With the assistance of Mari (inaneinsanity), Jimmy (moonlitsage), Andrew (the44thHour), and Kaiti (elvesdoitbetter), I have created a Podcast where we discuss many random things.

The first episode we talked broadly about the Internet. We’re still finding our footing here so please excuse any issues you might find.  The second ep has already been recorded and will be posted in the next couple of days. In that one we discuss MBTI theory.

Here is the Blog on which the Podcast will be posted for now:  http://gettingthinky.blogspot.com/  (Name possibly subject to change in the near future)

To subscribe in itunes just click the link on that blog.  If you want to subscribe in a different rss reader here is the feed link: http://gettingthinky.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Let me know what you think. Suggestions, ideas, assistance, criticism, etc. is accepted and appreciated. Rudeness however will be rewarded with my pointy hat death ray. Trust me, you don’t want to see that in action!

If you take the time to read one lengthy piece on politics this year, I strongly  recommend Eric Alterman’s Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency Is Impossible, for Now.

It’s 17000 words. It’s extensive. It’s detailed. It’s extremely well written. 

And I don’t agree with it at all.

Okay. That’s not fair.  I actually agree with the VAST majority of it.  I think Alterman does an extroardinary job describing in great detail what can be called the Progressive Critique of the current state of our Democracy. If you don’t understand where Progressives and Liberals are coming from and what they are going on about when they rail against a system gone haywire, you would do well to read this piece. It will paint the complete picture for you in the way we liberals and progressives see it. The corruption. The imbalance of power. The disgusting cravenness of the media. The broken Senate. The revolving door. The disproportionate influence of lobbying. It’s almost all there.

In fact much of the middle of this piece should ring true in the ears of many conservatives and libertarians and independents as well who perceive the very same problems with nearly the same roots. Certainly I should think that anyone who looks at things honestly would be outraged at the way the system we live in has continuously broken down over the last thirty+ years thanks to the greedy dishonest actions of perverse men with power. The facts really are hard to assail.

However, it’s Alterman’s overall argument that these facts are meant to support that I totally find difficult to accept.  Basically he asserts that all of these systemic problems he’s described are reasons why we need to cut President Obama a little slack. It’s because of all these things that it is impossible for Obama to be any more progressive than he has been.

OK… Why? 

It’s true, structural problems limit what a President can do. True. We’ve all known that. But there’s an assumption in Alterman’s piece that in lieu of those many structural problems, Obama would be a Progressive President. That half of the argument he has far from proven. And many many people on the left present arguments on a daily basis based on concrete actions the current administration has done and is doing that certainly seem to suggest he wouldn’t be progressive even given a chance.

Just to give the simplest example, there was extraordinary consternation amongst the gay rights community when the Obama administration chose to vigorously defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court.  There was no reason to do that. It’s hard to see how he scores any political points short or long term because of that action. In effect it seems like he’s just throwing gay people under the bus just because he wants to or thinks that’s the best thing to do.

Now perhaps he is doing some deeper calculation in order to prevent greater risks down the line. Maybe he’s playing “4 Dimensional Chess” as Jon Stewart likes to say in order to outsmart and outwit the structural constraints Alterman has described.

But I find that very hard to believe. 

If the drubbing the Democrats are about to face in the November election are a sign of 4-Dimensional Chess brilliance, I think I’ll stick with the good old fashioned kind.

There really is another possible explanation. It could be not just that these structural factors are impeding Obama from doing what HE wants to do. It could very well ALSO be the case that the Obama administration is itself a structural factor impeding our ability to get what WE want done. Both can be true at the same time.  Both likely are true at the same time. Obama might be more progressive if there weren’t quite so many forces allied against him. But at the same time… probably not all that much more progressive. Probably only a little bit more progressive. Because in truth, if you examine his speeches and his policy proposals, Obama himself is not and never was particularly progressive.

