EPTJust to expand on my previous post.
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9176
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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please. 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. | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
Just to expand on my previous post. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23250 Posts
On November 08 2017 13:21 Danglars wrote: https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/928094115350433792 Just to expand on my previous post. Was the turnout higher overall with a larger gap, was turnout down with Republicans losing more, or Dem turnout up and Republican turnout flat/down? | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15690 Posts
On November 08 2017 13:21 Danglars wrote: https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/928094115350433792 Just to expand on my previous post. It's just the typical cycle. Obama made rural America whiny and engaged. Trump will make liberals engaged. | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On November 08 2017 13:44 GreenHorizons wrote: Was the turnout higher overall with a larger gap, was turnout down with Republicans losing more, or Dem turnout up and Republican turnout flat/down? Dem turnout looks higher/good right now, but I haven’t examined that aspect much at all. | ||
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doomdonker
90 Posts
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Nevuk
United States16280 Posts
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ticklishmusic
United States15977 Posts
a seemingly big stat is that people who decided today ended up breaking 60-40 in northam's favor as well. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15690 Posts
On November 08 2017 15:25 ticklishmusic wrote: gillespie did a lot worse than when he ran vs warner for senator. he got blown out pretty bad in the swingy suburban areas where he needed to be competitive - looks like the moderate business republicans either stayed home or voted northam. turnout seemed pretty good across the board, but was particularly strong in dem strongholds. a seemingly big stat is that people who decided today ended up breaking 60-40 in northam's favor as well. Dem strongholds are like "well, lol, I recently learned it doesn't matter how much my neighbors agree with me. The other guy can clearly totally win". We'll be traumatized for a long time. | ||
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Adreme
United States5574 Posts
On November 08 2017 10:40 Danglars wrote: Virginia is purple or blue depending on how optimistic/pessimistic you are. Northern Virginia is very populous with a high contingent of people that work and breathe DC politics. Those suburbs have overwhelmed the rural areas that go Republican. Last elected Republican senator was 2002. The last Republican vote for president was 2004. I wouldnt dream of calling Virgina a blue state. It certainly falls into swing state category. Obama pulled an upset in 2008 and it was one of the states he held in 2012 along with every other swing state not named North Carolina. They also had no problem electing Republican governors during that time and the state house is course Republican controlled. All-in all the makings of a swing state that is trending more to democrats lately. | ||
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Introvert
United States4773 Posts
On November 08 2017 15:21 Nevuk wrote: Man, carter page is the gift that doesn't stop giving. (A lot of his testimony is in this Twitter thread) + Show Spoiler + https://twitter.com/chrisgeidner/status/927709900247130112 Since this thread seems to enjoy Carter Page, here's more. https://www.popehat.com/2017/11/07/excerpts-from-the-congressional-testimony-of-carter-page/ Or, in tweet form: + Show Spoiler + Read the whole thread, it's hilarious. | ||
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Nevuk
United States16280 Posts
On November 08 2017 15:30 Introvert wrote: Since this thread seems to enjoy Carter Page, here's more. https://www.popehat.com/2017/11/07/excerpts-from-the-congressional-testimony-of-carter-page/ Or, in tweet form: + Show Spoiler + Read the whole thread, it's hilarious. Just an FYI : the popehat ones are satire. Fucking hilarious though. I was pretty sure page wouldn't know the word prima noctae though. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3188 Posts
On November 08 2017 15:30 Introvert wrote: Since this thread seems to enjoy Carter Page, here's more. https://www.popehat.com/2017/11/07/excerpts-from-the-congressional-testimony-of-carter-page/ Or, in tweet form: + Show Spoiler + Read the whole thread, it's hilarious. I enjoyed this immensely, thank you | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On November 08 2017 06:40 xDaunt wrote: + Show Spoiler + Here's my first cut at responding to Igne's recent treatise. I've tried to stay focused on the larger points, so there will likely be some points that have not been directly addressed. On November 06 2017 12:18 IgnE wrote: The phrase "we have an interest …" repeated over and over is quite striking, and serves as an opening which I think illuminates some of the relationships between conservative values, such as those discussed in the Flight 93 election piece that you reference, and which have been generally referenced by the conservative posters here, like xDaunt. There's a certain communistic impulse within liberal (and I mean here "classical liberal" or "neoliberal" not the debased American sense of the word) political economy in which the vast plurality of people are reduced to a common denominator through the operation of the law of large numbers. So we get economic rationality, monetary incentives, and public policy which are all crafted towards a statistical community of individuals which are presumed to share a large (or at least important) set of preferences and values. That is the only way we can really talk about a nation, with a People, all with a shared set of interests, to begin with. In the American conservative affinity with nationalism, there is always this communistic side which seems to be in tension with the prime virtue of individual liberty. So let’s start here. Igne sets up a tension