Movement politics

I believe our society is heading for catastrophic failure, and the existing Democratic party is not going to save us, barring a science-fiction brain swap between Clinton or Obama and an actual progressive. It behooves me, then, to talk about ways of fixing our society.

There are several plausible scenarios for catastrophic failure. In the best possible case there won't be any kind of rebellion, coup, or general suspension of the Constitution; we will experience a severe economic depression and the short- and medium-term domination of our government by the Republican party, but our fundamental systems will remain at least nominally in place. If this scenario occurs, there are substantive and effective steps we can take to make our society a better place.

The right has used the movement/party model to take over our government. This model is very effective, and many fundamental features can be replicated by the left.

The movement/party model consists of a disciplined, unified, extra-political organization, the conservative movement, to construct and propagate a political philosophy. The members of this movement then use their discipline and unity to control the specifically political Republican party. Since the movement supplies a consistent philosophy, a voter base and, most importantly money, the actual politicians further the movement's agenda in official government.

There is every reason to believe the left can replicate the movement/party model with similar success. Create a liberal-progressive movement, take over the Democratic party and further a liberal-progressive agenda in government.

Moreover, the left can replicate the model excluding many of the features of the right's implementation that many on the left find odious: authoritarianism, dogmatism, and almost complete disconnection from reality and factual truth. Some of the right's features are very powerful tools for unifying a movement and ensuring discipline. The religious have honed authoritarianism and dogmatism to near perfection over at least two or three millennia. There are, however, tools that authoritarianism and dogmatism render almost useless, and which can be employed to good advantage by the left: truth and transparency.

To be effective, a movement has to be disciplined and unified. The members of a movement have to deliver a consistent and stable philosophical message, they have to vote as a bloc, and they have to concentrate money. These requirements force some degree of top-down approach to decision-making. An internally consistent and stable philosophical basis; majoritarian, consensus or near-consensus decision-making; and a rigorously bottom-up electoral structure can, however, prevent the top-down decision making from devolving into elitism, authoritarianism and dogmatism.

A bottom-up electoral process* in one in which those groups at the "direct" or lowest level elect one of their members to represent the group at the next highest level; the group of people thus elected then elect one of their own to represent them at the further level, until a small enough group has been concentrated to make decisions for the movement as a whole.

*I'm sure there's a name for this organizational method. I thought it was syndicalism, but that refers to a specific kind of labor politics.

I intentionally use the word "philosophy" in place of "ideology". Ideology has come to be too strongly associated with authoritarianism and dogmatism. However we label it though, any movement must have a set of core principles that are internally consistent and stable over time. Stability doesn't mean incapable of change; it means only resistance to capricious change, change only when there's a very good reason to change. Since a liberal-progressive movement can't rely on any kind of philosophical or religious authority, those principles will have to be fairly broad, and adherence need not be absolute; it should be necessary only that a lot of people can endorse most of the core principles directly, and find none of them abhorrent.

(I should also note in passing that "pragmatism" is not a core philosophical value. It just means "effective for some stated purpose"; without a specific stated purpose, it's vacuous. It should be noted that the Cheney Bush administration has been very pragmatically effective at enriching the top 0.01% of the country.)

With a disciplined, unified movement committed to using politics to implement its agenda, and by trading authoritarianism and dogmatism for universalism, truth and transparency, I believe those of us with liberal and progressive views can have a profound impact on the political social and cultural life of the country.

We should not embrace moderate religion

On de-conversion writerdd exhorts us to embrace, or at least befriend moderate Christianity. I think she's incorrect.

She first asks the question, "Is fundamentalism the authentic religious voice?" Her answer is no.

The problem is that the frame of the question is wrong. There is no such thing as the authentic religious voice. All voices of people who sincerely profess a religion — left, right and moderate — are "authentic". And atheists and the non-religious — precisely because we are not religious — do not have standing to contribute to the religious voice.

(And I think the more accurate and less presumptuous word is "extremist", not "fundamentalist". Religious moderates might well object that their interpretation of religion is just as or even more compliant to the fundamental nature of their scriptures and theology as the extremists. I might disagree, but I'm an atheist; I have no standing to interpret theology.)

writerdd would like it if the moderates were the "authentic" voice of religion.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, would rather encourage a moderate, liberal kind of faith where people are free to cherry pick what they want to believe while they conform to modern, secular values and use skepticism to make decisions in daily life.

