Booman posted an article today (Fri.,10/25) titled A Word on a Non-Story. It is about his own reaction to the whole Obamacare website kerfuffle. It basically refers to his refusal to pile on along with observers from every side of the political spectrum regarding the total incompetence of that site’s rollout. In it he states:
The problems will get fixed and we’ll all move on.
Sigh.
You missed it again, Booman.
Indeed, Rubiconlians have once again found a hook upon which they are successfully hanging their hype hat for a period of time…criticism of the amazingly badly produced Healthcare.gov website.
Sigh.
But it isn’t the only hook available. In fact, it is only one of many that proliferate on the hatrack of big government. Their opposition to the Dumbocrats…the growing success of that criticism…is linked to the rapidly accelerating failure of big government to be able to do anything right. It has not been working well since at least the assassination of JFK; the citizenry of the U.S. is (finally!!!) waking up to that fact and the hits just keep on coming.
And that is the real story here, Booman. It is not a “non-story,” it is rather just another episode in the story of a failing culture.
Read on for more.
Big Gov…and its ongoing, rapidly accelerating failure…is “the story,” and it is a story that is going to keep on breaking until either the Big Gov problem is solved or the system itself breaks.
It has been over 50 years since Dwight Eisenhower warned us regarding the dangers of what he then termed “the Military-Industrial Complex.” Now bigger than ever, it is nothing less than a corporate-owned and operated Permanent Government and…on plentiful evidence…it simply does not work very well. Not for for the majority of the citizens who live under its shadow, anyway. Only for its owners.
Big Gov at work…the failures abound:
Who was behind the rash of assassinations in the ’60s/’70s? Supposed super-sleuth Big Gov agencies have come up with no answers…or at the very least they have not communicated them to the people.
How could the gigantic U.S. “lose” a war with North Vietnam? That’s like a major league baseball team “losing” to a high school team. How? The complexity-induced inefficiency and waste of big government is how.
Unable to stop the drug scourge that flatlined the inner cities of America in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s? Or perhaps better, unable to resist taking its own profit from that scourge?
Unable to stop the flood of jobs and revenue out of the country during and after the Clinton administration? A flood that flatlined most of what we now lovingly call “The Rustbelt?”
Unable to successfully prosecute an effective war against Islamic fighters who drove 30-year old jalopies with machine guns welded onto their roofs and carried bombs in their underwear? Please!!!
Unable to deal with the criminal enterprise named “Wall Street,” the efforts of which eventually resulted in the flatlining of the entire fucking economy in the mid-2000s?
And the beat goes on. And on and on and on and on and on. The hits just keep on coming.
I got yer “Big Gov,” right there!!!
Lemme ask y’all a simple question. Have any of you ever had dealings with any of the bureaucratic appartuses of big government? Of course you have…they intrude on every minute of every day of our lives now. I don’t care if it’s the IRS, the military, law enforcement, big academe, big med, Social Security, the FDA, ICE, NSA, the U.S. Postal Service, Homeland Security, the Department of State etc…like I said, the hits just keep on coming. A morass of incompetence on any and every level. Meanwhile, I can usually contact a well-run business…the biggest businesses, like Apple or Google…and get whatever information or service that I need in a matter of minutes.
And that one fact is what is going to be the reason for the eventual downfall of the Democratic Party unless it wises up and does so very damned soon.
Can big government be made to work well? I really don’t know, but the Democratic Party must:
1-Prove beyond the possibility of doubt that Big Gov failures…failures of scope, failures of bloated inefficiency…can indeed be solved
or
2-Jump on the bandwagon in terms of downsizing Big Gov/Nanny State/Surveillance State.
If it does not, within about 10 years…quite possibly sooner…it will be taken down by some form of opposition.
Now…I am not saying that the Rethuglican Party as it now stands is in any way “better” than the Dumbs. They are both rotten to the core and they are both…rhetoric notwithstanding…up to their ears in Big Government. Republican preznit or Democratic preznit, Republican Congress or Democratic Congress, the IRS it still a smoking heap of badly functioning bureaucratic shit and so are all of the other federal systems. The Ratpubs are just playing politics…trying to stay in the game until the other team errors its way out of power and/or a real homerun hitter shows up on their own team.
Meanwhile what used to be considered “fringe” elements of both parties are gaining power…especially on the right, because now that the right is somewhat out of power it is looking for new ideas.
