What Ryan’s Budget Would Mean For Women
But as any good brogressive will tell you, there’s no real difference between a massive expansion of Medicaid and a plan to destroy Medicaid; it would be perfectly rational for a progressive to prefer that elections result in the latter outcome, because this would prove something about something.
…in fairness, although Ryan’s budget would destroy Medicare and Medicaid, there would be plenty of welfare for the military-industrial complex.
…more on the most influential House Republican’s hatred for the idea of non-affluent people having health care here.
A suggestion for the future: if plan to write a post that includes the word “brogressive”, you should wait a few hours before deciding whether to publish it or not.
And then hit the “delete” button.
A suggestion for the future: if you plan to write a comment with a 100-0 witless snark to content ratio, you should wait a few hours before deciding whether to publish it or not. And then hit the “delete” button.
I think we can agree that your suggestion above applies to both of us.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.
I want this in a t-shirt.
He’s trolling his own blog.
Those who find the term “brogressive” offensive are precisely those who seem to have no problem supporting people who would destroy abortion rights, eviscerate the National Labor Relations Board, repeal environmental regulations, and overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Because drones.
Look, civil liberties arguments somewhat to the right of the Obama administration are much more appealing coming from people who want to restore the Articles of Confederation. I think we can all agree on that, just as we can agree that there’s nothing more offensive than calling out alleged progressives who believe that gender equity doesn’t merit any weight in presidential elections.
Splitters!
Seriously, you wrote a blog post condemning “self-described progressives” because they
“taunt everyone who disagrees with their tactics as apologists for killing Yemeni babies, falsifies their arguments, papers over nuance in favor of denunciation, and generally channels sexist and misogynistic values of shouting and exclusion over debate and inclusion”
and in the same post do exactly that?
And then Scott repeat it again?
Don’t you guy have an ounce of self-awareness?
I’m afraid you’ll have to explain which positions I’ve falsified, or for that matter where the “shouting” and “exclusion” are.
Except that Sirota and Greenwald actually do taunt everyone who disagree with their tactics as apologist for killing Yemeni babies. I was just following on Twitter last night someone I will leave nameless but a deeply committed leftist challenge the two of them on supporting Rand Paul. They both immediately accused him of being a Obot and defender of a murderer. The person who asked these questions has long spoken against American imperialism.
And if you don’t see how such behavior reflects sexist and misogynist trends, you need to read more about the connections between the women’s movement of the 1970s and the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Because there were tons of guys acting in just this way and that behavior excluded women from the conversation, helping to convince female activists that they could accomplish nothing toward a more just society until they changed acceptable behavior among activists. Sirota and Greenwald have learned none of this.
So that’s what this is about, some Twitter spat. I was wondering why Scott would want to fart out a post guaranteed to lower the collective IQ of a thread and to spark lots of personality-driven (male personality-driven) trash talk. Why encourage it when so much of it happens anyway?
I’m sick of it. I’ve engaged in way too much of this kind of a group masturbation in which LGM increasingly specializes. It makes me feel gross. I’m going to try to quit. Now.
It’ll will cause no one here any tears but I’m done. Life’s too short. Farewell.
Love & Kisses,
D
Wait, you are leaving LGM?
Don’t let the door hit you.
Also, the Twitter thing was just an example. One of hundreds.
With all due respect…go fuck yourself. You’re the one who has openly admitted that you think commenting is “a game” and that you’re willing to say basically anything you think will score you points. So you don’t have any respect for any other commenter here who is actually interested in having a serious/interesting discussion in any sense. You’re an admitted troll who comes here because it’s a chance to play purity troll. Please do sod off, even though we all know good and well that you won’t.
HE’S TAKING HIS BALL AND GOING HOME!
Poor baby. Scot and Erik said mean things to him and pointed out the truth.
Leaving aside the rest, I’m amused that Mizner thinks the reason for this post was a twitter dispute that I was unaware of until now. Fascinating.