Is it so hard to imagine that part of the struggle to have a progressive President might also entail a struggle against an administration that thinks progressivism and liberalism are “f-ing retarded”? That this administration might be nearly as much of a hindrance to having a truly progressive presidency as any of the republican presidents we’ve had in the past? Indeed, isn’t it possible that he might even be MORE of a hindrance, since he legitimizes radical conservative ideas by making them seem bi-partisan? It’s ALWAYS harder to fight against your own friends and family who might support Obama initiatives BECAUSE it is Obama proposing and supporting them than it is to fight against a clear enemy that is proposing the same.

That being said, so what? Maybe despite that Alterman is right that we have no choice really but to assume that Obama is really playing the long game and is brilliantly playing within the confines of the system better than anyone else could be expected to. And our only real hope if we want to see a Progressive Presidency is to create a movement for change so large in 2012 that it compels Obama to be the President that he deep down wants to be or else has no choice but to be because of the strength of our movement. Maybe…

But I want to note that Alterman is asking progressives to take a pretty HUGE risk. It seems like a pipe dream to me, but let’s imagine it anyway.  What if we do  abide by this strategy and we create that movement and in 2012 there really is his massive progressive movement?   What happens when Obama still chooses not to govern progressively? What he slaps away the hands of liberals, calls them “f-ing retards”, proceeds to cut social security, start a war with Iran, and hires the most industry friendly people he can fine. And when we try to pressure him with our “movement” we run into another structural impediment created by Bush and Obama and the last few prior presidents the excessive power and unaccountability of the Executive branch. He just laughs at our “pressure”.

Can you imagine the extraordinary sense of despair and disillusionment that would capture hold of the left? It’s one thing to be disappointed now when we know in the back of our head that things are sooo hard that there might be an excuse for all the things we see that are going wrong.  But it’s quite another to try *again* and be slapped in the face again and for NO reason!! People would explode. Who knows what kind of blow that would do to the long term prospects of the left?

Admittedly it’s all speculation on my part. But so is Alterman’s more positive suggestions.  The real question is SHOULD progressives and liberals take the risk?

Regardless, it’s clear to all of us that we need to organize around progressive ideals and push to get people to understand that the lies coming out of Fox News are in fact NOT what liberalism are about. The only question is, is the more effective strategy for doing that to organize around the Obama administration or AGAINST the Obama administration. 

This is not an academic choice. Liberals are not generally the type to be inclined to withhold their critique of injustices.  If we are, however, to use Obama as a rallying point we would of necessity have to speak our praises of his administration louder than our critiques in the hopes that he get re-elected or in fear of saying something that might hurt his chances of re-election. That Health Care turned out weak we would have to stress is a result of Republican obstructionism and corporate interest (which is true)  but also de-emphasize that it was the Obama administration’s cow-towing to those interests that partly made it possible (also true). And similarly in our defensive of the Democratic party on any number of issues. That idea doesn’t sit well in my stomach. It sounds kinda sick. I’d do it if it were the only choice, but barring that I’d much rather approach issues honestly than engaging in that sick kind of pragmatism.

Alternatively we really could try to throw our support around a third party or a primary challenge or an independent candidate. We could push very hard to oust Democrats who haven’t served our interests up to and including the President even at the risk of possibly helping conservative candidates. It might even be substantially in our long term interest to push the debate further to the left and defeat the grotesque false narratives arising out of the Right even if it results in some minor republican victories. It could easily be the case that putting more pressure against Obama might cause the Obama administration to govern in a more left wing fashion. Right now, they seem to react only to those critiques levied by Fox News. Maybe we should focus far more on changing that dynamic.

Of course the risk of that is the more you criticize Obama on real topics the more likely people are also to believet he ridiculous false criticisms coming out of the right. The time we spend attacking him instead of defending him just allows false narratives to flourish distorting the national conversation. And that too feels a little sickening and wrong. It’s sort of like throwing Obama to the wolves in order to push a better candidate.