I'd like that too, but it's not up to me or any other atheist. I'd like to see that portion of any community that conforms to my personal views become the "authentic" voice of that community, but the whole point of defining a community is that they get to define their own authentic voice; outsiders are entitled only to criticize that voice, not define it.

People outside of any community, physical or self-identified, do not have the standing to contribute to or restrict the voice of that community. The religious do not have standing to contribute to the atheist voice, white people to the black voice, men to the feminist voice, straight people to the LGBT voice. We might have an obligation to listen to these voices, but we cannot directly contribute. Standing is what defines the community; standing is an essential property of the entire notion of a community.

In just the same sense, the conservatives would like to see the stay-at-home moms become the authentic voice of feminism; they'd like to see the hard-working black people condemning affirmative action as the authentic voice of the black community; the self-hating celibates become the voice of the gay community. You simply don't get to do that though, and any attempt is fundamentally patronizing, condescending, and intrusive. The community defines itself.

As skeptics first and foremost, atheists do have an obligation to the truth. And the plain truth is that there are religious moderates and they are not extremists. It would be patently false to state or imply that all religious people actually are extremists. But I'm obligated to speak the truth even about enemies who were actively trying to kill me; speaking the truth does not seem to constitute embracing or befriending.

writerdd asserts that moderate believers are being "left out" of the conversation:

The media features fundamentalists or extreme conservative believers every time a topic regarding morality comes up, as if these are the only people who can speak for believers, as if they have authority to speak for all people of faith on these issues. Not only are atheists and agnostics left out of the conversation, but moderate and liberal believers often are as well. They are not taken as seriously as those who are literalist or extremist in their views, and are often considered “soft” or “lax,” as if they were not “true” followers of the faith. When journalists act this way, they are echoing the fundamentalist point of view.

This idea is just nonsense. It's very difficult to determine in the first place what constitutes being "left out of the conversation" or not taken seriously. Even if we could make that determination, what power do atheists have to change the situation? And why is the marginalization and exclusion of the religious moderates our problem as atheists? writerdd just points out a pseudo-problem that atheists couldn't change even if it were a real problem.

Reading further, though, we perhaps get a sense of where writerdd is going:

The new atheists seem to agree. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris wrote that fundamentalists, who take their scriptures literally, are in a very real sense the best practitioners of their faith because they follow their scriptures most closely. Richard Dawkins also belittles those of moderate faiths when he insists that religion never changes because it is tied to the ancient writings of scripture, an entirely fundamentalist viewpoint (and entirely wrong, but that is another issue all together).

It's important to understand that Harris and Dawkins here (assuming writerdd accurately represents their views) are stating matters of truth or falsity. They are either correct or incorrect.

The closing parenthetical comment tells the story: the truth or falsity of Dawkins' statement is beside the point. This is an outrageous statement for any soi disant skeptic to utter. The whole point of skepticism is that the truth is paramount. If Dawkins is wrong, that he's wrong is the issue. writerdd seems to demand that we should not investigate the truth or falsity of some claims because simply raising the question "belittles those of moderate faith." This position is bullshit postmodernism at its worst.

One is a skeptic only if the truth always matters, only if the truth always comes first. Subordinate the truth to any consideration, and one is a skeptic no more.

Sam Harris may be a woo-woo loving airhead, but his fundamental point is either true or false, and deserves to be decided on the merits: Are extremists really "better" because they are truer to the literal meaning of their scripture? Are moderates really giving cover to extremists by endorsing the notion that sincere belief in an invisible sky fairy gives one a privileged position to talk about morality? These are serious questions, questions that seem to have a definite yes or no answer. If embracing or befriending the religious moderates means that the truth or falsity of these questions doesn't matter, that merely raising them is insulting or wrong, then I want no part of this "friendship".

Modal logic

Just as standard logic is a system for dealing rigorously with the ideas of "true" and "false", modal logic is a system for dealing rigorously with the ideas of "sometimes true" and "always (or never) true".

Modal logic is fine, as far as it goes. You can use it for a lot of different things, so long as your definition of "sometimes" and "always" is consistent. I'm sometimes in my house, but not always; I'm always male. Scientific laws are universals; facts are accidents. It's required that you pay your taxes; giving $3 of those taxes to presidential campaign funding is optional.