Not comprehending multiple contributors on this blog is a long-standing Internet Tradition.
Nobody could have anticipated a DRAMATIC EXIT.
C’mon, group masturbation doesn’t make you feel gross. The cri de coeur circle-jerk is the primary activity in the constant moral outrage enclaves. It just turns to frustration and ED when you take it on the road and can’t find enough people for a good game of drone-stroke.
Yeesh, I’d kind of liked Minzer’s comments here. I had thought there were some good points extractable from them, which served as a useful counterweight to the prevailing mindset here.
But who flounces from blog comments in 2013? I had thought everyone knows by now how poorly a flounce comes off, the vast gulf between what it is intended to express and what it actually conveys.
Not to mention the inevitable embarrassment when one comes back a couple weeks later trying to pretend nothing happened.
Also, this is what finally put Mizner over the edge? Really?
I’d love a pointer to such comments.
Generally, I didn’t find much of value in Minzer if only because he seemed far far too concerned with scoring points in the Leftiest Evah sweepstakes than backing up (or even clearly stating) claims. See my comment below.
AFAICT, he was against the very concept of evidence, esp. if the evidence worked against him.
So, he was on a reasonable side of many issues, but wasn’t a useful defender or even articulator of them.
Still my favourite Mizner admission.
Good times!
I am kinda sad not to have been a proximate cause of this hissy fit.
But I’ll miss such gems as:
or
or
(This was well after the conclusive refutation :))
Actually, I’ll sort of miss all this. Just this week we had Minzer, professional writer who often urged people to use a dictionary, assert that the meaning of “ineffectual” was that an ineffectual acting failed in its intended effect (rather than that being one meaning along with failing to produce any effect).
Oops, I picked up Jason’s typo. Sorry about that good forever David!
What typo? I am incapable of typos.
As for which comments of Mizner’s I liked, I am (contra, say, Joe from Lowell) generally a fan of the Greeenwaldian focus on the horrific human cost of waging war and/or police actions overseas. People–children, other innocents–die terrible deaths because of what we do, often needlessly. This should be of paramount importance in our foreign-policy thinking, and the Mizners of the world direct our attention to it.
Unfortunately, they lard it up with so much moral-absolutist, pox-on-both-houses, refusal-to-understand-the-forces-driving-American-politics, green-laternist holier-than-thou wankery that they tend to do more harm than good.
Eh. Frankly, I get more from Joe from Lowell than I’ve ever gotten from Mizner, even though I’m more toward Mizner’s side. Part of that might be that I’m more different than Joe, but also because Joe actually makes well supported points (often enough). Mizner just doesn’t, so there’s not a lot to learn. He has little nuance as well.
Now that I have clicked through to the links you and Substance provided, I see that Mizner is more prone to dissembling and self-deception than I had remembered. Oh well.
Yeah, life IS short.
Same you wasted so much of in here repeating yourself.
I did not explain myself: Greenwald is often an asshole; that is an easily verifiable fact (I avoid twitter, and will avoid it more after your comment).
That does not mean that (at least in these specific instances) you are not one too, and for similar reasons.
Instead of “killing Yemeny babies” you use “self-described progressive” and “brogressive”.
I suppose it’s an improvement; but hardly and example of “debate and inclusion”: more an example of “shouting and exclusion”.
More generally this whole feud between progressive people accusing each other of not being a “real” progressives and not caring about “important” issues is a well-known tradition, and maybe it’s a law of nature that one cannot be left-wing if he does not accuse someone else of being a splitter.
And yet it is quite ridiculous in small amounts, and highly annoying in high dosages (of course, it does not mean you should agree with each others on priorities or tactics).
It is the worst aspect of people like Greenwald and you. You both focus on important topics (labor, the “security state”) which are often ignored by other bloggers, and have interesting things to say on them.
So please take this comment as a plead from a reader to behave like adults more than as a taunt.