And also meanwhile…the Dems are suffering from hardening of the political arteries. This site’s rapid transition from opposition site to lapdog site during Obama’s tenure is proof of that as far as I am concerned. New problems are arising…problems of size, problems of mediocrity and worse in the federal workplace…and they are being met with cries for more size, more interference with the lives of everyday, working…or at least trying to work…citizens.
It ain’t gonna fly.
You say above:
The problems will get fixed and we’ll all move on.
Yeah.
Right.
Who told you that?
Pollyanna.gov?
That is the problem.
Big Gov problems do not get fixed. They just fade out of the news cycle after a little tinkering and hype…replaced of course by the latest hottest-thing-ever fuckup…and continue to work badly. Eventually they all combine into a gigantic feedback system that amplifies itself like a mainlining junkie’s ongoing jones, and that feedback system will eventually blow the whole enchilada right down the wormhole.
Bet on it.
Somebody who knows how to work a can opener has to do the job.
Who dat?
The “loyal left?”
Not on the evidence that I am seeing.
Not in a million years.
Watch.
Here come da queen of Big Gov.
They are going to roll her out like a new model Chevy. Bet on that as well.
She has proven her loyalty to the PermaGov…and her efficiency as an administrator/hypemaster as well… with her SecState tenure. She next, if she’s healthy enough.
Watch.
And Big Gov will jes’ keep rollin’ along.
Bet on it.
Yup.
Until it’s not the right answer.
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now…
Watch.
AG
Ah cain’t wait!!!
(WOOF!!!)
AG
Big Gov/Big Corp point here…
Check this out!!!
Nice.
Can there be any remaining doubt about the ongoing fix after this sort of thing comes to light?
Please!!!
The corporate-owned PermaGov is rotted through and through. Revolving door after revolving door leads us by the nose into ever deeper piles of corporate shit.
Time for a change, before the entire barrel is filled with rotten apples. Haloween is upon us. Dem ghosts and RatPub goblins compete, bobbing for nothing but rotted, useless fruit.
Wake the fuck up!!!
AG
That’s got nothing to do with big government and everything to do with political corruption.
Oh, come on!!!
It is size that allows and encourages effective, big-time corruption. Size means lots of places to hide and size also means big rewards. Why take the chance of corrupting some small town government…someplace where the hiding places are few and far between… and make a dollar three-eighty when you can corrupt the federal government, access millions of hiding places and make billions?
Get real.
AG
I’m sure these people will agree with you. Too bad they tend to lean heavily Republican.
That is the Democrats’ fault, Don. Big Gov doesn’t work. The “outs” are taking advantage of that. They are mostly full of shit, but then so are the “ins.” ‘T’ain’t about DemRats and RatPubs anymore. It’s about the UniParty and its opposition.
Wise the fuck up.
AG
Apparently the subset of our population attracted to libertarianism is largely white, male, and given their apparent party leanings, quite into white male privilege. I would say those who fail to realize that are the ones who need to WTFU.
I do not believe in the use of blanket “naming,” Don, nor do I believe much in polling results upon which your own blanket naming assertions are undoubtedly based. I will flat-out guarantee that I can walk into any minority ghetto neighborhood in the U.S., engage multiple random citizens on the street and…after a certain push-and-pull ceremony until they begin to believe that I am not just another white hustler looking for agreement about the way this system is working…get overwhelmingly negative results about their own degree of trust and belief in “Big Government.” Especially as far as how the whole police/justice system is working, but also about taxes, welfare and other so-called ‘social services,” etc. They are not identified by the media as “libertarians,” but then neither are the masses of young white people who identify more with the various Occupy movements and anti-surveillance whistle blowers than they do with any other segment of this society.
You are a media-fed clomp-clomp-clomper, Don. Sorry, but there it is. As Shakespeare so presciently wrote:
Bet on it.
And those “things” are going to arise eventually.
Bet on that as well.
Watch.
It’s just a matter of time.
Watch.
AG
I get it – you prefer personal anecdotes to data collection. If you follow the link and read through the survey results, they are illuminating. The organization responsible will discuss its sampling methods and so on. Basically, I tend to pay more credence to findings from the sciences (social in this case, but otherwise as well) rather than anecdotes, as there is now ample evidence that the samples used for personal anecdotes are highly limited (we tend to self-select who we encounter, and filter that personal info through whatever attitudes we already hold). Data collected through probability sampling methods has a really good shot at actually representing a population. I would rather believe something collected via those latter methods – even if it might fly initially in the face of my own preconceptions – than my own personal and very biased samples. In this case, the data seem to fit a few things that have been found elsewhere, and in a weird enough way at least seem to fit my personal experiences with libertarians – the ones I run into tend to be male, tend to be white, and tend to be relatively a bit better off than the average person in their communities – and despite their a pox on all houses approach to our current parties, they hold attitudes that often would be more consistent with the GOP than the Dems (don’t even get me started on what they would have to say about my particular party preferences).