I honestly don’t know which strategy makes more sense. Honestly I think it’s probably neither. Rather I think the game will need to be played in much smaller dimensions with tiny movements sparking up across the country fighting injustice and intolerance without a thought to how it plays in the media circus and Washington politics.  If the movement gets big enough and united enough and influential enough, it won’t matter whether they support Obama or someone completely different. As long as the movement doesn’t get suckered the way the Tea Party is being suckered by the Republicans and the way many in the Elect Obama movement currently feel suckered by the Obama administration.

But right now I only see the smallest of stirrings of that kind of movement here and there. People are discouraged and disheartened (not to mention broke) and with good reason.

So there’s one further aspect of the Alterman piece I think is incredibly important. The message of hope. It is right for Alterman to remind us that not long ago it would have been seen as an impossibility for a very young, inexperience mixed black man with a name that rhymes with Osama and a middle name of Hussein to actually win the Presidency. But he did. WE did. We got him elected against all odds.

And throughout history all meaningful change seems impossible before it actually happens.  There’s no reason to think that at this time we can’t make it happen to. We just need to engage in the boring day to day activity of learning, understanding, building communities, organizing, protesting, sharing, teaching, dispelling ignorance, and growing as we day by day continue to make this world, just a little bit at a time, better.

50 years ago if I were alive I wouldn’t have had the right even to vote. 150 years ago I would have been a slave. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not all that long ago. If you could time travel back to 1960 it would be a world unrecognizable to the world we live in today. We enjoy extraordinarily more freedom as a society now than people could ever have imagined back then.  And sure not everything is better now. Change always cuts both ways. But it’s hard to say the overall history of the last century as not being primarily a time of great social progress around the world. 

In 50 or a hundred more years who knows what more social progress we might achieve if we fight to achieve it? We just can’t let the fear and despair overwhelm us. I often find that a tall order myself especially of recent days. But we all have to continue to pick ourselves up and do our part. Again and again and again.

So I agree wholeheartedly with the quote Alterman borrows at the end of his extroardinary piece. “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

Keith Olbermann pretty much perfectly captures my feeling on the whole Shirley Sherrod affair.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Weirdly despite all the nonsense that has happened during the last year and a half, I think this was the one incident in which the Obama administration disappointed me the most.

I mean Shirley Sherrod in this speech presented exactly Obama’s philosophy on race and social justice. At least she expressed a view perfectly congruent with the one Obama expressed during the campaign. So the whole thing comes off as seeming as if Obama will sacrifice any ideal, any principal, and any sense of Justice if it will protect him from criticism so he can win more votes and get more democrats in office. I don’t know why I didn’t fully believe this before, but I guess now I do.

I want my Presidents to care about what’s true, first. I want them to care about what’s right.  And I want them to lead other people to care about those things to.  I want them to protect the powerless when they are set upon by the wolves, especially if it’s one of the people who work for you.  At the very least, I want them to try.  But they didn’t.  The administration comes off as the same as any of the worst most feckless bosses in the country who will fire you at the very first hint of complaint from a customer. They don’t have anyone’s back.

I’m glad the President at least called Sherrod to apologize in person. For a second I thought he wasn’t even going to offer her that minimal courtesy. Of course the administration only changed course after this was covered in like every major newspaper and television network in the country and was even starting to get international coverage. Of course that makes it seem like they didn’t apologize because it was right. They apologized because not apologizing would have looked bad. It’s twisted.

It’s like he just didn’t care if a woman who did no wrong’s character was deliberately assassinated by monstrously grotesquely evil people.

But I’m being a bit unfair. It’s not just him who didn’t care enough. Lots of people didn’t care enough. Her boss didn’t care enough. The entire hierarchy above her didn’t care enough. The media didn’t care enough. The viewers who swallowed the bait hook line and sinker didn’t care enough. Almost nobody cared enough. And we haven’t been caring enough month after month after month as these tactics of lies and deception capture the national debate and destroy people’s lives over nothing.

There are always people saying that dark times are coming, etc. etc. etc.  There’s always doomsayers in every age in history, but I’ve always been an extreme optimist. People generally find a way to reach a better state against all odds.

