deathtokoalas

what he said ending about 24:00 was that he's trying to undo the divide and conquer of the ruling class in favour of building a class consciousness.

i consider glenn a right libertarian with leftist characteristics. and, this will come out over and over again when you prod him - he'll use lefty sort of language, but always ends up as a market libertarian in the end. it's maybe something akin to a moderate proudhonianism.

but he's right to point out that he sees himself as post-ideology, and that he's not going to hold himself to any particular theoretical framework.

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deathtokoalas

i don't know anything about the trans person being referenced, but, as a trans person, i think it would be disingenuous to suggest there was anything disrespectful in this particular exchange. i get misgendered  all of the time, and it's generally not difficult to figure out whether it's being done with malice or not. conversely, you can often hear the dripping sarcasm underlying what i would consider to be a correct gendering. i'm going to run into a lot of pushback when is say this, but it really is all about context. on top of that, i would even refer to myself as a male in the timeframe that existed before i went on hormones, so referring to this person using female pronouns when discussing her existence as a female is not just fine but technically correct, imo. for all of these reasons, the existing social convention is to ask rather than to make assumptions. and, we're going to react on a spectrum that reflects our personalities - personally, unless i think you're intentionally doing it to get under my skin and piss me off, i'm likely to ignore it as inconsequential. because i don't give a fuck what you think, anyways...

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deathtokoalas

i just want to put the chomsky thing into that little extra context though, because chomsky was, of course, at one time known for advancing the exact opposite argument - that we have a one-party system of corporate domination and it doesn't matter who wins. i'm not sure exactly when he switched that argument, but it seems to have been at some point during the (second) bush administration, and he cites some study that is a literature review (you can look it up) to back up the point. so, we're actually in the awkward position of citing chomsky for both sides of this debate. i'm going to actually flip the argument over on him and suggest that his study is dated. maybe there was some difference in the 80s and even the 90s, but there doesn't seem to even be a small difference anymore. and, it's even worth wondering if jill stein was right when she suggested that clinton might have even been worse than trump on a number of things, even as she might have been better on others. either way, it might be useful to ask for an update on that study whenever you see it cited.

al

Chomsky did that Mondale and Dukakis also. According to Arron Matte.

deathtokoalas

this is a direct quote from chomsky in 1988, and you can see that he doesn't think it matters much:

Sometimes. I tend to vote more at lower levels: school councils and so on. The reason is that there, you find some real choices. Quite often, it's going to make a difference to the schools whether X or Y gets in. As one goes up the ladder I tend, by and large, to vote less. At the presidential level, things rarely matter much. Sometimes I do vote in presidential elections - albeit holding my nose. For example, I think voting for Reagan made things somewhat worse than voting for, say, Carter or Mondale. Voting for Bush makes things slightly worse than voting for Dukakis.

These decisions are often extremely difficult to make. To tell you the truth, the first time I ever voted in a presidential election was 1964, and then I voted against Goldwater, because I thought a vote for Goldwater would mean a vote for escalating the war in Vietnam. I learned later that while the election was going on, Lyndon Johnson was sending emissaries to his friends like Lester Pearson, explaining to them how he was going to escalate the war in Vietnam in precisely the way he was denouncing Goldwater for talking about doing. Pearson approved, incidentally. He told Johnson he shouldn't use nuclear weapons; conventional bombing would suffice. That's the sort of thing you get the Nobel Peace Prize for.

In 1968, I just couldn't figure it out. I mean, the marginal difference between Nixon and Humphrey - I couldn't make a decision. The major issue, on which virtually everything else turned, was terminating the war in Indochina. My own guess was that Nixon would probably do it a bit faster than Humphrey, which in retrospect is probably correct. But I couldn't make a choice, so I didn't vote. And so it goes.

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and, you can find myriad quotes from him where he describes the parties as interchangeable.

so, perhaps his thinking only evolved slightly from the 70s to the 00s, but it wasn't until kerry that he started actively backing democrats, using this lesser evils argument and citing this study that you can look up yourself.

i guess maybe his intuition that the democrats were a little bit better was always there, but he didn't actively make the point until he was armed with that study to do it with. and, if you pushed him in the 70s or 80s or 90s, he would have always ultimately pointed out that the differences are negligible.