Indignant Desert Birds

What we say:
We need to create new regulatory environments wherein the market is nudged to invest in critical infrastructure. We may need to raise taxes to create some of this rich infrastructure, but it will give to everyone– rich and the poor alike– a better country. This is in no way Socialism*

What they hear:
We need to raise taxes on the rich to give to the poor. This is Socialism.

This is why conversations between parties are so frustrating; we’re speaking entirely different languages. Democrats want a functional State that takes care of the needs of the people. Republicans want a minimal State that doesn’t have the power to hurt the people.

The irony**, from where I sit is that a weak Federal Government tends not to be able to protect its citizens against depredation. The Conservative, laissez faire, ideology really has allowed for workers to be paid virtually nothing. State protected collective bargaining organizations are the only thing which allows for power between bargainers to be balanced. And so forth.

They see Socialism, we see citizens acting in their best interests for the common good. And so, on it goes…

*While I was in Ohio, many of the Brits were deeply amused by how much “socialism” was a dirty word in this country…

**I’ll give the benefit of the doubt that this irony is unintentional.

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Just as a reminder: in 2000, the United States elected a president who would go on to torture people, and do so in the name of the American People. In 2008, I worked to elect a man who promises to end that practice, and close down the factory in which we do so.

Barack, you’re on the hook now. You need to begin shutting this place down before 100 days have passed. Do that and I’ll forgive much. Don’t do that and, well… I don’t like your chances for reelection..

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I was chatting with Harold Goldstein* a couple days ago. He, like many liberals, is sort of terrified that if Obama is successful at getting a liberal agenda passed, there will be a backlash, causing us to lose power.

This may be true. We liberals got our agenda passed in 1964 and “[lost] the south for a generation”. In 1932, we created a whole “New Deal”, which conservatives have been running against for 70 years.

The thing is, most of the Liberal Agenda is pretty popular. We’re offering people Health Care and an end to the war. If we can get just those 2 things, there can’t be a backlash powerful enough to actually matter. The point of “power” is not some mindless holding of the same, but rather it’s the ability to achieve things. Obama has the ability to achieve things that would really make the world a better place.

We should not fear the backlash. We should fear children dying because the richest country on Earth cannot properly allocate resources. If we save lives and lose elections, it’s a small price to pay…

*around my family, we call him “Uncle Harold”, since my father had the good sense to marry his sister a decade or so ago.

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29 March 2007

Circuit City said yesterday that it had fired 3,400 of its highest-paid sales staff and will replace them with lower-paid workers, a risky strategy to cut costs that goes beyond the layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes commonly used by struggling companies.

-Via

3 March 08

(AP) Circuit City Stores Inc. said Monday it is closing about 20 percent of its U.S. stores and cutting thousands of jobs in an effort to return to profitability as it finds consumers reluctant to spend and its vendors less eager to give it credit.

-via

Perhaps this is a bit of post-hoc reasoning, but it seems to me that when you fire your most experienced and most loyal employees, this has cascading moral and competency effects. You no longer have solid base of informal training which can help new folks get up to speed much more quickly. It causes your medium term employees start looking over their shoulder, wondering if they should jump ship. Also, you take an immediate hit to your customer service ability. Not to mention the PR disaster– I’ll never shop at a Circuit City again.

Lesson: A company may be screwed if they treat their employees well, but they are definitely screwed if they treat their employees like interchangeable cogs…

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Direct racial hatred is… it’s not dead. Not even close. But it’s a lot closer to dead than it was even 10 years ago. What we have left is… I won’t say worse, but it’s not better. It’s fairly pervasive, and damned near unconscious. In American Society, in 2008, “white” is “normal”. Michelle Obama gave a fantastic speech the other night. Here was some of the reaction:

The evening ended with the candidate talking to his wife from the giant screen, as Ronald Reagan did with Nancy Reagan during his nominating convention. It was a beautiful family tableau with the daughters interrupting to tell their dad they loved him. The whole bunch seemed straight out of Central Casting. That’s a cliché, and for the first black family with a realistic chance of living in the White House, becoming a cliché is a big win.

