Search






Jeff's Amazon.com Wish List

Archive Calendar

November 2024
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  

Archives

Everything old is new again

Or rather, it should be.  But then, that would mean the kind of puristy baggage that simply doesn’t sell in this changing electoral landscape.  Wherein we must adapt, finesse, massage, and adjust our principles to meet the new reality if we ever wish to regain power.  And we do, power being the ultimate goal.  Liberty, individual autonomy, a free market capitalist system built on a stable rule of law and equality of opportunity: all nice, don’t get me wrong.  Very pleasing to think about in theory.  But really secondary to winning.  To power.  And so negotiable to that end.

Still, it’s often useful to look at how quaint people were back when they thought politics was about something other than getting elected.  As if such a tack could ever work today. So here, enjoy.

(h/t JohnInFirestone)

 

12 Replies to “Everything old is new again”

  1. William says:

    Everyone knows that at the first sign of trouble you should abandon your principles. Especially if the person you’re fighting seems stupid/scary/spoiled.

    Yes, your children may hate you when they realize how little effort you made to protect them, and you may have spurned your country’s memories and sacrifices, and the stories of propaganda are legendarily boring and uninspiring but… I uh. Flag label?

  2. BigBangHunter says:

    – Maybe, with the passage of enough time, and the ultimate realization of the empty unfulfilled promises of the material ego based intellectualism, morality will make a comeback, as quiant and anti-intellectual as that may seem for the presemt.

    – If not, we may not have any role models or heroes left eventually.

  3. Blake says:

    From the interview: “I’m never quite sure what you mean be consensus politics. I believe that what most people want in their lives, is what the Conservative Party wants to have for them. I believe that our policies are fundamentally common sense policies.”

    Damn, it’s on the tip of my tongue…who was the politician that recently and frequently used the phrase “common sense?” Little help here, please?

  4. JohnInFirestone says:

    I was depressed thinking about how Obama wants to move America Forward! to the mid-1970s England, but then I remembered that early-mid 1970s England gave us the Benny Hill Show.

    Anything that gets our society closer to 1/2 naked chicks running around on TV while Yakety Sax plays in the background is ok in my book.

  5. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Everything new is old as well.

    Obama is going to take us back to the future

    –as envisioned eighty or ninety years ago.

  6. palaeomerus says:

    Proposed new name for the NEW(tm) United States of America : Greater Shitlandia Paradise Project

  7. JohnInFirestone says:

    I guess we’re just Immanentizing the shit out of that Eschaton, huh?

  8. Bob Belvedere says:

    Indeed, we are, JohnInFirestone…but at least some of us can still see the Fnords.

  9. sdferr says:

    The time of killing has returned to Lebanon. Old, new again.

  10. Danger says:

    Well placed, Double B!

  11. serr8d says:

    This in interesting…an academic ‘Dream Team’ of behavioral science professors helped the Obama campaign finesse their messages…

    This election season the Obama campaign won a reputation for drawing on the tools of social science. The book “Victory Lab,” by Sasha Issenberg, and news reports have portrayed an operation that ran its own experiment and, among other efforts, consulted with the Analyst Institute, a Washington voter research group established in 2007 by union officials and their allies to help Democratic candidates.

    Less well known is that the Obama campaign also had a panel of unpaid academic advisers. The group — which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS — provided ideas on how to counter false rumors, like one that President Obama is a Muslim. It suggested how to characterize the Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in advertisements. It also delivered research-based advice on how to mobilize voters.

    “In the way it used research, this was a campaign like no other,” said Todd Rogers, a psychologist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former director of the Analyst Institute. “It’s a big change for a culture that historically has relied on consultants, experts and gurulike intuition.”

    When asked about the outside psychologists, the Obama campaign would neither confirm nor deny a relationship with them.

    But interestingly enough, all these profs had to sign nondisclosure forms.

    Romney and Republicans didn’t have a fucking chance, and won’t, as long as these groups work to secure a one-party system, which is their ultimate goal. That is not an acceptable outcome to an ever-shrinking pool of Americans.

  12. sdferr says:

    And if to Lebanon, why not to Gaza?

Comments are closed.