I do not understand ...
and that's why I get so depressed that I am quitter for writing OTs.
Can you please bare with me and help me through my frustrations?
Here. Look at this diary Using Venn diagrams to understand primaries and caucuses which I missed to see yesterday by dopper0189. Unfortunately I made already a rant comment over there, before I read the comments. As a foreigner I feel lost looking at the "Democratic Party" Venn diagrams. It just shows me that I will not understand this country and be not really at home in it, as anything is as vague as the Democratic Party's Venn diagram definitions.
People in Germany would never vote on a single issue alone. You expect single issues to be covered by all parties, just in different ways. There is or at least was a clear distinction between the "Liberals", which used to be represented by the "FDP = Free Democratic Party". They were liberal in single issues like marriage, privacy rights, today probably in LGBT issues etc, also moderately liberal in anything that concerns racial discrimination, they were free traders, but not necessarily supporters of a "equality first" meme and not working class oriented. Basically they could be in coalition with the conservatives and with the Social Democrats. And they used that position to "condition" either one of the big two parties, as long as they competed against each other.
The Social Democrats in Germany were less liberal and more in support of socio-economic equality and in support of equality when it comes to single (identity?) issues, racial equality, specific gender related rights etc. They were clearly middle and working class oriented and if they called themselves Social Democrats, the "Democrat" part of the name had ideologically more weight than the "Socialist" part. That was the set-up when I left Germany in the 1980.
Meanwhile that has bled out on all seems and through the right wingers and Green Party and "Die Linke" (the new leftist) after reunification, I am more lost about what's going on in Germany. The Social Democrats get more and more corporate-addicted and free traders, ie neo-liberal, there is no real strong voice for the working class, the Green Party could draw voters from the conservatives as they from the Social Democrats, the new right-wingers are racially challenged and populists, you can safely say they are closet neo-nazis in modern style sheep clothes. They are dangerous and people know it, so they start to sound more populist than racist and get better at that specific kabuki theater.
But with my old mind-set, conditioned from the Germany of the sixties and seventies, to me racial equality, civil rights, human rights, gender equality were all incorporated in the Social Democratic ideological platform. In economic terms they were clearly defending (at least they were expected to do that) the working and middle class, the little people, pro welfare for the poorer people.
May be I should say that Germany was so well-off in post wwII times that there wasn't really a hard-core lower class of poverty-struck people that were unable to move at least into the lower working class realm. So nobody was really poor as in poverty-struck black neighborhoods in the US. Social net enabled them to not make a hard landing from which nobody could pick themselves up again. So, if Germans appear very arrogant these days towards poverty struck Greeks or other Southern European nations then basically, Germans (born post wwII) never knew such poverty and never expected anything else than free public higher education, healthcare for all, social security for all etc. This kind of social environment and thinking was valid for my generation.
(You might imagine that my "culture" shock was quite intense).
I don't mention that as an excuse, but I learned the hard way in my life that everything has to be learned by experiencing something physically and locally in your own personal life. So, basically I can still sense (more and more vaguely so) the differences between German reactions to political events, be it in the population or among politicians.
I have no understanding of the younger German generation, which grew up shortly before reunification and afterwards. Something shifted after reunification. The privileged Western Germans experienced for the first time an under-privileged and poorer population group within unified Germany. It didn't work out so well. As I didn't experience that time physically myself, I feel more estranged from the post-reunified Germany than other Germans.
Now coming back to the US.
I can't sense the same differences I can identify in Germans among Americans. To me to find out, if someone is liberal, but also a racially challenged person, or a populist with no sense for social equality rights, or an establishment democrat, who talks for the poor, but not necessarily legislate for the poor, all this is very difficult to me to find out and be sure of having understood something correctly just reading the gos or here. That's why I am a lost puppy.
The diagrams for the Democratic Party in doppler's diary distinguish between these categories:
-
Liberals: Self describe liberals
Populist: Pro-union, fair traders
Moderates: Social moderates, economic moderates
Civil Rights Voters: Discrimination. immigration, LGBT issues
Establishment: Major fundraiser, elected officials, etc
I find those categories amazingly lacking of meaning.
