Stop Me Before I Vote Again

...There's something really wrong and misplaced with all this. Nobody gets beaten up or raped on an email list. People can be awfully rude and nasty, but for heaven's sake, at the end of the day, it's just pixels on a screen...

It's interesting how this line of reasoning is always used to defend whatever the arguer's comfort zone is. As opposed to the arguer thinking to himself, Well, I personally don't mind the gender-specific insult the other person is unhappy about. OTOH, it doesn't really take anything away from me to substitute some other term. English is a rich and varied language, and it's not as if this one type of term is my only option for conveying my point.

After all, I want to meet my comrades halfway when possible. Words, after all, are only words.

Go ahead and tell me I'm some kind of priss. You wouldn't be the first, nor the last. But a lot of the language we prisses complain about isn't just offensive, it's also corny and woefully uninventive coming from the mouths of people who pride themselves on their ability to actually flex their brains from time to time.

Generally, when insulting a man, I use an insult aimed at a man. And when insulting a woman, an insult aimed at a woman. Gender-specific insults aren't abhorrent as much as they are ...well... specific.

If I'm talking about some guy being Mr Asshole, I suppose I could opt for the manliness-insult spin and call him "Mizzz Asshole" and see if he gets that bit about the "Mizzz" questioning his virility and orientation/preference. But wouldn't that still be gender-specific?

When someone insults me, I think they are insulting the ME --the self that I am-- and not so much the fact that I'm XY or XX.

What is all this irritability gaining us? At what point do we have to erase all reference to gender, to genetic XX or XY typing, to pronouns and nouns and epithets that reference a simple biological fact?

What's the aim? Hermaphroditism?

I'm reminded of that Kate Moss picture used a couple weeks ago... and my comments thereafter.

Probably that is because I'm a man. And we all know how men are.

Or, y'know. You could just use the word "asshole." We've all got one, last I heard.

Example:

I kinda' like that Oxtrot dude sometimes. His posts can be intelligent and thought-provoking, when he's not totally hell-bent on acting like an asshole.

See? Did The Cause-- whatever it might be?-- just suffer even a minor setback? Enquiring minds want to know.

Jeebus, MJS, how can you keep reading that site? Old Carrol Cox sounds like he fancies himself Marx and Engels' third wheel in their efforts to purge some schmuck they didn't like from some drunken pointless meeting in 1855.

Meanwhile, one wonders what people on that site could agree on insofar as they profess concerns about the Woman Question. "That women be equally included in the class struggle," I'd wager. How wonderfully specific and productive!

"...It's the mentality of the revival meeting: are you really saved?"

Ayup.

Show that you conform to the sanctioned view, or beware the opprobrium.

Demonstrate the proper attitude, use the right terms, follow the script, respect the group sanctioned boundaries, take care not to offend the apostles and prophets, quote them at length, tender obsequy to your spiritual elders, defer to those claiming the mantle of rigteousness, and always, always remember that the faith trumps you in all things.

Ms X, I'm sorry to have gotten on your bad side with this one, since your contributions here (too rare) are so highly prized. But I just can't see it your way.

The gender specificity of insulting epithets is an interesting and poorly explored topic. Johnson and Boswell once had an argument about whether you could call a woman a "blockhead". Johnson, feminist that he was, maintained you could, and Boswell (IIRC) said not: "blockhead" was gender-specific for him.

As is "asshole". In practice, people don't often call women "assholes" -- at least not in my circle. And they don't often call guys "shrews".

It's not clear that the use of a gender-specific insult necessarily implies that the speaker holds the view that one gender is inferior or properly subservient to the other -- which is what sexism or male chauvinism means, at least on the ideological plane, right?

Admittedly, the symmetry argument has to be used with caution where there has been a history of asymmetry. But... but... isn't symmetry where we want to get to?

[shrug]

Smith, I had somebody once tell me that I couldn't be a "curmudgeon," because it was a term that could only apply to dudes. I had to drag out the dictionary to prove that the definition said "irascible person." None of this shit is new to me, so don't worry.

But it's not the individual instances that are important so much as what happens when they're tallied up at the end of the day. I've seen this at work in daily life, though I'll spare you the harrowing details because this isn't one of those confessional blogs.

Speaking of confession, I find it humorous that Crow also mentions the religious angle. You can find people capable of making a religion of any damn thing: from vintage sitcoms to Yoga class to an odd-shaped spot of mold on the side of the refrigerator. I don't consider that automatic grounds for avoiding sitcoms, Yoga, and the use of refrigeration. I just steer clear of the people who don't know how to keep them in proportion.

Ms X -- Points taken.

I think what's bugging me about my comrades' piety on the lefty list is precisely the obsession with purity of heart -- as if we could root out from our minds and our spontaneous speech the legacy of thousands of years, or should even bother to try something so narcissistically and Quixotically self-improving.

What we can do is add a new layer. Reflecting on it, I think maybe this is a more accurate way to think about what the women's liberation movement, and the black liberation movement, did for us pale males of a certain age: not getting rid of stuff -- which you can't really do, unless you get Alzheimer's -- but putting something new into the mix. A new bird's voice in the internal Parlement of Fowles.

It made a difference. It didn't make us post-racial or post-gendered, any more than getting baptized is going to make you a pure incorporeal spirit, but where it took hold, it made us amenable -- even enthusiastic -- about the substantial work of dismantling the world of Jim Crow and Betty Crocker. Isn't that what matters?

" it's not the individual instances that are important so much as what happens when they're tallied up at the end of the day"
alas both profoundly true
and daunting
thomas scheelings nickles and pennies demonstration proves the long run results are ..segregatrion culturalization polarization hyper differentiiation until...
like a bubble in lot values it explodes
or for reasons of a more potent re polarizing force decays

as socially constructed cultural entities
we hu beings are caught :

isms are all ways with us

can't live with em
can't live without em

this site is a rally pole/rally hollow
a polarizer of sorts
let me add a recent exhibit to the ism hunt
congo for congress
i used it thinking of inept amateur drunks at the high tide of a wedding

HOWEVER ....

images of chained africans danced in
folks heads
and after all
we do have a colored potus
and his party is indeed heading up that conga line so ...

at anyrate justly turkey roped
butthen semi withdrawn

i replied
with the not entirely knee jerk following:

i do not find being accused of racism absurd

i'm sure i'm a racist

i'm prolly not even
a technical non racist

always prepared to be drawn up short on this

so "fire away gridley"!!!

i simply mistook your words

btw
if a random reader objects
to anything i write
that random reader
need do no more
then comment here
and they will receive my personal public response

in this case
as peter sellers sez in what's up pussycat

http://upcomingdiscs.com/ecs_covers/whats-new-pussycat-large.jpg

" i promise ...i'll never do it again "

Hey, that was me!

Actually, this describes some of the difficulties I have with your… movement? Ideology? I’m not entirely sure what you’re advocating, collectively or as individuals, sorry. Or, maybe "difficulties" is inadequately descriptive. Maybe "areas of not understanding what the hell you mean" would be better.

