to America’s democratic process would be worth the effort. The most we’ve seen in the way of atonement are Clinton’s former campaign spokesman Brian Fallon admitting on Twitter, “We Dems erred in ’12 by mocking” Romney, and Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau sheepishly conceding, with a chuckle, “we were a little off.” If Obama feels any regret, maybe he’s saving it for the memoir.
But even if liberals do eventually show a modicum of humility and acknowledge just how catastrophically wrong they were about Romney, this would not sufficiently prove their seriousness about Russia. For their current criticisms of the Trump administration to carry water, liberals will have to do more than simply apologize for regurgitating Obama’s insult that Republicans are retrograde Cold Warriors. They will have to renounce pretty much the entire Obama foreign policy legacy, which both underestimated and appeased Russia at every turn. Otherwise, their grave intonations about “active measures,” “kompromat” and other Soviet-era phenomena will continue sounding opportunistic, and their protestations about Trump being a Russian stooge will continue to have the appearance of being motivated solely by partisan politics.
For now, the newfangled Democratic hawkishness on Russia seems motivated almost entirely, if not solely, by anger over the (erroneous) belief that Putin cost Clinton the election—not over the Kremlin’s aggression toward its neighbors, its intervention on behalf of Assad in Syria, its cheating on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty, or countless other malfeasances. Most Democrats were willing to let Russia get away with these things when Obama was telling the world that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” are obsolete, or that Russia was a mere “regional power” whose involvement in Syria would lead to another Afghanistan, or when he was trying to win Russian help for his signal foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. If the Democrats’ newfound antagonism toward the Kremlin extended beyond mere partisanship, they would have protested most of Obama’s foreign policy, which acceded to Russian prerogatives at nearly every turn. As the former George W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer cleverly imagined in these pages, had Trump ran for president and won with the assistance of Russia but as a Democrat instead of a Republican, it’s not difficult to imagine Democrats being just as cynical and opportunistic in their dismissal of the Russia scandal as Republicans are today.
How could he have done differently? Stand firm on Magnitsky. Tell the truth (don't lie) about the Russian opposition to bolster them. Stay firm on missile defense systems no matter how hard he asks. Call attention to Russia's violations of arms treaties. Hold your ground on whatever limited role you see the USA playing in Syria (or stay out altogether). Stand firm on NATO (Don't preview the Trump administration's future policy of downplaying NATO's role against Russian aggression) Stand firm on not granting concessions based on political considerations.
So, will you read the quoted article with bolded emphasis to tell me which of the article's points you agree or disagree with? Secondly, will you admit that the far sighted Russia hawk or dove has much more credibility to criticize in the Trump era (See last two sentences)? I'm more than willing to engage with someone that reads with understanding and responds substantively, because we might move on to current events and agree on Trump's indifference to Russian aggression. I've repeatedly said he's a man with authoritarian tendencies that is too forgiving of other authoritarians and behaves in a naive manner.
I can agree or atleast understand most of those points.
Not sure where Obama did not stand firm on NATO. And as I previously stated Obama couldn't do much more on Syria after Congress brick walled him. You can say he could have acted without them but then he would keep handing them free PR points while they complain about not getting to make the decisions. I'd say he made the best call he could under the circumstance.
But I don't think any of this would have changed a thing about the situation we are now in. Magnitsky, missile defense, arms treaties. Its small fries compared to publicly having his hands shackled by Congress in emboldening Russia, tho I will say that is partly on him for making the red line statement in the first place. Crimea played a big part and probably happened because of the red line situation but I blame the EU for that more. Its our backyard and it was the UK that had a treaty with Ukraine.
I'm not sure how you can say, with a straight face, that Obama needed to go to Congress for strikes in Syria (despite a monthslong no-fly zone in Libya without congressional approval), and then (I presume) support his actions to get the US in the Paris Agreement (i.e. purposely structure the agreement to circumvent Congress) and oppose US withdrawal after Obama was replaced with a Republican (Congress has opposed the deal from its conception until present).