As I said in another thread, you really need to apply for a WaPo gig with those false equivalency skills.
I already ignored your inane comment at that time: but you didn’t catch the message…
Well, I suppose it is easier to keep repeating a transparently wrong characterization of someone if you just ignore the part where everyone notes that it’s wrong.
You’re right, 1)when people argue that there’s not any difference between Romney and Obama it’s safe to infer that they don’t give a shit about the countless issues on which there are major differences, and 2)people who put no weight on things like gender equity and expansions of health care for poor people when evaluating candidates clearly don’t care about them very much and hence aren’t real progressives unless you think one can be progressive and ignore these issues.
And I’m afraid that your high Broderist false equivalencies don’t work the other way, because most Republicans (including Rand Paul!) are worse than Obama even on national security state issues. If I was arguing that Obama’s policies shouldn’t be criticized I agree that this would be an equivalence but fortunately I have never said any such thing.
More simply, both sides don’t actually do it here. For a quick example: LGM is highly critical of the drug war, and generally critical of the Obama administration’s handling of the drug war. But no one here spent the run up to the 2012 election screaming that there was no difference between Obama and Romney on the drug war, so progressives really shouldn’t care who won the election at the least, and maybe should have even considered actively supporting Gary Johnson. That’s exactly what Greenwald, Stoller, etc. did.
Let me get this straight: take someone who is in favor of strong unions and labor protections, maybe even a socialist, but does not care about gender equality: is he a progressive?
And the other way around: someone who is feminist but does not give a fig about labor; what is she?
Not someone who deserves to be taken seriously as a voice of “the left.”
Considering the links between labor issues and feminism, she’d be a pretty shitty feminist.
And unlike white dude progressives who don’t really care about issues that don’t impact white dudes, I can’t actually think of any such person off hand. I think that might be important!
maybe it’s a law of nature that one cannot be left-wing if he does not accuse someone else of being a splitter.
And if you don’t see how such behavior reflects sexist and misogynist trends,
No that is just nonsense. Purism, yes. Turning your opoenents into convenient strawman, yes. But “if you care not about my hobby-horse, you are history biggest monster” tactic is not sexist per se. It can be used that way, but then what can’t be used in a sexist way.
And just in cause you want to use history a club again: I do know that is was sexist to treat womans emancipation as a Nebenwiderspruch in the late sixties and early seventies.
No, this doesn’t work. Because Greenwald and Co. aren’t promoting themselves as people with pet issues, but as spokespeople for the “real left” or whatever. So when they simultaneously do that and reject the notion that “real progressives” can legitimately put women’s rights on the same level as their hobby-horse, they are indeed fundamentally sexist.
And I should add that I’m not talking about priorities and writing topics. If anyone doesn’t want to write about reproductive freedom or health care, that’s fine; nobody can have useful things to say about everything. But when you say that politician x and politician y are the same while putting no weight on many issues where they’re different in ways that affect disadvantaged people, that’s a different story.
“supporting” is sure doing a lot of work here. Supporting one discrete part of a person’s publicly stated positions is quite different than supporting that person in all their endeavors. Just because Alan Grayson worked with Ron Paul on audit the Fed legislation doesn’t mean there is some sort of blanket endorsement of Grandpa Liberty’s other positions.
This would be fine, if we were talking about tactical alliances to pass legislation. Stoller, Sirota et al were arguing that Romney would be no worse or possibly better than Obama, full stop. That’s not a tactical alliance on an individual issue. That’s just an argument that people less privileged than themselves should go fuck themselves because DRONES! even though defeating Obama would make the DRONES! problem worse.
With respect to Rand Paul, if he’s making a push to limit or repeal the AUMF, say, then progressives should join him if the legislation is good and not worry about his motives. But when he’s just engaging in an ineffectual filibuster, it’s fair to note that his position to the right of the Obama administration on civil liberties makes him a less than ideal spokesman.