between individual liberty and communal membership within a state. While I agree with the general proposition that the existence of the state necessarily restricts individual liberty to the degree that is proportional to the power of the state, I don’t think that the intrinsic tension between individual liberty and the mere belonging to a state is particularly interesting. Hobbes laid out the reasons for the individual to cede some amount of liberty to the state centuries ago. The real issues to be explored are 1) whether the power of the state flows from the people, and 2) and if so, the extent to which the people cede power to the state. As we’ll see, the answer to that first question is the most critical, as it determines the fundamental form of the state. Finally, I’ll note here that expressions of nationalism within a state cannot be properly evaluated without consideration of that first question. Nationalism in a state where state power is absolute (a totalitarian regime) is a very different animal than nationalism in a “free state” such as the US where state power is derived from the people. I’ll elaborate more on this below. I have posted in the past about the "aestheticization of politics" in the era of Trump. Walter Benjamin theorized this development in response to the rise of Fascism, saying: "The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values." What is this difference between political right and expression? This difference between politics and aesthetics? Maybe we can look to the notion of the vita activa, elaborated by Hannah Arendt years after the war. I don’t disagree with any of this per se, but it should be noted that underlying Igne’s post is a fairly strict dichotomy between fascism (property structures are maintained) and communism (property structures are overturned). No room is given for a third alternative. Perhaps this is merely an issue of semantics, but the obvious problem here is that both fascism and communism are totalitarian forms of government. There should be room for a third way that is not totalitarian in nature. The Political and the Economic + Show Spoiler + As Giorgio Agamben points out: "The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word 'life.' They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group. Arendt, drawing on ancient Greek notions of the human, the polis, and the good life (eudaimonia), proposed that the vita activa encompassed three "fundamental human activities: labor, work and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man. Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor … Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an 'artificial' world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings … Action the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world … this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the condition sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life." Politics, or life in the public sphere of the polis, was a life among equals. It was also a life completely separate from the life of the household, or oikos. It was the realm of human action, and the realm in which humans could leave some trace of themselves behind after they die, through deeds and actions. Humans, as unique individuals, were the mortal animal, neither immortal like the gods, nor immortal as simply an exemplar of a species perpetually renewed in the cycle of procreation. It was in action, and the opportunity to do something that exceeded your time-bound, enclosed, private existence that something like the divine spark shone through your mortal coil. The advance of modernity brought with it what Arendt calls "the rise of the social." The emergence of society is commensurate with the shift of economics (i.e. oeconomia from oikos) from the private to the public sphere. Economics, centered on labor, comes to dominate both work, as in the rise of societies of jobholders, and action, which devolves into "behavior." Society expects from its members "a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to 'normalize' its member, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement." The rise of society not only affects what old-school orthodox Marxists might call the "superstructure" or "culture" by virtue of imposing a socially accepted "behavior" on its members. It also elevates labor, and the production of commodities through labor, as the foremost concern of the state. Property, in the form of land and slaves, tied to immortal agricultural cycles of birth and death is turned into capital, on a rectilinear temporal trajectory of accumulation. I think most of us here would agree that the "rise of the social" which is linked to the rise of capitalism had led to a number of advantages: material wealth has fantastically increased, owning slaves is no longer a necessity for freeing one to engage in higher pursuits than labor, etc. The elevation of economics as the foremost public concern, however, also ushers in the rise of the nation-state, which subsumes its members into a national household focused on laborious production of commodities and operating under a social code of consumerist conformism. Homo sapiens becomes Homo laborans, and political life, at least Arendt's interpretation of the ancient Western conception of political life, all but disappears. The public realm is no longer populated by equals within a political body, but by individual sub-households (of single people, married people, and nuclear families) whose organization is completely aligned with the communal national household for the maximization of gross domestic product. Political questions are entirely subsumed into economic questions. The only thing left to citizens in between the workplace and home life is Benjaminian "expression" through a limited consumerist palette. I’m on board with the general description of society until we get to the end where Igne reduces all political questions to questions of economics. I don’t think that this reduction accurately reflects modern politics, particularly in the US, where values are very often at issue to the exclusion of economics (see abortion). Western Culture xDaunt has suggested numerous times that "the West" and its values are under attack. His tentative proposal for what he meant by "Western values" included: "traditions of individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, rationalism, and the rule of law" He has also previously suggested, not without reason, that Western values go back at least to classical Greece. I want to suggest that this conservative notion of "individual liberty," circumscribed as it is within a nationalism defined by the economic logic of the national household, is ultimately dehumanizing and inadequate, and is so within the very philosophical traditions that conservatives claim to uphold. Similarly, conservative paeans to things like "rule of law" are blind to their fascistic tendencies, as they pay homage to Law out of one side of their mouth, while asserting the necessity of strong sovereign power operating within a perpetual state of exception. For those who are having difficulty following, here is Igne’s big idea and the ultimate point of his post. Dauntless juxataposes "individual liberty" to "inalienable rights." This Jeffersonian/Lockean invocation draws on a long tradition, certainly influenced by Christianity, of the sacredness of human beings. In humanitarian discourse universal and inalienable human rights, tied to the sacredness of individual human life, are the basis for modern liberal democracy, and are opposed to the capricious, brutal exercise of sovereign power. This is all accurate, but Igne left out the final step. The value of the individual is derived from the acknowledgment of natural law, which is a derivation of the Greek concepts of physis (nature) and cosmos (order). Inherent to this acknowledgment is an understanding of “the objective” as contrasted to “the subjective.” Concepts like “morality” are absolutes and not mere social constructs. There is a right and a wrong, regardless of the accuracy of the assessment by the individual or the society. It is from these principles that we get to the conclusion that human beings are sacred. Agamben's investigation of sacred life, Homo sacer, begins with that figure in Roman law of a "life that cannot be sacrificed and may yet be killed." The Homo sacer, whom Agamben identifies with the bandit, or the outlaw, may be killed by any law-abiding citizen without legal consequence, yet cannot be sacrificed (i.e. punished by the Law). As such, the Homo sacer is seeingly outside the law. But it is in being excluded from the juridical regime of the body politic, and in being exposed to death from fellow humans, that Homo sacer is paradoxically included within the Law insofar as the sacred life is affected by juridical power. The human life of the Homo sacer is included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed). The Homo sacer, of course, no longer participates in political life, and so properly lacks bios or the way of life of an individual within social relations. Agamben calls the remainder of such a human life, on the threshold between the animal and the human, "bare life." And this is where we can see why that final step matters. The argument being presented by Igne is that human life is only sacred by virtue of the state. This is not the traditional Western position, which holds that the sacredness of the individual is absolute, regardless of the power of the state as manifested through human law. This distinction is absolutely critical as it forms the philosophical foundation for the inalienable rights that are vested in all persons. When Jefferson wrote that “we hold these truths to be self-evident….” he was most certainly not referring to a universe where ultimate authority is vested in the state. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's political theology, and in particular his formulation of sovereignty ("Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception"), Agamben argues that sovereign power is a relation of exception and takes the same form as that of the Homo sacer: the inclusive exclusion or alternately, the the exclusive inclusion. While the Law operates within an ordered regime that applies to the "normal case," its operation is assured by sovereign power which functions according to a paradox: "I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law." The sovereign decision, then, operates on an exception that is neither a rule (having not yet been instituted) nor a fact (since it is not yet a rule), but a "zone of indistinction" in which the sovereign decision is both and neither. The rule of law applies to the exception in no longer applying, in withdrawing from it. Agamben gives the name "ban" (i.e. "from the old Germanic term that designates both exclusion from the community and the command and insignia of the sovereign") to this relation of exception. So in relation to the Homo sacer everyone within the politico-juridical order acts as sovereign, able to act (kill) on the exception as exception, outside the rules. And contrary to the humanitarian discourse, wherein the sacredness of human life is a bulwark against the overextension of sovereign power, the sacralizing of human life, turning it into "bare life" as such, is the originary activity of sovereignty: "It is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it … the relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable … The sacredness of life, which is invoked today as an absolutely fundamental right in opposition to sovereign power, in fact originally expresses precisely both life's subjection to a power over death and life's irreparable exposure in the relation of abandonment." If you accept the premise that absolute power is vested in the state, then what Igne has written above follows. The alternative position is that power is vested in the individual, who then cedes some of that power to the state. The former is position is an argument for totalitarian government. The latter position is the traditional Western position and the foundation for modern liberal governance. I believe in the latter. The Greeks took for granted that freedom was exclusively located in the political realm. Freedom, or "individual liberty," was not simply the freedom to contract one's labor, as it appears to be in market-oriented, liberal conceptions. The "unhappiness" (i.e. the opposite of eudaimonia) of the slave, for the Greeks, was the result of the slave's inability to participate in the political