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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i don't listen to speeches and i don't give a fuck about feel-good. all i do is perform a cost-benefit calculus to figure out which candidates and parties are more likely to support an environment that is most beneficial to my interests, which are, more or less, the unfulfilled promises of the enlightenment (reason, tolerance, secularism, human rights, individual liberty, scientific inquiry, etc). <-- that's what i want but won't happen in my lifetime.
i have to weigh the current administration's war crimes vs. the crimes of the previous + future administrations, and the democrats come out on top. i have to weigh the "godless' democrats vs. the "American Taliban" republicans and teh democrats come out way on top. human rights crimes are split 50/50 in the international arena, but in the domestic front the democrats look like st. francis of assisi when you compare them to the republican policies (not saying they aren't both flawed, st, francis only by comparison). individual liberty is split: democrats win on the personal morality front and the repukes win on economic freedom. scientific inquiry, democrats hand down-- republicans are anti-science. the environment, which wasn't a concept of the enlightenment-- both are hypocrites but democrats pollute less. internationalism, a cause dear to your beloved mr. selassie-- again the democrats (teh repukes would love to dismantle the UN). peace-- both are war criminals but the democrats are less bloody and gloat less about their crimes and do less rah-rah flag waving.
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So long as you've taken it into consideration that is all I can ask for. Myself, when I analyze previous administrations, the very same things which I have criticized the Kennedy/Johnson, the Nixon/Ford, the Carter, the Reagan/Bush I, the Clinton, and the Bush II are EXACTLY what the Obama administration has done, and with a bit more swagger and panache I might add
Where we have both done the analysis, I am afraid we've come to very different conclusions. Shit is shit. Romney's shit stinks so bad it is quite self-evident that the GOP has decided to throw in the towel and continue to do what they've done best the past few years, run the country from behind the scenes.
I am not asking you to support them, what I am asking you to do is much more critical of the failings of the political parties which you do support. Its not just Barack Obama who has failed us, it is the entirety of hundreds of Democratic politicians at every level of government, because they are all the complex machinery which has constructed and perpetrated these crimes.
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Sheeeeeeeeit son, i don't need anybody to monger my fears and i don't need anyone's talking points, i've seen the bastards run the congress the past couple of years, they've done nothing but harm, and i've seen their international politics the whole first decade of teh century, i've read their plans for the economy, and I AM SCARED SHITLESS without anyone having to tell me about it. first thing they're going to do is kill health care reform.
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I think you missed my point. I'm not accusing you of solely targeting Republicans in fear-mongering, rather that by perpetuating the myth of "its us against them" you are inadvertently promoting the party-line fear-mongering which only
stokes partisanship. It is a political distraction to point out how much stinkier someone else's shit just may happen to be to cover up the stench of your own shit. So for now, the Democrats would love to rowel up our animosities and frustrations with some of the more backwards and backwoods thinking folks in our society, so that we will inherently support them and their own evils. I say, fuck them both.
We should be putting equal pressure on ALL the corruption in the political machinery, not getting caught up in partisan partiality in judgment. We shouldn't be concentrating on trying to make people afraid of Mitt Romney, we need to be focusing on making Barack Obama intimated by us, otherwise he will just carry on like the Democrats did in the 50s, letting deportation and war carry on as ever until the shit really hits the fan. Maybe as a community we can prevent that by working on it now, today, and not simply kicking it down the road. That requires us not only to stand up to the GOP for our priorities, our values, our convictions, but to the Democrats too.
Honestly, I am as afraid of Barack Obama as Mitt Romney any day, because what makes me nervous is that behind closed doors how much the smoke and mirror rhetoric disappears and how much their policies are the same. The Republicans are really going to gut the country or end abortion, they are just pandering to their base, just like we know the Democrats aren't going to end the war or regulate our corrupt and exploitative market, they are just pandering to their labor-oriented base.
In the long arc, their policies tend to meet in the reality of the fucked up system we have today, where both parties mutually support the very policies which I am heavily criticizing, which is an increasing appetite for war, economic exploitation through "free" trade programs, institutionalized racism (it used to be Jim Crow, not it is the "undocumented" folks who number equally in their millions and live in the same kind of limbo that freed slaves lived in during the early 19th century), and callous police-state enforcement (see 2.1 million incarcerated Americans and counting, let alone the nearly 10 million on probation or parole). See, where is any of the change we can believe in? In the past four years there have been MORE wars, MORE deportations, MORE growth of capitalism yet a decline in jobs and real income for the working class, and MORE incarcerations on trumped up political agenda related laws.
The slogan is "Yes, we can." The question is what exactly are we doing?