January 11, 2012

Banksters should resent the implication that they're lazy.

They're actually very hard working guys, nowadays. No matter the size of the funds under management, they have a lot of hours to consider all components, and assistants to present to them the relevant facts. Just because they're managing X billion they're not laughing off decisions involving "mere" millions as trivial. A relatively small proportion can produce a big part of the annual earnings margin, which is what it is all about (and is often the basis for bonuses). Given that even an average working year has about 2000 hours in it, it's not plausible Mr. Lew was not cognizant of and did not consider and sign off on all major decisions involving the biggest piece in one of his funds. It's like saying a movie director who's made a dozen films totalling 30 hours shouldn't remember what happened in the climactic minute of one of his films. It's insulting to the craftsman!

And again, what does the investment with Paulson say about the scruples and strategies generally at work?

January 11, 2012

Top Citibank fund managers should not have jobs in the White House.

Yes or no?

January 11, 2012

Easy: Mountains of narrative bullshit ending in predetermined outcome.

In an open presidential primary season (no incumbent running), just measure who's got the highest stack of dollar bills by the time the primary voting actually starts. That's your winner. In fact, the winner usually has double the dollars of all opponents combined. (Obama-Clinton was exceptionally even, almost a push. Most non-incumbent primary seasons since 1976 at least have seen the minimum 2:1 spending ratio of winner-to-all-losers apply.) For an even more accurate idea of final outcome, subtract all donations under $100 so you're just seeing who the rich and the corporations like. Things may get a bit crazier this season, since there's now no limit on anonymous money, but the rule appears to have applied as usual. (Prior to 1968 or so, the procedure was even better: after going through the motions of primaries and caucuses, the party poobahs got together at the back of a convention hall and told you who was running, like announcing a pope, and you could shut up and vote.)

It's hard to imagine a less rational system as the basis for a democracy. Trivial, opaque, staged, and romanticized to a ludicrous degree by all pundits and scholars who want to stay respectable. Oh, the glories of America and her salt-of-the-earth little people, she is so great because she is so good!

January 11, 2012

Once they are enabled again, will you try this pandering as a poll?

I certainly hope the following comment is allowed, given that the OP is pandering and taking a stand in an ongoing set of controversies on this board that cover many other threads and are far from settled:

ProSense is a one-woman dogmatic talking-points factory with some followers serving as her echo chamber, acting both to reinforce the most counterproductive self-delusions among DU members and, worse, to guarantee that newcomers will be alienated by her perpetual purge-happy search for thought-crime.

January 10, 2012

Can you provide some harder data on these questions?

There are no doubt many examples of jurisdictions where prostitution was legal and then illegal, and vice-versa, as well as jurisdictions where it has been legal for decades or illegal for decades (so that we can see how it's developed). What does the social science using reliable data and comparing these various types of jurisdictions say about developments for the factors you mention?

- comparative rates of violence against women and violence against prostitutes
- rates of prostitution
- demand for prostitution
- human trafficking
- rates of disease
- conditions for the prostitutes

etc.?

Because these things can be evaluated by empirical study, so while your argument is compelling, it is only so if the factual claims you make about rates of violence and demand and so forth are actually supportable in a comparative study.

January 10, 2012

The GM thing was pure rescue capitalism.

A socialist would have reorganized GM as a public firm, taken over the management and declared: "We make trains and electric cars for the world."

January 10, 2012

Actually, Limbaugh is likelier to use this piece as the subject of his next show.

The real point of the piece is not that it makes no sense to classify pedophiles as disabled (it doesn't, assuming that's really the case), but that "Bankrupt, Spendthrift Greek Freeloaders Take German Taxpayer Money and Give it to PEDOPHILES!!!" makes for great smear propaganda.

The critique of Greek policy on this point (whatever the actual details and faults of it) should be its own issue.

It should not be falsely associated with the Greek economic crisis, as though there is a necessary relation.

To do so is a propaganda assist to the bankster criminals who are in the process of seizing all the wealth that can be squeezed out of Greece, and who recently executed a coup d'etat against democracy in Greece, installing one of their own as the unelected prime minister.

January 10, 2012

Here's the link to Stoller's column in original.

Surely the best option?