I'm speaking as who someone who generally supports global action on climate change (though lukewarm towards the Paris Deal) and supported Obama's rejected strikes in Syria, by the way.
I think Obama was fine not going through congress but he didn't want to keep giving the Republicans free points by letting them keep yelling "You need to go through us, overreach!" and decided to put them to the test on an easy call (chemical weapons). I would love for the President and Congress to discuss policy. But for that we need a Congress willing to govern.
I don't know how many times this argument has to be made. Obama didn't ask for congress approval to "get back to the good old days of congressional approval for foreign intervention", he did because he didn't want to be the sole responsible for the US policy in Syria when both Congress and the rest of the US were incredibly conflicted on the issue. It's likely that Obama himself didn't want to intervene but chose to posture as a proponent of war to goat the GOP into opposing him despite their tendency for warmongering and to prevent them from calling him wishy-washy after he made his comments about the red line.
For fuck sake, the line of attack from the republican on the issue is that for once Obama didn't use his magic pen to go over their head when he could have...
Danglars appears to be stuck in some kind of loop. While "Trump" = president Print "but Hillary"
Does anyone know how to restore functionality to Danglars.exe?
Kwark seems to have gotten stuck on Trump-Russia hysteria. Do we have some way to restore his critical thinking on the breadth of topics, including current events from the chair of the Judiciary committee?
I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood the content of your post. It seemed to me that you were attempting to defend Trump's Russian meetings by pointing to the DNC and claiming that what other people who aren't President do somehow impacts whether what Trump did was ethical.
Was that not what you were doing?
Apologies, I just rather assumed that you'd consider further investigations into malfeasance in office/campaigns to be welcome in the fight against unethical (or others would say criminal) behavior. Not that everything not TrumpRussia = distraction from Trump Russia, that it seems to me you insinuate regularly. I'm a big fan of blind justice that doesn't matter if you're named Clinton or Trump, you'll be investigated. Here you see new allegations from the chairman of the judiciary committee and his recommendations, and if you've had a chance to read them, maybe you'll comment on the literal content of my post.
I'm certainly not arguing that Trump, and only Trump, should be investigated or prosecuted for wrongdoing for the next four years. If you thought that that was my stance then I'm happy to correct you. I think justice should be blind and that people who commit crimes should be prosecuted, even if they're not currently the president. I see now that you were confused and genuinely believed that the left thinks that for the next four years all the rapists and murderers etc are off the hook because only Trump matters. Obviously if that were the case it's important to remind us that other people who aren't Trump still do things wrong.
However, now that you understand that nobody is saying that only Trump should be investigated, do you see the issue with your post? If not, I'll spell it out to you.
1) Claiming that Trump is being treated unfairly because other people commit crimes does not, in fact, absolve him of anything. There is no way of getting from "other people did things that were wrong" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 2) The crimes of others aren't actually being ignored. 3) There is no way of getting from "the people objecting to this are hypocrites" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 4) Even if Trump was being treated differently, that still doesn't get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Unfair treatment by the law does not absolve sins, if it did then we'd never lock up an African American. 5) The crimes of people who are not President, while still criminal, are not as important as the crimes of people who are President. Investigating the possible compromise of the President is a more pressing matter than investigating the possible compromise of someone without that kind of influence.
Hopefully you'll read this and understand that "but Hillary" will never, ever get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Complaining that the world is unfair is the act of a child or an idiot. The argument "I shouldn't get punished because she wasn't" is not valid. The argument that "I shouldn't get punished because you're hypocrites" is not valid. To get to "Trump did nothing wrong" you have to talk about Trump and what he did. Not Hillary. Not the DNC.
On July 26 2017 05:16 TheTenthDoc wrote: 20 hours away at most from a final vote.
I doubt this. There is no way there is a vote pre TI7. I mean there is the Seattle recess coming up for god sake!