But (at least some) philosophers seem to like modal logic because it's easy to create equivocations which are difficult to detect. Plantinga's modal ontological argument is a perfect example of an equivocation fallacy.

1. It is proposed that a being has maximal excellence in a given possible world W if and only if it is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good in W; and
2. It is proposed that a being has maximal greatness if it has maximal excellence in every possible world.
3. Maximal greatness is possibly exemplified. That is, it is possible that there be a being that has maximal greatness. (Premise)
4. Therefore, possibly it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists
5. Therefore, it is necessarily true that an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists. (By S5)
6. Therefore, an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good being exists.

As Graham Oppy observes, "Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Plantinga himself agrees: the "victorious" modal ontological argument is not a proof of the existence of a being which possesses maximal greatness." When a philosopher denies the conclusion of his own argument, you must suspect he's bullshitting you.

A careful examination of premise 3 — Maximal greatness is possibly exemplified. That is, it is possible that there be a being that has maximal greatness. — shows the problem. But first some background.

One of the uses of modal logic is to examine the concept of logically possible worlds, i.e. those worlds where true statements about that world are logically consistent, but some statements that are true about that world are not true of our world. This is just a rigorous way of talking about subjunctive and counterfactual reasoning, which people routinely employ: e.g. "If I hadn't gone back for my wallet, I would have caught the train," or, "If Ralph Nader hadn't run, then Al Gore would have been inaugurated President in 2001."

This semantic way of employing modal logic, though, assumes that each set of consistent non-modal truths defines a possible world. A non-modal statement (e.g. "Al Gore was inaugurated as US President in 2001") is different from a modal statement (e.g. "There exists a possible world in which Al Gore was inaugurated President in 2001"). The non-modal statement is (sadly) false in this particular world, but it could easily have been true (along with other statements) without any fundamental logical contradiction.

The modal statement, however, is true in all logically possible worlds. Even if Al Gore was or was not inaugurated President in this or any particular possible world, it is true in all possible worlds that some such possible world exists, perhaps elsewhere. A modal statement in possible world semantics does not divide possible worlds into those worlds where it is true and those worlds where it is not. It's either true everywhere or true nowhere.

So on one horn of the dilemma, Plantinga's premise #3 is simply not well-formed, it is not a statement of modal logic.

But perhaps Plantinga does not intend logically possible world semantics. Perhaps, as his comment leads us to believe, he means epistemic possibility: we don't know whether or not God exists; its epistemically possible that God exists. But if so, he seems to use modal logic in a weird way, weird even for a philosopher.

Consider this similar argument:

1. All true arithmetic statements are true in all possible worlds. (Definition)
2. If Goldbach's conjecture is true in any possible world, it is true in all possible worlds. (By 1)
3. It's possible that Goldbach's conjecture is true. (Premise)
4. Therefore Goldbach's conjecture is true in at least one possible world.
5. Therefore Goldbach's conjecture is true in all possible worlds. (By 1)
6. Therefore Goldbach's conjecture is true.

Of course premise 3 is the problem; I was trying to bullshit you; it's the only statement where I don't fully qualify "possible". A more rigorous way of stating premise 3 would be: "It is definitely true in all possible worlds that there exists a possible world in which Goldbach's conjecture is true." Stated so plainly, it should be obvious that I'm simply begging the question.

Plantinga goes on to say, "Take any valid argument: once you see how it works, you may think that asserting or believing the premise is tantamount to asserting or believing the conclusion." His argument can be construed to mean that "either the existence of God is logically impossible or it is logically necessary." I'm sure that those paying Dr. Plantinga's salary are quite pleased that he has gone to elaborate lengths to prove that logical arguments are indeed logical, and modal logic is indeed modal.

At least I'm not racist

At least I'm not racist.

Carnival of the Godless #91

Carnival of the Godless #91 is up at State of Protest.

Why the conservatives are winning

Art, commenting on Mike the Mad Biologist explains why the conservatives are winning the strategic war.

The right spent its time in the wilderness cultivating an entire self-supporting alternative media ecosystem from the ground up.

Read the whole comment.