Bottom line, unless given a good, evidence-based reason to distrust properly sampled data, I’m going to go with what the data say. Call that what you will. Doesn’t really matter.
That mostly depends upon who is doing the collection, Don. If the “collectors” are the major polling companies…all owned and operated as PermaGov subsidiaries, bet on it…then yes, I believe what I see and know from my own wide experience on all levels of this society rather than what I am told to see by various polling groups who are quite consciously skewing their results so that different segments of the PermaGov will hire them to do even more polling.
Blah, blah, blah.
Wake the fuck up. This isn’t “Family Feud” here. it’s life and death.
“…and so on.”
Indeed it will, and here they are fresh from your link to them.
I really don’t have to go much further. The Ford Foundation is PermaGov to its core. “Generous funding” from such an organization means that the group being funded is in line with the purposes of the funder. I mean…is the Ford Foundation “generously funding” the Occupy movement, those who are trying to stop the ongoing U.S. economic imperialist pillaging of the world or groups that oppose the criminality still rampant on Wall Street? ? Give me a break.
The “Nathan Cummings Foundation?”
The first paragraph out of Wikipedia’s mouth is enough for me to immediately distrust it.
Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee?
I don’t like Sara Lee…part and parcel of the poisoning of the American food chain…and I generally do not like the words “Jewish causes” in PermaGov-speak because they almost always mean support for the criminal state of Israel and its U.S. lobbying organizations.
Hmmmm…the “GfK Knowledge Panel,” eh? I wonder what that is.
Oh.
It’s part of the international PermaGov, of course.
Ludwig Erhard? Great.
Good ol’ Ludwig and the “Great Society” guy/beneficiary of the JFK killing right in his own home state and city/Vietnam war criminal. The “Great Society.” How’d that turn out?
I’m getting a good picture now of just who signs on to this shit.
Riiiight…they provide ” Internet service and a netbook computer” to those who do not have them in order to “ensure that panel respondents are representative of the U.S. adult population.” How nice. Did they give one to my friend 139th St. Papo? I doubt it, and if they did he would be very careful to give them answers that would maintain his free internet connection and netbook. “You don’ wanna alienate them social work kinda people…they may cut you off. Get what you can get in this dog eat dog world.” A ghetto mantra. Bet on it.
I don’t have to waste any more time on this bullshit…my point has been made if you have any awareness of what is really happening here outside of media trance-enforced disinformation
You say:
Clomp on.
AG
In other words, reading through the rest of the detritus in your missive, you were able to communicate to me that a form of probability sampling was used. We could certainly entertain the soundness of that form of probability sampling relative to other forms of probability sampling, but thus far at least I can say that their data collection process looked pretty careful and thorough. One thing I would then be looking at is if their findings could be replicated by others using different methods of probability sampling. If a finding becomes replicable, it becomes pretty doggone believable in a hurry. One of the reasons I am willing to believe that the war casualty rate in the third phase of the Iraq War was considerably higher than what was reported through media sources within the Green Zone was due to a series of surveys conducted by separate research teams over the last few years employing a number of probability sampling methods (the early ones relied on something called cluster sampling, whereas the most recent used a different form of probability sampling. The findings converge on a plausible set of numbers – ones that lead me to accept that somewhere between a half million and a million Iraqis were killed in that senseless atrocity.
I know you seem to be in conspiracy theory mode. Not sure that helps much with conversing, unfortunately. My point still stands – if you want to convince me that the findings in that survey are way off, find me others that have been conducted utilizing other probability sampling methods, and conducted independently of that pollster. That’s how you convince someone like me – show me carefully collected and analyzed data. I get the feeling that is not going to be a conversation that you and I will have – given our radically different mindsets and past history. However, if someone else cares to jump in, I am, as the saying goes, all ears.
To paraphrase what you wrote above:
I get it – you prefer to rely on data collected by people you do not know to the messy and potentially dangerous act of going out into the real world and seeing things for yourself.
I gotta say…at least you’re not alone.