Liberals: Just because I self-declare as a liberal doesn't mean I know what that liberal stands for. I could for example be very liberal and accept any extremely secretive "religion". Would I be so liberal to accept "Scientology" or "Mormonisn"?
Populists: If you are pro-union that would be a social democratic frame, if you are a fair trader, what is that supposed to mean? There are corporations, who claim to support fair traders, but I don't think what they stand for is that fair. Kabuki.I have participated in a populist movement conference in DC. I think it was a very strange mix of folks there and appeared to me confusing. I have images from that conference, but don't have the laptop anymore, where they were on. They were illustrative. I should try to retrieve them out from nowhere. Basically they were everything at once. Which ends up not standing for anything specific. So, I would say it's not a category. Sigh.
Moderates: What does it mean to be moderately social? Or economically moderate? - Can't figure that out - Pro small business? How small? Are you just moderately for marriage equality? How do you squeeze that? Or moderately capitalistic or corporate inclined?
Civil Rights Voters: If there is a category like that, it would mean that members of all other categories are not for civil rights? Are those the ones that don't want their civil rights protected ? How can anyone be not interested in civil rights?
Establishment Ok, I don't know them myself, but my son has dined and spent vacation times with those very rich and elitist/establised Democrats' kids as a kid and teenager himself. It took him a long time to "see" what they stand for. Basically more than 20 years. It took a war, and combat and failing in school. It is a somewhat hard experience. I wouldn't say the establishment are really social democrats. They are good people, but ... well ... they are so rich they can buy voters, campaigns etc. I know, Ted Kennedy, I get it, but it's easy to be generous, when you are so rich. Where would Ted Kennedy be, if he were poor?
So, that's the end of it.
I just give up. I lack the will to try to understand. Looser. Quitter. Done. Sorry.
Comments
It's meaningless to me
First, I am not sure of how he arrived at the labels he used. Second, I have a real problem with labels in general. The issues facing us in the United states and elsewhere in the world are beyond the labels he is using. IMHO, just like everything else, his Venn diagram is simply another distraction by the political horse race junkies to avoid discussing the issues and the policy solutions. Maybe that is because only one candidate has been substantively discussing the issues.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
thank you, gulfgal98,
I guess the whole primary disputes and insults among the readers and diarists over Sanders vs. Clinton at the gos get me down, because I hate it to be in controversy with the black kos community there. I just wished I had never started to read dailykos and discovered those. I am a bit puzzled over myself, as to how much it gets at me.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Agree wholeheartedly--these diagrams are
no more than a distraction--gibberish, really.
When I get to today's OT, I've got a remedy for your "DKos Blues" (hopefully).
Mollie
"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."--Helen Keller
Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.
Due to personal tragedy, an E.German family and I became friends
Superficially, at first—Dresden and Honolulu?—it might have seemed that we had nothing in common.
Yet I quickly found myself empathizing with their thinking and way of living, to a much greater extent than I would have thought possible.
Maybe it has something to do with this. I was just short of being a teenager when Hawaii became a state. The mom and dad in this family were teenagers when German reunification happened.
In both cases, the promise of a brighter, "the sky's the limit" future for all quickly tarnished, soured, and turned into a carpetbagger-style colonization process and a gold rush showering riches on only a few.
That's a subjective experience we both share.
you were even lucky to make that personal experience
and I can well imagine it. The only contact I had to former East Germans were through two interns who came from Germany to DC into our German TV studio and both were so young, they had no idea anymore about the "regime" their parents grew up in. I also had contact to Germans, who were from Poland originally and related to Russia via marriage, younger ones. Clearly very critical of Putin and Russia all over, they hated Snowden, if you can believe it. I can't deny myself to listen to their voices as well. I also remember an already passed away aunt of mine, whose parents came from one of the Baltic states, who were in service of German colonizers in Samoa and she has spent her very early childhood years in Samoa. Shortly before her death she told us that she had a reunification with some people from Samoa and that she was shocked to discover that Germans were still hated hundred years later there.