I've been much put off by the "elect Obama/Clinton no matter how dumb they are, because McCain is batshit crazy!" idea that's floating around lately. It's true, as far as it goes, but aside from my conscientious objections, this idea reveals a lack of strategic thinking.

No good general predicates the success of his or her strategy on winning every battle. But that's precisely what the Democratic party has been doing: they have to win every election no matter what or the country is screwed. If they have to shift to the right to win this or that election, they do so, because if they lose on principle, they still lose.

The one time I showed up at a Drinking Liberally event, I was appalled. The dominant theme of the discussion was about how to win elections. When I tried to talk about substantive policies and progressive ideology, I was mocked as an unrealistic idealist.

The Republican strategy is very simple, and very powerful: When they win an election, move the government to the right. When they lose an election, prevent the government from moving to the left. Sure, they'd like to win every election, but they know they won't, and they have a plan in place for when they lose, and thus they can afford to lose on principle.

The Democratic "strategy" is precisely the opposite. When they win an election, they try (with diminishing success) to prevent the government from moving to the right. When they lose an election, they themselves move to the right to win the next one.

Closely allied with strategy is logistics. In a battle of values, ideology and people to propagandize that ideology are the resources a general must marshal to the front. Art describes the conservatives' logistical system. The left's ideological logistics used to be the academic humanities, but too many idiots have become so mired in bullshit postmodernist nihilism that they've become an ideological laughingstock.

The fundamental problem is that the left doesn't like ideology per se, and the left doesn't like private money. For good reasons: The last time we had a leftist ideology, we ended up with Communist totalitarianism. Private money, especially when concentrated, is a poor driver for social and economic equality. People with a lot of money tend to want to keep it, and they invent endless rationalizations why they should keep it.

But ideology and money are too effective to simply abandon. Ideology unites the True Believers, who are the driving force in any social change. Furthermore, most people have jobs to do, children to raise, lawns to mow — they're busy keeping Western Civilization afloat, thank you very much — and they simply do not have the time and energy to carefully and intellectually evaluate each position on its subtle and nuanced merits. "Just fucking tell me what you stand for!" they yell. The conservatives actually stand for something, and even though it's most people really think it's kind of odious, at least it's something. The progressives? Not so much. What little progressive ideology exists is all over the map, and 90% of it is useful only as a drug-free method of general anesthesia.

The failure of the Democratic party is so deep, so profound, that we must see its function as effectively part of the conservative movement. The Democratic party maintains the illusion that we have an adversarial political system, and they serve as whipping boys and scapegoats to take the blame for conservative practical failures.

Of course, that the conservatives are better at politics than progressives is not the worst problem. If it were, then we might end up with a harsher, more unforgiving country than I would like, but nu, life is tough. The worst problem is, of course, that the conservatives have lost all connection with objective reality, especially economic reality. Our actual economy is in tatters: We don't actually make anything any more. Even our intellectual and technological economy is in tatters: We are no longer actually teaching science, math and engineering to actual Americans. Our entire economy is based on suing each other and selling our homes to the Chinese for electric can openers. And that's it. When that runs out, we'll have nothing left. Our supposedly mighty army will be impotent: What good is an army when your opponents make the bullets? (Or grow the food and own the homes of those who make the bullets.)

It's far too late to change anything. All the institutions necessary to preserve an actual democracy — academia, the media, the opposition political parties, the economy, campaign finance, the judiciary, the rule of law — have already been corrupted and owned by the conservative movement. Electing Clinton or Obama to sit in the Oval Office and take the blame for the conservatives is not going to change anything. It's just as plausible that it'll make things worse as it is to stave off collapse. The Christianist military and militia, for example, might be more likely to actively rebel against a Democratic party government than a Republican party government.

Catastrophe and revolution

The political and economic system of the United States is doomed. Elect whom you like in November, Clinton, Obama, McCain, the large-scale structural elements forcing a collapse will stay in place. A catastrophic collapse of our society seems inevitable.

The United States is no longer a democracy. I mean this not in the quibbling "It's a republic" sense; I mean that the government is no longer responsive to the will of the people. If the United States were a democracy we would not have invaded Iraq in the first place. Even if we'd invaded in a moment of temporary insanity, we would have been been out by 2006, if not sooner. If the United States were a democracy, George W. Bush — the worst and more importantly the most unpopular President in the history of the nation — would have at the very least been forced to resign (as was Nixon) and at best impeached or even prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

To be even more pessimistic, there's no possible way in an actual democracy Bush would be president in the first place, having actually lost two "elections" that would have shamed Ferdinand Marcos.

