We, The Hard-Working White People
I told you so, didn't I? I said a few days ago that I want Hillary and Bill to stay into this thing to the bitter end, that I want it to go right through Puerto Rico, right through the summer, and right onto the floor of the Democratic National Convention!
I said that every new day is a great day because the Fearsome Twosome dig themselves ever deeper into a seemingly bottomless pit of ignominy. Long live the 24/7 news cycle!
Today we see Hillary courting the Klan vote. Move over, David Duke. Here's the latest words from the junior senator from New York that will warm your heart:
"Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.... Whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here."
You betcha there's a pattern here. One of overt racialization by Madame Clinton. Now, it was kinda fun to watch the cable shows Friday and see the line-up of Democratic talking heads hemming and hawing over HRC's racial references. From Willie Brown to Harry Reid there was agreement that Hillary's words, while unfortunate, certainly couldn't be intentionally racist.
No? I thought Hillary was Experience Embodied. Hasn't she been preparing for 35 years to be a steady, stable governatrix from Day One? Isn't she the political pro, ready to answer the phone at 3 am and tell whichever dictator on the other side of the line exactly the right thing?
Or is it possible that she, and Mr. Clinton, might just be two calculating pols ready and willing to say anything, or do anything, to achieve and retain power?
So while Hillary was out courting hard-working non-Negroes, Bubba Bill was also out on the stump, angrily berating individual voters who dared to question his wife's failed health care initiative. And that's how low Bill has stooped. The fomer President of the United States doling out verbal swats to unruly members of a campaign audience. Check out this latest clip.
Problem is, every time Bill whips out that erect, admonishing index finger millions of us imediately remember where it has previously been. And it ain't a pretty thought. It's about as bad a tell as they come. Raise that finger and strat trimming the truth.Anyway, speaking of I-told-you-so's.... That's the only conclusion I've come up with to explain Hillary's current strategy of forging ahead. I have discarded the earlier suggestion she might really be running for Veep. Nor does she really need Barack to pay off her campaign debts. And she isn't delusional enough to believe she can really win.
So it must come down to a simple strategy of building up as much a constituency as possible while damaging Obama as much as possible. Her hope? To see a weakened Obama beaten in November leaving Hillary standing and saying "I told you so." And ready to run in 2012.
Someone tell me I'm wrong.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Not going to tell you you’re wrong Marc, because more and more it seems that this is the only plausible reason to keep this race going–and going all the way to 2012. Can’t help but think back a couple months ago when Mitt Romney sized up the math of the GOP race and graciously stepped aside for the sake of McCain. In comparison, Sen Clinton begins to look more Machiavellian every 24 hours.
The biggest reason I’ve always detested the Clintons is because they’re not on anyone’s side but their own — first and last. They’d throw any constituent overboard to save their own sorry ass hide.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Also, nice youtube clip. Go Ruth Callibra! Loved seeing someone call out Bubba for royally flopping on health care. Don’t we all remember the campaign mantra Carville got Gov. Clinton parrot back in ‘92? “…if every criminal deserves a lawyer, then every honest America deserves a doctor…” Turned out to be just ‘fancy speechifying.’ Remember that sample health security card President Clinton flashed in that State of Union speech? Turned out to be just that — a flash.
To channel a little Marx, or jcummings: Obama-Democrats of America unite! You have nothing to lose but the narcissistic power mongers of the party!
May 9th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
The best thing about the Clinton’s are racist meme is that its well past is expiration date as a political confection.
There is no evidence whatsoever in either Clinton’s long record of public service that would indicate the white supremacists or anti-Afro-American.
Bigotry of all stripes reflects ignorance and insecurity more than specific grievances.
Marc’s increasingly screechy broadsides against the Clintons reek of ignorance and insecurity in that they rely so heavily on innuendo, slurring, blurring and ad hominem.
So it’s no surprise that comments about the ethnicity of voters would strike Marc as racist. It would not occur to him to consider Hillary’s motives in light of her career as a senator or as a progressive voice for in politics for decades. Rather, Marc’s instinct is to brand, label, blur, slur and insult. This in itself isn’t bigotry, but it’s a close cousin.
I’m betting Marc will eat his crow pie silently and all alone, sans comment, when Hillary accepts the VP nomination.
May 10th, 2008 at 12:30 am
The way Hillary’s “White Americans” comment was reported confused me (was that from an AP poll, and AP article?) It turns out it’s from a USA today phone interview with her, and you can listen to the audio clip.