realm. The poor man, as Arendt says, "preferred the insecurity of a daily-changing labor market to regular assured work, which, because it restricted his freedom to do as he pleased every day, was already felt to be servitude, and even harsh, painful labor was preferred to the easy life of many household slaves." By reading Arendt's "rise of the social" in light of Foucault's notion of biopolitics and Agamben's idea that the originary activity of sovereignty is the inclusion of bare life into its ban, we can see how the modern nation state is the culmination of this logic, extending the national sovereign household(s) over as much of the earth's bare life as possible. Well this is fucking depressing. But again, these conclusions flow from a different construction of the relationship of the individual to the state. The expanding inclusion of bare life operates according to its own self-sustaining logic, as the expansion and originary activity of sovereign power. Any as everyone knows, the so-called fundamentals of an economy are essentially demographic. Bare life reproduces itself, being organic, as life itself. So sovereign power, as the production and inclusion of that life, as bare life, subject to the power of life and death, on the threshold between man and animal, is also intimately bound up in capital reproduction as a means to the reproduction of bare life (both as births and as the inscription of life activity as labor, which nowadays includes even the most basic activity, that of providing attention). The maximization of biopolitical activity, as the inscription of bare life within mass culture, necessarily leads to the state of exception becoming the rule. Conservatives can talk about Obama and the decay of the "rule of Law" all they want, but these formal actions ("activist judges" and executive orders) are only the ordinary exercise of sovereign imperial power within a constant state of exception, almost wholly consolidated on 9/11, and exemplified in actions ranging from the imposed curfew during the search for Dzhokar Tsarnaev to wide-ranging surveillance of every person on the planet. These latter actions are at best wholly ignored by most conservatives, while at worst cheered on in the name of "security," itself something fundamentally connected to the logic of biopower and the inclusion of bare life. The point I want to emphasize here is that by turning the earth into a communal oikos you turn it into a hierarchical system of households, wherein the "rule of law" is the fascist vitae necisque potestas (right over life and death) exercised by sovereign power and its representatives according to the interests of the "People," and where human action, and human freedom itself, have disappeared under the crushing weight of the imperial decree to produce more. The "rule of law," for conservatives more than most, is "the rule of the sovereign." The root problem with this conclusion is that Igne has conflated his construction of the rule of law (which flows from the premise of the totalitarian nature of the state) with the conservative idea of the rule of law. The two are very clearly different concepts. To a conservative, the rule of law is the idea that there is something external which binds and limits all human actors equally. This is one of the big ideas behind the American constitutional form of government. The Constitution exists as an external check on the power of the state. The serfdom to the state that Igne describes is precisely what the conservative (or classical liberal, if you will) notion of the rule of law is designed to avoid. Clash of Civilizations The "Culture War" which obsesses the Right operates primarily in the register of myth, by which I mean Roland Barthes's conception of myth, as "depoliticized speech" (i.e. "myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification") that serves to naturalize the status quo and its dehumanizing priorities. Myth serves, Barthes says, as a "pseudo-physis," which, drawing on the Greek word, physis implies a kind of constructed, artificial nature, which operates as a "a prohibition for man against inventing himself." All political questions today, as illustrated by the endless discussions on this board about the "practicality" of a Bernie Sanders, or the obsession with the electability of Hillary Clinton, are burdened by the weight of history. That history, shrouded in myth as it is, has narrowed the scope of human action to create a society of laborers, or a society of jobholders, and tells us that that is all there is. Goddamn, Igne. This is more depressing than Hobbes. There’s clearly more to life and civil society than “the job.” Yes, people generally must do some work in order to survive and provide themselves, but let’s not pretend that American society does not afford individuals an incredibly wide array of options to do just that. This is the essence of individual liberty and freedom in practice. Do you wonder why all of the electable, successful "conservative" politicians only ever operate along the economic axes of taxes, privatization, deregulation? Why does it seem like everyone is a RINO? Similarly, why did Obama struggle to push any truly progressive legislation through when the Democrats had Senate and House majorities? Why did Obamacare turn out to be a chimeric public-private beast? Well, there are pragmatic considerations. Politicians can't do the "impossible." It is just that the impossible in America is determined by the weight of American myth. This would be the macro version of the “glass is half empty” perspective on American political failures. I’m perfectly willing to shit on our leadership, but I am not ready to conclude that these political failures are emblematic of a fundamental problem with how American society is organized – or, the American myth, if you will. Earlier I said that flows of immigration and cultural mixing were necessary to the continued accumulation of capital within the imperial regime of the liberal democratic order, as defended and exemplified by the US. xDaunt replied by saying that if that were true, that only implies "the need for some type of cultural defense" and equated the more progressive or permissive views in America with "defeatism" which would presumably result in the extinction of