Even with the massive propaganda campaign, even with the so-called "liberal" New York Times leading the charge, even with Colin Powell lying his ass off to the United Nations, the invasion of Iraq was still so massively unpopular, and whatever support existed was so thin, that any sensible politician in an actual democracy would have realized that the war would be political suicide. That Blair supported the war, and is now reviled in the UK, just emphasizes my point.

The United States no longer has a free-market economy. While Capitalist economies have usually employed markets with more distributed economic decision-making than communist governments, there is nothing inherent in Capitalism that entails a free market. The definition of Capitalism is that the owners of capital are privileged to restrict the market as they see fit; a truly free market would not privilege anyone but the people as a whole to restrict the markets.

The United States is no longer a civil libertarian society. The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, FICA, the War on (some) Drugs (used by some people), the ridiculous joke that's been made of the Fourth and Ninth Amendments, the astronomical rate of imprisonment. Need I say more?

The United States no longer employs the rule of law. Bush has explicitly and clearly declared himself and his minions above the law, and the Congress, the Supreme Court and the "opposition" political party have utterly failed to punish him.

The United States no longer has freedom of the press. The press, specifically the commercial media, has become completely dominated by a tiny elite of billionaires. It has become an organ of partisan Republican propaganda differentiable from Pravda only by its sophistication and professionalism (and sometimes not even that).

The above are not just bad in themselves, they are fundamental error-correcting mechanisms. When you lose error-correcting mechanisms, errors accumulate until the only ineluctable error-correcting mechanism — reality — causes a catastrophic failure of the system. Even if we were to elect Obama or Clinton, even if they were completely well-intentioned, even if they had the power to kill with their minds, they could not reverse our path to catastrophic failure. Things will have to get much worse before we can even think about any major structural changes.

Catastrophic failure is bad, but humanity will survive it. We've survived catastrophic failure time and again: World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the Panic of 1873, etc. ad nauseam.

What's more worrisome than the collapse itself is the aftermath. There's only one group ideally positioned to take power after a collapse: Christianist extremists. They've openly infiltrated the US military. Their civilian militias are well-organized, well-disciplined and extremely well-armed, and they enjoy the active tolerance of the Justice Department. They have a definite, elaborate and fanatical political agenda. They have a good 20-30% of the population firmly on their side, which was enough for Hitler after the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

If we're lucky, very lucky, "find a winning lottery ticket in the trash" lucky, some rich bastard like FDR will pull our nuts out of the fire at the 11th hour out of desperate self-preservation. But if FDR had faced a Communist party with the organization and armament of today's Christianists, we might well have ended up with Joe Steele instead.

Perhaps there is, however, some reason for hope.

As well-armed and organized as are the Christianists, their ideology is extremely loopy and insane; by comparison Nazism and Stalinist Communism are models of rational clarity. They're already extremely sectarian; they'll spend as much time and energy fighting each other as they will the rest of us. I don't think there's any alternative but to fight them, but they can be beaten.

[Update: I'm with Tim Kreider: I plan to be drunk off my ass when the shit hits the fan.]

A Critique of Communism

At Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse gives a cogent and mostly accurate critique of Communism.

To be pedantic, Ebonmuse criticizes "Communism" in the sense of the practices and policies of self-described Communist governments, such as the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Albania, etc. ("practical Communism"). This is a completely legitimate target of criticism, and a completely legitimate way to use the unqualified word "Communism", but there are other more theoretical constructions that do differ substantively from the practical sense.

Furthermore, there are two distinct senses of theoretical Communism: economic and political. Political Communism is, even in theory, usually totalitarian or crypto-totalitarian, but political Communism is separable from economic Communism. Care should be taken, I think, to understand that a legitimate and (mostly) accurate critique of practical Communism cannot be applied willy-nilly to its theoretical cousins, especially its economic-theoretical cousin.

Communism lacks a good mechanism to allocate resources to where they are most needed, resulting in waste, shortages and inefficiency.