She sounds exhausted, and a little confused. A lot of “uhs” and “ums” … pauses to think that still didn’t produce very clear thoughts. This was not a rehearsed line.
This might be a case of slightly opportunistic source management. If she’d said this in a set speech, or in a debate context, it would have been a serious howler. In its actual context, however, it sounds like the product of having to over-use the word “American” to the point where it becomes a verbal tic. Which, in a race where these frickin’ flag *lapel pins* have been an issue, would be unsurprising.
There are two audio clips there, and in both of them, she mixes Conversational Clintonese (yes, she CAN sound non-robotic), Stump Speech Clintonese (could you please turn it down?) and Electoral Technician Clintonese — that last aspect being worth a hearing.
In the first of the two audio clips at USA Today, she talks about West Virginia and Kentucky, and about the kinds of voters needed to win the general election and that’s some useful context. This raises again a question for which I still have no answer: is anybody publicly tracking the electoral college calculus? Are there polls I don’t have to pay for that tell me something about that?
I’ve read statements from the this it figured out, but it might be grasping at straws. Nothing I’ve noticed (so far) on this point from the Obama side.
Not leaning Clinton-ward here, mind you. Just sayin’. And still searching for that electoral college analysis. It’s not racist to hypothesize that white working-class voters might be the key to winning against McCain in the general. If Clinton had been willing (and foolish enough) to speak purely from Electoral Technician, she might have been more lucid, she might have said something like, “the Reagan Democrat is still alive and living in districts I have to win; and the Reagan Democrat is less likely to vote for a black man than for me.” From the polls I read, African Americans are more likely to say that America is not ready for a black president. And maybe they know what they’re talking about.
May 10th, 2008 at 12:41 am
I just wrote “I’ve read statements from the this it figured out …”
Argh. I meant, “I’ve read statements from the Clinton camp about this saying they’ve figured it out ….”
May 10th, 2008 at 12:44 am
“Go Ruth Callibra! Loved seeing someone call out Bubba for royally flopping on health care.”
Whoa. The Clintons flopped, but Callibra’s flip-flopped here. I think she accused the Clintons of promising and then doing nothing. At the end of the clip, though she says they promised but we got nothing. You want to argue they botched it? Sure, there’s a case for that. You want to argue they did nothing? That crap, and I don’t blame Bill for this particular red-faced-anger moment.
May 10th, 2008 at 4:54 am
While it’s common and defensible for political analysts to render commentary based on a candidate’s demographic strengths among particular voters, I don’t ever remember a candidate making as explicit pitches for their being the tribune of particular identity groups as baldly as the Clintons have. Unless George Wallace counts. Her supporters have made gender-identity a cornerstone of her candidacy, unlike Obama’s. It’s useful to remind oneself that Obama started this race with minority support among African-Americans and had to win them over. Once he began to garner black support, the Clintons began to treat it like an albatross. God knows if it were a different primary and Hillary was winning a close race with overwhelming black support, she’d be sporting corn rows by now.
Did Nixon ever put himself forward as the candidate best able to attract the votes of “hard-working white Americans?” I don’t remember him stating such. Obviously that was the strategy and it was undoubtedly more cynical than Hillary’s in it’s ultimate intent, but even back then I don’t recall that it was considered kosher for the candidate to simply say it.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Yeah, I’m not so sure I am willing to chalk this up to a gaffe. “Hard working…white” is kind of hard to spin. It implies that blacks aren’t hard working. If it was calculated, it is more of the Clinton merde. And if it was not calculated, then it is an unpleasant look inside her mind.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:17 am
I can’t get a post with a link through it seems, but there is a May 1, 2008 Scientific American article called Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain, which is pretty fascinating, and somewhat related here.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:21 am
The point here is not so much that the Clintons are out-and-out racists, it’s that implicitly they have been counting all along on the racism of others to beat back the Obama challenge. When it didn’t seem to be working, they started becoming more overt about it (remember Geraldine Ferraro?) It’s called dirty politics, and that’s what has defeated Hillary in the end–the American people didn’t turn out be as racist as she hoped.
That’s also why this is not going to the convention floor, it’s not going past the month of May. Obama will be over the top in needed delegates long before that.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Good points here, Michael B.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Slightly off topic, but isn’t the Huffington-McCain flap a nice fun distraction?