Almost the entire population of the U.S. has been duped by this foolishness.
Enjoy yourself, Don.
It’s later than you think.
AG
That is such a load. This separation of data collection from everyday life is such a straw argument that it burns to ash the moment the faintest of morning light shines upon it. Maybe it makes willful ignorance easier to maintain, perhaps, but I’m not buying in. Have you ever tried to gather survey data before? You actually have to interact with real, living, breathing human beings and convince them to spend a few moments sharing their thoughts. I know…I’ve done it. It beats relying exclusively on anecdotes. Otherwise, we’d all be trapped in our own little bubbles of self-selected acquaintances, and selective self-perceptions and selective memories. Maybe you’re anti-science. I don’t know. I would not be surprised if the whole enterprise reeks of “permagov” to you, and is not to ever be trusted. I want to be wrong about that. However those same data gathering and analysis methods are our best hope of getting at a closer approximation of truth. As I said before, if you want to convince me of something, show me a data set collected based on sound methods that backs up your claims. If you won’t do that, as far as I’m concerned, you’ve got nothing.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Upyours, signing off.
You write:
Oh.
Well whyn’t ya say so out front!!!??? You’re one of them “truth-lappers.” Hell, if Id’a known that I wouldnt’a wasted so much time trying to talk sense to you. I would have just told you what I thought you wanted to hear like the people you surveyed. Anything to get you outta their face.
Clomp on in your middle-class “progressive” beliefs. Like I said…y’ain’t nearly alone.
AG
P.S. Polls? Pollsters? Sampling methods? Like those polls, pollsters and sampling methods that made a fortune telling Romney he was going to win?
Wake the fuck up.
If it’s official in this current version of the United States of Omertica…if it’s mainstream, accepted knowledge, the way things “work” here?
It’s a lie.
WTFU.
Obama knew.
Obama didn’t know.
The NSA bugged foreign leaders. So-called “allies.”
No it didn’t.
Yes it did but…but…but they were bugging us.
WTFU.
Go take a poll.
Well, THAT was predictable. ROFL.
Yup. It was.
Didja need a survey to be sure?
Betcha.
AG
Whoever can shout about their subjective experiences the loudest wins. I guess that’s your game.
Bored now
No, Don.
It is my quite objective experiences during about 50 years living as what amounts to an outlaw in this system…an artist who travels through all levels of this society as a kind of double agent, an ad hoc pollster in a manner of speaking, someone who is comfortable in many parts of the culture but truly “belongs” to none…it is those experiences talking with and observing people in those many segments of this system that inform what I am saying. I no longer believe in the PermaGov myth, because I have seen too many examples of the truth that lies beneath it. When I read your bland acceptances of what the pollsters say, all I can see is the endless line of blind middle, upper middle and ruling class Americans that I have watched make fools of themselves on the dance floor as the help…the musicians, the waiters, etc., mostly all minority people…look at them in absolute disbelief. “How can they be so stupid!!!???” is the mantra that I have heard under the stairs and behind the curtains for most of those 50 years. You swallow whole the disinformation aimed directly at you and then get all hincty when someone calls you on it. I don’t give a shit. Consider yourself called. I no longer care whether y’all get it or not. I am calling you on it.
Get used to it, because I am not about to back off.
Step out of your corner office with your brains in the air.
You be bettah off.
Bet on it.
AG
Same demographic that in 1980 voted for Reagan and cheered for him when he busted PATCO. Unlike the older and Republican men that I worked for and with at that time, those my age resented having to compete professionally with me and the women that followed me into the field. Back then their sense of white male entitlement was less well formed and expressed itself more obviously as sexism.
That’s about what I was figuring. This is probably a bunch who generally for economic and social privilege reasons would be a better fit with the GOP if they have to choose between the two largest political parties. The expression of racism and sexism has indeed changed over the last few decades – a lot of good research on modern racism is available at this point, although I don’t know how much of that would look specifically at ideology. I imagine some of it would. I also suspect that there would have to be some sort of modern sexism as well – not overtly expressed so much, but covertly. And I would wager that some demographics and ideological positions would be more prone to show it than others.
There is a bit of a pattern emerging regarding libertarians swinging generally in favor of the Republican Party (although the extent of that swing may vary depending upon whether or not a Republican is occupying the White House, or the performance of a Republican while in the White House) – see here for one summary, although largely quaint in its takeaway points about the end of party polarization. Again, mostly I’d love to see more data. At this point, though, I am feeling more comfortable with the tentative conclusion that libertarians tend to swing GOP when push comes to shove, and that they tend to be disproportionately white/non-Hispanic and male. Until good contrary evidence to the contrary is presented, that would be the way to bet.
