Lu Xun, who was sort of the Chinese Orwell, and not nearly well-known enough
Picasso
Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold or David Brower
the architects of the eradication of smallpox
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill
Nelson Mandela
Vaclav Havel
Hemmingway
Auden
Yeats
Patrick: out of curiousity, why Stewart Brand? I think I might agree, but what are your reasons?
Gee, and do you think that the FCC ruling to allow the media equivilant of a one-party-state will help bring any of the Administration's lies and manipulations to the fore?
I think the 2004 election will ("if held", my cynical side pipes up) be the most important in our nation's history. I think we're all going to have to put aside a big chunk of whatever else we had planned to do in 2004 and help replace this unelected, hereditary ruler the Republican supremes put over us.
But you know what makes me angriest, as a good progressive? That rhetoric like this (which I don't like, as a rule) is a completely appropriate and accurate assessment of the situation. It's that dire.
Heh, nice, Moles.
The way I like to think of it is that this is a coalition comprised mosetly of those who will sleep with us but don't want us to kiss them in public. It's seedy.
Patrick: the first time I heard the "this is what democracy looks like" chant was Seattle WTO. It made more sense then, as the protests were directly in front of (and in opposition to) an highly un-democratic body.
I suspect it's just protest legacy code now.
It's a brilliant idea. It should be spread far and wide, if only as a model for the kind of person we want in that job.
Henley couldn't be more wrong about the UN though.
We must put the UN back in charge. We'll enforce the peace. But the UN should set up the administration of occupied Iraq and manage the reconstruction.
The main advantage here, beyond the moral one of it being IMO the right thing to do, is that it might actually restore some global confidence in the US. The past several month have seen the Administration turn us into a planetary pariah state. Handing over all civilian decision-making to the UN would restore some of the world's faith in us and lend credibility to the argument that we attacked Iraq because it violated UN resolutions.
I think we need a 2 pronged attack from here: watch-dogging the conduct of the war and reconstruction and getting people we trust and believe in elected next year.
Yes. Exactly. Don't mourn, organize. We need not just a victory in 2004, but a fundamental shift in direction. There's plenty still to be done, even if we couldn't stop the war.
I find Raimondo's argument morally suspect and of questionable practicality - that in order to avoid losing our rights, we should refuse to exercise them. There is a long, long tradition of political thought that says the threat of oppression should always be challenged.
That said, I too think direct action is not the path here, and agree with Burke and Baugh above that what we need is calm, respectble, convincing counter-arguments, made by people with whom many americans will agree, made in ways they can hear. The goal here is not merely protest but persuasion - a goal that some protest-adicted direct-action-types seem sometimes to have completely lost sight of.
Yes, the Nadarite idea that things have to get worse before they get better seems to me to be a close analog of the old Trotskyite idea of fucking things up to "heighten the contradictions."
Not a good idea at all, if only because when things start spirally out of control, they're as likely to land someplace we hate as someplace we hope for.
Y'know, Graydon, while I sympathize with the sentiment behind your earlier post, I think you dangerously misstate the dangers here. Civil war? C'mon.
There are brutal, violent, evil elements in our politics. No suprise there. People are violent animals. And the Right in America has more thugs than those of us on the Left sometimes like to admit. Coulter's comments about killing liberals are indicative of a spirit on the Right, one that we ignore at our peril.
But the fact of the matter is that, compared to, say Czechoslovakia or South Africa in 1989, reform here would be a cakewalk. I reject out of hand the idea that we have lost our democracy (yet).
Which brings me to money, which, it seems to me is the missing element in this Dem-Green debate. Bush didn't "win" because he had better ideas. He "won" because he stole an election; because his brother helped suppress voter turnout in a key state; because the media are owned by his allies; but most of all, because he and his allies could spend *a hell of a lot more money* - money the campaign spent, soft money, "issue" money, thinktank money, astroturf campaign money.
Nadar was a sideshow in this process.
And we'll never outspend them. They buy. We vote.
We'd damn well out-vote them next time, by a big margin, and then put everything we've got into getting private money out of politics. That's the only fight that matters, now. This familial bickering gets us nowhere.
So, here're the facts:
*we have an Administration and Congress run by Retrograde Corrupt Fools
*said RCF are stealing elections, own the media, are shredding the Constitution and building a police state
*we need to change this.
Did I get that right?
Well, assuming the electoral system still functions, there is one general guideline worth thinking about: as a general rule, the more people who turn out to vote, the more progressive the results. If we want to change the regime, we need to turn out the voters.
I don't have any One Big Answer that'll fix this mess we're in - indeed, I'm beginning to fear that fixing it is going to take the rest of our lives - but I have been thinking of a small, potentially useful idea.
What if everyone who feels as we do agreed to do this one thing: take election day off, and help get people to the polls. Drive old people. Man phone banks. That sort of thing. And, preferably, do it in swing districts, where a couple hundred voters sometimes means the difference between a D and an R.
The Democratic Party is broken. They can't and won't pull this off. But we and folks we know have a lot of expertise in helping large, distributed groups of people collaborate on projects.
Perhaps those who want to do more could take more days off, say, make a four-day weekend of it. Those who are really steamed could get to work earlier, registering the unregistered and talking to voters about how they feel about the Administration and its policies.
This may sound stupidly basic, and it is. But I've spent a little time around politics, and have always been amazed at how few people are involved at all. In many congressional races, ten volunteers can make a measurable difference. In any congressional race, 100 smart, dedicated volunteers are a force to be reckoned with. I can't imagine but that there are a large number of people who feel like us, but don't know what to do about it. A nationwide effort to encourage taking election day off to get out the vote might really have an impact.
Dumb idea? Worth kicking around? You tell me.
For comparison, we spend about $1.3B for food aid, despite the fact that 800,000,000 people worldwide are suffering from chronic hunger and are just one bad harvest away from famine.
The Administration has said several times that that 1.3B is all we can afford.
And the "new" funds the President promised to fight HIV/AIDS? Turns out a big chunk of the money comes from programs to fight other infectious diseases.
Being able to cough up another $26B on demand kind of gives the lie to the Administration's credibility on these and other humanitarian issues, no?
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 12 |
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