My take on it:
michael-balter.blogspot.com/2008/05/who-did-mccain-vote-for.html
May 10th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Relevant commentary all around here, guys. Only thing that bothers me, Marc, is that you compared Hillary Clinton to David Duke. Hillary is counting on racism to help push her numbers up among the bubba sectors, and as such is shamelessly exploiting race. That’s still bad, but she isn’t out there burning crosses. I have no doubt that if she won the presidency (which I hope to hell doesn’t happen), she would be very pro-civil rights (but anti-progressive in just about every other aspect).
May 10th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Perhaps a better comparison would be Pat Buchanan in 1996/2000 in the southern states, who came very close to conceding candidly that the fringe right was an important base of support for him in those areas of the country.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:48 am
And Hillary’s happy to be quiet right now, in the face of a coordinated AIPAC attack on Obama.
May 10th, 2008 at 7:53 am
BB, hagiographizes: “There is no evidence whatsoever in either Clinton’s long record of public service that would indicate the white supremacists or anti-Afro-American.”
bullshit.
Developmentally disabled death penalty victims, “Welfare Reform”, other privatization measures aimed at Urban areas like “school choice,” firing progressive Black folks like Lani Guinier, Sister Souljah, the whole pretending to be loved by Black people moving to Harlem game, only to be spurned and now show true racist colours…
May 10th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Dan O - that’s an interesting piece. My major area of research is jibing historical materialism with genetic discoveries of non-contingent aspects of human objectivity. These are some disturbing tendencies, hinted at in Geras’s great Contract of Mutual Indifference.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Actions count more the feelings, thoughts or opinion. To exploit racism is to be racist. Respectfully, David you are stating a distinction without difference.
They’ve got no code and they’ve got no soul.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Maybe Obama can run commercials linking Hillary Clinton to the guys in Texas who killed a black man by dragging him behind their truck–like the Democrats did against Bush.
With this new insight into the Clinton’s, maybe they should re-open the investigation into Ron Brown’s
murderdeath.May 10th, 2008 at 8:19 am
A vote for Hillary is a vote for burning crosses.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:25 am
Dan O, I haven’t read the article your referenced, because a lot of information from Scientific American is quite tainted with leftist ideology, but here is the link that gave you problems, for the gullible curious: Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain
May 10th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Woody.
Science is a left wing doctrine, man. You should burn an effigy of Gallileo!
May 10th, 2008 at 8:32 am
And, to think that Bill Clinton was so affected by his “vivid memories” of black churches being burned in Arkansas. Maybe he only remembers the ones that he set.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:34 am
jucummings, don’t forget that science once told us that the world was flat and that the atom could not be split. It only got worse once they found they value of giving into liberal politicians to get grants.
May 10th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Michael Turner: regarding the clip with Callibra. You’re right Michael and I’m not saying that the Clintons did nothing on health care. And I think Ms. Callibra’s confrontation with Pres. Clinton and the subsequent rebuttal she gives afterward are not well spoken. In ‘real time’ we all fumble a bit verbally. However, Ms. Callibra isn’t that off the mark: the Clintons’ efforts almost certainly pushed health care reform backwards. I’m saying it was fun to see someone get in his ‘grill’ and rile him up. The defense overreaction by Pres. Clinton, (”…we’ve released millions of documents(?)…) imho, is a hint at how fragile the Clintons’ grip on this issue really is.
May 10th, 2008 at 9:03 am
sheesh….that should read “defensive overreaction…”
May 10th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Al Sharpton for Obama’s V.P.!!!! Sharpton owes nearly $1.5 million in back taxes
May 10th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Yeah Woody. Better to study intelligent design
May 10th, 2008 at 9:16 am
Intelligent design takes less faith than global warming.
Here’s my last one since my wife wants me to edge the yard, and it will probably take me half the day just to start the edger.
Really, don’t miss this one….Clip: Hillary’s Downfall
May 10th, 2008 at 9:17 am
The funniest thing to me, going beyond even that ludicrous hillaryis44 site - talk about cults - is what happened to what used to be one of my go-to sites for foreign affairs, noquarter (noquarterusa.net), run by Larry Johnson. Johnson used to be a CIA agent, and ran one of those sites passing on inside agency gossip, and very searing and cogent analysis of American Imperialism.