So, you see, it's not easy to get over your ancestor's historical sins.
https://www.euronews.com/live
That is not encouraging at all. But the young are easily led.
All during my childhood, the pro Chiang Kai-Shek / Kuomintang people were able to exercise thought control in Hawaii and given free rein to define China and the meaning of being Chinese. The U.S. saw to it that the small—but equally Leninist in its methods: see the February 28 incident—rump regime in Taiwan could hog China's place at the table in international bodies such as the U.N. Security Council.
I was taught to hate and fear the philosophy of the communists in China because for them, instead of believing in human rights and civil liberties, the interests of one social class, the working class, trumped all other considerations and justified "benevolent" dictatorship.
So guess what? Now it's becoming increasingly clear that the West—those who wield actual power of command in the West—don't really believe in human rights or civil liberties either. Nor are they opposed to the "benevolent" dictatorship of one social class.
There turns out to be no consensus that the government (and its agents, the police) shouldn't be able to just kill people or hold them, even torture them, for years without a trial; no consensus that they shouldn't be able to snoop on everyone and scoop up even citizens' most private communications 24/7.
On the contrary, our leaders and media are trying to sell us the exact opposite, or?
The interests of one social class, the billionaires, the 0.0001%, trump all other considerations?
The Washington DC insiders, the Davos set, and ranks of technocratic lackeys serve as party cadres and "manage" the rest of us—exercising, as gatekeepers of access to mass media (and to lucrative careers), thought control on the 0.0001%'s behalf?
All the stops seem to have been removed? No mechanism, no check or balance, is in place any longer that can prevent this system from becoming as abhorrent as what I was taught in my childhood to condemn?
Is that the way it's going to be? The forms of democracy, of religion in the West: no more than window-dressing and kabuki disguising an iron will to power? "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality"? We never emerged from the barbarity of antiquity, we're still trapped in Bronze Age biblical times? What the 1968 musical Hair called "the electronic Stone Age"? Caesar's deputies and the religious establishment crucify the innocent to intimidate and keep everyone else in line? Meanwhile, bread and circuses?
Mimi, this is so insightful
Your observations are enlightening to me.
Ever looked through a kaleidoscope and turned it very slowly? The patterns collapse on one another and form new patterns, new groupings. Imagine that the shapes at the end of the kaleidoscope are the lose circles of a venn diagram. If you stop turning, the picture you see might be the diagram of the party groups, alliances, ideologies, and issues — at just one moment in time. But for only just that moment.
Up until the invention of industry (and the gun) — a diagram pattern of a civilization may have lasted for an generation, a lifetime, or a century, or even a millennium or two. Out of these extended holding patterns came mankind's enduring religious texts, the seminal philosophical works and ideals, and the maps of morality and social roles.
But, the moment the industrial revolution began to emerge and the gun could exterminate an entire indigenous people and clear an entire continent for the gun-owners, through genocide — which is the very recent history of the United State — the kaleidoscope has been turning steadily and the patterns constantly changing.
Now they change slowly year by year, and they change dramatically over a single decade. Thus, a venn diagram is utterly useless. It is, at best, a picture of the past the very moment it is drawn.
There is really only one question that must be answered in order to get a grip on what is happening:
"Why the constant and rapid, ever-changing regrouping and (often violently) shifting alliances of the social order — nationally and internationally?"
I have my own theories about the answer. It must be primal to exert such force across humanity, therefore, it must be a product of evolution or evolutionary adaptation across millions of years, rooted in the survival of the species.
Scarcity.
Competition for depleting resources on this monumentally overpopulated planet, where much of the species is doomed to die as a result of the pollution of its own waste product. (This could be a delusion of the collective unconscious, but it will still lead to doom, either way. Like crabs in a bucket, they will crawl on top of each other, creating a mountainous crush of crabs, so that a few can escape the bucket.)