Western values, as defined above. Now it seems that the conservative notion of "individual liberty," as the negative freedom(s) from interference and the limited positive freedom(s) of contract, which Dauntless lists as the foremost Western value, is simply inadequate. There is a certain hypocrisy, I think, in talk of defending a "Western" cultural tradition when conservative political philosophy in the US is so thoroughly allied with a fascistic biopolitics of sovereign power, as exemplified in nationalistic rhetoric about "the People." The pliability of a word like freedom is taken for granted to such a degree that there is no sense of inherent contradiction between asserting that there are identical interests common to the normalized individual members of "the People" and that "individual liberty," or the freedom to have and act on divergent interests, is under attack by the Left. The Greeks, remember, assumed that freedom only had meaning within a public, political space for intersubjective relations between equals. It can only be assumed, therefore, that conservative reference "individual liberty" is reference to the language of myth, and that the supposed cultural conflict, such as it is, is entirely confined to the economic realm, where it can be reduced to the bare exercise of power upon bare life in a relation of increasing exploitation. (As an aside, it always baffles me that conservatives and libertarians alike can claim with a straight face 1) that wealth inequality is not a serious concern when the rising tide of capitalism eventually lifts all boats and 2) that all government needs to do to ensure the efficient operation of capitalism is to protect competition in the marketplace through adequate, minimalist regulation. It is so clear that wealth inequality always eventually leads to the elimination of competition.) Let me first acknowledge that Igne has a point here. There is an inherent tension between the idea of the universal concept of the sacredness of the individual as an absolute truth and the idea of nationalism. If, as Jefferson puts it, it is self-evident that all men are created equal, why should we divide ourselves by nationality? This is something that conservatives very clearly struggle with. My answer to that is as follows: Regardless of the objective truth of the sacredness of all individuals, we must recognize that not everyone accepts that truth. The lack of universal acceptance does not make it less true. Whether everyone accepts natural law has no bearing on its truthfulness. However, we must be practical. Given that our form of government is one that is based upon the premise that power is vested in the people, who then cede some of that power to the state in the form of a social contract, anyone whom we admit into this country must be willing to accept that same social contract. When large numbers of a given population reject the social contract, that is when conflict – including war – occurs. This should clearly be avoided. Because the social contract is fundamentally an expression of the common values of the people, it follows that the people who will accept the social contract are the ones who share the same common values. Accordingly, the rational immigration system is one that ensures that people who are admitted share the same common values as the majority. It is on this basis that we are justified in our discrimination for the sake of nationalism. And this a good time to return to our earlier discussion regarding nationalism. Igne has framed nationalism as the aesthetic expression of the populace that occurs in a fascistic society in lieu of a change in property relations. Stated another way, nationalism is fascism’s drug for the masses. If you accept the totalitarian construction of government and society that Igne has put forth, then such a conclusion is not necessarily unwarranted. But again, I reject that construction. So what is nationalism in the context of classical liberalism? The answer is simple: it is the expression of the common values that hold a people together and that form the basis for their social contract. This is why I have always found Leftist arguments that nationalism is inherently bad or evil to be silly at best, and outright dangerous at worst. If we discard nationalism, if we discard our common values, and if we discard our Western heritage, what do we have left in common as a people? What happens to our social contract? The answer is clear: civil collapse and life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.” The plight of the refugee in all this is paradigmatic of the new order. In ordinary speech these days "sacred" has a unipolarity that it did not have in times past. The ambiguity in the sacred can be immediately seen in Agamben's discussion of Homo sacer, but is also exemplified in anthropological and sociological discussions of the sacred and profane (see e.g. Mircea Eliade). In any case most people seem to have an unalloyed reverence for human life these days. I don't know if a study has been conducted of how, when, and why this shift in the notion of the sacred occurred. Maybe it has to do with Christianity's impact on Western culture. And yet, the "inalienable rights" of human beings everywhere, connected to the sacredness inherent in human life, only attach within the sovereign ban of the nation state. The refugee, trapped between national household economies, is afforded no rights by accident of birth, and yet, in the language of international humanitarianism, is consigned to the space of Homo sacer in relation to national citizens. Excluded by law, yet included by virtue of the simple fact that they have been pushed out into the non-space between nations, where they are held by the law that excludes them; there is no space left for them. Let’s pause here and correct something regarding the concept of inalienable rights. The concept of inalienable rights does not mean that there is an absolute freedom from having those rights infringed. Bad shit clearly happens every day. Instead, the proper way to think of inalienable rights is in the way that the Enlightenment thinkers applied them: as a foundation for a moral form of the state. Take a look at the Declaration of Independence. Fundamentally, it is an argument in morality. The moral