But for the first time I’m starting to believe them. We seem to be heading to a really dark place filled with prejudice and fear and intolerance and I don’t know how we are going to change course.

Keith Olbermann is right. There’s a fucking war going on out there. And Hate is winning.

I saw this interesting debate on Democracy Now! between two environmental activists on whether or not we should even be considering geo-engineering.

Now I have no idea if Gwynne Dyer is correct about the terrible panic within the Scientific community surrounding climate change. It wouldn’t surprise me though. Recent events over the last couple of years have certainly made it seem like the world’s governments really do plan to do absolutely nothing meaningful about climate change, especially in the world’s biggest CO2 producers. The US and China.

But what I find really scary is this idea that the very people who are suffering the most might end up blaming the entire crises entirely on SCIENCE. Those damned “arrogant” “irresponsible” scientists! They shouldn’t keep thinking they can control the planet! That’s the message portrayed by Vandana Shiva. Sure she blames rich societies for their excesses, but she also puts an extraordinary amount of blame on science and the scientific community itself not just the people who have miss used it.

That scares the shit out of me. Because one of two really bad things could happen as a result of this attitude.

One is that the climate could reach a state where the only viable solution that remains is geo-engineering. Without it many millions, perhaps billions of people will die. But then the very people who are hurt THE MOST will be soooo distrustful of science and so suspicious of the more advanced economies that they won’t LET them do geo-engineering no matter HOW devastating the consequences of doing nothing will be.

Alternatively, maybe the wealthy countries will take it upon themselves to do geo-engineering over the objections of the less wealthy countries in their name.  And when we do that geo-engineering, there will almost certainly be some negative consequences. Or at least some visible consequences that will disturb and scare people. Changing the color of the sky or the color of water for example. That’s why scientists always stress cutting emissions first and only talk of geo-engineering as a last resort.

But then all those people will blame all those negative results, real or imagined, whatever they may be entirely on SCIENCE. The scientists will be villified and scapegoated.  People will turn further away from science and reason and embrace a kind of weird naturism and mysticism that explicitly rejects advancement in science and engineering.

That would be freaking horrible!  We already see how much damage the anti-science movement in the United States has caused in spreading madness and slowing down the development of the society.  A global anti-science movement could herald the initiation of a new dark ages.

Throw nuclear war and global climate resource wars into the mix and I’d say that outcome will be almost an inevitability. Who will be blamed for nuclear war? For all war? The scientists of course! It’s their knowledge that enabled the creation of the weapons!

And it’s inevitable that some corrupt people will manipulatively use this anti-science sentiment to their advantage. If you don’t think some brutal dictator won’t take that anger and funnel it to obtain power over others you don’t understand human nature.

Maybe I’m just being overly imaginative, but the whole idea of “HOME” (hands off mother earth) freaks me the hell out.

And yet I mostly agree with Vandana Shiva in terms of the ways society needs to change in order to create a sustainable future. I doubt you’ll find many scientists anywhere who disagree with the value of things like ecological farming and not cutting down rain forests. Where I strongly disagree with her is her simplistic view of what and who is to blame for this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into!

It’s NOT the fault of scientists that the planet is warming! Just like it’s not their fault we created world destroying arsenals of nuclear weapons! That’s crazy! It’s OUR fault. Our societies fault. So blame the organization system of western societies. Blame the governments. Blame the corporations. Hell, even blame the selfish fat and lazy people. The undeveloped and developing world will have every right to be outraged if we don’t get this problem under control.

But for the love of God, don’t blame the Science!

All this is just more reason why we can’t afford to fail to get our CO2 emissions under control. It is not an exaggeration to say the fate of advanced human civilization may well lie in the balance.

Brad Delong wrote wisdom on his blog today as he often does:

Let’s repeat that in overly ridiculously simple terms.

Let’s say your apartment burned down. But not to worry you have insurance! Not only that, but you live pretty frugally so no worries. Let’s say you figure out in December, 2008 that you had $50 worth of stuff that was destroyed in the fire that you need replaced. So you call your local insurance representative and tell them you need $50. He tells you that there’s no WAY he can get you $50 out of his pain in the butt bosses and that the best he can hope for is about 2/3 of that. So he goes to his superiors and asks for $33.33. 