Speaking of DRONES! This story about a tweet by one of the brogressives has it all. Drones! Drug War! Hysteria! Hilarity! And a Monty Python reference!
My God that is fantastic.
That is a pretty definitive takedown of Greenwald.
To be fair to Greenwald (eep), I think his drug war reference was about the use of asset forfeiture money for the purchase, not what the drone would be used for.
I don’t.
Let’s say that’s true. Do you think his tweet was just a neutral, factual observation, or meant to infer a nefarious new phase of drone proliferation financed through the drug war?
Plus, if that’s the angle Greenwald is going for, what does the drone have to do with anything? Would asset seizure be less nefarious if the money had been spent on a squad car or a helicopter and not a remote control plane?
Good points. I take it back.
And forcing people to read it!
Anyone who has a problem with Sirota-mocking is silly. He’s an eminentely mockable figure and brogressive is a perfect term for him. Why LGM can’t get on board with the idea that lauding Rand Paul’s filibuster (or Ron Paul’s general foreign policy stance) isn’t the same as endorsing them, I don’t understand and never will.
I voted for Ron Paul in the Republican primary because he’s anti-national security state and sorta anti-imperialist. It’s just a protest at the status quo I don’t like, not expressing a wish that Ron Paul get his way about things. Doesn’t mean I don’t see him for what he is, a racist goldbug, woman-hating loon and I wouldn’t vote for against a decent person, but against Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum why the fuck not? Similarly, I can be happy that Rand Paul is making trouble for the Obama Administration on its fuckign stupid drone war without thinking changing my opinion that he’s a piece of shit.
Erik and Scott particularly seem very quick to call any damn thing like that “support.” It’s not support any more than agreeing with the ACLU on free speech makes me an Illinois Nazi.
I don’t think you’re engaging with any argument I’ve actually made. I’ve never said there’s any problem with agreeing with Rand Paul just because he has horrible positions on a lot of issues. I have pointed out that even on the narrow questions of the national security state Paul’s actual positions are worse than the Obama administration’s, which is one reason that his filibuster was much less of a challenge to the status quo than it’s sometimes being portrayed as.
It’s probably not a disagreement with any specific argument, just annoyance at the frequency you guys raise it and a belief that you’re sometimes fudging by suggesting people like Greenwald support the Pauls just because they said something nice about them.
Walks like a duck and all that.
Except that on Ron Paul, while Greenwald (who I don’t think is the same as Stoller and Sirota) didn’t endorse Paul he did make an exceptionally tendentious comparison suggesting that a progressive could rationally prefer Paul, which is absurd.
Witless, I think you’re missing that there’s a disagreement of substance here, not just one of tactics. I myself could not imagine voting for a racist, woman-hating loon who actively promotes political policies that would be terrible for the people he hates (non-whites and women), and whose political opponents promote much, much better policies on these very issues. I presume that is because I weigh these issues more strongly than you do.
There is the further question of whether it ever makes sense to vote for a member of the more imperialist political party as a protest against imperialism, in the context of a political system where parties have far more power than individual politicians. But that is a separate matter.
Did you miss where I said “in the Republican Primary”? There’s nobody there who’s better than Ron Paul on any of those issues and they’re worse than him on foreign policy.
Yes, I did miss that. Please revise your original comment so mine can then look better.
But for the want of an edit button…
I voted for Ron Paul in the Republican primary because he’s anti-national security state and sorta anti-imperialist
He’s not, though.
Compared to Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney?
Yes, compared to Santorum and Romney–unless you think one of them favors using drones to take out nonviolent dissidents inside the US.
I’m agnostic on that question and could be convinced either way.
Are you possibly confusing which Paul because I started talking about the other one? Because I think Ron’s indisputably the only one in either major party who’s going to say that Sept. 11 attacks were motivated by U.S. foreign occupations in a major party debate. As I understand it, he’s doing so for the same reasons a 1936-vintage isolationist would, but it remains a good point that I’m glad got aired for all the idiots in that crowd to boo at.
