Patriarchy Hurts Men Too

McCain is doing better this time around.    But he keeps interjecting attacks on Obama into his answers, and every time he does his rating on the insta-poll goes down.  It also sinks every time he repeats a lie.

They both keep going over time and Tom Brokaw keeps getting annoyed with them.

Curiously, at times Obama is getting very favorable ratings from the self-described Republicans...sometimes, better than the independents.
And the independents seem to be tracking with the Democrats most of the time, though not always.

At the end, the PBS commentators are saying that Obama did better.   I think so, but as in the first debate, I thought that Obama missed some opportunities.  

Here's an article from the Washington Post about the nasty mood Sarah Palin is fostering at her rallies:  www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/06/AR2008100602935.html

I don't think it's just that they're desperate.  I think it's a deliberate strategy.   Not necessarily to win THIS election.   But if I'm right about their long-term goals, it fits.   I don't think Sarah Palin is campaigning for 2008 any more.  I think she's campaigning for 2012.

In order to get Americans to accept a fascist dictatorship, they would have to achieve these goals:

• Undermine faith in the existing government.
• Undermine faith in, knowledge of, and attachment to our longstanding democratic institutions
• Foster chaos
• Foster divisions between Americans and hostility of the factions towards one another.
• Foster divisions between Americans and the rest of the world, both hostility towards Americans and American xenophobia, isolationism and exceptionalism.
• Create more and more tolerance of their approaches; normalize disinformation and authoritarianism, while slowly moving power towards the executive branch.
• Undermine trust generally, between citizens and their government, between citizens and each other, and every level in between. Sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

If you look at the governmental policies and political strategies of Rove and the rest of them, you can see how everything they do works towards those goals.  Absolutely everything, even the things they are doing that appear to be shooting themselves in the foot.   For example, getting nasty at this stage of the game won't win them the election, but it will make it harder for a President Obama to govern.  It might even provoke violence....we know for a fact that all the "kill the liberals" rhetoric that people like Sean Hannity spout does have that effect on people.   And when people get desperate, they get violent.   And as the economy tanks, more people are about to get desperate.

One thing:   DO NOT buy into the "culture war," divided America, red state/blue state bullshit.   That is doing their work for them, that's how they want you to think.   Barack Obama understands that, which is why he rejects those ideas.  

Instead, get out there and talk to people you don't normally talk to.   Put a human face on them.  Put a human face on yourself.  There are lots of things that you and I can't do much about, but this is an essential part of the strategy that we can do something about.

The other big thing we can do is participate in our democracy.   Get out there and vote, get out there and volunteer, talk to your legislators on the local, state and national level, get involved.   A populace devoted to democracy is our best defense against any and all of that.

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On this day, Daniel M. Laenker spewed forth:

• 02:42 @ultramundane I've had an idea for a while to design some kind of deep-blue foofoo cocktail drink called a Piso Mojado. #
• 13:55 Doctors have discovered an organelle in HIV that never mutates: tiny.cc/dNRqn #

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Why is it when I forget to bring my earphones to DMACC, everyone nearby has to see how loud they can get?

bheansidhe met "Joe Sixpack" today.    I'll let her tell you about it:  bheansidhe.livejournal.com/470218.html

Hee.

Many thanks to everyone who's posted sympathies and thoughts for our losing Bada, here, on ramtops' LJ, on the the cats' blog, on my Facebook, on IRC, and in real life.

I'm not having what you could call the happiest of birthdays today, but you've all helped as much as any help other than the passing of time can do. Life (and its inevitable end) will continue, but can we please not lose any more of our tribe quite yet, please?

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I've seen this reported in a few places: Iceland, one of the most prosperous nations in the world, is in full financial collapse.

I saw the Naomi Wolf video that has been floating around.   She thinks that the $700 billion bailout was essentially a coup that gives the President his own Treasury, and that moving a brigade to the US for the first time for the purposes of "crowd control" is meant to put teeth into the threat of martial law.   She has been talking about the US being on the road to fascism for a while.   All of the things she says are certainly alarming; you can find the video of her, and the one of Rep. Sherman where he mentions that members of Congress were threatened with martial law if they didn't pass the bill, on YouTube.   I can see why she thinks what she does, however...