Because, you know, my initial reaction to your post was: UGH UGH SPOKEN LIKE A(N) (OLD?) WHITE DUDE UGH. But I think, in certain ways, you’re right; the quality of self-awareness upon which our human experiences are based is an artificial construct, and it is by necessity filled with garbage, and sifting through the garbage to value-judge every rotten banana peel is extremely stupid. Like, I suffer from an irrational hatred of organized religion, which I am semi-capable of controlling. That is not a whole lot better, for me or anybody else, than my being a reasonably quiet evangelical gay-hater.

But these things are real problems! Racism is a problem (insofar as I can tell you that I, personally, have been called a "nigger" several different times by multiple ugly white people, etc.)! Sexism is a problem (insofar as women who suffer "suspicious miscarriages" in Utah can be tried for murder, etc.)! Homophobia is a problem (Google "NOM," etc.)! These are not the quaint artifacts of a bygone era dredged up by dorky liberals in Indiana Jones hats, who use them to destroy a panoply of imagined cultural Nazis. They are real, actual things that hurt people. Still. Now. Here.

While I am sure sexism is not a problem in the playground of your left-wing mailing list, it is indeed a problem in Real Times America™ — and I’m with homeslice up there, I’m afraid. If you don’t have a plan to deal with it because you’ve reassured yourself that -isms are the stuff of undergrad-seminar theses, you’ve already lost. Well, I mean. Not that you were necessarily winning in the first place.

(P.S. — I often call women "assholes," and "bastards," and sometimes also "dicks" or "dickheads." If that helps.)

Emma,

I didn't get the impression that Mr. Smith encouraged a return to imaginary glory, where White guys had free reign to be and do their awful worst. I think he's just suggesting that the -ism doesn't always address the problems it proposes because it creates divisions which preserve the problem itself. The purity of heart required for conformity does not create a greater whole. It breeds sectarian division.

I could be reading it wrong, but that's how I took it.

Xeno,

I didn't introduce religion. I commented on one part of the original, because I agreed.

Jack fires a bull's eye (NOTE: not a cow's eye!) --

I think he's just suggesting that the -ism doesn't always address the problems it proposes because it creates divisions which preserve the problem itself. The purity of heart required for conformity does not create a greater whole. It breeds sectarian division.

That's right. Dworkin-MacKinnon-Paglia cause me to dislike women and feminism, not feel empathy toward women and feminism.

Again, it's the same old thing: Angry Jews pissed off at Hitler's extermination efforts, they gather together, plead their case, get a "homeland", call it Israel, and begin acting just like Hitler. How's that helping their cause?

ms_x --

I find the generic, broad-spectrum use of "asshole" to be devoid of creativity. The whole point of insult is to insult, and more precisely to insult the target chosen. Using "asshole" in a broad manner strikes me as calling someone a "doody-head" or "meanie." Juvenile. Lacking creative impulse.

As to the "cause"... I'm afraid I don't know what "cause" I'm working here, other than to vent frustration with the insane counter-productive trends among The Noble Democrats and their vast minions. I wouldn't call that a "cause" as much as I'd call it an existential poppet valve.

Isn't this post really about the now settled dustup regarding 'Congo' and 'Obama' used in the same paragraph a few days ago?

Y'all should try to hang on to Emma in the comments. She brings a much needed touch of color to the proceedings and seems to have had a different life experience than most of the regulars here. She might just descant usefully off-key when the brotherhood swings into the Whiffenpoof song.

Jack:
I didn't get the impression that Mr. Smith encouraged a return to imaginary glory, where White guys had free reign to be and do their awful worst. I think he's just suggesting that the -ism doesn't always address the problems it proposes because it creates divisions which preserve the problem itself. The purity of heart required for conformity does not create a greater whole. It breeds sectarian division.

No, I didn’t think he advocated that, either. I just thought he wanted to do away with -isms because, as a white guy, he doesn’t really have to deal with them and would prefer to pretend they don’t exist. I don’t believe that makes him a racist, a misogynist, or even an apologist. I think that makes him a person who is desperately defending the arbitrary boundaries of the world he thinks he lives in — just like the people he’s criticizing.

Also, denouncing misogyny et al. breeds 'sectarian division' only if some of the people you’re attempting to include are racist misogynist homophobes. Who are probably hopelessly crazy anyway, amirite?

CF Oxtrot:
That's right. Dworkin-MacKinnon-Paglia cause me to dislike women and feminism, not feel empathy toward women and feminism.

If you can shoehorn Naomi Wolf in there, I’ll cosign.

Nowhere did I say I was infatuated with the feminist establishment, by the way — but "feminism" and "misogyny" aren’t the two heads on any legitimate coin I’ve ever seen.

I don’t understand why Israel is going out of its way to behave like it’s being run by a consortium of comicbook supervillains, either.

Lastly, I thought the point of an insult was to be insulting, generically or otherwise? "Poopyhead" works, too.

Emma,

I would choose the other Public Naomi -- Klein, not Wolf. Sorry, but my reading of The Two Public Naomis leads me to find Wolf palatable, Klein disgusting. Based on the writings I've read, I agree with Wolf fairly often, I disagree with Klein almost always.

As to "generally" insulting people, I have no plans for political leadership, so I don't try to do anything generically, as I'm not seeking a broad-spectrum base of admirers, fans, or followers. "Poopyhead" sounds like a winner for a group of 5 year old kids, though I'm not sure what one gains by insulting a 5-year-old to the delight of his/her fellow 5-year-olds. If I wanted to be Bob McAllister and have a 21st Century WONDERAMA, I'd be doing that. And I'm not.

Oooh. Eeeeeh. Oooh aah aaah. Ting. Tang. Walla walla bing bang.

So what does that make me, Emma? I agree with MJS about the -ism problem, and I'm not caucasian, could give a rats severed testicles about preserving the status quo ante (nor does Mr. Smith, I imagine), find lefty self-criticism to be so much gonadectomious refusal to do anything in favor of talking imaginary futures, and generally all around feel at home in the conditions which formed me on the streets of Boston, and on my walkabouts to Nawlins and points south - among West Indian Jah prophets, African immigrants, Lebanese alcoholic poets, Dominican gun runners, ex-AIM radicals, ex-Marine anarchists, Egyptian expats, Armenian prostitutes and Puerto Rican macheteros.

Damn you, Jack, and your insistence on paying attention to the world of reality, instead of the Universe of Pwoggie Koffee Klatches.

A little history on acquisition of the "homeland" might dispel confusion on why Israeli leaders tend to come across as ethnic cleansing thugs and whether success of the project, which got underway in the 19'th century with the aim of "spirit[ing] the penniless population (the Palestinians) across the borders", had much to do with Hitler except as retroactive justification:

To this day, it is the mantle of the Judeocide that covers the actions of the Zionist state, in the eyes not only of the Israeli population or Jews of the diaspora, but Western opinion at large. Historically, however, there was little or no connexion between them. By 1947, the fighters of the Haganah and Irgun were well aware of what had happened to the Jews trapped in Nazi Europe. But they would not have acted otherwise even if every compatriot had been saved. Zionist objectives had been laid down well before Hitler came to power, and were not altered by him. Ben-Gurion once said he was willing to sacrifice the lives of half the Jewish children of Germany, if that was the price of bringing the other half to Palestine, rather than leaving them all safely in England. Of how much less account was the fate of the Arabs, children or adults. The goal of a Jewish national state in the Middle East admitted of no other solution than that which was forcibly realized by the Nakba. After the event, the Judeocide has served as pretext or mitigation, but it had no immediate bearing on the outcome. In Europe and America, it gained external sympathy for the Zionist war of independence, but this was never a decisive factor in its success.