I think you are talking about Rand. He is closer to the republican mainstream then his father in foreign affairs. (Note: Mainstream doesn’t mean good or moderate or anything)
It always baffles me when people get huffy about Scott’s reminders of the inanity of the brogressive worldview (or call it what you will). There’s no trolling here: the worldview is real. I had many arguments last election season with supposed progressives (every one a white man) who saw no meaningful difference in likely outcome between Obama or Romney getting elected. The learned from Greenwald to hate Obama and the hatred felt righteous, and in any case they had secure jobs and weren’t ever gonna have to get an abortion themselves, so screw it.
Here’s the kicker, though. They don’t really “hate Obama.” (Well, maybe Greenwald does, but Greenwald has been stewing in indignation for so long I’m not sure he has any other emotion than implacable hatred for the world and people he has to suffer through having to contact.) Most of them are just trying to egg each other on. Liking Obama is like liking Coldplay. The indie kids just want to signal to each other that they’re too cool for that.
Berube had this dynamic nailed.
Oddly, it appears also to explain the source of FlipYrWhig’s nom de blog. What’s the matter, Flip? New Day Rising not commercial enough for you? Sellout.
I like their earlier stuff — Land Speed Record — but when they got all poppy with Zen Arcade I tuned out.
On YouTube there’s a hilarious appearance by Husker on the Tonight Show with Joan Rivers sitting in. They perform a song from Warehouse and Rivers needles them about how they’re no longer underground. It’s quintessentially mid-’80s.
You know, I was reading MB back then, and I don’t remember that! Nice! Well, I do have the “h” in there for a minimal difference…
While we’re on the subject, the “Yr” is also an indie signifier. So I know a bit of that whereof I speak.
And I suspect that 70% is due in large part to women not wanting to go through pregnancy without adequate medical coverage. Or at least, the doctors I deal with say labor & delivery services for Medicaid patients makes up a large chunk of their Medicaid payments.
But you know, just because your political party makes a huge ugly issue about every zygote being sacred doesn’t mean you should give a flaming about whether said zygotes or their incubators are healthy or happy.
It is sort of implicit that you accept Loomis’s formulation of this thing and his libelous inclusion of Greenwald in the group of pundits that deserve the characterization. Why don’t you disavow either his definition or his decision to label GG? What explains your affection for this zombie libel about GG not caring about economic issues or women? Iz da zombee pretty to your addled eyes?
“libelous inclusion”
Are we sure this isn’t actually Greenwald? Because anytime someone criticizes him over anything, it’s libel.
Are we sure this isn’t actually Greenwald?
Brazilian ISP?
And of course, it’s not remotely libel.
Maybe it’s Leiter.
Heck, at this point it’s practically Leitmotif.
Iz da zombee pretty to your addled eyes?
Hey now. Nothing wrong with liking zombies.
Is ‘brogressive’ a thing now? Because if it’s going to keep being used, it should probably be defined better.
My understanding of the term is that it refers to men who think we shouldn’t put too much emphasis on economic issues and issues affecting women and minorities because drones.
And who constantly pound their dicks on the table over certain issues while spewing lathered outrage over disgusting hypocrites and moral weaklings who refuse to take part in the ritual dick-pounding.
I couldn’t pound a dick even if I wanted to, not being in possession of one and all.
I’m sure Scott will make these same legitimate points about the unsupportable effects of cuts if Obama signs off on cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
I’m sure I will!
At first I was puzzled over the Republican proposal that children who did not receive good grades in school should receive less food.
This budget proposal resolves that puzzle. Block grants will limit the number of children who can be fed, so obviously a mechanism needs to be put in place to determine which children will receive food.
So,
Women who have sex must be punished with pregnancy
Pregnant women who fail to produce a human resource have committed a crime and must be punished
Human resources who do not succeed in school must be punished by depriving them of food
Those are the guiding principles of the Ryan Budget.
Accountability!