Pluto, your comments are always so inspirational and
a catalyst for me to try further thinking about an issue. I thoroughly admire your comment. Let me read again and make it sink in. Oh, I think you are so right. Your imagery of the mountainous crush of crabs built so some can escape and survive, makes it vivid and understandable. Competition for resources and getting away with exploiting them for your own advantage and survival first before anyone else is as a primal instinct across the human species. Scarcity of access to life-sustaining resources. Yes, just look at the boats with refugees to find them.
Excellent imagery how you explain the constantly changing groupings as being a single spot moment in time changing like the turning kaleidoscope's patterns.
It helps a lot with coping over this. It's a delight to read you. Thank you so much. I wished I could,as the people say, rec this a hundred times.
https://www.euronews.com/live
No diagrams
no polls of mass deception or breakdowns constructed by wonks can give you understanding. They do not want you to understand. It is not that complicated the political elite, the 'oligarchical collectivists' the powers that be globally regardless of whatever faction, party or label they slap on themselves have nullified and declared void any democratic, populist or lefty uprisings or resistance from we the people. Stick to your good heart and mind. Forget about trying to make sense out of global and domestic factions that all espouse raw power with no humanity. Politics as we knew it are dead and gone all we have now does not relate to anything past. It's Chinatown. All you need to do to understand it is to let go of your past present and future expectations of anything democratic or decent. Goldman Sachs and it's ilk rule the world. What people need top do now is figure out how to pry them off the face of humanity. Forget about the old breakdowns of global past politics this is a whole new game and it's rigged, financed, armed and dangerous.
Everyone is so hopeful
…that they can vote their way out of this.
Watching Americans go through this over and over again — even knowing that the house always wins and seeing it with their own eyes via Citizen United — is so very sad.
They will do it again in 2016, enthusiastically, and in 2017 find themselves betrayed, as usual.
And, they will start making plans for the next election. Hopeful.
yes, but if you give up that hope, what do you have left?
Nothing. How do you fight the system? If you can't change it, then the system will crash completely, people will suffer tremendously and only after that, a hopefully better system is created. Aren't most people, who follow their instinct urge of survival and fight for scarce resources, as you said above, scared to go through this melt-down and therefore always will hope for "reforms" through the electoral process? Can you blame them, really? Fear is a huge motivator to accept fake solutions. It's as if they beg to be lied to. It's so amazing how far that has gotten us into the abyss already.
So sad. Really.
https://www.euronews.com/live
I am very optimistic about the US.
But, as I explained in America's Mein Kampf, change can only come from the outside, by the world joining together to marginalize the US. The first and most important step is to put the US Dollar out of business as a global trading currency. This will be accomplished on October 20th, 2015, when the IMF votes to make the Chinese Yuan a reserve currency. At least, that will be the moment of change. Its affect may not be fully manifested in the US for another year.
Indeed, the American people have no idea that right this very minute, Chinese President Xi Jinping is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 15th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit and the seventh BRICS Summit, both of which are being held from July 8 to July 10 in Ufa, Russia. US media never covers news that will have a profound effect on the US, geopolitically. I posted this HERE yesterday:
The US remains completely oblivious to the impact of what is happening to it, and seems moronically unaware of the unfolding of its own destiny as a failed empire. To put it another way: Globally speaking, the young people alive today are living in a brand new world; a world of extraordinary possibility that did not exist just a few months ago.
In its self-absorbed hubris, drunk with Neocon and Neonazi power, the US has completely missed the decade-long spectacle of the entire world working in concert to end its global reign of ever-present military and economic threat.
It is the rest of the world that will save the American people. And, soon.
Without a single shot being fired.
yes, I remember what you said before
and I will slowly re-read it, because it's something that doesn't come to me spontaneous as it deals with economics.