They will vote on the final bill by tomorrow or the next day. This is what they promised, 10 hours to review the bill and offer amendments, then a final vote. The ACA could be dead before labor day.
So pretty much anything goes.
Ten hours from now 50 votes will be cast and pence will break the tie. Whatever garbage amendments are needed to pay off reluctant republicans will make it, democrat's amendments won't. They won. Obama care is going to be repealed and we are going back to pre 2010 healthcare. Don't get sick.
So with John McCain's dying breath, as his brain deteriorates, he's happy to destroy the lives of millions of other people. So he's basically Andross and the American people are StarFox...
It baffles me that McCain would vote yes on this bill. If he was in an ordinary citizen's shoes and this illness afflicted him, would he have had a change of heart and voted against it? He'd be killing himself otherwise, correct?
On July 26 2017 05:16 TheTenthDoc wrote: 20 hours away at most from a final vote.
I doubt this. There is no way there is a vote pre TI7. I mean there is the Seattle recess coming up for god sake!
They will vote on the final bill by tomorrow or the next day. This is what they promised, 10 hours to review the bill and offer amendments, then a final vote. The ACA could be dead before labor day.
So pretty much anything goes.
Ten hours from now 50 votes will be cast and pence will break the tie. Whatever garbage amendments are needed to pay off reluctant republicans will make it, democrat's amendments won't. They won. Obama care is going to be repealed and we are going back to pre 2010 healthcare. Don't get sick.
So with John McCain's dying breath, as his brain deteriorates, he's happy to destroy the lives of millions of other people. So he's basically Andross and the American people are StarFox...
On July 26 2017 04:44 On_Slaught wrote: I don't think they will be able to avoid taking the blame for this healthcare disaster. It will be passed under full Republican control. They have gone so far in creating this black and white view of healthcare (ACA bad!) that if their 'fix' makes things worse they have no choice but to own it.
Oh yeah, they'll own whatever gets passed. Dems owned the ACA and lost two branches with that debacle. GOP will see the same thing happen if it doesn't repeal the major aspects of the bill.
This bill will only result in people losing healthcare and the costs rising. The Republicans don’t have the governing skills necessary craft a replacement for the bill. They are the party of “NO”. They don’t fix problems, they tell people that it isn’t government’s problem. They are only useful the wealthy and powerful.
We don't have a bill yet. It'll depend on what amendments make it in. The moderates still how the power to doom repeal and keep the ACA chasing out insurers and raising rates.
It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all.
The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left?
This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire.
Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population.
On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought.
Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state.
It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy.
And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the "imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto.
On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung:
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another."
Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying "I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is.
I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective.
In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred.
Lastly, I need to address the following:
But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions.
You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does?
The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people.
i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following:
western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone?
Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking.
And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left.
I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so narrow as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict.
Let's start with a broad definition of Western culture, which would include traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, and the rule of law (I'd throw Christianity in there as well, but I'm not sure that we need to go down that rabbit hole yet).
I'm not sure we can say the US was founded on those concepts. I suppose if you just erase the humanity anyone but* white males (a common practice for some) then those would be traditions of western culture though .
Don't worry, I'm sure that I'll be addressing this when I respond to Igne's next post.
Alright, Igne hasn't responded, so I'll give GH my response now.
First, the question was about the definition of western culture, not necessarily American culture. Though America is a Western nation and has been a driver of Western culture -- particularly over the past 100 years, the two concepts shouldn't be conflated.
