I was reading the Saturday Toronto Star this morning and I just had to take a walk away from the kitchen table.
Let's see, the cover story has harper braying like a jack-ass about how he'll slash spending and taxes if re-elected. The Star reports that economically illiterate right-wing voters and hack, right-wing think-tanks are praising this nonsense. (That cover story ain't on the online version of the Star. Here's the gist of it .... link.)
All I can think is that it's depressing that this shit-head, with his shit-head ideas is considered a serious option for 30-40% of the people who bother to vote. Seriously. You want to see how good this economic drivel works? Take a look at the USA where millions of people are losing their homes, and the auto-industry is relying on extending credit to the same sort of people who were given crooked loans during the housing bubble. There's bankruptcies and tent-cities galore down there but the elite are living in never-never land in their bubble of privilege and doctored statistics.
Thomas Walkom has a piece about how Forest Hill voters talking about gravitating to the harpercons, with two Jewish women saying that harper's rabid support for Israeli war crimes has won him their votes.
The cover story about harper's spending cuts continues on page A8 with the headline: "Harper says savings will come from attrition." More grist for the mill that. Just like Rob Ford says that stopping the gravy train at Toronto City Hall will help him find the $1 billion shortfall between revenue and expenses! More completely fraudulent nonsense that should be presented with the crushing disdain it deserves.
In the "Greater Toronto" section there's an article "Duelling for downtown" dealing with the "condo factor" on downtown politics. There's a picture of a 69-year-old woman who votes NDP and two picture/bios of 30-something condo-dwelling yuppies who are "conservative" because of whatever, i couldn't bother to read anymore of it.
They're no doubt "conservative" because MASSIVE amounts of corporate wingnut welfare has sustained bullshit "think-tanks" and corrupted empty-headed newsrooms, and has fostered astro-turf groups on university campuses and in civil society to inculcate the false belief that corporate capitalism has been a success rather than a dismal failure. The whole right-wing counterattack has thrown progressive values back in shock and disarray, primarily because as an intellectual minority, we don't have the courage of our convictions and because tactically-speaking, we suck shit. Oh yeah. Also, the corporats have billions of dollars of everybody else's money (if they can afford to waste it on con-jobs for the public, they're obviously over-charging us for their products) and they control the media and the two main political parties.
At the end of reading all this shit, I'm moved to say that for genuine progressives, honesty is the best policy. (NOT, mind you, the Liberal Party hacks on "Progressive Bloggers" who are willing to return harper to power if it means they can steal enough votes from incumbent NDPr's and strong NDP challenges to harper. That sort of scum studies up on progressive issues only so that they can get jobs explaining why their party's latest betrayals of them are necessary and good.) By "honesty is the best policy" I mean that we must honestly and fearlessly express our views. We should not be afraid of "alienating" clueless people. How is the country supposed to turn away from right-wing economic nonsense, support for NATO or Israeli imperialism, worship the rich/bury the poor social policies, or police-state values, if there's nobody out there trashing such garbage?
And people are never going to move towards democratic socialism unless we sing its praises loud and proud. If you believe in something, and the majority doesn't, you have to ask why that is so. Given the serial failures of right-wing hegemony, I'd say that we're more than justified in our belief that we are right and the majority is wrong.
Last word, ... honesty ALSO means acknowledging when your opponents are right. This doesn't mean that you have to take the time to read everything from shit-heads like Ezra Levant or Jonah Goldberg. Some people have already discredited themselves with their consistent errors and stupidities. I just mean that if you come across an opposing view that effectively challenges you worldview, engage with it honestly, ... don't run from it.
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9 comments:
And there, old thwapster, is the conundrum, isn't it.
The whole "engage with honesty" thing is a challenge. You and I both, along with more than a few of our progressive brethren, have basically run out of patience with corporate/right-wing shitheaderry. Why, in god's name, must we waste hours and hours going back to first principles and defend ourselves from idiocy?
Why do we have to recycle every discussion and repeat over and over again that concern for due process and effective criminal-justice policy is not the same thing as being soft on crime and subscribing to some notional hug-a-thug approach?