I'll put in a yes vote (bad word, I know) for MJS' larger point that something is very rotten in the Left Denmark, and it has to do with the fixation on verbalism.

My view of this is that the big problem is that we are all so tied to our old tropes that we are doing 99 percent posing and 1 percent thinking about the world.

On marxmail, they almost all agree that sexism is horrible, but have nearly zero to actually say about its actual working in today's world, as opposed to its place in "theory."

Meanwhile, no offense Emma, but I also find this to be a pretty typical statement of the feminist position:

Sexism is a problem (insofar as women who suffer "suspicious miscarriages" in Utah can be tried for murder, etc.)!

Fuck Utah, certainly. But it is preposterous to say that the number one problem now facing women, the most important manifestation of sexism, is abortion stuff.

The far-and-away #1 impact of sexism at present is the continuing imposition of "parent of last resort" on women in a society that does not have serious early-childhood stipends and support institutions. This is a direct result of the continuing power of "separate spheres" ideology. Unlike getting women the right to be equally considered for employment, a struggle most won, this one actually attacks capitalism much more deeply. And upper and middle class feminism ignores it like the plague, while perpetuating the largely faux politics of abortion rights.

Tens of millions of women have their lives ruined each year by delivering a child into this society, which continues to insist that mothering is a mere gift, not a form of extremely important human labor.

Where the fuck is the marxmail list on all this?

I'm pretty hardcore against sexist language use. But that issue is gossamer fluff compared to the steamroller of our super-sexist "family life" ideology and non-policies.

slk --

correlation =/= causation

I'd wager Nikolas Copernicus dreamed of being on the moon, but that doesn't mean NASA's efforts were all about Copernican dreams.

I'll also endorse MJS claim that we are winning the culture wars on race and gender. Men call each other bitches now. I think that's an early sign of an eventual dissolution of the old firewall between gendered insults. That doesn't mean "bitch" isn't a problem still for women. It just means let's acknowledge and celebrate that this isn't 1955 any more.

MD has articulated a lot of what bothers me about Left ismism. It seems to be all about subjectivity and diction and manners. Whereas the big problems are concreta, not mentalia.

Very few people would describe themselves as racists these days. Racism is acknowledged to be disreputable even by most "conservatives". That was what I meant about the ideological battle being won.

Yet of course black folks are still a long way, as a group, from terms of economic equality with whites. Now why is that? Is it because lingering subjective racism persists, though we no longer acknowledge it as such?

I doubt this explanation, though I don't doubt the fact that people have not yet become color-blind. And in fact the ritual deployment of "racism" -- the subjective condition -- as the designated villain in these discussions gets in the way of thinking about what's really going on.

I hasten to add -- just so there's no misunderstanding -- that I'm not hinting at a blame-the-victim hypothesis instead. Rather, I think there are institutional forces at work which don't even need subjective racism, either as ideology or just as attitude, to keep the status quo where it is and even turn the screws on the vast majority of us, black and white, further every year. But as long as we obsess about bugbears in people's heads, or gaucheries in people's speech, we're not thinking about those institutional forces.

And PPS: As a materialist, I think "bitch" is still a problem for women mostly because of the material/institutional risks of being a woman. Equalize and livably remunerate the labor of parenting and finish the struggle for pay equity, and the sting of sexist words ends in two generations at most.

"A room of one's own," bitches!

Oh, and PS: I'm enjoying Emma's comments, which always give me something to chew on even when I don't agree, and I hope she doesn't get too fed up with all the churlish old dudes around here, myself the most churlish of them all.

Michael — your post is too long and closely-worded to C&P anything meaningfully, but you’re right, of course. I was aiming a little more directly at things that cause observable pain, and I continue to be appalled that female citizens residing in Utah are held to semi-comedic Biblical standards when it comes to reproduction rights (although I’m sure worse laws exist in other states as well; I read an article in the NYT a few weeks ago describing legislative attempts to force women who want to terminate their pregnancies to sit through narrated ultrasounds first). Your argument is certainly more powerful — although, because it represents a nearly impenetrable problem, it is often discarded in favor of more controversial, less representative topics like abortion. At least by me, it is.

CF Oxtrot — Namecalling is always ridiculous, and when an argument has unravelled to the point that people start insulting one another, you might as well just go for broke and call your opponent a "poopyhead." Because however observant and incisive your put-down may actually be, in practice, it boils down to "poopyhead." A joke, that was. Sort of.

Jack — Again, I never said the poster liked, embodied, or wished to embody any of the -isms he claimed had ceased to exist. But, I am impressed that you went to the trouble to try and shut me up by displaying the variegated plumage of your life experience, and then went on to describe the great comfort with which you navigate the corner of the planet in which you live, but it is completely irrelevant to the question I raised. I have been less comfortable, in my own life, attending school with and living next to racists. Which is my point, remember? How do you deal with racism when you have convinced yourself that no such thing exists? And why would you go to the trouble of pointing out how very brown and marginalized all your cohort are, if race and gender are irrelevant? Shouldn’t you have included your ultra-white third grade math teacher in there, too? Also, I am completely positive that some of those people you laundry-listed as the providers of your epic social enlightenment might have something a little more complex to say about the role of racism in modern life. Just a guess, though — I’ve never met them. (I don’t think.)

as long as we obsess about bugbears in people's heads, or gaucheries in people's speech, we're not thinking about those institutional forces.

Exactly.

"But it is preposterous to say that the number one problem now facing women, the most important manifestation of sexism, is abortion stuff."

Then later...

"Tens of millions of women have their lives ruined each year by delivering a child into this society, which continues to insist that mothering is a mere gift, not a form of extremely important human labor."

Isn't there some significant connection between 'abortion stuff' and tens of millions of women having their lives ruined each year? That child rearing should be paid labor is the implication. But one could likewise assert that women's access to abortion services whens 'life's ruin' is threatened under current economic circumstances, where child rearing is not paid labor for mothers, is issue number one.

Social change agents should not avoid picking the low hanging fruit .

PPPS: The #1 source of energy for racism is now the material disparity imposed by our history of racial economic deprivation. Black poverty is presented as proof of black inferiority, which then gives continuing life to racist thoughts and reactions, which remain immensely present behind white politeness.

But the key point is that the material conditions are the cause, and the rest, symptoms. Erase racial wealth disparities (which would require either an extremely unlikely outbreak of genuine white regret or a very serious attack on capitalism) and the practice and pain of the words involved rapidly drop.

This is why they shot MLK, of course.

The "Left" still fails to get it, even though we supposedly claims to be historical materialists.

Emma,

Oh to be from the rarefied strata of human existence where namecalling has been banished forever out of polity.

Sorry to say I grew up playing The Dozens with friends, and continue to play it to this day, much to ms_xeno's and op's chagrin I think.

I don't for a minute pretend or think that namecalling is a substitute for logical, rational, fact-based cool analysis.