Second, pointing to the sometimes unequal application of the liberties and traditions that I listed above as a reason not to defend Western culture is myopic. The very arguments that one would make for the more equal application of rights and liberties are all grounded in the traditions of Western culture. Following GH's lead, let's take slavery as an example. All of the arguments for abolition were derived directly from one aspect of Western culture or another. In fact, one could argue that Christianity was the primary driver of the abolition movement, both through direct religious influence on the arguments of abolitionists and through the liberal philosophies that were spawned from Christianity (natural law being a big one). The Civil Rights movement, likewise, is also grounded conceptually in Western traditions. From these examples, we can see that Western culture has provided its own framework for self-improvement. What matters most is that Western culture has created the very ideas that form the foundation for its own self-criticism. The revolution isn't the equal application of the concepts of individual liberties and inalienable rights. The revolution was the development and broad-based acceptance of those ideas in the first place. Those on the Left who demonize Western culture have lost sight of this fact. Stated another way, my argument is that it is unwise to throw the baby out with the bath water.
It’s anyone’s guess whether the latest round of Russia revelations will flame out or bring the administration toppling to the ground. But either way, the drama is only one act in an ongoing cycle of outrages involving Trump and Russia that will, one way or another, come to an end. That is not true of the controversy over the President’s remarks in Warsaw last week, which exposed a crucial contest over ideas that will continue to influence our politics until long after this administration has left office. And the responses from Trump’s liberal critics were revealing — and dangerous.
The speech — a call to arms for a Western civilization ostensibly menaced by decadence and bloat from within and hostile powers from without — was received across the center-left as a thinly veiled apologia for white nationalism. “Trump did everything but cite Pepe the Frog,” tweeted the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart. “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto,” read a Vox headline. According the New Republic’s Jeet Heer, Trump’s “alt-right speech” “redefined the West in nativist terms.”
Thus, the intelligentsia is now flirting with an intellectually indefensible linguistic coup: Characterizing any appeal to the coherence or distinctiveness of Western civilization as evidence of white nationalist sympathies. Such a shift, if accepted, would so expand the scope of the term “alt-right” that it would lose its meaning. Its genuinely ugly ideas would continue to fester, but we would lose the rhetorical tools to identify and repudiate them as distinct from legitimate admiration for the Western tradition. To use a favorite term of the resistance, the alt-right would become normalized.
There is no shortage of fair criticism of Trump’s speech: For example, that he shouldn’t have delivered it in Poland because of Warsaw’s recent authoritarian tilt; that his criticism of Russia should have been more pointed; or that he would have better served America’s interests by sounding a more Wilsonian tone when it came to promoting democracy around the world. And, yes, Trump has proven himself a clever manipulator of white identity politics during his short political career, so it is understandable that critics would scrutinize his remarks for any hint of bigotry. But by identifying Western civilization itself with white nationalism, the center-left is unwittingly empowering its enemies and imperiling its values.
How did progressive intellectuals get themselves into this mess? The confusion comes in part from loose language: in particular, a conflation of “liberalism” and “the West.” Liberalism is an ideology — defined by, among other things, freedom of religion, the rule of law, private property, popular sovereignty and equal dignity of all people. The West is the geographically delimited area where those values were first realized on a large scale during and after the European Enlightenment.
So to appeal to “the West” in highlighting the importance of liberal values, as Trump did, is not to suggest that those values are the exclusive property of whites or Christians. Rather, it is to accurately recognize that the seeds of these values were forged in the context of the West’s wars, religions and classical inheritances hundreds of years ago. Since then, they have spread far beyond their geographic place of birth and have won tremendous prestige across the world.
What is at stake now is whether Americans will surrender the idea of “the West” to liberalism’s enemies on the alt-right — that is, whether we will allow people who deny the equal citizenship of women and minorities and Jews to lay claim to the legacy of Western civilization. This would amount to a major and potentially suicidal concession, because the alt-right — not in the opportunistically watered-down sense of “immigration skeptic,” or “social conservative,” but in the sense of genuine white male political supremacism — is anti-Western. It is hostile to the once-radical ideals of pluralism and self-governance and individual rights that were developed during the Western Enlightenment and its offshoots. It represents an attack on, not a defense of, of the West’s greatest achievements.