I think it's not as bad as all that quite yet.    I think that the bailout was something of an attempted coup, in that the original version gave broad unprecedented powers to the Secretary of the Treasury with no oversight.   The new version isn't all that much better, frankly, and I wish they hadn't passed it, but at least it's not quite as egregious.   I also think that if things had turned out a little differently, she might be right and the next move would be to declare a national emergency and "delay" the election, etc.   I do not think that will happen.   Not because I don't think their ultimate goal isn't a fascist United States, but because at this point it's a risky strategy. 

People hate Bush a lot right now.   And they are stirred up.   There was an overwhelming and unprecedented response to the bailout bill, people are jumpy and keeping a close eye on what is happening.   A declaration of martial law would produce a huge backlash...one that could not be controlled.   There is simply not enough centralized force to deal with that, especially when the local police and other government forces "on the ground" could not be relied upon to be on their side.   Furthermore, there's a lot of political will backing Obama up, lots of people engaged and invested.  That also means resistance beyond their ability to control or quell.

Besides, and this is the most telling, why would they take a risky strategy which might fail, when they can simply take other strategies which might take a little longer but will lead to success?

Scenario 1:     They manage to confuse or bamboozle enough people, or hack enough Diebold machines, so that McCain wins.  They tighten their grip.   They get President Palin,  sooner or later....either because McCain dies, or because they run her after his term.   If they work it right, they could keep her in office for a decade....a decade in which they will have continued the dismantling of our freedoms and government, and in which a new generation will reach adulthood who don't remember a time in which things weren't as they are now.

Scenario 2:   Obama wins, but since they just drained vast amounts of money out of the Treasury to dubious ends, and already had a lot of money and power, a huge political machine and influence over the media, it won't be that hard for them to block or scuttle or weaken practically anything he tries to do.   Plus the new President will inherit a huge mess.   All they have to do is fuck everything up as much as possible, and then after four years people will vote for whomever they put forward.   They can then continue their previous methods of whittling away at the Constitution bit by bit, with the added bonus that their opposition will be in disarray and won't put up much of a fight.

I actually think that Scenario 2 is better for them, if their long-term goal is a fascist dictatorship.   They have to discredit their opposition a lot more than they have been able to thus far.   In any case (to quote Bujold) an effective strategy is one in which every outcome leads to success.

So what do we do?   When the election is over, it isn't over.   We can't go back to sleep.   If McCain wins, the same factors that would work against a President Obama will work against him, and could provide an opportunity to regain ground.  If Obama wins, as seems likely, it's just the beginning.   It will be a window of opportunity, and serious changes need to happen while that window is open.

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Very funny -- possibly offensive (I'd rate it PG-13)

This guy, Thomas Frank, wrote a book about something I've said for a while, which is that if you vote for people who run on the premise that government itself is inherently bad, what you get is worse government.     The FEMA fuck-up in 2005 and the current financial disaster are both inevitable results of a failed philosophy of government.

The Wrecking Crew 

"Casting back to the early days of the conservative revolution, Frank describes the rise of a ruling coalition dedicated to dismantling government. But rather than cutting down the big government they claim to hate, conservatives have simply sold it off, deregulating some industries, defunding others, but always turning public policy into a private-sector bidding war. Washington itself has been remade into a golden landscape of super-wealthy suburbs and gleaming lobbyist headquarters—the wages of government-by-entrepreneurship practiced so outrageously by figures such as Jack Abramoff.

It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state."

Point number one:     The anti-big-government guys have been in charge for thirty years now.   Government is not notably smaller.   It's actually much bigger and more expensive, while delivering far less to actual people.