Only when it gets to his superiors they decide that $33.33 is waaaaay too much. I mean, studying your profile, you’re obviously a lazy bum who shouldn’t be allowed to succeed in anything!  So they decide to cut that in half.  You end up getting $16.67.

Only it turns out a year later you realize that YOU miss-estimated the value of the items in your house in the first place. You forgot about all the awesome stuff in your closets! In reality what your stuff was worth was twice as high. So you should have gotten $100 for your lifetime of insurance premiums, but in reality you’re now forced to suffer through with $16.67.

It gets worse.  All of a sudden you start getting fines from the insurance company! You suffer 50 small fines for negligence related to fire safety and missing filling deadlines and the likes. The total amount of all of those fines ends up being… you guessed it $16.67!

That’s kinda the state of the economy. The proposed Stimulus would have given us a pitiful percentage of what was needed to make up for the damage caused by the flames of the financial crises. What we actually got after it went through our corrupt and broken political system was substantially less than that. On top of that the States have all been cutting back spending and raising taxes and revenue , in other words engaging in anti-stimulative behaviors that have wiped out what little gains remained.

So yeah, the stimulus failed. It helped a little but it was far too little to deal with the scope of the economic disaster Bush and the big Banks left us with. So we have 10% unemployment and 17% underemployment.

As ridiculous as it is for republicans to claim that the Stimulus didn’t save jobs, it’s even MORE ridiculous for Democrats to try to sell their stimulus as having “worked” when the unemployment rate hasn’t gone down at all. What kind of rational person can believe that? Too many of us know people who have lost their homes and are out of a job or are making substantially less than we used to. We don’t see any extraordinary gains from the stimulus.  It strains the imagination to say the least.

If you had a school where only 17% of the students were graduating and you implement a policy change that years later results in… still 17% of students graduating… it’s damned hard to argue that your policy change was great because it prevented the school from dropping to a 0% graduation rate which would have happened otherwise.  That might be true, but you can’t call that a success. It’s a failure.

It’s clear the Stimulus failed. The only real question to me is whether or not it was as Brad DeLong suggests: partially a deliberately induced failure encouraged by lawmakers more interested in short term gains they could achieve by making Obama look bad.

There’s no clear evidence of that that I’ve seen. It could just as easily have been the case that the Republican lawmakers who reduced the effectiveness of the stimulus were just being stubborn and dumb and don’t understand the economics. After all we did have years and years where the republican economic strategy consisted solely of cut taxes.

But at least there IS a strategic logic that can be applied to the Republican decisions. As to why the Democrats would have proposed less than their best guesses and then capitulated to their adversaries demands to cut even more even knowing, or at least supposedly believing, how dire the consequences could be, I have no idea. There appears to be no rational excuse.  It seems like they just closed their eyes and wished that things would work out alright.

In summary:

Republicans: Either Well Meaning Idiots or Strategically Smart Immoral Assholes.

Democrats:  Total Idiots.

I honestly think the democrats deserve to lose the elections this year. And were it up to me, I would totally vote every single one of them out of office. Only one problem. There’s nobody half-way decent to vote for instead!

EVERY indication is that the only other party we have would be even worse. They wouldn’t have done any stimulus, wouldn’t have done any health care reform at all, wouldn’t have extended unemployment benefits at all, wouldn’t have made BP pay for the damages from the oil spill at all, would have tried to create a much weaker financial reform bill, and would have increased wasteful spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s not stuff I made up. That’s their stated positions.

Unless they were lying all along just for political gain. And for the sake of the country, if republicans take over again in November, I really hope that they were.

My favorite internet meme/twitter meme is the new “Al Gore is Fat” meme.