As any alt-rightist will be quick to point out, many Enlightenment philosophers were racist by current standards. (Have you even read what Voltaire said about the Jews?) But this is a non-sequitur: The Enlightenment is today remembered and celebrated not for the flaws of its principals but for laying the intellectual foundations that have allowed today’s conception of liberalism to develop and prosper.
As Dimitri Halikias pointed out on Twitter, there is a strange convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right when it comes to understanding the Western political tradition. The campus left (hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go) rejects Western Civilization because it is racist. The alt-right, meanwhile, accepts Western civilization only insofar as it is racist — they fashion themselves defenders of “the West,” but reject the ideas of equality and human dignity that are the West’s principal achievements. But both, crucially, deny the connection between the West and the liberal tradition.
To critics, one of the most offending lines in Trump’s speech was his remark that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Trump clearly intended this to refer to the threat from Islamic extremism — and, presumably, the politically correct liberals who he believes are enabling it. But there is another threat to the West’s survival in the form of a far-right politics that would replace liberalism and the rule of law with tribalism and white ethnic patronage.
The best defense we have against this threat is the Western liberal tradition. But by trying to turn the “West” into a slur, Trump’s critics are disarming. Perhaps the president’s dire warning wasn’t so exaggerated, after all.
The author's main point is interesting and functionally indistinguishable from the arguments that I have previously made regarding the radical Left's overbearing use of identity and racial politics. What say y'all on the left?
This article is interesting because it at least draws distinctions between the "extreme" left and right despite its tepid equivocation ("there is a strange convergence …") and despite rehashing Horseshoe Theory pablum. The problem is that its vision is far too limited (and I am not just talking about the unalloyed celebration of "liberalism"). The "racism" or, perhaps more properly, "Eurocentrism" of the Enlightenment is far too narrow a hook on which to hang the divide between left and right. If anything, this kind of analysis seems to have missed the epochal shift from the modern to the postmodern that Negri and Hardt point out in their book, Empire.
Negri and Hardt identify a struggle between two modes within the emergence of modernity that the Enlightenment ushered in. On the one hand is the revolutionary transition from "a dualistic consciousness, a hierarchical vision of society, and a metaphysical idea of science" inherited from medieval Europe to "an experimental idea of science, a constituent conception of history and cities, and [the posing] of being as an immanent terrain of knowledge and action." The Enlightenment brought about "an affirmation of the power of this world, the discovery of the plane of the immanence." This new found creativity ushers in a revolutionary subjectivity within modern people, that fundamentally changed the modes of life of the population.
On the other hand, uprooting and destroying traditional forms of life and connections to the past provokes conflict and war, or counter-revolution. The second "mode" of modernity "poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." You get modern capitalism emerging in Genoa and the Italian city states, as well as the Reformation, civil wars, and the reestablishment of ideologies of command and authority: absolutism, parliament, and the rise of the modern nation state which sought to control, mediate, and harness the productive energies unleashed by Enlightenment thought.
Insofar as the contemporary left and right appeal to "modern" Enlightenment ideals, or in the context of this article, we could talk about "the West," I think they are talking about two separates modes of Enlightenment. On the one hand you have the opening up of the potentiality of the multitude in the plane of immanence, and on the other hand you have a modern appeal to a "people." The "people" being the reduction of the heterogeneities and singularities of the multitude to a single subjectivity: "the national people," which is capable of univocal communication and knowable, controllable, desires. The "people" legitimates sovereign authority in the presence of the prince, the parliament, the dictator, etc. The crisis of modernity is the "contradictory co-presence of the multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule of one" or at least the imagined community of the nation-state.
It's hard to know how seriously to take the idiots who talk about "neo-Marxism," "feminism," and "post-modernism" as the premiere monolithic evils ailing us in the present. Mostly because even when they can convince the totally ignorant that they have a working knowledge of those concepts, they actually have no clue what they are talking about. But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions. You don't have to look any further for evidence of the waning legitimacy of the imperial world order than the ineffectiveness of police action by the United States within the last two decades. It is effectiveness, itself, that legitimates those actions by restoring peace and upholding humanitarian principles, and every failure greatly undermines that legitimacy.