The assumption that most White Americans make is that African Americans have to prove themselves. African Americans are “other”…

The thing is, it’s possible to be blinded to non-white Americans while still not being racist. It’s what we call “systematic racism”. Another example? Carnival Games. 2k (as far as I know)* isn’t staffed by people who want to hurt blacks, kill them, deprive them of economic opportunity. What they did was to make a game in which a player could have any face they wanted as long as it was white. African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos– anyone not strictly White would find it impossible to find themselves represented by the game. Racism by oversight!

Of course, pointing out to people that their actions are… racially insensitive
is a good way to start a fight. Nonetheless, we need to be aware of it; only by constantly challenging our assumptions can we make our society better. For everyone.

*Which is a shade past “not at all”, actually. I’ve got a friend there (who I hope doesn’t read this…), and have been to their offices. I can safely say: not one person in Klan robes

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The thing about healthcare is that there are many, many ways of doing it. Ours is about the worst. I mean, maybe not the worst possible, but certainly the worst we’re likely to see and still have a whole ton of very competent doctors. (In order to get worse, you pretty much have to be Cuba.)

How do we improve? Well, you’d want minimum care standards. And a dedicated funding stream. The idea is that it should be paid for by the government so that it’s not paid for by an employer– and so that you don’t lose care if you lose your job. After all, in this country, cancer is the number on cause of bankruptcy.

What would make the system perfect? Well, I’m not wild about the idea of the government running the health care system– I do like the idea of private actors competing for customers. Ezra Klein has more: part 1, part 2, and part 3

Maniakes: I’d love to get your take on this…

Tags: death, human rights by Punning Pundit
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32 Days ago the California Supreme Court looked at our State’s constitution and found enough protections for gays within that document that any restrictions on the rights of gays would have to meet “Strict Scrutiny” tests. legislative Bans on marriage did not meet that test and were therefore illegal. At 5:01pm, PDT, the paperwork was handed out, and about a nanosecond later, the first legalizable ceremonies took place.

It is fascinating to me the ways that human beings want to get married. The forms of marriage differ across time and culture, but the fact of it is universal. A society such as ours should have the broadest, most inclusive terms possible. Allowing more people, more couples to formalize their roots within the community makes us all that much better off.

For too long man kept apart what the gods had joined. Yesterday we began correcting that mistake.

Tags: human rights by Punning Pundit
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I don’t know which emotion is stronger: Happiness that it’s back, or anger that it was ever gone.

Before today, the President reserved to himself the right to declare an individual an “Enemy Combatant”, and for those classes of people, he opined that they could be held– forever– without charges being filed.

The court today held that a plain reading of “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” means that Congress must find that either a state is seceding, or has been invaded, or else Habeas Corpus cannot be suspended.

Let’s be clear: if we think someone is a terrorist, we can still hold them long enough to put them on trial, and if they are convicted we can treat them– fairly harshly under military law. If they’re innocent, however, we’ll let them go.

It’s only just.

Tags: death, human rights, politics by Punning Pundit
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I was listening to this song by the floblots, and had never heard of Anne Braden. Naturally wikipedia was able to help…

If this is accurate, an American was thrown in jail for selling his house to another American. Power was used to maintain injustice. I am always and forever terrified of being on the wrong side of power– and so for that reason I’ve always been _very_ supportive of free speech.

The problem comes when people who have no interest in discussion seek to drown out the voices of those who do. Speech is then used against itself to the edification of no one. For a free-speech fetishist like myself, this presents a problem: how do I keep a conversation moving when the trolls show up– without destroying the right of a troll to speak. After all: the person may not be a troll, but merely have (true) ideas I find repugnant. What if I am on the wrong side of history?

One solution which presents itself is disemvoweling. “Offending” comments are still there, and if there is truth, it will shine through. But no one will struggle to read asshole comments. I think it’s a good compromise. If there is a better idea, please let me know in the comments…

(updated within 30min. of posting. For clarity)

Tags: free speech, human rights, politics by Punning Pundit
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