and I could summon legions of witnesses to attest to that. But enough about me.
> As for me, I think that Reed is making an expansive point, one that
> travels light years beyond the immediate question of what to think
> about 'Barry.'
>
> He's asking whether or not a coherent left -- coherently opposed to
> bloody excesses abroad and solidly embedded inequality at home --
> exists in the 21st century US. He answers that question with a
> decisive no.
>
>
>
> >> True.
>
> Reed brings us full circle, back to the early statements of Black
> Agenda Report's Glen Ford which began our on-list slap but no tickle
> fights. Despite all the back and forth yelling we've done for months
> about who hates who more and who's the worst person, Ford's statements
> -- which should've served as a pivot point for both pro and con
> statements -- were never so much about Obama as they were a challenge
> to the idea that a progressive movement is developing around, and
> because of the Senator.
>
>
>
> >> I haven't heard this idea much. What I recall is that BHO has helped
> to
>
> mobilize progressive sentiment, not incidentally constructing a
> formidable
>
> and new-type personal political organization, and not incidentally taking
>
> over the DP apparatus at least for now.
>
>
>
> >> It seems to me most of the talk here is that BHO is less bad than HRC
>
> and JMC, and evident support for him is a good thing that may signal
>
> better things to come.
>
>
>
> Recently, I've found myself less and less interested in debating
> 'Barry' this and 'Barry' that and much more intrigued by the idea that
> the left actually has no plan, other than getting elected and
> pressuring Democrats to distribute a few crumbs to the loudest
> irritants.
>
>
>
> >> True, in re: there is no coherent left to begin with.
>
> Nobody has figured out how to do it, some have certainly tried.
>
> Seems to me most of the flapping on LBO is the distinction between
>
> dwelling on the inadequacies of BHO in isolation from plausible
>
> alternatives, as opposed to trying to encourage Democratic electoral
>
> sentiment to look beyond DP pragmatism in terms of both content
>
> (program) and organization.
>
>
> Speaking with Doug in 2003, Zizek said:
>
>
> [Regarding the failure of European protests to prevent the invasion of
> Iraq]...when people complain, "But this was a weak resistance, now
> it's vanishing, now already Chirac is practically withdrawing," and so
> on, how Europe really showed its weakness. Oh, but I would say, are
> people aware how precisely by experiencing this as Europe's defeat,
> you at least set certain standards? You become aware in a negative way
> of what should have been done. My parallel here is with feminism. The
> first step of feminism is not, "Women should win." It's that you
> become aware of how defeated women are. You know, the first step
> towards liberation is, in a way, the awareness of defeat.
>
> [...]
>
>
> >>> Expecting Euro demos to stop a U.S. invasion is a pretty high bar
>
> for judgment on the viability of the (Euro) left.
>
>
>
> <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Zizek.html>
>
>
> It is the left's weakness which fascinates me now. Not in a morbid
> sense but in almost precisely the way Zizek meant: as a necessary
> first step towards genuine action.
>
> Reed, Ford, M. Kimberly and others are arguing that the *ideas* about
> the Obama campaign -- the Netroots and Daily Kos style of simulated
> empowerment -- have fooled people into thinking that they are not
> defeated. It's this lack of an appreciation of defeat which is the
> biggest problem.
>
>
>
>
>
> >>> As I've mentioned here before, Kos thinks he invented participatory
>
> democracy and is only beginning to figure out that it doesn't do what he
>
> thinks it can do. He should get some credit for bitching about BHO, but
>
> he's got a long way to go.
>
>
> About this, Reed writes:
>
>
> I remember Paul Wellstone saying already in the early '90s that they'd
> gotten into a horrible situation in Congress, where the Republicans
> would propose a really, really hideous bill, and the Dems would
> respond with a slightly less hideous one and mobilize feverishly
> around it. If it passed, they and all their interest-group allies
> would hold press conferences to celebrate the victory, when what had
> passed actually made things worse than they were before. That's also
> an element of the logic we've been trapped in for 30 years, and it's
> one reason that things have gotten progressively worse, and that the
> bar of liberal expectations has been progressively lowered. It's also
> one of the especially dangerous things about Obama, that he threatens
> to go beyond any of his Dem predecessors in redefining their
> all-too-familiar capitulation as the boundary of the politically
> thinkable, as the substance of "progressivism."
>
> [...]
>
> >>> This is pure speculation. There is no way to prove or disprove
> it.
>
>
>
> And so, the FISA bill the Senator supported is declared to be better
> than the purely Republican version but still, according to the ACLU,
> "Gives the president broad new powers to spy on innocent Americans'
> phone calls and emails – even when they have no connection to
> terrorism."
>
> The rest --
>
> <http://www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/35872res20080701.html>
>
>
> In the name of a 'compromise' which supposedly reflects progressive or
> liberal concerns, things actually get a little bit worse.
>
>
> Regarding this, Zizek writes:
>
>
> We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation":
> in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal
> consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing
> against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent"
> democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this
> populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way -
> in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has
> already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is
> just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true
> danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror":
> "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy
> will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical
> fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph:
> they will no longer be needed, since their message will be
> incorporated into the mainstream.
>
> [...]
>
> >> Yeah but the Kos left is still much opposed to the "decent left"
>
> in the sense of the Euston gang et al. Re BHO, see 'speculation'
>
> above.
>
> <http://www.lacan.com/iraq.htm>
>
> Here's my new fantasy: we stop talking about Sen. Obama and start
> thinking and talking about the complete disarray of left politics - a
> dangerous situation to be sure, because we're needed, at full our
> strength and highest level of alertness, to deal with problems such as
> climate change (which, by now, is at least as much a political issue
> as it is about methods of energy production and consumption).
>
>
>
>
>
>