And so there's a conflation here, in this article you have linked, xDaunt, between "Western Enlightenment modernity" as the bevy of imperialist, war-prone, nation states that carved up territories and maintained strict lines between the capitalist market inside, and the colonial outside, and the "imperial global market led by the United States" which is based on a truly global sovereign imperative, breaks down borders, opens flows of capital, culture, and people, and incorporates the entire world into a single united market. The fundamentalist Islamists of ISIS are no more pre-modern than they are post-modern. Jihadist mentality of "being-against" is an active response to globalizing post-modern imperial sovereignty. They resist in the only way open to them. To put up strict borders and cut yourself off from that policing, organizing influence today is to turn your territory into a ghetto.
On the question of Enlightenment I am partial to Kant's answer in Was ist Aufklärung:
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason by in lack of resolution and courage to use it without distinction from another."
Insofar as "identity politics" attempts to overturn hierarchies by circumscribing individuals and groups within eidetic boundary lines, saying "I am essentially this [or these] kind(s) of entity," I think it is silly and short-sighted. One might say childish. Insofar as the wiser members displace hierarchies, recognize fractured subjectivities, and refrain from putting me or themselves in the very boxes that [we] want to dismantle/deconstruct, I don't even see what the big deal is.
I want you to know that I needed two cups of coffee before I tackled this. And at times, I felt like scotch may have been more effective.
In short, I think that you're missing the forest for the trees. At issue here isn't really a particular definition of the Enlightenment or how Western thought evolved following the Enlightenment. What's at issue is whether we should embrace the culture that gave birth to the Enlightenment: "Western culture." For decades, the intellectual left has been making arguments that undermine the status and prestige of Western culture. And these arguments have only grown more radical in recent years (hence the author sounding the alarm at the attacks on Trump's speech that necessarily incorporate various levels of demonizing Western culture). Thus while I agree with you that the average proponent on the right really doesn't understand what they're talking about when they loosely throw around terms like "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist," there is more than just some truth to the fact that the Marxist schools of thought have been the primary launching pads for the current outbreak of Western self-hatred.
Lastly, I need to address the following:
But if I were to try and identify a common thread among those gripes from what we could loosely call the "alt-right" I think it would be their discomfort in the new, post-modern imperial epoch, which suspends history, deterritorializes and reterritorializes (thereby incorporating the Other), and legitimates itself through police action to maintain "peace" in the name of human rights and production vis-à-vis the market. The inside and outside of national borders can no longer be drawn. Likewise, there is no longer an ontological basis for differentiating humans. Biological differences "have been replaced by sociological and cultural signifiers." In other words, it is a racism without race, wherein racial difference is replaced by cultural difference and segregation. But this incorporation (and differentiation, individuation) only appeals to the winners in the global market, and the losers tend to be drawn to "fundamentalisms" that erase difference and attempt to redraw the lines. The specter of migration across fluid national borders is a serious threat to traditional lives and strains ordinary biopolitical administrative solutions.
You identified the problem (cultural clashes => conflict/war/bad things). You even tacitly admit that this problem is well-grounded in historical fact. But then you dismiss this problem with a wave of a hand by declaring that we're in a new epoch where none of this cultural difference shit matters anymore, and by implication, it won't matter in the future, either. I simply find that to be an incredible declaration. I have no idea where your confidence in this newfound state of world order permanence comes from. In fact, your repeated use of the term "imperial" or "imperialist" when referring to this order shows that you understand that this order is maintained through Western (re: American) unipolar force and power. What happens when we inevitably revert to a multipolar world? What happens when another unipolar power emerges that may have a very different idea of culture (not to mention cultural tolerance) than the West presently does?