Naked Capitalism, “A Home for All Sorts of Bircher Nonsense”

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/01/naked-capitalism-a-home-for-all-sorts-of-bircher-nonsense.html

By Matt Stoller, "former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute."

It's well worth reading in full, as the writer intended it, before moving on to the predictable spin and misrepresentations.*

Hint: It's not really about Ron Paul.

In Stoller's words:

Stoller then proceeds to do both, admirably. (He does not touch upon Austrian economics, or Johnny Reb, or any of the other matters which the OP of this thread brings up as a way to distract from Stoller's thesis and falsely associate him with Bad Things.)

To see for yourself, just follow the link to the original article. (Don't worry, even if you disagree it won't bite and it won't magically turn you into a Ron Paul supporter, or lose the election for Obama.)

But thanks to ProSense for drawing attention to this important and excellent piece.

January 10, 2012

The appeal of religions is really not that amazing.

You're right in all your descriptions of quantity (a "mere" 2000 years, this little planet, our lifetimes on it are but a blip of a blip of a blip) and yet you and everyone else also experience the "mere" length of an average lifetime as a seeming eternity (most of the time). Your experience of every moment contains a self-aware universe of perceptions, cognitions and feelings. As far as we know, the only thing-that-knows consciously any of the facts you cite or anything else is this blip of a blip of a blip of a brain (or organism). These sentient, conscious organisms, these people need orientating stories scaled to their actual experience of the world. Science and scholarship have usually ceded the realm of creation myths and meaning-of-life paradigms to the religions. Human psychology will always need to fill that realm with something, and for most people, a strictly correct but negative declaration that the religions are full of shit is not enough to meet that need. This is why there is now a "big history" movement among many academics.

January 10, 2012

Body language, facial expression, tone of voice, manner of speech...

character armor, choice of metaphors and symbols, choice of dress and venues, timing... in truth, these cues generally communicate more, and with greater honesty, than the literal meaning or face value of a verbal statement. Sometimes these cues serve as a code to communicate what a speaker really intends to say, without doing so in the face value statement. (It might allow pandering to one audience while plausibly denying it.) Sometimes these cues communicate truths that the speaker is not aware of communicating. We can all think of a million examples of both, dating back to our earliest memories.

To maintain the pretense of civilization, in public discourse we are supposed to respond only to face value, since -- given that discourse is about our conflicts and given our that we generally lack scruples about how we win our arguments -- we would not analyze all of the other cues with rigor and honesty, but would instead descend to misrepresenting face value and imputing motives and spinning everything on the basis of word choice or posture or someone being too loud on a microphone or our own arbitrary associations or ad hominem qualities peripheral to the face-value issue.

Come to think of it, in what passes for public discourse, that is exactly what's happening all the time.

It's a tough and paradoxical situation, since (to reiterate) it remains true that much of communication is non-verbal and that verbal communication is conducted through many more devices than face value meaning, that speakers inadvertantly reveal truths about themselves through such non-face-value cues and also that they use such cues to engage in coded communication with chosen audiences. So the world of communicative cues should matter to us, and yet considering them will always open the door to interpretative abuse, and the interpretations that prevail will usually do so because they are compelling in narrative terms, or in conformity with hegemonic opinion, and not necessarily because they are true.

So yes! You're absolutely right on the face value. Romney did not say what his attackers are now attributing to him.

Nevertheless, out of the many ways he could have said what he intended to say, the words "I like firing people" came easily to him, and in context of prior statements around firing he seems to come to the subject easily, most likely because it makes him feel insecure, since it points to one of his greatest weaknesses as a candidate.

Thus, although the interpretation now being used against him is completely wrong as a reading of his statement's face value, it almost certainly identifies an unspoken truth about him: either he really does like firing people, or, even if he doesn't, it comes easily to him, since he did a lot of firing and firing was his business model.

It seems like a cute and fitting way to hang him for something that's actually true, and it plays to the audience as a "narrative beat." Of course, if we assign too much significance to this one statement, it distorts insofar as we are not applying an equally rigorous analysis of all textual and non-textual cues outside face-value statement to all other people at all other times. It's selective.

But how the hell are you gonna stop it? I think public discourse is already too far gone (and was so already decades ago) to pretend that this isn't how the game will continue to be played, in which both truths and untruths are far more effectively conveyed not on the rational but the irrational plane, often with puzzling, irritating and surprising results.

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