I have no idea where this meme came from, but I think I glean the simple reasoning behind it if you can call it that. Basically, people noticed that over the last few years climate deniers have continuously resorted to the most extraneous ridiculous arguments to try and counter the sound science behind climate change. Arguments tended to revolve around the personalities of particular scientists or advocate and not about the science itself. Other arguments were of the “of course it’s not happening” variety and “human beings couldn’t possibly effect the earth’s climate!” type. The worst arguments went so far as to imagine some vast liberal conspiracy planning to maliciously promote climate change in order to raise your taxes!

Particularly remarkable of course were the people who often didn’t even bother to put forth an argument at all. Instead, rather than trying to engage the scientists they simply made fun of Al Gore’s weight gain and talked about his appearance, called him a liar and mocked him in a thousand different ways.

Of course all of this is besides the point. Al Gore could be a modern day Hitler and could be the fattest man on the planet and it wouldn’t make a lick of difference in terms of the veracity of the serious dangers of man made global Climate Change.

So progressives have recently fought back by mocking unintentionally ridiculous arguments with deliberately ridiculous counter-arguments.  Hence whenever there is news or reports that demonstrate, yet again, that Climate change most likely really IS happening, they’ve taken to the Twitterverse to proclaim that it is proof! Proof positive! No, not proof of any of the theories of man made climate change. People don’t want to hear that crap! Nooooo! It’s proof that Al Gore is, in fact, quite FAT. 

Obviously that’s something that Americans REALLY care about.

A variation of this simply declares the fact about the man made destruction of our environment and goes “But don’t worry! Al Gore is STILL Fat!” The idea being again that everything will be fine just so long as Al Gore remains fat because obviously nothing a fat man says should ever be believed by ANYONE no matter how many accredited scientists happen to agree with him. I mean come on, look at him! He’s so overweight! So everything will be fine. We’ll only have to worry about global warming if Al Gore miraculously loses weight!

At times I wonder how Al Gore actually feels about this meme. I hope he’s okay with it. I mean it’s good natured mockery for a good cause. Far better, I guess, than his weight being used by those who want to discredit his message and what he believes in. Still, it must be strange to search for yourself on twitter and find all kinds of references to your weight.

In spite of being overweight myself, I just find the whole thing hilarious. It’s sort of the perfect form of deliberate slightly subtle sarcasm.  I think it captures perfectly the heart of the battle between the pro and anti-science movements in this country. One side, bases its arguments on facts and reasoning and effective functioning institutions. The other, cares far more about appearances.

So if it happens to be snowing, regardless of whether scientific models predict it or not, it doesn’t appear to be getting warmer on that day, so therefore global warming isn’t real.  So if it happens to be that a couple of scientists appear to be fudging the numbers, it doesn’t matter whether or not a careful study or analysis determines that they weren’t in fact fudging any numbers. So because we human beings appear to be small compared to the size of the Earth it makes sense to say we can’t effect the climate of the planet no matter what scientists who have made it their life’s work to study the climate happen to say about it.

And just because it appears to be that Al Gore is fat, everything he’s ever said on the subject of global warming and climate change should be dismissed out of hand without study or scrutiny.

Analysis versus supposition. Facts versus appearances.  Scholarship vs guessing. 

Which side do you belong to? 

We’re currently suffering from an extraordinary nation wide heat wave. This, of course, is no proof of anything by itself, no more than the heavy winter storms (actually arguably predicted by climate change) are proof that global warming wasn’t happening. But it doesn’t look good.  Especially when it is combined with the numerous careful analysis of global temperature readings that continue to show a global trend in temperature that goes upward and a ten year temperature average that is higher than ever before. Not to mention studies that show how we seem to be increasingly hitting more and more localized temperature records and more of them being high records than low records. And on top of all that investigation after investigation after investigation have fully cleared all Climate scientists involved in the so called climategate scandal of wrong doings and fully re-affirmed and validated the science of climate change. Even so called smoking guns that were supposed to show that the IPCC report was inherently flawed were soon found fully erroneous and had to be retracted.

So what do you think?

Does Al Gore still look FAT to you?