The answers to these questions are precisely why Western culture should be defended and why it is foolish for the Left to antagonize Trump for doing so. As we know from the examples of Rome and every other great empire that rise and fell, cultural integrity matters. And when it's lost, it's usually not regained, to the peril of the people.
i'm not going to respond at length now but in short my point might be distilled to something like the following:
western nostaglia for 50s leave it to beaver pastiche from the likes of Publius has failed to adequately reckon with and accept modernity's passing. there is no way to return to the (fantasy of) the past. this problem is exacerbated by conservatives' general belief in markets and the creative potential of capital without properly understanding that the need for expansion, and the concomitant incorporation and articulation of the outside (i.e. those scary elements that threaten order itself) is what has propelled us into our contemporary imperial order. corruption, in the sense of "degeneration" and/or recrudescence (or if you prefer "creative destruction") is the necessary condition and modality of this imperial order. you cannot maintain empire, with its legitimacy bolstered by effective police action and a universalizing set of human rights, without that corruption. the only way to get rid of discomfort with the disintegration of the boundary line between us and them, between first and third world (if that is what you feel and what you mean by "integrity," or identical self-sameness) is to end the project of empire. that's all fine and good, as long as you understand that empire is the only substrate upon which capital accumulation can continue unabated. at least until other avenues of expansion open up. mars colonization anyone?
Maybe some conservatives are preoccupied with the past and a return to the "glory days," but that's certainly not the point that I am making, which is strictly forward looking.
And again, you're missing the forest for the trees with the point that you're making. Let's just presume for a moment that you're correct in asserting that the dynamics of capitalism make cultural contact, mixing, and conflict inevitable, thereby creating the forces that threaten cultural integrity. All that you have done is define the need for some type of cultural defense. You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you? Such defeatism is absurd. And this absurdity becomes very apparent once you step outside of Western culture and see what other peoples think. The Chinese created the perfect slur for the people who adhere to this kind of defeatism: "baizuo" -- the white left.
I want to take this question very seriously, but it would help if you would elaborate on what you mean by "Western culture." I take it you don't mean anything so narrow as "that which is opposed to Islam" but I am not sure how much of what might be perceived as "Western" you think is worth defending. In other words, I would prefer to skip over the inevitable apophatic objections and move to a more positive characterization of "Western culture," including that which you think needs defending from the forces of cultural contact, mixing, and conflict.
Let's start with a broad definition of Western culture, which would include traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, and the rule of law (I'd throw Christianity in there as well, but I'm not sure that we need to go down that rabbit hole yet).
I'm not sure we can say the US was founded on those concepts. I suppose if you just erase the humanity anyone but* white males (a common practice for some) then those would be traditions of western culture though .
Don't worry, I'm sure that I'll be addressing this when I respond to Igne's next post.
Alright, Igne hasn't responded, so I'll give GH my response now.
First, the question was about the definition of western culture, not necessarily American culture. Though America is a Western nation and has been a driver of Western culture -- particularly over the past 100 years, the two concepts shouldn't be conflated.
Second, pointing to the sometimes unequal application of the liberties and traditions that I listed above as a reason not to defend Western culture is myopic. The very arguments that one would make for the more equal application of rights and liberties are all grounded in the traditions of Western culture. Following GH's lead, let's take slavery as an example. All of the arguments for abolition were derived directly from one aspect of Western culture or another. In fact, one could argue that Christianity was the primary driver of the abolition movement, both through direct religious influence on the arguments of abolitionists and through the liberal philosophies that were spawned from Christianity (natural law being a big one). The Civil Rights movement, likewise, is also grounded conceptually in Western traditions. From these examples, we can see that Western culture has provided its own framework for self-improvement. What matters most is that Western culture has created the very ideas that form the foundation for its own self-criticism. The revolution isn't the equal application of the concepts of individual liberties and inalienable rights. The revolution was the development and broad-based acceptance of those ideas in the first place. Those on the Left who demonize Western culture have lost sight of this fact. Stated another way, my argument is that it is unwise to throw the baby out with the bath water.