The political split in the office was 70-80% Republican to 20-30% Democrat. (Not that political affiliation was ever discussed.) The men in my age co-hort didn’t differ in political affiliation from that of the older men. The difference was that the older guys could be described as Rockefeller Republicans and almost all of them were very supportive of me as the first women. Most of the younger guys had that libertarian edge. The one that didn’t yet remained a Republican, didn’t navigate the transition to a meaner and more cutthroat business environment any better than I did.
Something was definitely in the water for those of us who might have been either born toward the end of the Baby Boom or who were early Gen-X-ers. Whatever trends toward individualism (or what Michael Parenti calls hyperindividualism) – an individualism which is marked by a ruthless everyone for themselves mentality, and marketed as self-expression – that were already happening in the culture would have had more of a complete effect on those of us who are now maybe a half century old or slightly younger. Those leaning toward the right were probably more primed to be receptive to, say, Ayn Rand. Those who would have ordinarily been involved in any of a number of more traditional leftist organizations tended to begin gravitating to anarchist and autonomist approaches. Regardless, too many of us seemed more ready to engage in the art of shouting each other down in the name of “thinking for ourselves”.
Anyhoo, just a few musings while I try to wake up this morning. In some very fundamental way, I do tend to think there was something qualitatively different about Rockefeller Republicans and the ones who ended up buying into more libertarian strains (and of course more cultural strains). To be continued, I’m sure…..
.
PermaGov business as usual.
Thanks…
AG
2007 Can you say “Cheney”?
The real story regarding the Healthcare.gov failure.
Big Gov and its entitlements. Up and down the line.
It’s not just one failure, it is a gestalt of failure.
About that “…longtime failed website-builder Kathleen Sebelius” thing?
Sure
I repeat:
and
My point exactly.
The U.S.A.’s governmental system…federal, state, county, city, you name it… is now now simply a black hole for incompetence.
Incompetence is the new graft, and it has been produced by an educational system that has essentially given up on human beings. It simply passes most of them through its works the way a digestive system passes non-digestible items. In one end, out the other. And then where do they go? Into incompetence. Gotta feed ’em, right? So they go to work. They don’t fix roads right; they don’t run a cash register right and they don’t build websites right. It is not that they are too natively stupid to do these things…I mean, really. Were the people who built and maintained the U.S.A. when it really worked well all geniuses? Hell no!!! But they were educated and socialized to the point that they could actually function as workers. Not now. Bet on that as well. I spend quite a bit of time in the public school systems around NYC as a freelance specialist teacher of music and I shepherded a son through them in the ’90s…successfully I might add, because I saw what was happening early and took steps to show him what was up as well. These “schools”…up and down the economic ladders…are merely holding cells for incompetent workers. Bet on it. Real “work” is not a set of multiple choice questions; it is not graded on a curve and it does indeed leave some people behind. Schools? Just the opposite, so the kids come out unprepared to do anything real and they are also not taught that they are incompetent. The surprise when they hit the real world drives many of them mad. Quite literally insane…crazy as a fruitcake with a gun just a few dollars away. Meanwhile functioning businesses have to show a profit, and the really well-functioning ones grab up all of the competent workers…there is of course an educational system for competent workers as well, only it is a very small part of the overall educational establishment.
And there we jolly well are, aren’t we.
You wonder why I fear a collapse?
That’s why.
Station WTFU signing off once again.
Have a nice day.
Sigh.
Later…
AG
Crony Capitalism. The solution is not to shrink government. It is to get for profit business out of government and return to the Civil Service System and the Arsenal system of Defense procurement.
And how exactly do you propose to achieve these noble aims?
Magic?
‘Cuz that’s what’s going to be needed short of a real crisis.
Bet on it.
W/out adequate food and fuel, people will wise the fuck up. Until then?
ZZZZzzzzzz…
Just like it is now.
ZZZZzzzzzz…
AG
Well there is always violent revolution, but that’s the last resort. Not being a political organizer, I can’t answer your question with any other solution, but I do have faith that there is another solution.
Here’s my answer:
How well do you think this little creature and her toy bomber will do against the massed forces of the PermaGov?
Nice.
Please.
Dream on.
AG