I have to say that I just listened to the last three interviews Chris Hedges gave on the Real News Networik, reading the transcript while he was speaking with Paul Jay. Gladly they provide transcripts which are to me essential to really follow what has been said. Hedges gave answers to how to build a movement and a vision to resist the corporate totalitarian capitalism system we are in. He addresses also very well the issue of racism and the split in the African-American community of how to proceed, when 30 percent of that community sells out the bottom 70 percent of Afro-Americans. It's the split between a Cornel West and an Obama supporter. It answers or makes clear a lot of questions I am struggling with (as is gjohnsit). He also makes clear how he relates to Sanders campaign with the Democrats and as a Democrat (like many and like Cornel West - critical and also critical of issues of how Sanders relates to military issues and foreign policy). He also relates to the younger generation world wide as being a new force, and he talks about in how far Black Lives Matter and the occupy movement played a role in future vision building. The most important to me that he does not shy away to address the racism and white supremacy as well.
I should write for myself something out as a more serious attempt to give myself some guidelines, so that I not anymore so reactive and dependent on censoring efforts by the kos brigade.
All this together with your explanationof how the US could be saved from the outside should make a structural changes a possibility and helps to build a vision. Thanks you Pluto.
Here are the three parts of the interview with transcript. Part 2 is to me the most relevant.
Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt - Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself (1/3)
Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt - Chris Hedges on RAI (2/3)
Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt - Chris Hedges on RAI (3/3)
I will just pull everything together including your diary posts and make myself reading it over and over til it sticks and I don't get anymore discouraged and confused.
https://www.euronews.com/live
You don't have to
give up hope. If you give up hope in 'reforming' the irredeemable and thoroughly broken system that is in place globally it frees you up and actually helps get rid of misplaced fear. The electoral process along with representational democracy cannot exist when it is owned by the 1% oligarchical collectivist's who look on justice, democracy and human and civil rights as an impediment to their global agenda. I place my hope in the people as this is an old struggle and any human progress throughout history has been hard won by humans. Look the outside the beast for your hope. Look to the movements by, for and about those inalienable and self evident truths and join in solidarity. You can't hope to change from within this rotten and antidemocratic because it is owned and controlled by the entities that mean people and the planet harm and destruction. Working for movement is all you can do, there really is no victory in compromise with this lot.
let go of past and future expectation of anything
democratic or decent ...
To let go of future expectation? That means you give up and fall into despair. Then even the understanding that comes with it will not help you in any way.
I have a distinct feeling to not want to accept that kind of fate. I have to read Hedges again. He tries to get a handle on not giving up, on the need to resist, rebel and not accepting the abyss in which giving up would lead us into.
I had it mentioned somewhere in a comment, but everything I have read just keeps falling like sand through a sieve. There must be a way to deal with it.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Past and future expectations
of decency and democracy should not be let go of. I see it as the opposite, letting go of expectations of decency and democracy from our current global reality frees you from both fear and allows movement progress that is not defined by or chained to, this current lot of psychopathic masters of the universe. It's a process always has been. It's sad that it has come to this but evil Empires do die as they always go too far and people have to stop them. If you love democracy, decency and peace all the good stuff humans also do then do not despair they are still alive and kicking. Humans thought up and imagined these inalienable self evident truths they are universal and unlike the want to rule the world asshole's in power now they are really 'inevitable'. There is something to be said for that old maxim 'the truth shall set you free'. Feel the change that does not come from fear but instead comes from liberating yourself from being chained to defeatist lies that say this is the inevitable world as we find so embrace the suck. The aspirations you speak of past, present and future need to be embraced and fought for.
You've nailed it, Shaz . . .
I believe this, which is why I've had to limit my exposure to certain blogs (wink, wink) which blatantly and unashamedly use fear to manipulate its readers/members. Eventually, the environment becomes toxic, and therefore counterproductive.
Mollie
"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."--Helen Keller
Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.
I think the diagrams add more heat than light
Yes, I would say many of the categories overlap more than as written. Many of us, I'm sure, support a strong social safety net and a higher minimum wage and civil rights and so on. The vagueness of the definitions, as you point out, only adds to the confusion. So you're not as confused as you think you are. The diarist is.
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