Now it has become perhaps the most openly racist, disgusting sites on the web, leading myself to believe that it was a (failed) “op” on LJ’s part. As far as I can see, and I’ve been following this from the beginning, the first mention of all of the Obama “scandals” (probabyl piped in by Blumenthal) and the subsequent (and current - check otu the video on the front page) threats to superdelagates, the whole slew of folks openly stating that they would not vote for Obama, the redbaiting (there is a video of David Axelrod superimposed with Karl Marx) the racism, everything. Even I’m shocked sometimes, especially from someone who seemed as reasonable as Larry johnson.
His career as a commentator is done, so he can go back to lobbying for the Narcostate of Columbia.
May 10th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Thanks for posting that link Woody!
May 10th, 2008 at 11:24 am
No, I can’t say you’re wrong. But I do think that she’ll have done so much damage to her own reputation pursuing that strategy that no one would want her in 2012 if her scenario plays out. She seems tone deaf to the anger and shock she’s provoked within her own party.
May 10th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
But I do think that she’ll have done so much damage to her own reputation pursuing that strategy that no one would want her in 2012 if her scenario plays out
And if doesn’t play out, let’s hope no one wants her in the Senate either.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Meanwhile, Mayhill Fowler’s latest told us that Hillary was on the verge of winning North Carolina.
Based on her on the spot coverage of the campaign in North Carolina on election day.
On the spot coverage of the Clinton campaign, because the Obama folks don’t want her anywhere around …
May 10th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
“Or is it possible that she, and Mr. Clinton, might just be two calculating pols ready and willing to say anything, or do anything, to achieve and retain power?”
Some of us have been saying that since late 1993/early 1994! What took you so long?
May 10th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
I don’t think she meant it to come out as it did. She wanted it to sound like a demographic analysis, but botched the wording. The trouble is she’s been playing wth fire on this issue for weeks now. It was inevitable she’d slip up like this and get burned.
I’ve never seen anything like the transformation she’s undergone in the last few months. Sad and sickening to watch. She makes Romney look like a pillar of integrity.
May 11th, 2008 at 2:08 am
I once pointed out to an argumentative fool that the laws of conservation of matter and energy go back to the 17th century, whereupon he came back with, “Well, if you’re going to rely on 17th century science!” My point was, of course, that those laws have been recognized for a very long time, and continue to be true and to be recognized by thinking people. For one of the commenters here to argue that science once thought of the world as flat and the atom as unbreakable is to argue at about the same level; the statements are demonstrably false if by science you refer to the patterns of thought and methodology accepted for the past 300 years or so; worse yet, they suggest that science is subject to criticism because scientists have not always been correct on every single conjecture or hypothesis. The one thing that is obvious about how science really works is that it progresses, finds a few errors and at the same time continues to build data and theoretical structures for those ideas that are, in fact, not incorrect. Of course, to argue that the data for intelligent design is superior to the data for global warming is simply to identify oneself as intellectually dishonest. This has nothing to do with the rest of the writer’s take on political value judgments, but I would submit that to present oneself as expert on scientific matters while simultaneously demonstrating gross ignorance is to limit one’s credibility accordingly.
May 11th, 2008 at 5:38 am
“She makes Romney look like a pillar of integrity.”
Yeah, like any good salesman, he really BELIEVES in faking sincerity. Clinton only does it to win elections.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Anyone happen to see SNL last night? What a coincidence that the opening skit with Amy Poehler more a less approximates Cooper’s post here.
Poehler deadpans Hillary as
A sore loser
Who’s supporters are racist
And has no ethics
You oughta get a commission from the SLN writers, Marc.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Uh, oh. Haven’t we seen a controlling wife in the White House before?
“Close-in supporters of Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign are convinced he never will offer the vice presidential nomination to Sen. Hillary Clinton for one overriding reason: Michelle Obama.”
May 11th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Good point, Evets, about how Hillary Clinton has dragged herself into the mud over the last few months. Her recent dismissal of Paul Krugman - who, by the way, has actually been a bigger critic of Obama then of her…he seemed to actually be endorsing her candidacy - as “one of my Republican critics” (or words to that effect) for narrowly/politely criticizing her gas tax elimination proposal pretty much shot whatever respect and credibility she had in my eyes. That’s sad, because although I have never supported her, I have had a deal of admiration and sympathy for her in how she has had the strength to endure the REAL misogynisitic attacks on her gender which happen courtesy of right wing reactionaries on AM radio and on Fox News (somehow, these kind of attacks only get media coverage if they come from an Obama supporter). But by the way in which she has been verbally insulting logic and reason and laughing about it, I am beginning to feel less and less sorry for her with each passing day.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
“For one of the commenters here to argue that science once thought of the world as flat and the atom as unbreakable…”
That commenter has only accepted these scientific facts recently Bob. Rush validated them on a recent radio program.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
These ’scientific facts’ the world is not flat and the atom is divisible.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
“I don’t think she meant it to come out as it did. She wanted it to sound like a demographic analysis, but botched the wording.”
