There are some days that conspire to sour one’s spirits, and
this, alas, is one of them. First of
all, we are one week from the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year,
and even though I am not more than ordinarily afflicted with Seasonal Affective
Disorder, or SAD, nevertheless, the seemingly endless series of holidays, when
normal schedules are disrupted, makes this time of year depressing. It is also a cold, raw, rainy day here in stubbornly
un-blueable North Carolina, and this morning, of all mornings, the café is
closed, which disrupts my ritual of picking Susie up after her exercise class
and sharing coffee and a muffin with her before driving her back to our
apartment.
Then there is the overwhelming victory of the Conservative
buffoon in Great Britain. I am not at
all knowledgeable about British economics, so perhaps clued in readers can correct
me, but I fear this means really bad economic times for the Brits. I am old enough to have developed a deep
irrational affection for England, born of my youthful idealization of Oxford
and Cambridge coupled with my yearning for a country that both speaks English
and has a sometimes victorious Labour Party together with a National Health
system.
Then there was the spectacle yesterday of the Republicans on
the House Judiciary Committee. And seemingly
endless polls showing Biden in the lead.
I am terrified that a Biden nomination could hand the election to Trump,
and the bright side, a Biden presidency, is so depressing that I feel as though
Dante himself were leading me on a guided tour of Hell and inviting me to
choose a circle to which I shall be consigned for all eternity.
Does anyone know a good joke?
40 comments:
The world is everything that is the case
I fear you are right to fear. But the bad economic times in fact started in 2010, when the Tory-Liberal coalition began the programme of austerity that saw, effectively, the poorest third or so in our country punished, through a combination of cuts to welfare payments and cuts to public services, in order to (attempt!) to bring the deficit down. The level of public spending in the UK shrank from that of middling European nation to a level closer to the US and Canada. Levels of poverty have increased, as have levels of homelessness and rough sleeping. It's been suggested that austerity policies may have led to the preventable deaths of some 120,000 people. (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/tory-austerity-deaths-study-report-people-die-social-care-government-policy-a8057306.html)
Now, on top of that, we have to face another five years of these sadists. I feel utterly desolate.
The only a propos joke that leaps to mind is well-known enough that I'll only give the punch-line: "Only when I laugh."
Thank you, Tim, for putting some flesh on the bones of my despair. What makes me so irrationally angry is that it is not I who will suffer most directly here in the United States, but many of those who voted for Johnson and will vote for Trump yet again. I can deal with billionaires who clutch their moneybags to their heaving bosoms, but what do I do or say about the millions who vote against their interests? Oh, I know all the usual answers, and I will persevere, but at eighty-five, just two weeks from my eighty-sixth birthday, I begin to doubt that I will ever glimpse the promised land even from a mountain top.
I don't fear Biden as a president but I do fear him as a nominee--I don't think he can get elected. That to me is the overriding issue in this campaign--to beat Trump. Any Democrat who gets elected will not accomplish much positively. Apart from possibly Medicare for all who want it, I doubt if anything significantly progressive will get through Congress in the foreseeable future. Nothing, in fact, will get through if the Democrats don't get control of the Senate, and the odds of that happening are not good. Sanders or Warren could begin the long, long process of putting progressive ideas on the agenda. They'll be debated and voted down (or totally ignored in the Senate if McConnell is still in charge). But the debate will have begun. Lyndon Johnson gave Harry Truman the first Medicare card, 20 years after Truman tried unsuccessfully to get universal health care. And that was just to get Medicare for a population the insurance companies didn't want anyway.
"We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice." — Woody Allen
"In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem." — George Carlin
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." — Winston Churchill
I'm cribbing these from https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/07/31/a-reminder-that-elections-matter-and-every-vote-does-count
I googled Woody Allen "best jokes" and here's one, from Zelig.
I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women.
1) A violist and a 'cellist were standing on a sinking ship. "Help!" cried the 'cellist, "I can't swim!"
"Don't worry," said the violist, "just fake it."
2) A violist in an orchestra was crying and screaming at the oboe player sitting directly behind him. The conductor asked, "What are you so upset about?"
The violist replied "The oboist reached over and turned one of the pegs on my viola and now it's all out of tune!"
The conductor asked "Don't you think you're overreacting?"
The violist replied "I'm not overreacting! He won't tell me which one!"
(RPW admitted to reading the first page, here, so I thought a joke or 2 from p. 2 would be just the thing.)