role of government is to secure our inalienable, god-given rights. When the government ceases to fulfill that function, it is no longer a moral government, and the people have the moral prerogative and right to abolish it. In other words, that homo sacer may have his inalienable rights violated does not change the fact that he has them. So let's return, again, to xDaunt's question: "You're not saying that the Romans should have bent over sooner for the barbarians, are you?" Well, what are we really talking about here? You can't be completely aligned on the one hand with capital accumulation and a fascistic biopolitical regime (callousness to the plight of the worker, total emphasis on labor and productivity to the exclusion of other human activity) and at the same time say that "Western values" need defending from the accelerating inclusion of bare life needed to expand that regime. The seeds for this "biopolitical-social" are to be found in the paradox of sovereignty itself as formulated within the "Western" tradition such as it is. In a real sense, then, the need for expansion and for incorporation of the outside, including flows of immigrants, resources, and capital, is entirely within the "Western" tradition, at least insofar as it includes the potential for the reduction of the human to zoē and bare life within the political paradigm. The evolved, modern paradigm, Agamben says, has become the concentration camp, where life and law are indistinguishable. The cases of the refugee and the immigrant confirm this. The irony seems to be that contemporary conservative myth, through the use of what used to be political language, opens, supports, and justifies an ideological space where "individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, rationalism, and the rule of law" have become entirely disconnected from the vita activa of the Greek polis. Back in 1930 Keynes predicted that the working week would be drastically cut to a fraction of the 40 hours typically spent by salaried workers. Yet nearly 90 years later we don't appear to be any closer to freeing up citizens for work and action as distinct from labor. Why is this? I would tentatively suggest that this is because we have already abandoned "Western" values, or, at least, the desirable ones. Fears of a multipolar world seem misplaced or ill-conceived, at least because plurality in Arendt's framework is a precondition for action. Production and reproduction (of capital, and of bare life) have become the unquestioned public raison d'etre of the body politic. While sovereign power whose originary activity is the production of bare life, thereby becomes identified with production itself, ensuring its own continued expansion. The dialectic nature of imperial power as discussed by Negri and Hardt and Empire which featured in my previous posts can then be seen as the epitome of a particular Western tradition. It seems, rather, that the only possible "defense" of a "Western" tradition worth having cannot be conducted via police power, either through military instruments or financial ones. It has to come through the dual operation of rhetoric within the political sphere and personal experience of the good life (eudaimonia). So now we are back to Igne’s “glass half empty” view of society and economics: we’re all a bunch of slaves to the labor economy unless we have individually accumulated sufficient property to emancipate ourselves. I don’t like this pessimistic view. For starters, it fails to account for who we are. The “natural man” will always have needs. We need to eat. We need to drink. We need to rest. We need shelter. The list goes on. Those needs are fundamental to the human condition. For that reason, the need to work is also fundamental to the human condition. I don’t see why the need to work to fulfill those needs is necessarily a bad thing as Igne does. In fact, there is no shortage of studies showing that work is good for us psychologically. As I mentioned earlier, just consider the sheer array of options that are available to us to fulfill our needs in a country like the US where we are fundamentally free. Any number of different lifestyles are available depending upon our preferences and our capabilities. People are empowered under this classic liberal system. This is what the pursuit of happiness is all about. Circling back to the larger issue of the clash of cultures, the obvious question to ask is “which culture best defends and preserves man’s inalienable rights and pursuit of happiness?” There’s clearly one answer: Western culture. And it is for this reason that I fervently believe that Western culture deserves a defense. That it is not something to be taken for granted. I appreciate your taking the time to read and think about what I wrote and acknowledge a certain open-mindedness on your part. That being said my opinion here is that you are thinking about sovereignty and "the social contract" in the wrongs ways. Let me get around to reading [i]Leviathan before I try and flesh out exactly why that is, though. Sovereignty is a tricky thing. I'm still trying to work it out. I will note two things that caught my eye as needing immediate correction. 1) You said that both fascism and communism were totalitarian. It is true that both Fascism and Communism were totalitarian. But those were only historically contingent political formations. I would argue that only one social structure necessarily tends towards the herd instinct, and the desire to have someone else legislate life. A communistic social structure demands active participation in the political sphere, in the truly Greek sense, as action among equals. What the revolutionary communists of the 20th century carried with them was the fascizing elements carried by the man of [i]ressentiment. 2) You say that "values" are often at issue in American politics, and choose abortion, as the exemplary "value" issue. On the one hand, there is some sense in this. The religious fervor of the pro-life crowd does not seem directly tied to economics as disciplinarized by the university. On the other hand, however, state intrusion into abortion is a prime example of the exercise of sovereign power on "bare life." It is police power (broadly conceived here as the networks of institutions, laws, social codes, and actual policemen) exercised in the matter of abortion/birth control that is one of the most clear examples of state biopower, dictating what individuals can and can't do with their bodies, how they are to conduct their sexual lives, and to whom or to what they owe certain kinds of legal obligations. Keep in mind here that economics comes from oikos (household) and nemein/nomos (distribute, dwell, possess, law). Abortion is a biopolitical issue in the sense that it's the intrusion of sovereign power into private household ways of life, and it is an economic issue, in the Arendtian Greek sense, in that it is the expansion of a private household issue that would have been prepolitical into the public realm, where administration of the national household (demographic control, birth rates, ensuring a female population of caretakers) has subsumed the properly political. | ||