To be more precise, it is the part of Communism that specifies a state-planned economy that results in inefficient distribution of commodities. The problem is practical (or information-theoretical); it's not per se a problem in Communism's fundamental economic assumptions. In theory, a planned economy should be more efficient than a distributed free-market economy, but in practice information-theoretical laws of diminishing returns and exponential complexity of large formal systems doom the notion of central commodity distribution planning.

The information-theoretical analysis does not, however, entail that a state-planned capital allocation system would necessarily be worse that the Capitalist alternative; capital allocation is centralized under Capitalism in the capital-owning elite. Furthermore, a mixed system, where capital was partly state-owned and partly worker-owned, might have the advantages of both central and distributed planning, and would not violate the spirit of economic Communism.

Communism discourages productive effort and innovation.

This criticism is accurate, but it applies only to certain phases of practical Communism, and the identification of the specific cause as the lack of (immediate) "material rewards for invention, innovation, or greater productivity" is controvertible.

The two largest Communist governments, the Soviet Union and China, experienced massive economic growth and industrialization in the early phases of communist rule. (Admittedly, a large percentage increase from a tiny base is not at all impressive to anyone with a basic understanding of statistics.) There clearly there was some operating motivation other than immediate material reward. Additionally, there are any number of examples in Capitalist economies (notably the open-source software movement) of productive endeavor without immediate reward.

Furthermore, most productivity is rewarded by nothing more than brute survival in a static or contracting Capitalist economy (and quite a lot even in an expanding economy). While simply removing the work-or-starve ethic seems insufficient (and its replacement by a work-or-get-shot ethic seems worse), its replacement with a less brutal ethic would seem desirable from a humanitarian standpoint.

I suspect it's far more likely to lay the blame for late-stage practical Communism's lack of innovation on the failings of specifically political Communism. We see precisely the same lack of innovation in non-Communist totalitarian societies as well as in many large-scale Capitalist corporations (with an internal political culture of monarchical feudalism).

Communism necessarily denies the freedom of the individual.

There's no doubt that Communism as practiced has massively and inexcusably denied individual liberty and freedom, but it is again the specifically totalitarian component of political Communism, which politically privileges a specific party, that entails the denial of individual freedom.

But economic Communism does not necessarily entail the denial of freedom. Indeed, under ideal circumstances, everyone is free of economic coercion; they are entirely free to apply their productivity to suit their personal preferences. Even under non-ideal circumstances, people would be expected to have at least greater choice in allocating their personal productivity as desired.

Since economic communism does not permit exploitation or economic coercion, it has to be expected that some people will choose to be unproductive or less productive than they would have been under Capitalist work-or-starve economies. Since we have never seen economic communism in practice, it is an open question whether a great many people would choose to be negatively productive, and whether those who do choose negative productivity are those who would be very productive if coerced.

Christian Logic?

I'm checking out Christian Logic. Their list of fallacies is sound and thorough enough. I'll have to check out the rest of the site.

I am not a Democrat

Since I was 18 years old, the top criteria I've used to decide my vote has been abortion rights and by extension feminism, and racial civil rights. If a candidate or party does not unequivocally support both they do not get my vote. Period. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've voted for the Democratic party candidate in every general election. I added sexual orientation civil rights to this deal-breaker list in the 90's. (Yeah, I was late to the game on this one. Sue me.)

I don't know that I can vote Democratic any more.

As I've said before, I'm no fan of Clinton. I don't know how I would have voted if the Democratic primaries had been run just on the issues: I really can't tell the difference between Obama's political bullshit and Clinton's. I think both of them would have made fine Republican candidates in 1964. [a grudging tip of the hat to fatuous idiot Andrew Sullivan].

Some of my important values have never been shared by any candidate, Democratic or Republican: socialism (which is just the idea that we have an active obligation to see to the basic health and well-being of all our citizens, not just the ones we like), civil-rights libertarianism, anti-imperialism and anti-exceptionalism. The Democratic candidates have typically been less bad (I'm happy I didn't have to choose between Johnson and Goldwater), but less bad is still, you know, bad.