Like Tim I’m desolated by the outcome of the British election. I was hoping against hope that Labour/Corbyn would be able to get across the message that both left/centre Leavers and left/centre Remainers had in common the perception that things in Britain had become horrible and desperate for a great many people and that looking, as some did, to Brexit or, as others did, to the EU for salvation was merely to put a band-aid on a cancer. But the effort to reach beyond the epiphenomena, to begin to grapple with the underlying disease has failed. Short-termism has triumphed. It seems possible to me that the British Labour Party will go the way of the social democratic parties in France, Italy, Greece—and Scotland (cf. a somewhat contrary view here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/december/labour-s-defeat ).
For the foregoing is all rather an English oriented perception. In Scotland, the SNP won almost everywhere. It some time ago all but eliminated the electoral significance of the three all-UK parties. Even one of its candidates whom the SNP had disowned for making anti-semitic statements won his seat as an independent, beating its Labour incumbent. The SNP not only wants to break up the United Kingdom it also wants to stay in the EU. The Tories have said they will not countenance an independence referendum, but a Scotland which is deeply hostile to Toryism may one way or another make the preservation of the UK very difficult and maybe even very nasty.
PS. For those who care for intimate details, here’s a list of the seats Labour lost. Their Leave vote in the Brexit referendum is attached. Note that only in the Scottish constituencies—nos. 15, 25, 27, 35, 38, 44, all won by the SNP—and a couple of English constituencies—nos. 34, 50—was the Leave vote less than 50%:
https://labourlist.org/2019/12/the-60-seats-labour-lost-in-the-2019-general-election/
Guardian article on why Corbyn's defeat does not mean that Warren or Sanders could not win.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/sanders-warren-uk-elections
s. wallerstein
The key sentence in the Guardian article is in the last paragraph: "What matters is who shows up." My fear is that once the Democrats have a nominee--any nominee--many supporters of the other candidates will go into a pout and take their marbles and go home.
Political polls in Chile note not only what percentage of support a politician has but also what percentage of rejection he or she has. I suppose that polls in the U.S. generally contain both figures too.
So the idea is to select a candidate with not only a high percentage of support, but also a low percentage of rejection, that is, one who does not turn people off and thus, whom voters will vote for even if their candidate is not nominated.
As Wallerstein and Palmeter note, turnout, both percentage and composition, matter. Trump, though the use of lying, false narratives, Orwellian logic and delusional theories about everything, has to keep turnout low. His base can not expand much, if any, and Democrats have a 10 point advantage in voter registration nationally.
Trump also faces another problem, the second coming of the 'Blue Wave'. Blacks, Hispanic, Asian and Millennials turned out in record numbers in 2018. All things being equal, they will again. Trump should lose by a large margin, along with further Republican losses in the House and Senate.
To balance things out here, Democrats have the capacity to screw things up in the best of circumstances.
Christopher Mulvaney
When looking at the election nationally, it's important to keep the Electoral College in mind. As Al Gore an Hillary Clinton know only too well, winning the national vote is not enough. All it take is a couple of screw ups and states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are lost, and with them, most likely, the election.
> I fear this means really bad economic times for the Brits.
Your fear seems irrational. As far as I know, none of the predictions of how bad Trump was going to be for the US economy have panned out.
Given all the doom & gloom—not that I disagree—I wonder where in the world the political situation is good. Where might we look for hope or role models today?
It’s very sad. Corbyn is a humane, principled, decent politician - who, by the way, has a habit of being on the right side of history. Yet when I speak to voters, they say they agree with and like this policy or that policy of his, but they could never vote for “that man”. There’s never any evidence or reason - when pressed, people might bring up anti-semiticism, but I sense that for most people I’ve spoken to that’s just rationalisation for an already existing irrational antipathy.
I have a theory that it’s Corbyn’s very decency that has undone him. Johnson (and most politicians) routinely make personal attacks, but Corbyn hardly ever does. As a result, Johnson (who really is a lying, bullying, unscrupulous, alcoholic little toe-rag) sounds as if he has no faults, while Corbyn sounds like he’s a loony jew-hating irresponsible trot. And people fell for it.
It’s a dangerous thought to have, but just at this moment I feel the British public don’t deserve democracy. If people aren’t going to take the vote seriously, why have the vote at all? Ah, but that’s the very tendency Corbyn opposes within the left. Either way, we lose. It was a good manifesto, it would have been so good for this country, and I’m very depressed.
Robert
UK
Anonymous,
The left just won in Argentina, and the new president, Alberto Fernandez, seems decent and sensible to me. We'll see how he does. Maybe he could be something of a role model.
So, Boris is "an alcoholic little toe-rag", and Corbyn is an "irresponsible trot"? Would that our own American political discourse aspire to such adjectival exuberance.