Why do we have to spend time explaining that our discomfort with Harper's crypto-totalitarian disdain for democracy doesn't mean we're ready to surrender to the terrorists and steal money from hard-working taxpayers before forcing them to marry gay Muslims?
This is where I sometimes run out of answers. I'm all for engaging people with whom I disagree in a spirit of openness and respect. Especially when I'm talking to liberals of the big-L variety. You've put it very clearly and succinctly yourself, in fact, when you write that you get on fine with individual Liberals even as you despise their party. (At this point I could go for the cheap laugh and protest, with my most innocent wide-eyed expression, that some of my best friends are well-meaning Liberals.)
Easy enough for me to say, I know, and god knows I don't always manage to live up to the high-minded impulses behind such nice words. Sometimes, in fact, I may even descend to patronizing condescension, or even, god help me, genuine rudeness.
Building bridges is an art, and it's one I don't claim to have mastered. If we're trying to bring people 'round to our own point of view, we're more likely to succeed if we don't antagonize them. If we throw in the towel and decide going in that some people are so stupid and deluded and brainwashed and incapable of critical thinking that it's pointless to even try, well, we've lost the argument before it even starts.
It's a delicate balancing act, I know. And there are times when, despite my naive good intentions, I start losing faith in my ability to find that balance. Today, I just don't know what the answer is.
The problem is we spend so much energy trying to find that balance that our argument gets lost in the process.
Like many I am currently at a loss as how to proceed given that the con support remains static in spite of the evidence that the philosophy that they espouse has been thoroughly discredited.
We have tried politeness and civility and it is not working perhaps it is time to get all up in some faces.
OB said:
"Why, in god's name, must we waste hours and hours going back to first principles and defend ourselves from idiocy?"
Because they've got the money.
Kev said:
"perhaps it is time to get all up in some faces."
>shrug< Sure, so long as it's done intelligently.
ARRRGHHH!!!!
For the THIRD TIME in Four days, blogger has eaten a comment.
shorter version of the departed:
I'm not so much talking about building bridges as about not compromising our own viewpoint.
And say what's gotta be said no matter how they'll smear it. And smear them in return.
That'll have to do.
Committed as I am, in my wide-eyed naivete, to civility in all things, I shall have to take your argument about smearing under advisement.
In the meantime, though, there are times when our efforts in that regard are pretty much superfluous. Every now and then, far-right fucktards manage to do it to themselves. For example ...
excellent post thwap! I feel like you do and pick myself and keep going.
Thanks Kincardine.
I was just looking at that NDP = 18% and i thought about the 82% who i can't comprehend ...
OOPS!
That was me, thwap, replying to Kincardine on ephemeral's computer.
(Hmm. Seems my last response was also eaten. Let's try again . . . .)
Something to keep in mind:
"That [productive disillusionment] has not happened yet, neither here nor anywhere. That’s not surprising, since the historical evidence mostly shows that crises are good for the right, not the left. Crises make people want to retreat to the familiar, not strike out in new directions. So here and in many other places around the world, we’re seeing an upsurge in nativism and xenophobia, not solidarity. The 1930s were an exception, but that’s because things got really really awful then, with the unemployment rate maxing out at 25%. Times have been bad here lately, but nothing like that. Do we really want to see the unemployment rate more than double because it might be good for politics?"
http://lbo-news.com/2011/04/08/against-catastrophism/
Also found something new:
"In A Company of One, Carrie M. Lane finds that the new culture of corporate employment, changes to the job search process, and dual-income marriage have reshaped how today's skilled workers view unemployment. Through interviews with seventy-five unemployed and underemployed high-tech white-collar workers in the Dallas area over the course of the 2000s, Lane shows that they have embraced a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary and all workers are, or should be, independent 'companies of one.'
....
Sympathetic to the benefits that this 'company of one' ideology can hold for its adherents, Lane also details how it hides the true costs of an insecure workforce and makes collective and political responses to job loss and downward mobility unlikely."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801477271/leftbusinessobseA/
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