Evets got it right. Hillary and Bill are not a lot of things, but racist is not one of them.
What is distressing to learn is we have so many hyper-sensitive adults in this country, and from the overly mothering party that purposely made them this way. Adult children.
May 11th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
As usual, a liberal doesn’t debate what was stated but what he wanted to be stated to make an argument.
I said “a lot of information from Scientific American is quite tainted with leftist ideology,” so the liberals want to turn that into a debate on science itself.
Many so-called science publications have flaws in that the writers and publishers often are not qualified as scientists and have political agendas. Scientific American falls within that trap.
- - -
Richard Feynman:
“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.”
“There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.”
May 12th, 2008 at 1:52 am
There are plenty of unanswered questions in science but this does not mean that all manner of attacks on the realities of science are equally valid. I can remember the anti-evolutionist Duane Gish giving a lecture in which approximately every third sentence was a serious misstatement of some scientific finding or principle. For example, he referred to the big bang theory as saying that the universe expanded from an electron, which is a false statement. The argument he was misquoting has to do with the quantum wavelength of a given amount of energy, which gets smaller as the energy gets larger (eg: the wavelength of a radio wave is a lot larger than the wavelength of an xray or a gamma ray). He did a calculation about the statistical likelihood of a particular DNA sequence arising de novo that was a complete non sequitur (there are many possible DNA sequences that produce the same enzymatic activity). Perhaps writing a line about how people once thought the world is flat shouldn’t be taken so seriously, but merely viewed as snark, but in that case the snarkist should accept a serious reply to the snark on its merits. My point is that cheap shot non sequiturs are generally not valid arguments.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Bob G, scientists and doctors have been proven wrong century after century about what they previously “knew.” If you want another example, doctors bled our first president to death as part of their science to cure him. Global warming is another claim based upon false faith.
It’s legitimate to say that what scientists “know” is simply theory or bias if they cannot prove it, and time clears out that which is wrong .
You just want to turn this into an argument about creation, likely because you hate to think that you might be accountable to God for how you live. I’m not going there with you.
Just to reminid you, this is a political post about Hillary Clinton, who was sent here from another planet to conquer Earth.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:17 am
This is a funny revelation about Hillary Clinton using a phony headline to attack Obama:
“They couldn’t actually find a newspaper clipping that was titled what they wanted (”Obama Attacks Clinton gas tax plan”), so they made one up… but they attached the headline to a Troopergate article!”
May 12th, 2008 at 7:38 am
This just in,
The eminent Slavoj Zizek unambigously backs Obama, while predicting a Mandela/Lula situation - hopes raised higher and then within two years masses disapointed in Mandela/Lula/obama.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:39 am
I would like a grant to study the courtship rituals of the Arctic iguana.
No?
How about a grant to study the the courtship rituals of the Arctic iguana as they relate to Climate Change?
I thought so.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Woody wrote: “If you want another example, doctors bled our first president to death as part of their science to cure him.”
This just goes to show why Woody shouldn’t be telling anyone what science is or how it works.
Did anyone back then do controlled clinical trials on bleeding to see if it worked? Of course not — if they had, they would have seen that bloodletting didn’t work. Because they didn’t, you can’t say that bleeding was a scientifically supported practice, or part of science in any way.
Wikipedia puts it well enough: “The logic of bloodletting was based in the theory of the four humours. According to this theory, a mystical equilibrium between several bodily fluids maintains human life.”
Mystical, woody. M-Y-S-T-I-C-A-L. Not science.
But in Woody’s mind, a practice becomes “part of science” simply because it was practiced by doctors (not scientists) at one time, and because we now have a field called “medical science”, which somehow retroactively applies to medicine as practiced in the early 19th century.
Good thing you didn’t try to become a scientist, Woody. You would never have made the cut.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Richard Feynman:
“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.”
Well, Woody, as a good scientist, Feynman certainly understood that science never proves anything. What it does do is this: disprove competing theories. Absolute proof of anthropogenic global warming? I’m not holding my breath. But if all the other theories aren’t working out very well, and warming continues, what’s the difference from a policy point of view?