Dear jgkess - indeed, “avoid needless words” is the single greatest American export. You didn’t think it was Bud, did you?
Trouble is, needless words is just about the only consolation I have now. Please don’t take them away from me.
I had always believed that the injunction to avoid needless words comes from Orwell's rules of style (Politics and the English Language). At least I learned it there.
Ah, “omit”, sorry. I hang my head in shame. It’s a more precise word anyway, as you’d expect.
However, to return to the somewhat less important subject of the end of the socialist project in England after 140 years...
"Omit needless words." Strunk and White, The Elements of Style.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946).
Rule 3: If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
David Palmeter,
I am well aware of the electoral college problem but at this stage state polls are meaningless. To your point, in 2018 there were 4 districts in Pa that flipped. And to the point of the strength of the blue wave, the infamous right wing nut job Duncan Hunter (CA 50th) won in 2016 with 63.5% and in 2018 by 51.7%. Dr. Rachael Bitecoffer's model predicts a 278/197 electoral college Democratic win. It includes wins in PA, MI, and WI.
Christopher Mulvaney,
I hope she's right!
About Britain's elections: where on earth are the remainers?
For years those guys, unhappy with the first referendum, asked for a second referendum.
Although Corbyn himself was a Left Brexiteer -- together with northern traditionally working class electorates, all safe Labour seats -- , Labour forsook Brexit (and Labour Brexiteers) in an attempt to appease/accommodate the anti-Corbynites and Remainers inside Labour. If Labour had won, they would have renegotiated the Brexit deal and, once the deal had Brussels' green light, a second referendum would take place. Voters could decide whether to remain or leave, but having now a firm basis.
That, I would have thought, should have suited remainers just fine. Didn't they claim to be the vast majority of the British public?
Even if they didn't like Corbyn, remainers could have voted Labour just to stop Johnson. Or they could have voted Lib-Dem, for the Lib-Dems campaigned on a decidedly Remain platform.
Either remainers didn't bother to vote or they never were a majority, for neither Labour nor Lib-Dems got their votes.
Instead, Labour remainers followed Tony Blair's advice: don't vote for Labour. Having turned their back on Labour Brexiteers, Labour's electoral fiasco wasn't much of a surprise.
And it's true that Corbyn was unpopular. The Guardian and the Murdoch press outdid each other when it came to criticising him. The pro-Israel lobby hated him. Low-ranking soldiers used his photo for target practice, while high-ranking officers talked about coups against a Corbyn Government.
Well, folks, you've got Brexit. Pray the NHS is not privatized.
Labour's best move, critics say, is to shift again towards the right. (What a surprise, uh?) After all, neoliberal Labour was such an unstoppable election-winning machine under Tony Blair.
(I am not much of a Boris Johnson fan, but I hate him less than I hate Blair. At least Johnson manages to be funny.)
The Anonymouse
Hi, Anoymouse.
Total popular vote for Remainer parties easily beat vote for Leaver parties. So it’s not unreasonable that Remainers are currently the majority.
And Corbyn didn’t pivot to appease the Blairites, he did it because Leave is batshit crazy. It will leave our country somewhere between poorer for no gain and a vassal wasteland. Especially in the bloody north, and there’s a small part of me that says serves ‘em right. Perhaps Brexit could have worked, if handled properly and by Lexiteers, but in practice it was always going to be a few billionaires setting the country on fire to avoid paying .1% extra tax. As is the wont of billionaires, just as it’s the wont of idiots to vote their way because they read it in the Mail. As I say, dangerous thoughts. Professor Wolff, can you do something on whether by definition the majority are right, or by convention they are, or whether they can be wrong and what we can do about it when they are without turning into something we hate?
As for Johnson vs Blair. You can’t be serious, Anonymouse.
Just to clarify, because this is a new thought for me.
Many times in my life people have returned governments and referendum decisions I didn’t want. Sometimes I’ve thought people were misguided, ill-advised, hoodwinked, but more commonly I’ve thought that on the whole, they hadn’t made such a bad call. Even for the Brexit referendum - I’m a remainer, I’ve been on all the demos and signed all the petitions, but at the time of the referendum I remember thinking about the way the EU had treated Greece and Catalonia and its humourless bureaucracy and I felt Leave had a point. Often, when an election doesn’t go my way, I feel there’s a wisdom of the crowd, that people as a whole were wiser than I was or that any individual was. And I feel this is the right reaction for a democratic socialist and a pluralist.
