US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

the rule is no trolling on political threads unless you are morbs or are high fivin' morbs

I preordered the new Amy Grant this morning btw so it's a banner day for me

high fivin' morbs

found my electro-bluegrass stage name

LOL the Cure did not skip Mpls in 1985, my best friends from HS were on stalker duty for two days.

They totally skipped MPLS in 1989, I was pissed as SHIT about it (and my parents wouldn't let me road trip to Chicago, gee I wonder why).

u can watch me do "Love Cats" karaoke sometime

^^^ will contribute to the fund that makes this happen

does it even matter what GOP pols believe? or any pol? not really; what matters is the people they serve. i think the tribal loyalties and passions always come before any statement of principle. "principle" is a nice way to expressing those loyalties and passions, imo. "my people are good, what my people want ought to be law" is the beginning and the end of it, all this other stuff about "limited gov't" or "states rights" is window dressing.

of course there are conservative thinkers that hash out those ideas, and most GOP folx are true believers to some level, but it doesn't matter. or, it matters at the level of day-to-day argument but not much beyond that. this back and forth of "they are evil" "no, they really believe" "what they believe is evil!" runs into unresolvable territory pretty quickly. of course nobody considers himself to be serving evil, i don't see how it's "being a dick" to point that out. for ex "social justice" sounds wonderful to me, but i gather this actually means totalitarian control?? boy, i had no idea i was an evil person.

i think this kind of tribe-principle disjoint is worse for right-wingers but i'm a liberal so i would say that wouldn't i.

principles which, if you weren't bent on going "lol ur wrong!", you would happily describe as wrong/evil/select-word-that-means-"I-think-these-principles-are-wrong"

you don't actually disagree w/Morbs's assessment, you're just being a dick to him & me for no reason

okay I am sorry for being a dick to you but not sorry for being a dick to morbs, cause cmon, it's a politics thread

yes, obv we are using the dumbed-down def of "principles" here, similar to calling Tarantino an "auteur"

and now it's a film thread

it's morbs' board, we just type on it

forget it Jake, its Morbz-town

yes, obv we are using the dumbed-down def of "principles" here, similar to calling Tarantino an "auteur"

hahaha Dr. Morbius I gotta take this as an admission of some masochistic poster tendencies

btw iatee no hard feelings these threads are for quality narcissism-of-small-differences bangin'

The real snag is that - both anecdotally and empirically - a scary number of members of Congress are either ill-informed or simply not so bright. That's true across the board, of course - House and Senate, Dem and Republican alike - but considering one rallying principle of Republicans seems to be this latent/overt anti-intellectualism, being a smarty-pants can sometimes be a a greater liability (see: Gore, Al; Kerry; Obama, maybe) than being a total dumbass. Regardless, the Republicans sure excel at playing dumb, even when they're not, and running on an "I'm stupid" platform is a lot easier to defend than running on an "I'm smart" one.

PLus, running on the "I'm stupid" plays on the anti-intellectual thing America's had an flavor of for like a century. It's the same narrative summoned by talking heads referring to small towns in some backwater full of under-educated folks and massive loads of poverty as "real america". "I'm not one of them smarty-pants high-falutin' political scientists, I'm just a caveman. You're modern world with its automobiles and noise-making boxes scares and frightens me! But I do know this....." etc etc etc

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer was supposed to be Clinton I thought? (Or could be just Phil Hartman transference)

LOL, Kingfish, it's almost as if you went into that 'populist' headspace and caught a dose of bad possessive!

Caveman was played by the same actor who did Clinton, but I think that UCL showed up before his version of Clinton did. However, according to the wiki:

Cirroc became a defense and personal injury lawyer, and in a later skit, a politician running for President on the platform of eliminating the capital gains tax. He was portrayed as a selfish, well-dressed attorney who repeatedly claimed to be a simple-minded caveman, and would employ simple folk wisdom to win his cases. He also enjoyed significant wealth, driving luxury cars like BMWs and Range Rovers, as well as owning a home in Martha's Vineyard.

PLus, running on the "I'm stupid" plays on the anti-intellectual thing America's had an flavor of for like a century. It's the same narrative summoned by talking heads referring to small towns in some backwater full of under-educated folks and massive loads of poverty as "real america". "I'm not one of them smarty-pants high-falutin' political scientists, I'm just a caveman. You're modern world with its automobiles and noise-making boxes scares and frightens me! But I do know this....." etc etc etc

not following all that's happening on this thread today, but this ^^^^^^^^^ can neatly explain a lot of US nat'l politics over the past 15 years. the he-men vs. the eggheads.

Actually, the term goes back farther:

http://slog.thestranger.com/files/2008/04/AdlaiStevenson.jpg

tbf the modern world is pretty scary!

republicans have played on two themes relentlessly for at least the last quarter century -

1 - govt never did anything right
2 - you are being looked down on by liberal pointy-heads

this makes the job of right-wing radio host absurdly easy - just interpret any event thru these two filters

dems don't have messages that are even remotely comparable in their effectiveness - do they simply not give a shit?

no. they have a harder job unless the economy is in recession.