Point number two:    They don't believe in getting the government out of your business, either.   Same-sex marriage and abortion are not about "values," at least not in the way they frame it.   In both cases, the Republicans want to take away private decisions from the hands of private persons and forbid them with legislation. 

Point number three:    The whole laissez-faire, trickle-down, Free Market Fixes Everything model patently doesn't work.   It didn't work a hundred years ago and it's spectacularly not working now.   Furthermore, the people espousing it don't actually believe in a free market.  They believe in a market rigged in their favor, and a government whose main function is to keep the public stalled and tied up as their cash cow.  That, by the way, is fascism.  


It's not true that the Democrats are "just as bad."    Some of them are on the take; that's inevitable, when the people with the money are running things; they hedge their bets.   But, as Frank puts it, "One of the many problems with the media is they've given in to a logical fallacy -- false mirroring, the idea that what one party does, the other party also automatically does to exactly the same extent. It's factually not true. And that's not to let Democrats off the hook for anything, but the two parties are very different animals...And it's not just the parties -- the way conservatives behave and liberals behave are two different things."

(from here www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/10/06/thomas.frank/)
 

At first I divided the roles thusly:

Fast: Striker
Tough: Defender
Smart: Controller
Dedicated: Leader

Strong: Defender/Striker
Charismatic: Controller/Leader

The strong hero was equivalent to the fighter in D&D. The problem was guns. Yeah, a greatsword could deal comparable damage to a handgun (and a Str bonus on top of that), but the handgun had superior range and could nail anyone with a greatsword several times before that person could get into melee, ignoring cover.

So I'm starting to think that Strong should be the pure Striker, and Fast should be the Defender/Striker hybrid. I mean, cops have guns, and they're supposed to be our "defenders".

Also adding to defenses. I could do the easy thing and just add +2 to the defense that the leading attribute goes to. (Strong and Tough get a +2 Fort bonus, Fast and Smart get +2 Ref, and Dedicated and Charismatic get +2 Will). On the other hand, I could go and extend the bonuses from d20Modern (Strong and Tough still get +2 Fort, Fast still gets Ref, but Smart gets +2 Will, Dedicated gets +1 Fort/+1 Will, and Charismatic gets +1 Ref/+1 Will)

Poll #1273719 Better, Faster, Stronger
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

How should the roles be divided between the two classes?

How about the Defense bonuses by class?

Because unlike some people, LJ wasn't the first thing on my mind Saturday morning when the apartment building I was in caught on fire. Fortunately for me, it wasn't my apartment building. I was staying at Ian's.
We all got out safely and so far it seems like the smoke smell will come out of all of their clothes. The only problem with their place now is that it reeks (from what I've been told, I'm not going back until it's been cleaned...). I've had a migraine for the past two days, presumably from the toxic fumes.

In other news, I got a 98 on my first law school test. We can go get the test today in the school office, so I'll be headed out in a few minutes to see what I missed two points on.

Good news, I got my GRE Test Results back.

Bad news, the written was 3.0/6, and I only managed 8% over.

Actuary makes a leap in the "Professor/Actuary" battle for my soul.

I've got an 800/800 in quantitative, but I don't know how far that'd get me.

If John McCain had publically used the n-word as extensively as he has used the slur "gook" over the last several decades, he would have been disqualified as a presidential candidate immediately (from debunkingwhite):

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Jim Cramer's latest advice to stock market investors: take as much money out of the stock market as you think you would need to live on for five years if you became unemployed today (and i guess put it under your mattress) (from the_recession):

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And, saving the most cheerful for last: an argument by Naomi Wolf that there was a coup in the United States on October 1, the day a military brigade was deployed on US soil for law enforcement (just in time for the election!) This is ostensibly so there will be a unit on-hand in case of some disaster like Katrina, but hurricane season is almost over, why do it now? (from a locked post):

( Read more... )

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On this day, Daniel M. Laenker spewed forth:

• 01:54 Just saw "Blindness". Oh my God. #
• 15:26 Transportation policy-related election macro lulz: tiny.cc/QnUeT #

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