If Feynman said that “there is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made,” Carl Sagan also said “They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
Be careful what side you end up on, Woody.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Micahael Turner, it doesn’t do any good to argue with you because it just becomes one of those back-and-forth things where I am right and you won’t admit it. Don’t forget, this post is about space aliens taking over the world.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Mandela and the ANC, of course, had the problem of getting out-negotiated, and scammed by the white negotiators who used the IMF and other instruments to keep their power intact. At least that’s what Naomi Klein agrues. So the analogy falls down there.
Of course, by raising expectations, Obama is certain to leave some of them unfulfilled–I certainly expect to have some of mine left with no one to dance with–but I also expect incremental (not radical) change, especially given the range of forces arrayed against reform. I’ll be happy with someone in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt; very happy if we throw some FDR in; even happier, if Obama proves to be another animal altogether.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Klein makes that point quite well….unfortunately she’s a better journalist than theorist - her book fails spectacularly theoretically - if she stuck to strict journalistic/historical narrative it would have been fantastic. But she is all to Keynesian and denigrating of Marxism, causing one big syllogism, given her faulty premise of the so-called “shock doctrine” - ignoring the structural crisis of capital in the 70s and instead all but calling Milton Friedman genocidal. She’s caught up in blaming individual actors and ideologies for the world’s problems - and actually believes that capitalism can be reformed!!! I mean, even if capitalism could be reformed, reforms are not brought foward by demands for reform, reforms are brought forward by threats of revolution.
Good journalism though.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Zizek’s point is less about ideology and more about the type of minority/urban worker/intellectual bases that Lula, Mandela and Obama have.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Interview from DN
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/12/world_renowned_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on
May 12th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hint for Amy Goodman:
If you have to identify someone as “world renowned,” he probably ain’t.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Aside to bob williams - Jesus christ, I just read Christopher Hitchen’s Michelle Obama screed - it was linked today by Eric Alterman in one of those “more in sorrow than in anger” reflections on his former friend - and I have to say, having been roasted for questioning the breadth of Hitch’s insight, that it was even dumber than I feared when I said that Hitchens wasn’t intellectually competent (I probably should have said “analytically competent”) and out of his depth when he wrote about African Americans. Yes, I was too kind. It’s clear from the article that however limited he may be in his grasp of the subject and context, he’s really just a wilfully dishonest slag who doesn’t even bother to summon the journalistic skills of a bright contributor to a college newspaper when he’s rattling off many of his Slate columns.
Consider: college age Hitchens was hawking the Socialist Worker outside factory gates. College age Michelle Obama was attempting ot analyse, using empirical data she collected, the relationship of Ivy-league educated black people to the larger black communities from wence they came.
Advantage ? Michelle Obama in what amounts to “no contest.”, whatever the weaknesses or immaturity of her thesis.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
If we are being fair to HRC, and that is of increasingly less interest to me, she was trying to cite a demographic/voting fact. However, she did pull back the rhetorical curtain to reveal that when she and the campaign said “hard-working Americans,” it meant “white people.” And this is an insult to black people, brown people, yellow people and, you know, others who on occasion work as hard as, say, Paris Hilton.
The stammer with which she delivered this analysis seems to come on when she is making an argument that she knows is reprehensible.
Hillary Rodham Clinton most certainly is not a racist in any reasoned sense. So when she makes racialized arguments, for the purpose of weakening her Democratic opponent, it is all the more morally blameworthy. She knows better, but chooses to exacerbate the divide between and among the races for her own ends. Bill knows better as well, but he can just access his inner Bubba and shut down the evolved world citizen within him.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Crosby -
You speak the truth.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Shades of the kitchen sink - we’ve now got the spectre of Holy Joe Lieberman expressing concern about Obama because he’s been “endorsed” by Hamas on the one hand, and a New York Times Op-Ed claiming that because Obama’s an “apostate Muslim” according to the writer’s tortured definition, the Islamic world will ramp up hatred of the US and want to kill him for embracing Christianity if he’s elected President.
May 12th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
So what exactly is the difference between a racist and someone who “chooses to exacerbate the divide between and among the races”?
Only hypocrisy and cynicism fit into that dime-thin space.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
“the difference between a racist and someone who ‘chooses to exacerbate the divide…’ ”
Generally the latter is asking the former to vote for them.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
So when Hillary specifies which hard working people she was referring to as white, because clearly they are not hard working black folk voting for her, she is the racist.