But today in 2008, the overt, explicit and egregious misogyny [h/t to The Apostate] in the Democratic primary campaign and commentary burns my fucking shorts. It's not just one or two retards; most of the media, and a nontrivial part of the so-called liberal and progressive blogosphere has participated this misogyny. And Obama himself and his campaign are complicit, in just the same sense that he has been complicit in the Iraq war by not doing everything in his personal and official power to end it.

Normally, I would say that if I had supported either Clinton or Obama in the primaries, I would vote for whomever secured the nomination. (And I understand that party nomination is not exclusively a matter of popular vote.) But if I'd seen overt racism in the campaign, and seen Clinton's complicity by silence, I would not vote for her in the general election. Racism is a deal-breaker. Likewise, misogyny is a deal-breaker. So is support for the Iraq war. So is homophobia.

I've compromised on almost everything. The Democratic party has actively supported a devil-take-the-hindmost corporatist plutocracy. The Democratic party has actively supported the war in Iraq. The Democratic party has actively supported the erosion of our civil liberties. I've compromised so much so often that sometimes I feel like I'm just "rooting for the shirts."

And I can't even root for the shirts any more. The whole point of opposing political parties is for each party to exploit and punish the other's mistakes, excesses and incompetence. And the Democratic party has failed to do even that. If the Democratic party wins the presidency and/or a congressional majority, they will have done so in spite of failing to punish the Republican party for the egregious and monstrous excesses of the Bush administration, literally the worst presidential administration in the history of this country, and they will leave the batshit-crazy fucktards in the Republican party strong and well-placed to undermine and harass the Democratic party government. And I'm not sure the Democratic party will even win, with or without my support.

The only possible reason I can think of to vote for either Clinton or Obama would be that both are less crazy (or less in thrall to the nutjobs) than McCain. That's the best I can say about either of the Democratic candidates' politics.

But a deal-breaker is a deal-breaker. Clinton's support for the Iraq war is a deal-breaker. Obama's failure to actively oppose the Iraq war comes pretty damn close, but the misogyny he's exploited definitely does the job, as does his homophobia.

(I find the whole Wright controversy completely retarded. Wright's political opinions — his religion and the his opinion on origin of AIDS excepted, but I understand where he's coming from — are closer to my own than any of the candidates'. If I believed in God, then yes, "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human." Condemning a public figure as "narcissistic" for speaking his own mind and his own opinions when he has an opportunity and invitation to do so is moronically hypocritical. And that's from the liberals. Everyone gets to speak; we then talk about the content, not the privilege to speak. Read your fucking J. S. Mill, people.)

If I (and others like me) don't actually vote for the Democratic nominee, McCain has a greater chance of winning. I understand that completely; magic fairies are not going to guarantee a good government. But there comes a time when you just can't patch the system any more, when you can't put out fires faster than they're starting. There comes a time when the best you can do is cowboy/cowgirl up, let the disaster run its course, and rebuild once the dust settles. I won't make my final decision until I step into the voting booth in November, but right now I think that's the best we can hope for.

I don't see that electing either Clinton or Obama will have any effect more than delaying the catastrophe by at best two to four years. If that were the only consideration, I might still vote for them: maybe we really can teach the horse how to fly.

But I don't know they can do even that.

Supreme Court nominations? Faced with a strong Republican minority, a Democratic president will deliver justices who will at best merely slow the increase in abortion restrictions. At best. We'll still get parental notification, mandatory waiting periods, spousal consent, remote providers, restrictive licensing and liability... all the features that make abortion a privilege of the rich and not the fundamental human right to control one's own body.

Civil liberties? Economic equality? Anti-imperialism? Energy independence? Global warming? Anti-corporatism? Give me a break. Neither Clinton nor Obama are going to do jack shit but give us platitudes and bullshit, if they do even that.

Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, I admire you both for overcoming the contemptible and egregious sexism and racism prevalent in American society to get to where you are today. That's taken intelligence, skill, dedication and hard work. But that's all I admire you for; I admire Margaret Thatcher equally for the same qualities. I don't like your politics or your policies. I'm not going to vote for genitalia or melanin. I'm not even going to vote for intelligence (although I will vote against stupidity). I'm going to vote for political, social and moral character, and on every substantive issue, I think you're both not just wrong but rotten to the core.

I have my conscience to consider, too; there are some things up with which I will not put. Racism. Misogyny. Homophobia. Warfare. I won't compromise on these principles, and damn the consequences.