You would think a company like Google would understand something about naming. It is after all the choice of the name of a product or service which makes it possible to talk about and even more importantly to find in a search engine. Instead they use stupidly generic names which mean that many of their excellent services never get known outside the narrow world of early adopters. The only ones that ever really prosper are the ones with distinct names. Eg. YouTube, Gmail etc.
Google+ was doomed from the start to never leave its niche by the choice of its name. Hangouts were destined to a middling fate by a combination of its awful ui and the inability (unlike Skype or Google) use its name as a verb.
Over 1,300 people died in the sarin gas attacks in Syria in 2013. An attack that almost gave the US govt the pretext to topple the Assad regime. At the time I thought the story was highly suspicious (i.e. why gas your own people while knowing the effect on world public opinion? Why empower the people who want to overthrow you?).
Then in 2014, Seymour Hersh published an investigative article that seemed to point the finger at Turkish government operatives. Now the Turkish opposition is presenting evidence that this was indeed the case. Given what we know now, will the Obama regime lead a military invasion of Turkey in order to bring these genocidal killers to justice?
Obnoxious Australian election strategist, Lynton Crosby, may have been behind Harper’s divisive anti-Muslim anti-niqab messaging. Seems that this kind of blatant pandering while initially successful, helped fortify anti-Harper sentiments and contributed to sweeping him from office. Yet another demonstration that Abbott-style politics is bad politics.
FTA: ‘Richard Nixon brokered the deal with Dixiecrat leader Strom Thurmond at the ’68 convention in Miami, wherein states of the old slave-holding Confederacy would join the Party of Lincoln. It took two election cycles to convert the “Solid South,” but Nixon and GOP apparatchiks made it clear with private assurances that Republicans would discreetly retire their historic commitment to civil rights.’
The country club wing of the GOP needed some way to get people to vote against their own economic self-interests, so they turned first to Southern segregationists and later to evangelical Moral Majority types.
FTA: ‘So what caused the current rebellion in the GOP ranks? It finally dawned on loyal foot soldiers in the odd-couple coalition that they were being taken for suckers. Their causes always seemed to get the short end of the stick.’
The moneyed establishment wants enough progress on social issues to keep the hardliners complacent and, more importantly, giving more to their campaigns. For example, if Roe v. Wade was overturned and abortion outlawed, would social conservatives reward the GOP with increased donations? No, not unless there was some other issue with which to rile them up. Look at how they turned to blocking same-sex marriage when the abortion tank started running dry.
Even at it’s most ideological and millennial, the left helped to build something, the modern welfare state. They may have been aiming for a socialist transformation of society but what they got was strong democratic institutions, a mixed economy of public and private sectors, much better access to medical care and education and a fairer distribution of the nation’s wealth. This they did through an epic struggle with conservatives in every nation’s parliament and while many radicals did not (and still do not) recognise the legitimacy of “bourgeoise” democracy, most preferred the progress that resulted to what things had been like prior.
Social democracy has always been a compromise position, an engineered solution and philosophically unloved. Yet it has been immensely productive in raising, educating and caring for generations of working class people; people who in previous times had always suffered from deprivation. Social democracy certainly did not mean a utopia but it did still mean something practical, a doubling of real incomes, greater representation and a stake in the system.
Today the “conservatives” effectively are on the left of politics and most of what they stand for is the preservation of egalitarian institutions, of universal rights and even protecting democracy. With the exception of extending rights, the political programme of the left has been largely quiescent. Meanwhile millennial radicalism has been transferred to the political right. Now it is the right that is doing all the tussling. This historic interaction of right wing insurrectionary forces with the status quo however has been much less productive and economically the only real beneficiaries have been the very wealthy. In the social sphere it has only tried to roll back and curtail rights but even here, they have far from successful.
There are echoes of the wild enthusiasm and ultimately the collapse of the left (in the 1980s) evident in the chaos of the modern right, most specifically in Republican party but there are stark differences as well. The modern conservative movement and its political programme of low taxing, deregulation and privatisation was forged in the heady days of the 1970s while the left was still ascendant. It also took on some of the left’s utopianism and organisational techniques (and perfected them). What they produced was an insurrection of anti-democratic, anti-government, anti-rational zealots who are violently opposed to the status quo in front of them and yet have no real programme except it’s destruction and a belief in the transformation of human nature through faith. The dialectic between the revolutionary right and the status quo left has been far less fruitful and productive than the old dialectic but I believe that it’s best days are now behind it. A new consensus is in the works and another historic compromise will emerge. Meanwhile this movement of contradictions and Mad Max dystopia will splutter along and continue to eat its own.
This article by David Brooks, normally a frustratingly apologetic writer, clearly lays out the state of things.
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