This election is different. The people who voted for Johnson were simply wrong, in the same way that that American state congress that voted for pi to be equal to 3 in the c19th were simply wrong. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s not wisdom of he crowd. I don’t know whether They were overwhelmed by the new psychology, the offspring of Cambridge Analyticia, or whether people have just lost all their braincells from watching too much bad TV. It wasn’t just that people voted against their own interests - that can be understandable, even laudable - but that it was a real no-brainer. If you wern't a billionaire or a nazi (inclusive or), you should have voted against Johnson. The surprise isn’t that he got so many votes, but that he got any at all.
The conclusion is: People were wrong. They are to blame for the coming disaster. They did not fulfil their part of the democratic contract - vote as adults and with care and thought. It isn’t Corbyn or Johnson or Putin or Murdoch who did this: it was us, it’s our responsibility.
The question is: how can I reconcile this nasty thought with democratic socialism? How can I live with myself, wanting a society that is just to all the people when, suddenly, I actually quite dislike the people?
Robert
UK
Robert,
I see no contradiction between wanting a society that is just to all people and disliking the people.
I feel that myself.
I believe in the principle of social justice. I am not a Christian: I do not believe that I have any obligation to love my fellow human beings. I may even detest them. I admit to being an elitist in many of my tastes.
To use an analogy, I'm a vegetarian and am opposed to factory farming. That does not mean that I like chickens and cows. I'm not an animal lover at all. I just don't believe that animals should be treated cruelly.
Robert,
Re: the billionaires voting for Johnson and Brexit, wasn't London and its environs strongly "remain" in the referendum?
Sorry, pressed wrong button.
Chickens and cows don’t get to vote, and they’re not the architects of their pwn suffering. More importantly, they’re not the architects of anyone else’s suffering: the homeless, the single parents, the ethnic minorities, the disabled, the young. People voted, and people voted selfishly. Why shouldn’t I be selfish as well and say that, when austerity next hits them, that they deserve it?
Because everyone "deserves" or has a right to certain basic social services: healthcare, education, pension, public library, low cost public transportation, heat in the winter, water, internet, etc.
People have a right to such things whether they are selfish or not, whether they are proto-fascist thugs or not.
What's more, I'm not at all sure that anyone "deserves" anything. The concept of moral responsibility or desert confuses me, but it's not important here. Let's use the concept of human rights. There's a human right to healthcare and every society has an obligation to assure that right to all its members just as they assure the right to free speech.
Thanks, sw. it does help. But I’m so angry. Friday morning, on my way to work, I got panhandled by a homeless man. That happens every morning, at least once in the 500m from my bus stop to my office. Sometimes I give, especially to women, who I think have a much harder life on the streets - although, what do I know, with my not-bad salary and warm house? What do I know? But I do what I can, like we all do. Anyhow, Friday morning I snapped at the poor bastard, asking him if he’d voted. Of course he hadn’t - wasn’t even registered. To my small credit, I walked off before telling him that it was his fault, then. But it was what I thought, and I hate myself for that.
Thanks, everyone. I’m going to go read something Mathy, take my mind off it. Shaikh’s book looks good, and I’m long overdue for rereading RPW’s one on Marxian economics.
A thought for Ecrasez L'Infame's question
"The question is: how can I reconcile this nasty thought with democratic socialism? How can I live with myself, wanting a society that is just to all the people when, suddenly, I actually quite dislike the people?"
Who do you dislike less? There is no committee of angels in the wings. The alternative to democratic socialism (in the UK) is the UK's plutocracy, and surely the common people, no matter how imperfect, cannot be worse than them.
"I begin to doubt that I will ever glimpse the promised land even from a mountain top." -Dr. Wolff
"I've seen the Promised Land..." -Dr. MLK Jr.
It's off topic, but I've kinda always wanted to know how many people, who have heard Dr. King say this, thought he was being totally serious or just metaphorical? In the past I just thought Dr. King maybe was being symbolic only. But my mind has changed concerning this. I believe he did have a extra worldly experience. Just like great men like St. John did; like Nostradamus did; like Isaiah; like Moses; like the Buddha, etc. But was it a near death experience that Dr. King had? Or instead a vision? Was it heaven? If it was heaven why did Dr. King say "I might not get there with you..."? For he was very pious in life. Was it a space-station like in Jody Foster's "Elysium" movie? Who knows?
@Écrasez L'infâme
I'll outsource my reply
Bregret eh!
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=43897
I know that won't persuade you, anymore than anything I could argue. There's no amount of reasoning that could achieve that.
But at least it takes little of our time. Cheers.
The Anonymouse
PS,
Still, I will reply to something. For all of his faults, Boris Johnson has never been accused of being a war criminal. That's a lot more than one can say about Tony Blair.
That may be another quirkiness of the uneducated, but I take wars of aggression very seriously. My apologies for that.
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