The problem is, if you're a member of the party that intrinsically supports the federal government or at least supports the federal government's role in our lives, then you're always gonna be on the defensive.

That's not true. If "we" thought of the federal government as "us", it would be otherwise. The enemy (enema) of the state would naturally be on the defensive then.

Yeah, but when we bitch about "bureaucracy" and "Washington," Euler, they're not "us."

at least the last quarter century

more like the last 100 years

Humanizing it helps, of course. My mom's bitching about the stimulus package noticeably dropped off after I explained how my (Republican) university president credited it for saving several underfunded departments.

more like since the first caveman thought fire was going too far with this progress thing

Right; and the civil rights acts remain the way that the right is able to argue that the feds aren't "us", at least if you're a "real" American.

more like since the first caveman thought fire was going too far with this progress thing

goddamn cavenerds

Right; and the civil rights acts remain the way that the right is able to argue that the feds aren't "us", at least if you're a "real" American.

wait

As far back as Toqueville people have talked about how prickly Americans can get when they're criticized. We were supposed to be exceptional, to be a vanguard but as the Republic got older and more and more compromises were made (even in the Constitution) and our expansionist policies became more and more blatant and full of disregard for the 'opinions of mankind' and as that very process eventually made us more and more powerful, we retreated into ourselves culturally (it's noteworthy that, while all countires have their sporting preferences, we tend to only be interested in 'our' sports).

Whereas once staunch U.S. patriotism could be wedded to high-minded, universal thought about the nature of mankind and the State, it grew in disrepute and what 'patriots' preferred was jingoism unadulterated with any rational thought or appeal to rational thought. One could always end up bested in a debate down that path. Add to that the various waves of religious revival that prize intensity of faith over subtlety of doctrine and I can see where 6,000-year-old-Earthers and virulent homophobes prefer not to inquire or think too much - there lies the Tempter. Conversely (and I'm never certain how honest they are with themselves) they're not really interested in climate change (could God's design or punishment) so much as they are in making sure that the 'limited Govmt' which really means local ways for local people (i.e. getting your school board bullied into relgious orthodoxy by cliques full of intensity and fervor and being able to run all the undesirables out of town). They've shown themselves largely amenable to certain govmt services and programs as long as they feel they're doing as well from them as anybody, epsecially those lazy, immoral people of that other ethnic group. To give up on the kind of limited government they say they like would be to renounce American exceptionalism and if they do that then they're just some stubborn shlub in a double-wide and some of those annoying Europeans might actually have been right about a couple points or it means having to work their heads around a lot of complicated, evolving, interconnected stuff that can be quite subtle and quite deceptive and that requires too much work.

American anti-intellectualism stems from high self-regard which is either too craven or too lazy to justify itself.

(it's noteworthy that, while all countires have their sporting preferences, we tend to only be interested in 'our' sports).

eh, but other countries don't really care that much about "our" sports either. American Football and Baseball are non-entities in Europe. Basketball has broken through (cuz it's AWESOME), but other than that...

Yeah. Basketball is breaking through very effectively but American sports culture has traditionally been very narcissistic compared to other countries. Even the Brits with their proud culture of sport have exported them and now have to face their old colonies (and now their neighbors) in football and cricket and rugby matches. Part of it is size and distance to other countries in the American case but we very consciously took rugby football and rounders and made them very much our own.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71MQZ5YE0TL.gif

published in 1963, covers more than a century before that

Yeah, that was in my grandfather's bookshelves when I was a kid.

neither anti-intellectualism or anti-big-govt ideas are

woops

they're not ineluctable aspects of the American character, they're the product of deliberate and consistent propaganda

I'm not as sure of that as I used to be.

what's the difference? the former stems from the latter, and... vice versa. i mean, it's not even a distinction worth making, the anti-intellectual force is there

Anti-big-govt is one of the founding ideological threads of American life, I would say. What's odd about that was the fear of a tyrannical majority that informed much of that tradition was endemic in slave-holding states. The Democratic-Republicans, the majority of the nullifiers, the CSA, etc...

the other thing is that "big government" became a code word thanks to Reagan's expanded Southern Strategy for pretty much spending on anything other than means of enforcing authority. Pentagon, FBI, CIA, DoD, etc are never called to slash funds, only everything else. Because it was hammered into many voters minds that only lazy poor minorities use government services, and thus taxes were stealing money from some moral upstanding hardworking businessman to give handouts to the welfare queens.

Again, they really think this way.

I've read several accounts of why America's racial diversity is one of the reasons we never adopted as many 'socialist' programs as Europe. To be fair to Libertarians and some of the Paultards, though, they're not just anti Dept of Education but not really happy about the culture of venality that surrounds the military-industrial complex and think the DOJ/FBI have massively overstepped their bounds.

http://i39.tinypic.com/saw7cy.jpg

ouch

deem and pass is the new awesome

i am kinda amazed that it is happening tbh