What then should we call 90% of hard working black folk voting much higher along racial lines? Oh, Mr. “My major area of research is jibing historical materialism with genetic discoveries of non-contingent aspects of human objectivity” proclaims reverse racism is not possible. Thanks for the jibing jibberish.
And btw, Obama was doing very well with white folks before his stupid bitter statement, and his kooky 20 year Raving Racist Rev surfaced.
Sure Hil would have been better off leaving it at just ‘hard working people’ in this highly sensitive, highly racist, highly f—ked up party. You just can’t be spontaneous and speak clearly. It has to be run through a pc ’sensitivity’ machine, else your plain speak common sense ass is going to get run through, one way or the other. Pathetic.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Actually, Zizek is the only Marxist (and one of three Leftists, depending on how you define the term) on the Foreign Policy/Prospect list of 100 most important public intellectuals, and is probably the most influential living philosopher.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:11 am
“Micahael Turner, it doesn’t do any good to argue with you because it just becomes one of those back-and-forth things where I am right and you won’t admit it.”
Of course, I’ll admit it, Woody. As soon as you come up with that history of bloodletting describing how it was tested in double-blind controlled studies before it was used on George Washington. And since you’re an expert on what science is, I’m sure you went and fact-checked your statements on this point before letting fly with them. So give it up, Woody. Give me that evidence.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:15 am
bob williams writes: “Hint for Amy Goodman: If you have to identify someone as “world renowned,” he probably ain’t.”
Oh, but what about all the World Renowned Scientists in The Deniers. We have to call them world renowned. Otherwise, there’s no chance anybody will ever hear about most of them, and the global economy will be destroyed by the estimated 1% global GDP outlay required to combat global warming and its effects. Utterly destroyed. Shattered, I tell you.
(This message brought to you by the World Renowned Michael Turner.)
May 13th, 2008 at 3:20 am
“Zizek is … is probably the most influential living philosopher.”
More influential than Peter Singer?
May 13th, 2008 at 4:23 am
“Oh, but what about all the World Renowned Scientists in The Deniers. We have to call them world renowned.”
The only world-renowned climatologists I know of are Dr. Albert Gore and Dr. Leonardo DiCaprio.
May 13th, 2008 at 4:58 am
bob williams is manifesting the inattention to detail for which climate change deniers are noted. In my post and in the subtitle for The Deniers, it’s “Scientists”, not “climatologists”.
In fact, there is one undeniably world-renowned scientist profiled in that book: Freeman Dyson. Trouble is, even Dyson admits that human-released CO2 is at least a major factor in global warming.
But consistency doesn’t matter to these people. Lawrence Solomon, the book’s author, claims the support of an undeniably major statistician (but not even a scientist, much less climatologist) in revealing “The Case of the Missing Hockey Stick” (i.e., a general trend of ever-increasing global warming.) However, in the same article for Canada’s National post, he quotes that same statistician implicitly admitting that the statistical errors he found made no difference in the results. And they don’t — you still get Hockey Stick out of every significant climate model running.
People reading this stuff don’t notice the contradiction? That should give you a handle on the mentality of the people who like to read this stuff.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:20 am
OK.
You’re wrong.
The Clintons aren’t taking this to the convention.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Michael Turner, give it up on global warming. That campaign is starting to break down just like Hillary Clinton’s. It’s just another false scare by the left that time and evidence are proving wrong. Politics corrupts science, and people are beginning to see it.
BLACK DAYS FOR BRITISH GREENS: NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE ANYMORE
An amusing cry of woe from an ecofascist below. The Fascists versus the people and the people look like having the last say
May 13th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Singer is pretty influential, especially among ethicisits, I’ll stipulate. But I doubt outside the English speaking world he has the cachet of the multilingual Zizek.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Alarmists lament growing skepticism! “The deniers are winning”
An amusing little rant by Joseph Romm below. Note his very vague usage: “The science”. He means “The models” but that does not sound nearly as good. And it does not do much for his image as an intellectual that he cannot spell “colossal”.
Blessed are the sceptics
In 1633 Galileo Galilei was hauled before the religious authorities of his day, the Inquisition, for daring to concur with Copernicus that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and also that it orbited the sun rather than the other way around. For his pains, he was placed under house arrest and forced to recant. Giordano Bruno failed to recant and suffered a crueller fate.