I also don't think that the majority of comment threads around the InterWebToobz are the birthplaces of the types of social changes needed in America, and I have a hard time taking most Pwoggie Bloggies seriously, so my namecalling gets used fairly often. Yep, that's sure to cause people like you and ms_xeno to see me as a knuckle-dragging troggo, and well shucks and gosh-darn-it, y'all may even call me that under your breath without typing it and thereby having a record of it.

But I wouldn't mind. Comes with the territory. And as long as the focus on politeness is at the fore, the fear of insult at the head of the table... nothing needing repair will get fixed.

At least we'll have a civilized discussion though.

I'm busy having a mixed reaction of silent comic guffaws and nauseous dry heaves at the idea of abortion being mainly a socioeconomic issue.

That ranks up there with Stan Goff saying war doesn't really involve murder, it is really about politics.

Yeah, those dead bodies, destroyed limbs, ruined psyches -- just unfortunate fallout from political wrasslin'... yeah.

Emma, I don't see how demanding universal public daycare and preschool and Euro-style family stipends is impenetrable in any aspect. It's simply radical, hence ignored.

Lunch, you get this massively wrong.

The fact of the matter is that pro-abortion, as it now exists, politics is killing feminism and women.

Because even many progressive women will always choose to deliver less-than-optimally sought babies, abortion is only a partial answer to the politics of parenting.

In practice, what we have is a split society. In the North and Far West, women have lots of abortion and the rate of getting trapped with babies is medium-high. In the middle and South, where reaction runs high, abortion rates are lower and entrapment is extremely high.

Meanwhile, upper- and middle-class feminists continue to try to pass off pro-choice as a serious answer to it all, when the fact of the matter is that it is a distraction. And a pointless distraction, too, because this power elite will never outlaw abortion, as have been multiply proven by multiple reactionary regime in DC not doing jack about it, for the well and good reason that really acting would kill the Republican Party by driving elite women permanently away.

Feminism lies a-moldering in this stinking loop, and that seems to be just fine with most feminists, who generally have nice lives and full life choices already in hand. They can't be bothered to actually risk what they have, can they?

Conservatism: the desire to risk other people's lives for one's one benefit and pleasure

Another PPS: My post wasn't in fact motivated by the semantic missed connection on Owen's use of the word "congo". In fact I entirely missed the point of Emma's original Ewww remark on the subject, until other people leapt into the breach and cleared up the misunderstanding -- which is all it was, and easily set straight once recognized.

No, I really just lost patience with the torrent of sanctimony on my mailing list, and particularly the unreflecting way in which us Lefties, under conditions of stress, are wont to emit impenetrable clouds of squid-ink abstraction, full of unargued assertions made as if they were self-evident.

Here's a sample:

"how to 'treat' women" is an integral part of building a revolutionary movement in the U.S. I would expect it clear to most of us that such an integration of women's rights includes making the connection that opposing the death penalty for an Iranian woman or, for that matter, the use of rape as a military and political weapon by oppressor governments would be both a point of solidarity for women and men "in the u.s." but would also raise the bar for all, especially feminists, in comprehending the revolutionary implications of learning "how to 'treat' women."

Needless to say, it's the icing on the cake, for me, that this chap is also -- surprise, surprise -- calling for more missionary work directed at Iran.

Outlawing abortion would also reignite feminism and bring news personnel into its ranks, and those folks might develop non-brain-dead demands. Hence, another reason abortion rights are absolutely safe at the national level.

The best thing for feminism other a spontaneous self-revival would be for a national ban on abortion. Millions of pissed of working-class women would start questioning the NOW and NARAL armchair quarterbacks.

" op's chagrin "

perhaps u flatter yourself

" I have a hard time taking most Pwoggie Bloggies seriously, so my namecalling gets used fairly often"

way kool ...
so long as you use identically
antagonistic lingo
face to face
with some one that might
bust your nose open

but either way
u get a door pass
to call me whatever occurs to u ...

once again
gong show topics draw the most flies here

Emma,

Trying to shut you up? Please. I asked you a question.

It's some first order BS that you want to try to make a question about your pro forma assertion into an attempt to "shut you up."

I can no more silence you than I can describe your anonymous features. I have zero - zero - ability to restrain or impede your participation. And I wouldn't begin to want to.

FFS.

I think op-san has given us the concept of the week, if not the millennium: The Gong Show Left.

:-)

And I once again get to agree with MD about the connection between poverty and racism. Institutionally enforced poverty, buttressed by the drug war and the law enforcement targeting of black males as vectors of antisocial disease, maintains the real conditions of real racism.

Not the ghosts in the head that eager lefties and Kosnikauts worry in their bloggerific anonymity.

And I can take a moment, following that, to assert the connection between hierarchical power, poverty and the sustained oppression of poor and non-white women. The identity doesn't create the problem. The inequity creates the identities.

To continue the gong show:

Another problem with letting abortion-rights activism pass for muscular feminism is that abortion-rights activism is merely a get-out-the-vote campaign. A clear majority of women already know abortion is their right and aren't willing to surrender it.

Demanding European early-childhood policies would raise the topic of consciousness-raising.

Every radical and meaningful social movement combines demands for new institutions with efforts at consciousness-raising.

Wow.

I took a few moments to let the nasty really sink in:

"Also, I am completely positive that some of those people you laundry-listed as the providers of your epic social enlightenment might have something a little more complex to say about the role of racism in modern life. Just a guess, though — I’ve never met them."

Social enlightenment?

Here's what I wrote, before you dive off again into a clownish misreading,

"...all around feel at home..."

I expressed comfort. Get it? Not "social enlightenment." Not some profound experience of the wonders of diversity.

Comfort.

The environment which formed my worldview - egads! oh noes! incroyable! - is the one I enjoy.

This is what irked you into the nasty?

Come on, now...

op, I imagine you are nearly as chagrined by my insults hurled at various targets, as I am at trying to decipher your often cryptic fragmented prose.

Why do you get so flustered (or whatever) by these "gong show topics"? Do you want us all to enjoy the hair-splitting technical econ analyses that you prefer?

Do you dispute that many who consider themselves "on the left" are politeness/harmony busybodies who care more about politeness and harmony than fixing the issues that they pretend to trouble them so deeply?

Jack --

And I once again get to agree with MD about the connection between poverty and racism. Institutionally enforced poverty, buttressed by the drug war and the law enforcement targeting of black males as vectors of antisocial disease, maintains the real conditions of real racism.

And I can take a moment, following that, to assert the connection between hierarchical power, poverty and the sustained oppression of poor and non-white women. The identity doesn't create the problem. The inequity creates the identities.

Paragraph 1 -- yep. Which is why I say the Civil Rights Act of 1965 wasn't the watershed event that many "lefties" like to suggest. Forcing schools to integrate, forcing buses to allow Blacks to sit anywhere they like, removing separate water fountains -- these things are nifty symbols, but they don't change the mind of the bigot nor soften the antipathy of the prejudiced scapegoater. The CRA didn't fix the disproportionate "law enforcement" emphasis on arresting and jailing Blacks. Our harmonious Lefties would have us believe the CRA plus some changed rhetoric would fix all that. Uh huh.

