Outliving the US: the comments

[nancylebov]

The other day, I asked whether people expected to outlive the US, and got some very interesting replies.

The most noticeable similarity was that no one expected anything good to come of an end to the US, which probably supports the idea that the US is very stable.

tahkhleet posted a substantial core dump about politics and the state of the culture. I'm feeling rather swamped. This is unfair. Overloading people is *my* job.

Still, I'm going to pick out some bits. However, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Is Obama genuinely that awful? I'm disappointed that he isn't prosecuting those responsible for torture (and NPR did a bit about how he used the word torture before he was elected, but has dropped it since then). Is he letting *everything* important slide?

I'd have thought he's at least smart enough to take a lesson from what Katrina did to Bush's reputation.

Two "do my homework" questions:

Are his foreign policy advisors really all hawks?

How did he handle things when he was a community organizer? Did he get useful work done?
Slightly different angle about the financial elite: One of my friends believes that credentialism is part of the problem. The most likely way to get one of those very well-paid jobs is to be totally focused on the exhausting work of getting the right degrees. Aside from tahkhleet's point that only someone who's got bad values will be willing to do the work, getting the credentials means being totally focused on incentives rather than paying attention to the larger system.

Back to my pov: Having a system which makes room for competence is a very subtle problem. If people are totally shielded from consequences, whoever is good at social climbing will get the rewards, and the quality of work goes to hell. If there is too much effort to make sure the right thing is done, people game the measurement system, and the work goes to heck.

Genocide: I've been wondering for a while whether I'll see a nation commit auto-genocide (over 75% of population killed). It just seems as though people go nuts that way occasionally, and people are much more dependent on infrastructure than they used to be. Still, I don't know that the elites are dreaming of wiping a lot of the rest of us out, though worries about overpopulation can be read that way.

For purposes of this discussion, it isn't necessary that the elites would actually benefit from genocide, just whether enough of them strongly believe they would.

Comments

Three Tiny Bright Spots

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

...does not equal a "program" compared to the unholy trinity of (in order of descending importance with relative weights):

--> His role as King Log as the upper class loots the country's financial system (60)
--> Embracing Bush's "invincible executive" governing theory (as manifested in his insistence not to prosecute war crimes done by Bush) (30)
--> Continuing Bush's "War on Terror" (10, because the world is used to the US acting badly at this point)

plus

don't feel like getting the footnotes exhaustively set up but:
-->miscellaneous authoritarian gestures including (??? since sources not cited in detail yet)
(1) ban on hand loading ammunition (pending legislation but its past the draft stage)
(2) declaration on record and in front of reputable witnesses (two newspaper reporters among them)that he wanted a 2 million man "civilian security force" for "America's security goals"
(3) failure to over-ride Bush's executive martial law order that put FEMA in charge of the country, SPD 51. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_and_Homeland_Security_Presidential_Directive)
(this one is scary. Its like a Sword of Damocles. There's no definition of how the "state of emergency starts; nor how it ends; nor why the previous legislation was inadequate; nor why no one in the House or Senate can look at the actual operations plan for the marital law measures; nor why it calls for the illegal suspension of all branches of the gov't save the executive.(previous acts did NOT do this))
(4) His push to eventually have all people ages 18-42 donate two years of their labor to the gov't and to accept the gov't decision as to what type of labor to carry out.

to me, that's his real program, and the scattering of significant things he did are not a "program" compared to it.

For the record, I hate Anakin McCain and the Republican party passionately. I am not taking sides in a partisan dispute. I'm calling it like I see it because he is just behaving that badly, especially after extravagant promises to the contrary.

For a closing statement, read:
http://koogrr.livejournal.com/433037.html?thread=2045325#t2045325

...because I get the uncomfortable feeling from two commentators that I am drawing ire for having committed some type of "lese- majeste" against Mister Obama. I have not. I have struggled for clarity and accuracy my whole life in all things...most of all in ruminations about what's going on in the world and what we as individuals have to do. This is not some sort of petty "their man won" garbage.

Re: Three Tiny Bright Spots

[sethg]

Regarding the unholy trinity:

(1) As I said below, Wall Street has corrupted both parties. One of the reason Clinton's budgets focused so much on deficit reduction is that on the advice of Bob Rubin (his Treasury Secretary, who worked at Goldman Sachs before entering government service and worked at Citigroup afterward), Clinton wanted to stay on the bond traders' good side.

(2) This sucks and I hope more pressure can be brought to bear on the issue, but at least he hasn't pardoned the crooks, so if he doesn't have the cojones to prosecute them, maybe one of his successors will.

(3) Both parties, sadly, have a tradition of throwing the weight of the US military around. I would love to see an Administration pull back to something closer to isolationism, but the military-industrial complex is too powerful to allow such a drastic change in policy happen in one election cycle.

I don't know enough about your smaller points to comment.

Relative to the American political spectrum I'm pretty far to the left (if I were Canadian I'd probably be voting NDP), but Obama never campaigned as someone so far to the left. He campaigned from the center of the Democratic party (not to be confused with a "centrist" who splits the difference between the Democrats and Republicans) and that's how he's governing.

Do I wish the center of gravity in US politics was farther to the left? Absofuckinglutely. Did I expect my vote in a presidential election (as contrasted with all the other ways I as a citizen can influence the political system) to shift this center of gravity more than one or two degrees? No way in hell.