What if you didn't want the baby and it was kind of just, sprung on you? Can you toss it then?
Danglars appears to be stuck in some kind of loop. While "Trump" = president Print "but Hillary"
Does anyone know how to restore functionality to Danglars.exe?
Kwark seems to have gotten stuck on Trump-Russia hysteria. Do we have some way to restore his critical thinking on the breadth of topics, including current events from the chair of the Judiciary committee?
I'm sorry, perhaps I misunderstood the content of your post. It seemed to me that you were attempting to defend Trump's Russian meetings by pointing to the DNC and claiming that what other people who aren't President do somehow impacts whether what Trump did was ethical.
Was that not what you were doing?
Apologies, I just rather assumed that you'd consider further investigations into malfeasance in office/campaigns to be welcome in the fight against unethical (or others would say criminal) behavior. Not that everything not TrumpRussia = distraction from Trump Russia, that it seems to me you insinuate regularly. I'm a big fan of blind justice that doesn't matter if you're named Clinton or Trump, you'll be investigated. Here you see new allegations from the chairman of the judiciary committee and his recommendations, and if you've had a chance to read them, maybe you'll comment on the literal content of my post.
I'm certainly not arguing that Trump, and only Trump, should be investigated or prosecuted for wrongdoing for the next four years. If you thought that that was my stance then I'm happy to correct you. I think justice should be blind and that people who commit crimes should be prosecuted, even if they're not currently the president. I see now that you were confused and genuinely believed that the left thinks that for the next four years all the rapists and murderers etc are off the hook because only Trump matters. Obviously if that were the case it's important to remind us that other people who aren't Trump still do things wrong.
However, now that you understand that nobody is saying that only Trump should be investigated, do you see the issue with your post? If not, I'll spell it out to you.
1) Claiming that Trump is being treated unfairly because other people commit crimes does not, in fact, absolve him of anything. There is no way of getting from "other people did things that were wrong" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 2) The crimes of others aren't actually being ignored. 3) There is no way of getting from "the people objecting to this are hypocrites" to "Trump did nothing wrong". 4) Even if Trump was being treated differently, that still doesn't get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Unfair treatment by the law does not absolve sins, if it did then we'd never lock up an African American. 5) The crimes of people who are not President, while still criminal, are not as important as the crimes of people who are President. Investigating the possible compromise of the President is a more pressing matter than investigating the possible compromise of someone without that kind of influence.
Hopefully you'll read this and understand that "but Hillary" will never, ever get you to "Trump did nothing wrong". Complaining that the world is unfair is the act of a child or an idiot. The argument "I shouldn't get punished because she wasn't" is not valid. The argument that "I shouldn't get punished because you're hypocrites" is not valid. To get to "Trump did nothing wrong" you have to talk about Trump and what he did. Not Hillary. Not the DNC.
Now that you understand I'm more than just "but Hillary," would you mind commenting on the matter at hand. I see a lot of talk about issues I see resolved in the Mueller, House, and Senate investigations of Russian interference. My post was on new allegations from the chair of the senate judiciary committee. I saw some reason to hope people that want Trump held accountable for anything revealed from the investigations to cheer Grassley on in these new revelations. Show that the powerful are still subject to the rule of law. If you show by word that you're only interested in Trump, and I mean look at your post without a word of the two-page letter, we're at an impasse now for discussing a current event.
Don't something like 80% of Americans have employer-sponsored healthcare anyway?
As immeasurable as the effect can be on the other 20% (i.e. the individual market), I'm always a little amazed at how much people care about healthcare bills considering most people talking about the issue aren't even significantly affected by them.
That doesn't excuse the utter mess our healthcare system is, but Obamacare didn't do much to fix that except make the individual market less terrible.
I'm awaiting a real healthcare bill that actually tries to deal with the cost of healthcare in the US, instead of just bickering about who pays for it or about how much of it we pay for publicly. I'm not expecting it from either of the clown troupe factions in Congress though.
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