Paragraph 2 -- The inequity creates the identities, indeed.

So sorry, Mr. Dawson...but being one of those male lefiies who happen to support a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy if it threatens her life absolutely, I fail to see how the Left adopting an antiabortion policy merely to play the "pure economic" angle will do anything but further authoritarianism...which, last time I checked, went AGAINST everything the independent Left should stand for.

There are certain things that just should NOT be up for debate. A woman's bodily autonomy should be one of them.

This isn't just about rich women getting abortions; it's about ALL women having personal control over their own bodies.

Would you also be just as opposed to women having the right to safe and legal contraception, too....or would you consider that too to be more "get-out-the-vote activism"??? Especially when all it would take is one Supreme Court vote the other way to turn the clock back to the bad old days??

Why not just go ahead and say that repealing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts -- and repealing the 14th through 16th Amendments, too -- would be a goal of the Left in radicalizing Blacks to the "working classes", too?? It would be a logical extension of your "logic".

Anthony

" I imagine you are nearly as chagrined by my insults hurled at various targets, as I am at trying to decipher your often cryptic fragmented prose."

"Why do you get so flustered (or whatever) by these "gong show topics "

flustered ??....no
whatever ?....yes i get very whatever

"hair splitting" ???
i agree it must seem trivial
where nothing less then a scalping
would be necessary
......in some cases
to make even an impression

the floating rag time band
down here in the comment pool
strikes up another

dueling tubas exhibition

op, merely out of my occasional desire to increase fellowship, I sometimes wish that I cared about those micro-details of economics that seem to hold so much meaning for you.

I think that the number of people who can speak intelligently with you on such matters is very small. However, I do think you have a wider cohort than I would if I tried to discuss the niceties of insurance regulation. I've never seen a single discussion of insurance regulation's impact on our economy. Ever. Anywhere. On the InterWebToobz, I mean. Of course I used to discuss it all the time with the lawyers I worked with on insurance regulatory matters, and with the insurance company execs who would hire us to navigate those waters.

I just don't think it's interesting enough for most people. Too removed from their existence.

And that's kinda how your econ discussions strike me. I'm always looking for the hook that pulls me in, but most times I feel like I'm trying to read Aramaic with a mind that knows only English, Spanish and vulgarism.

It's good you have Fred Bethune here to discuss that stuff with you. Isn't it?

I spent some time years ago trying to understand car insurance regulation -- all that weird no-fault stuff. Brain-cracking. The Fourier transform is child's play by comparison, and trying to think about the economic implications is like string theory.

Nobody else gets it, either. You go to the experts, and they can't explain it. They know how to game it on behalf of their clients, but it's all voodoo -- swing a dead chicken over your head exactly three and a half times, no more, no less, and you'll win 55% of the time.

Some post gong show thoughts.

You know, there is a whole lot of identity political silliness and it bugs the hell out of me too, but MJS you paint with too broad a brush and it's getting old. You should write more on how identity politics plays into the left discourse on Iran and burqa purges in Europe and less about how trivial you think every single identity concern is. In the meantime, I think folks who hear a lot of sexist, racist, ageist, homo-hating shit talked about their ilk on listservs and blogs and in meetings should continue to comment until the folks around them do the fairly easy work of desisting. This is a practical matter: no fucking self-respecting woman is going to stick with any movement that thinks calling Hillary a 'bitch' is cool or, at worst, trivial. See, class struggle is actually fortified by not thoughtlessly alienating people from it.

Those who find the mopping-up effort endlessly tiring, endlessly trivial AND endlessly post-worthy should at least make a distinction between the Carroll Cox's of the world who use correctness as a cudgel and folks like Ms. Xeno who takes you to task with humor and fellow-feeling in an effort to repair the solidarity you compromise every time you trivialize matters that affect her more directly than they affect you. Isn't it enough that there are two women in this discussion and they both think you are mostly full of shit on this?

Jack, it's nice that as a darker person, you're giving MJS a pass on political correctness, but does your indulgence of straight, white guy behavior go across the board or are you cool with it because in left/lib political circles you don't encounter a lot of unadorned racism? If calling Hillary a bitch is a small thing, it follows that calling Obama a nigger is a small thing too. Presumably we real lefties dislike her and him and Hillary's a woman and Obama's black. Why not? Doesn't the left have far more serious things in front of it than how alienating racist language might be to black leftists? What about mass incarceration, for instance? We can never address that if we are too busy taking each other to task for use of the n-word.

But, of course, nobody would call Obama a nigger in left circles, because that word, unlike 'bitch' and other sexist insults, really has been rooted out of mainstream culture and quite correctly so. Yes, of course, stigmatizing the word has not ended racism, which, persists to this day. But it certainly was a necessary step because words are important. They disempower some and empower others. People stopped saying nigger because other people kept openly confronting it until practically no one felt any inclination to say it. I doubt that anyone would argue that doing getting to that was trivial or at odds with serious work.

"Jack, it's nice that as a darker person, you're giving MJS a pass on political correctness, but does your indulgence of straight, white guy behavior go across the board or are you cool with it because in left/lib political circles you don't encounter a lot of unadorned racism? If calling Hillary a bitch is a small thing, it follows that calling Obama a nigger is a small thing too. Presumably we real lefties dislike her and him and Hillary's a woman and Obama's black. Why not? Doesn't the left have far more serious things in front of it than how alienating racist language might be to black leftists? What about mass incarceration, for instance? We can never address that if we are too busy taking each other to task for use of the n-word."

It's funny that you confuse MJS for politically correct. Worth reading this for that laugh alone. Next you'll refer to Owen as interested in anything but economics, nu?

But hey! - at least you got to use the n-word a lot, on your way to jousting with a field of burning scarecrows.

By and by - not having a lot of affection for -isms does not equal "indulgence for white guy" anything.

Heh.

MJS — After reading your own comments on this post, I have gone from thinking you are a hopelessly-out-of-it white guy to agreeing with you completely. You are absolutely right; phantom bigotries with clearly-identifiable names are always attractive to people who think they’re trying to change the world, and the genuine problems represented by those terms can hide behind them and disappear from view. If that weren’t the case, we would have a federal Racism Museum to send schoolchildren to, so that the injustice would never be forgotten. I also agree that a thoughtless reliance on rote -ismology has lead to a lot of political blarghing, and not enough change — and that the people who generally say they want to do away with irrational social prejudice are often the ones who reap its benefits, directly or otherwise (re: the incessant media coverage of the demographically-tiny Teabagger movement, for example). I thought your original point was, "Why don’t these silly liberals stop bludgeoning racism/misogyny? It’s/They’re relics of a bygone era! We need to quit thinking about dumb stuff like that, and concentrate on the real problems, which are: [*WHATEVER YOU THINK THE REAL PROBLEMS ARE*]." Not the case, okay.

Also, I’m not trying to be disrespectful when I say things like, "I don’t know what you’re talking about." I often really don’t. This is my first experience with a 'people criticizing the left from even farther left' blog, and I often feel like I jumped in mid-sentence.