Today we are faced with a newer religion known as environmental activism which has insinuated itself into some aspects of science. It shares some of the intolerance to new or challenging ideas with the old. Immolation at the stake is no longer fashionable but it has been replaced by pillory in the media.
Give it up. Look at the true science rather than tweaked models and articles from Newsweek.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Woody, that blog you posted is good to refute some of the more extreme catastrophism. I myself think that there are those who bleat and bleat about climate change, etc. - and exxagerate out of faith, in a classic apocolyptic fashion. I’m thinking Gore here.
(Yes yes, I’m a heretic, burn me)
That said, you are taking the opposite point of view - that if “greens” (not Earth First or real green groups by the way, those who prefer, say, to ensure that coal mines aren’t built, for example) say something, then you have to say the opposite.
If I were to say that yes, climate change is real, and most likely caued by humans, but the big deals are being made about it partially out of alarmism and partially to empower land-owning forces like the British Royal Family, old pre-captialist artistocrats that want to limit industrial development, would that square the circle?
The root here is capitalism. “Green capitalism” is heavily invested in by Gore etc. He wants his investments to work. At the same time, other secctors of capital prefer not to do a thing. Truth is, both sides won’t take the real leap of faith and realize it is the institution itself.
We humans have come to a pretty pass when the end of the world is more easy to imagine then the end of capitalism.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:00 am
jc, I make up my own mind without knowing what the greens or anyone else says. It’s just that they are usually on the opposite side of common sense.
What I do see is that many of the global warming alarmists have the goal of killing capitalism, and they use global warming claims as that tool. Their motivations aren’t to save the world but to implement their own Marxist plans. Shouldn’t economic theory be debated on the merits of options rather than made-up issues?
I stumbled upon this write-up the other day. It isn’t famous, but it is an example of what I see coming from the left.
,a href=”http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/05/375571.shtml”>Limits of Private Property
“Global capitalism in its current form is increasingly losing legitimacy. Uneasiness grows over the economic model that produces gigantic riches for a minority and social exclusion for more and more people and leads directly to climate catastrophe. …Social justice and protection of the atmosphere are increasingly serious themes in the debates over minimum wage and in the pleas of the SPD (Social-Democratic party in Germany) and the Greens for credible initiatives in social policy. The chance of taking a further step in delegitimating the present economic order lies in these changes. Who owns what and what can he do with his possession? “
May 13th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Woody - you have it precisely wrong. The Gore type folks are trying to PRESERVE capitalism, and in a sense, the old Landlord class is involved. Yeah, a lot of the Left are incorporating the narrative, but at its heart, the Gore types are trying to DRAIN ENERGY AWAY from truly radical activity, notwithstanding their hypocrisy and self-righteous attitudes.
This is a Marxist take:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4196/
May 13th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
jc, thanks. I’m going to bed, so I’ll have to look at it closer tomorrow, but I think that Al Gore’s motivation began with an effort to redeem his image and perhaps take another run at the Presidency, but then it morphed into a profit scheme.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:08 am
I love this — JC debates global warming with Woody! The blind teaching the deaf to sight-read music!
May 14th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
MT, you neither hear nor see, yet you believe! Hallelujah!
Here’s a good site for agw debate and for you to understand skeptics: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/
May 16th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Went and looked, Woody. One of that blog’s stories about is about a guy who’s “auditing” an independent think tank’s reports of CO2 emissions from power plants. His beef: this think tank’s numbers are different from the EPAs. So I go look at the differences. No real difference from the EPA’s numbers in terms of total emissions. I’m scrolling down in his “audit report” and I hit this comment:
“CARMA’s model generates illogical results….It shows that natural gas plants are three times more carbon intensive than coal–UNLIKELY”
Yeah? And why?
“UNLIKELY because natural gas doesn’t have as much carbon as coal that can be released during combustion!!!”
OK, Now I know this guy’s a fucking moron: natural gas is often transported in liquified form, and liquifying it consumes a lot of energy, which in many cases derives mostly from fossile fuel sources.
CARMA’s numbers might be bad, but how does that hurt us if they aren’t official? In any case, this guy doesn’t know his energy models from his ass.
And he claims “peer review”? Unless his peers are teenagers in malls in San Fernando valley malls, one of more of them would have asked to have the triple exclamation points removed.
Nice try, Woody. But you still don’t know how to do a sniff test.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Advantage MT
June 4th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
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