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Introvert
United States4773 Posts
On November 08 2017 15:39 Nevuk wrote: Just an FYI : the popehat ones are satire. Fucking hilarious though. I was pretty sure page wouldn't know the word prima noctae though. Popehat is a hilarious follow. Yeah not sure a rep would use a curseword. edit: good to point that out tho, thx | ||
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mozoku
United States708 Posts
Corporate tax cuts are happening everywhere in the world... because the world has realized that it's more efficient to tax people than corporations. When you tax a corporation, the tax is pushed on to consumers, employees, and shareholders in hard-to-measure amounts. When you repeal it, the largest portion does go to shareholders but the US has to lower nominal corporate taxes rates to maintain the real tax rate in the new bill due to loophole closures. Finally, sure, this part of the bill is the most regressive portion (the GOP generally values growth over income equality after all), but that's made up for by the fact that the vast majority of the individual tax cuts are going to the middle class. Furthermore, the marginal rates on high earners are generally higher now, so the individual tax rates are more progressive in that sense. Sure, many high earners pay less overall but so does just about everyone else as well. It's not really tax reform, it's a tax cut. Finally, the top 1% of earners pays literally 50% of the total tax bill. Good lord, I understand the "but they can afford to pay more" argument but 50%? If that's not progressive enough for you, you might as well just straight up ask for a free ride through life. If you think your tax bill is too high, maybe you should consider looking where we can trim expenses instead of trying to pay more of your expenses with someone else's money. I'm not sure when our reference point for "not progressive enough" became the status quo instead of absolute reality. For the record, I'm not even a really a fan of this tax bill (even though I'd likely reluctantly vote for it). I'm a fan of small government in principle, but this bill feels more like Trump populist handouts then growth-minded reform. And before I'm accused of being irrationally scared of government (as is the usual knee-jerk reaction I get when I post), I'll restate for the 100th time that I'd rather have single payer than the current healthcare mess (though I'm somewhat uncomfortable with it in principle) and that I believe corporations may be underregulated in certain industries (though overregulated in others). | ||
Liquid`Jinro
Sweden33719 Posts
On November 08 2017 15:30 Introvert wrote: Since this thread seems to enjoy Carter Page, here's more. https://www.popehat.com/2017/11/07/excerpts-from-the-congressional-testimony-of-carter-page/ Or, in tweet form: + Show Spoiler + Read the whole thread, it's hilarious. They are honestly not that unbelievable lol Mostly because they seem to capture the tone so perfectly. | ||
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Introvert
United States4773 Posts
On November 08 2017 16:36 mozoku wrote: Sort of jumping back a page here, but I'm struggling to understand how this tax bill is supposed to be a "tax cuts for the rich"? There's literally no interpretation of this bill where this makes any sense, and the fact that anyone believes it is a testament to how thoroughly the left has brainwashed a large part of it's base--it's Fox News-level nonsense dogma. Corporate tax cuts are happening everywhere in the world... because the world has realized that it's more efficient to tax people than corporations. When you tax a corporation, the tax is pushed on to consumers, employees, and shareholders in hard-to-measure amounts. When you repeal it, the largest portion does go to shareholders but the US has to lower nominal corporate taxes rates to maintain the real tax rate in the new bill due to loophole closures. Finally, sure, this part of the bill is the most regressive portion (the GOP generally values growth over income equality after all), but that's made up for by the fact that the vast majority of the individual tax cuts are going to the middle class. Furthermore, the marginal rates on high earners are generally higher now, so the individual tax rates are more progressive in that sense. Sure, many high earners pay less overall but so does just about everyone else as well. It's not really tax reform, it's a tax cut. Finally, the top 1% of earners pays literally 50% of the total tax bill. Good lord, I understand the "but they can afford to pay more" argument but 50%? If that's not progressive enough for you, you might as well just straight up ask for a free ride through life. If you think your tax bill is too high, maybe you should consider looking where we can trim expenses instead of trying to pay more of your expenses with someone else's money. I'm not sure when our reference point for "not progressive enough" became the status quo instead of absolute reality. For the record, I'm not even a really a fan of this tax bill (even though I'd likely reluctantly vote for it). I'm a fan of small government in principle, but this bill feels more like Trump populist handouts then growth-minded reform. And before I'm accused of being irrationally scared of government (as is the usual knee-jerk reaction I get when I post), I'll restate for the 100th time that I'd rather have single payer than the current healthcare mess (though I'm somewhat uncomfortable with it in principle) and that I believe corporations may be underregulated in certain industries (though overregulated in others). Conservative publications are busy moaning (rightfully) that this isn't a tax cut at all and won't touch entitlements, meanwhile the left is doing the standard, tired "give away to the rich!" routine. They might as well actually DO the things they are accused of. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On November 08 2017 16:36 mozoku wrote: Sort of jumping back a page here, but I'm struggling to understand how this tax bill is supposed to be a "tax cuts for the rich"? There's literally no interpretation of this bill where this makes any sense, and the fact that anyone believes it is a testament to how thoroughly the left has brainwashed a large part of it's base--it's Fox News-level nonsense dogma. Corporate tax cuts are happening everywhere in the world... because the world has realized that it's more efficient to tax people than corporations. When you tax a corporation, the tax is pushed on to consumers, employees, and shareholders in hard-to-measure amounts. When you repeal it, the largest portion does go to shareholders but the US has to lower nominal corporate taxes rates to maintain the real tax rate in the new bill due to loophole closures. Finally, sure, this part of the bill is the most regressive portion (the GOP generally values growth over income equality after all), but that's made up for by the fact that the vast majority of the individual tax cuts are going to the middle class. Furthermore, the marginal rates on high earners are generally higher now, so the individual tax rates are more progressive in that sense. Sure, many high earners pay less overall but so does just about everyone else as well. It's not really tax reform, it's a tax cut. Finally, the top 1% of earners pays literally 50% of the total tax bill. Good lord, I understand the "but they can afford to pay more" argument but 50%? If that's not progressive enough for you, you might as well just straight up ask for a free ride through life. If you think your tax bill is too high, maybe you should consider looking where we can trim expenses instead of trying to pay more of your expenses with someone else's money. I'm not sure when our reference point for "not progressive enough" became the status quo instead of absolute reality. For the record, I'm not even a really a fan of this tax bill (even though I'd likely reluctantly vote for it). I'm a fan of small government in principle, but this bill feels more like Trump populist handouts then growth-minded reform. And before I'm accused of being irrationally scared of government (as is the usual knee-jerk reaction I get when I post), I'll restate for the 100th time that I'd rather have single payer than the current healthcare mess (though I'm somewhat uncomfortable with it in principle) and that I believe corporations may be underregulated in certain industries (though overregulated in others). You think the US really "has to lower nominal corporate tax rates to maintain the real tax rate in the new bill due to loophole closures?" When the top 1% controls 39% of the total wealth (good lord!) their paying 50% (source needed) of the tax bill doesn't seem that outrageous, does it? | ||
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Toadesstern
Germany16350 Posts
On November 08 2017 17:09 IgnE wrote: You think the US really "has to lower nominal corporate tax rates to maintain the real tax rate in the new bill due to loophole closures?" When the top 1% controls 39% of the total wealth (good lord!) their paying 50% (source needed) of the tax bill doesn't seem that outrageous, does it? google says: The top-earning 1 percent of Americans will pay nearly half of the federal income taxes for 2014, the largest share in at least three years, according to a study. According to a projection from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent of Americans will pay 45.7 percent of the individual income taxes in 2014—up from 43 percent in 2013 and 40 percent in 2012 (the oldest period available) [...] The high share of taxes paid by one-percenters is due partly to their share of income, but also to the progressive tax code, in which higher earners generally pay higher rates. The one percenters' share of taxes is 2.7 times their share of income in taxes. [...] In 1979, the top one percenters earned 8.9 percent of pretax income and paid 18 percent of federal income taxes. In 2011, the top 1 percent earned 14.6 percent of income and paid 25.4 percent in 2011 of federal income taxes. The CBO said that the average federal income tax rate paid by the top 1 percent has also dropped since 1979—falling from 22.7 percent in 1979 to 20.3 percent in 2011. source: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-federal-income-taxes.html | ||
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doomdonker
90 Posts
On November 08 2017 15:28 Adreme wrote: I wouldnt dream of calling Virgina a blue state. It certainly falls into swing state category. Obama pulled an upset in 2008 and it was one of the states he held in 2012 along with every other swing state not named North Carolina. They also had no problem electing Republican governors during that time and the state house is course Republican controlled. All-in all the makings of a swing state that is trending more to democrats lately. Its the narrative that some people on the right and left are pushing to downplay the result of this election. In terms of state politics, the Republicans quite recently held a supermajority (or was it near supermajority?) in the House of Delegates. That's not a <insert> state, that's a state that's quite evidently a swing state. Maybe not federally but that's sort of irrelevant in this situation. The real story isn't Gillespie getting bodied, which was predicted, but instead the real story is the amount he got bodied by and the sheer number of HoD seats that swung to the Democratic Party. That's the real story here and no one could have imagined how many seats the Republicans lost. And if you did, you could have become a millionaire right now. | ||
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