MD — Again, I was responding to the general biological bias in favor of motherhood, which as far as I know is not an easy thing to tease apart. In most of the world’s major religions, the icon of the mother & child is considered one of the most powerful and sacred — and that attitude trickles down to the mortal plane, creating a general insanity which seems to imply that giving birth is a holy and important act, and not one that’s simply painful and bloody, and often the direct result of nothing more spiritual than a broken condom. Mothers and children are dehumanized upwards; she’s glowing and joyful, and the kid’s a 'gift.' You’re again correct that many of the worst consequences of this bias could be ameliorated with simple acts like mandating universally-available child care and decent OTC birth control, but this part:

This is a direct result of the continuing power of "separate spheres" ideology. Unlike getting women the right to be equally considered for employment, a struggle most won, this one actually attacks capitalism much more deeply. And upper and middle class feminism ignores it like the plague, while perpetuating the largely faux politics of abortion rights.

Tens of millions of women have their lives ruined each year by delivering a child into this society, which continues to insist that mothering is a mere gift, not a form of extremely important human labor.

Is the worst and largest problem, as far as I can see, and as far as I know it doesn’t have a name. So how can we fight it? Oh, horrifying!

(NOTE: I’m not suggesting that religion is exclusively responsible for saddling women with the burdens of motherhood. It doesn’t help, though.)

CF Oxtrot — Have you ever read that piece Naomi Wolf wrote on Angelina Jolie for Harper’s Bazaar? It was unbearable. Or the essay on pornography, in which she suggested that the shrouding of the sex act in the mystical absurdities of religion was somehow sexy? I had to read one of her books as an undergrad, and I thought my eyeballs were going to roll out of my head.

I’m not super-familiar with Naomi Klein, but I’m not sure I knew she was a feminist. I’m always on the lookout for textbook feminists who have something new to add, morons or not, so I’ll try and look up some of her work.

Also, "The Two Public Naomis" would be a great name for a rock band. As would "The Two Private Naomis." Also, too.

Jack — I don’t think I was appreciably nastier than you, but I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I did in fact acknowledge that your comment expressed the great comfort you felt navigating the world, which I contrasted with the unhappiness I’ve experienced in my own environment living cheek-by-jowl with racist assholes who think the president (smirking incompetent though he may be) would rape their wives if he had the opportunity. I just found it a little ironic that you wanted to do away with -isms, and yet you found people who had likely been victimized by them so very valuable. Again, if I made you feel bad, or seemed to denigrate the life-experiences of your friends, I’m sorry.

slk — Thank you for the link. I’m sure that information represents one of five-dozen legitimate perspectives, but it was mostly stuff I didn’t know.

MJS:

...I think what's bugging me about my comrades' piety on the lefty list is precisely the obsession with purity of heart...

Okay. It's not for everybody. Personally, I'm fine with that. I don't put language and habit and their relation to identity under a microscope from time to time because I give a damn about my heart being pure. I do it for the same reason I analyze other things: it has value in real-world interactions with other people. Period.

I think those who claim that such examinations distract from "the important work" are kidding themselves. If I waltz through life figuring that my perspective alone is what matters, I'm not going to get anything important done anyway. It doesn't have to do with purity. It has to do with a perfectly logical desire to not gum up the works by constantly being an unthinking asshole to other people.

Jack Crow:

Xeno,

...I didn't introduce religion. I commented on one part of the original, because I agreed...

Yes, I know. That's why I used the word "also."

My opinion stands.

Oxtrot:

...As to the "cause"... I'm afraid I don't know what "cause" I'm working here, other than to vent frustration with the insane counter-productive trends among The Noble Democrats and their vast minions. I wouldn't call that a "cause" as much as I'd call it an existential poppet valve...

Uh, I'd say your sarcasm detector could use some work. Or else I need to use more gratuitous quotation marks.

At any rate, I might as well get back to choosing between the "kaffe klatsch," and "the important stuff" because we all know that one must choose, right? Striving to be less of an insensitive jaggoff in social interactions couldn't possibly be a worthwhile aid to interaction with one's political allies, or potential allies. Dear me, what WAS I thinking? Tsk.

insurance regulation sounds very interesting to me ox

why wouldn't all of us like
to read about that ???

the buggars have deep hooks into us all
i'd venture to say
more advances in micro economics have come thru efforts to model insurance "markets"
then any other
save credit markets and job markets

we had a run thru
on health insurance regulation
mpore then once
right here at SMBIVA

it proved quite the entertaining
mountain of madness
were you here then ??

the comment pool was filled
with ill informed untutored but
vehement bilge

if you aren't interested
in the economics of insurance
and yet are interested in
the politics of insurance markets
and products and corporations
and the social construction
of insurance regulation
i submit you may have built
a fortress in the air

economics is about how and why eh ??

if you already figure you got
the why of it all down cold
and the specifics of how
are just boring
my guess is you oughta think again

-------------------

nihilism as habitual posture :

though a delightful cri de coeur
......on occasion
in particular
AFTER
one has produced
some horrific act
of slaughter ala macbeth
or taken a well deseved battering ala lear....

however

once it becomes one's schtick
it can play all to close
to a certain hazard
audience mirth
morphing to tedium

caged zoo creature
growling acts
in time become more self display
then self expression....

purposeful
but ill managed
metoynmic venting
wears thin

charging pigeons in the park
is for pit bulls

the results are often comic
but
at the risk of idiotic

"for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion "

" I've never seen a single discussion of insurance regulation's impact on our economy."

Well I'm game. What aspects of insurance regulation and which types of insurance are you referring to?

If there's something interesting that you want to discuss that we haven't discussed yet, then I'll do a post on it.

As op mentioned, we had a pretty thorough discussion of health insurance.

Second the motion. I'd love to see some light shed on what is (to my eyes) the mad tangle of insurance regulation. Especially car insurance, which is a topic that particularly interests me.

Anybody who'd like to do a post on this subject, email me -- you know the drill -- stopmebeforeivoteagain NOSPAM yahoo.com. Replace nospam with the obvious item.

This is a practical matter: no fucking self-respecting woman is going to stick with any movement that thinks calling Hillary a 'bitch' is cool or, at worst, trivial.

Really?

Ships steered by naivete frequently strike rocks reefs and sandbars.

Emma,

I've never read Naomi Klein or Naomi Wolf on feminism. I am familiar only with their essays and books on subjects related to larger political/social issues. Frankly, I can't be bothered with feminism, for all the reasons I've stated in my comments in this thread. Anyone who wants to talk to me about their existential problems is free to do so, but when they gratuitously slide gender-rooted stuff in there, I become instantly skeptical. Probably that's a direct result of knowing too many self-described "feminists" whose agenda was nothing more than blaming men for their problems. This isn't to say there aren't misogynists out there; this isn't to deny rape and other forms of abuse. I'm saying that man-blaming and men-blaming in broadcast form is something I was exposed to 20-25 years ago by women I encountered. I was always left thinking that the woman in question got raped, never told anyone, and her existential response was to blame everything on men as if the one terrible event were conflated with her whole life.

Armchair psychology, I know. Can't help it. Human psychology is my favorite autodidactic subject.

++++++++++++

FB, I remember the health insurance discussion. I like discussions of that subject, although to me it is really more about policy choices and less about the nuts and bolts of regulation. Besides, I'm not familiar with how health coverage is regulated. I worked in the property & casualty/liability world. Not health, not auto, not annuities, not life. Most of what I worked on had to do with regulating whether a carrier can buy another carrier, or be sold to another carrier. Corporate regulation. Mergers, acquisitions, etc. Which really is about the carrier's accountants and actuaries convincing the regulators that post-transaction, the new company won't be a financial risk for those who choose to insure with it.

I do have thoughts on auto insurance regulation and the socializing of mandatory insurance -- something that dovetails nicely today, since many states mandate auto coverage, and the Glorious Noble Democrats of the US Congress have mandated that we all buy health insurance as part of their "reform." Maybe I can scratch out something on that over the next week or so.

ms_x wrote, sensibly:

It has to do with a perfectly logical desire to not gum up the works by constantly being an unthinking asshole to other people.

I may have confused the issue by introducing the diction police into the conversation; it's a pet peeve of mine, though it wasn't really part of the original tempest in a teapot on my lefty mailing list.

But it's the policing I don't like, and the Pharisaical smugness of the people doing it, who really could and should spend their energies on something more worthwhile, I think.

That's not to say that people shouldn't, on their own, make an effort not to be offensive to their comrades any more than they can help. Even I do that, believe it or not. And if this reminds you of Sam Johnson complacently observing to Boswell that he, Sam, thought of himself as "a very polite man", well then, you're entitled to a laugh at my expense.

A few other scattered observations:

1. One commenter drew an implicit analogy (in terms of offensiveness) between the words "nigger" and "bitch". Now this doesn't seem accurate to me, just as a matter of empirical sociolinguistics. I can't imagine any of the black folks I know not being extremely offended if I, a white guy, referred to somebody else as a "nigger", in their hearing; but calling some other woman a "bitch", to a female interlocutor, just doesn't necessarily have the same sure-fire power to offend.

I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps because ethnic and racial epithets apply by definition to all members of the group in question, but "bitch" doesn't necessarily apply to all women? (At least, not the way I learned to use the term, growing up; there may be other dialects where it's otherwise.)

2. This leads on to a more general reflection, about the comparability of gender and race. The black movement of the high postwar era was such a defining moment for all of us, and such an inspiration for those of us on the left, that we tend to use it, somewhat unthinkingly, as a template for all other struggles, including the women's movement.

I've always been a little skeptical of this analogy, but never really sat down and tried to puzzle it out. Maybe somebody else has more developed thoughts on this subject, pro or con, and if so I'd love to run a post about it. But my suspicion is that the analogy does a disservice to both movements by obscuring some of the important distinctive qualities of each.

ms_xeno,

My point is very simple. Those who want to work on consolidating human energies for social change need to know how to work with those who don't play nice in the sandbox. The main reason is there's a lot of us out here in the world like me, who are coarse, who aren't interested in smoothing ruffled feathers, who simply play down and dirty 99% of the time. Sure, we disgust you. Sure, we make your nape-hair stand straight up and trigger your fight-or-flight response. But here we are, and we're not going anywhere. Either learn that, or pine for the polite society that never will be.

If you want to know the real way politics works in America -- it's people like me, behind the scenes of people like Barack Hussein Obama. And perhaps you lament the fact there are people like me doing such things that affect people like you. I'd understand that. But I wouldn't consider the plea for politeness to be any form of effective social change. Polite discourse is about as relevant to social change as making "the right decision" on whether you fold or bunch your toilet paper before you wipe your ass.

PS to Emma:

Here's a misogynist life-experience tidbit for you, to show I'm not a callous dolt regarding the interests of women and their treatment at the hands of men.

My not-so-saintly Mum worked in the WH Press Office during Nixon & Ford, same era Diane Sawyer worked there. One of her bosses was Ron Nessen. About 20 years after that time, my mother, brother and I were talking about feminism and men's maltreatment of women during dinner. My mother broke out with the news that Ron Nessen told her she could advance quickly in the WH Press world if she would sleep with him. My instant response was to want to find Nessen and geld him. But retroactively.

I'm familiar with men treating women like shit in other contexts. I've seen step-fathers mis-treat my mother. I'm not denying that stuff. I'm saying that extrapolating the behavior of Ron Nessen to the point of blaming CF Oxtrot is bullshit.

One of the things that strikes me about the younger generation is how free these kids are with their speech. My nieces and my nephew are up visiting me, and they have been showing me the conversations they and their friends have on their Facebook pages. White and black kids call each other and their friends "my niggas," "my bitches" and "my girls." The girls have no problem expressing sexual interest interest in the boys, even boys of other races. Everyone freely discusses sexuality with no shame or inhibition. They say whatever comes to mind, with little regard to the accepted social nicities or PC norms of racial or gender interaction, though there are still some boundaries, obviously. The comfortability they have with each other is amazing. White girls have no problem posting pics of themselves kissing their black boyfriends. It would have been unthinkable for most white women of my generation to admit they had the hots for a black guy, let alone post intimate pics in a public forum.

I'm not sure what to make of all this, but it's clear these kids are not as racist and sexist as my generation was. They are also nowhere near as politically correct or obsessed with language and adhering to prescribed behavioral norms. These kids have broken down the racial and gender barriers to a great degree, but they have also broken down the language barriers, and don't seem to be too hung up on words.

This has always been the case with the working class in my experience, but never to this degree. Working class whites and blacks live, work and go to school with each other and have to get along, and zero tolerance policies for racial foibles don't make for good relations. Quite the contrary. In jobs I've been on, black and white men tend to tease and rib each other over racial matters, which in my opinion helps to break barriers down and create unity.

There is a place for sensitivity and politeness, of course. But in my opinion, the 5 alarm outrage that often occurs whenever someone deviates from the mandatory PC norms tends to create division, not unity. When your standard for social acceptability is purity then you are necessarily going to alienate the vast majority of people who are anything but pure.

http://www.economistsdoitwithmodels.com/

if you don't like economics
poping up in blogworld like a street mime

here's the site that'll send you over the edge

i was hoping some one more engaged by the TOPIC
would bring up this my favorite ism :

CLASS-ISM

essay ....for your mind only

compare and contrast

this take on society's
auto-cloven-ness
as means of forward propulsion
to that outlined in
the communist menifesto of 1847
by karl siegfried marx and fred 'hymie' engels

Insurance regulation? Insurance regulation is akin to banking regulation. You either compel insurers to sell products they must keep for themselves, or you allow them to engage in a range of spin-off shenanigans. But regulation is part and parcel of private insurance being a major industry.

Private insurance being a major industry is largely a by-product of having a puny welfare state. In civilized societies, medical, casualty, and life insurance is taken to be something that is a not-for-profit obligation of the collectivity of all individuals, i.e. the state. In the USA, this is denied, partly to avoid setting a civilized precedent, partly to create another industry from which to draw profits.

Most of "casualty insurance" is car insurance, which covers the inherently huge medical and vehicular costs engendered by cars-first transportation. I work as a paralegal in a car-crash law firm. The costs are real, and the private insurance industry is 95 percent non-controversial. It performs the claims-processing function that the state would have to handle, if private car insurance were banned yet cars-first transportation continued. Thanks to plaintiff's lawyers, the private system works approximately like a public, non-profit one would. The problem here is the transportation system, not the existence of the insurance it engenders. The left trope that mandatory car insurance is somehow wrong is simply way wrong. Cars impose huge costs on their owners, and insuring those costs is simply necessary. Without doing so, there would be legions of poor people unable to restore their damaged bodies and cars.

Insurance is topic #274 on the left agenda, in other words.

Race, sex and class repression remain real and no tinkering with word choice is going to change the material foundations of the beast but careful word choice might make a difference in the matter of whether alliances in struggle stick or not. And that's the only concern I have as to what words might be used in an article.

Mistakes are easy to make. I remain in opposition to the extradition of Roman Polanski, but I won't argue that opposing his extradition doesn't make one appear to be insensitive to the issues of violence against women. I just don't believe that the ruling elite should be allowed a media circus around an incident that transpired thirty plus years ago, or that the ruling elite should be allowed to pose as a determined proponent of women and children's rights around this question, when the fact remains that battered women and families right now and right here at home in the United States need much broader and more open support than they receive, and I don't believe that creating a show trial around Polanski will help us resolve that problem. Further, as the media hype and renewed interest in the scandal has died, it has become more and more clear that a great many extenuating circumstances that were themselves rooted in systematic abuse of women and children played a part in how Polanski's victim and her immediate family dealt with her situation both then and now, and this is the larger issue, which of course, goes unacknowledged because of the media generated desire to have Polanski's head over any serious public discussion of the issues of the abuse of women and children.

I do not believe that the people who own or oversee this political culture at this time should be allowed any opportuntiy to stage a public burning over a single incident decades old when it is clear that their continued indifference to legions of victims of domestic abuse is a matter of ongoing devastation. Moreover, their willingness to inflict or accept a military terror so immense that it creates further brutalities of this sort every minute of every waking hour demonstrates that they are as a leading body incapable of any coherent or consistent thought or practice in terminating the abuse of women and children.

" You either compel insurers to sell products they must keep for themselves, or you allow them to engage in a range of spin-off shenanigans."

only choices ??

technically or politically
believe me there's a lot to discuss here

that came clear to me over health insurance

md
btw you are right on the money with this:

"The costs are real, and the private insurance industry is 95 percent non-controversial. It performs the claims-processing function that the state would have to handle, if private car insurance were banned yet cars-first transportation continued. Thanks to plaintiff's lawyers, the private system works approximately like a public, non-profit one would. The problem here is the transportation system, not the existence of the insurance it engenders"
however it opens up
the health care payment system
can of worms
how do u bust apart
the easy analogy to ohbummer care

What a wandering thread of discussions! Break it up into twos and threes and GET A ROOM!

Having devalued politeness, perhaps the discussants will next jettison clarity and, of course, charity is always precariously teetering on the gunnels. Give it a shove. Why not?

Op-san, I don't think there's really a strong parallel between auto and med insurance. The former is largely a response to the medical industry and its pricing practices. When you win a claim for medical costs, all you win is your actual medical bills, plus a markup for your pain and suffering. The medical billers hoover back every penny of their bills. Contrary to overclass PR, those sums are almost always very conservative, not an easy payday. To get $100,000 for pain and suffering, you almost always have to suffer a life-harm of serious proportions. Almost never something somebody would choose to suffer in exchange for the money.

The problem in med insurance is the underlying industry, plus the access issue. The industry itself is wildly out of control when it comes to levels of pay and price.

Of course, one of the wonderful effects of fully socialized medical coverage is that it would reduce the car-accident claims process to a matter of pain-and-suffering claims only.

But still, cars-first transportation generates huge medical and collision-repair costs that are simply prior to insurance.

And auto insurance remains dirt cheap, marked up as it certainly is, compared with med insurance.

Of course, public, non-profit auto insurance is better than what we have. But the degree of savings and rationalization possible there is much smaller than in the realm of our saints in surgical garbage.

md

"The industry(healthcare)... is wildly out of control when it comes to levels of pay and price"
exactly

where as body shop income ...

i submit these differences
despite the superficial formal similarity
in particular now mandates are
headed into position these substantive differences
need to be traced out
till we get the the whys here
since most critiques
so far resort to mere form
suffices for the mungo mutts of the left
ie
"private profit motive " among the insurers

we need to make
the proper distinctions here

Post! Post! For Dog's sake, somebody send me a post!

BOTTOM
That will ask some tears in the true performing of
it: if I do it, let the audience look to their
eyes; I will move storms, I will condole in some
measure. To the rest: yet my chief humour is for a
tyrant: I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to
tear a cat in, to make all split.
The raging rocks
And shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates;
And Phibbus' car
Shall shine from far
And make and mar
The foolish Fates.
This was lofty! Now name the rest of the players.
This is Ercles' vein, a tyrant's vein; a lover is
more condoling.

Thanks, Nonny. My favorite character. O the large fair ears!

Oxtrot:

...If you want to know the real way politics works in America -- it's people like me, behind the scenes of people like Barack Hussein Obama. And perhaps you lament the fact there are people like me doing such things that affect people like you. I'd understand that...

Christ.

Are you this much of a pompous, self-important blowhard IRL, Oxtrot? If so, I have no doubt that any committee or organization would give you whatever you want in exchange for just the promise that in the future you'll either cork it or stay the fuck home.

But, no... Perhaps you're correct. At the next local organizing event I go to, I'll definitely throw around several racial, ethnic, and gender-related slurs at key moments. Just to see if I can move things along, shake out the deadwood in the movement and thus emerge as totally awesome as all the clear-eyed, take-no-prisoners movers and shakers out there in Reality Land, such as yourself.

Sean:

...There is a place for sensitivity and politeness, of course. But in my opinion, the 5 alarm outrage that often occurs whenever someone deviates from the mandatory PC norms tends to create division, not unity. When your standard for social acceptability is purity then you are necessarily going to alienate the vast majority of people who are anything but pure.

So our only choice is between stoic indifference or "5-Alarm Outrage." [rolleyes] How... uh, FOX news-like. Also, I missed the bulletin wherein the only group with the potential to be alienated in social interactions is the one that's used to roaming the Earth with its standard operating procedure unquestioned and unchallenged.

My, my. I'm just learning so danged much in this thread! I can scarcely believe my good fortune! Thank You, SMBIVA! Thank You, internet!

MJS:

...But it's the policing I don't like, and the Pharisaical smugness of the people doing it, who really could and should spend their energies on something more worthwhile, I think...

Suit yourself. In my experience, what reads to one party as "smugness" or "Pharisaical policing" doesn't read that way to the person doing it.

And discord tends to sap momentum and energy. So I like to see people called out when they sow discord, as opposed to just shoveling grief on the first person who manages to say that they're unhappy. It's illogical to say that we must choose between discussing worthwhile ways to interact and the interactions themselves. Why wouldn't I want to do both?

Oh, yeah. And before some other great thinker wants to dredge up the "purity" accusation: no, I don't go around rapping people's knuckles each and every time they say something stupid. That would be a full-time job with pretty much no material compensation. Besides, I'd have to rap my own knuckles from time to time, too-- and that would just look weird.

The long-suffering ms_x is entitled to the last word here. Let's all go on to fresh fields and pastures new.