Sigh.

[volemaster]

So it's the end of September in a year divisible by four.

Comments

[joriejc2]

I am significantly less depressed by Obama than I am by McCain, but the appointment of Biden as running mate was kind of pouring lemon juice on the wound. Also, I think it's important to qualify that wanting a non-veterinarian to be in charge of women's health affairs, to have money for HUD and other really really important government agencies, is not the same as wanting lots of taxes and big government. At least not to me. I mean, I could be wrong, but I dunno...I think what some people call fat I call absolutely essential.

[sciron666]

Oh, it's not that horrible. I mean, things could always be worse, right? You could have been bitten by a spider and then dragged back to its web.

[volemaster]

Fair point.

[doktorvox]

As you know, I am a huge fan of small to no government. I am also a huge fan of kicking stupid people who exploit others culturally and financially in the balls. The problems I see with so many libertarians today is that they are effectively blind to the privileges that allow them to conclude that society will somehow self-regulate.

Once we kill all the white people, all the stupid people, and eradicate money, then I'll vote libertarian.

Though for what it's worth Barr is a pretty okay guy. Ron Paul type libertarians are scary, mostly because they actively embrace ignorance and killing.

[snowspinner]

I have serious issues with Barr - I think he's by far the worst candidate the Libertarians have ever put up. He was a vehement social conservative while in Congress, and seems to have reversed course on all of that in order to step back into the spotlight as the Libertarian we are supposedly expected to believe he was all along. He was, in Congress, a major anti-drug figure, he voted for the Patriot Act and the Iraq War, he proposed banning practicing Wicca in the military, and was thoroughly pro-life. He's not a Libertarian by any meaningful measure

[not4profiteer]

Amen to your comments on anti-intellectualism. Though I wonder how much of the "climate" is based on actually public opinion and how much is based on perceived public opinion. Too bad ACTUAL public opinion is almost impossible to measure.

[snowspinner]

Well, I'd argue that public opinion exists in an intersubjective relationship with perceived public opinion (which is really just the public opinion about what the public opinion is). I think the more useful measurement than some sort of survey of public opinion here is one based on the power of particular ideologies. It's clear to me that anti-intellectualism is a powerful ideology at present. Whether its power is because it is widely held or held by a small group of important people, it is an ideology that dominates public discourse.

[not4profiteer]

Option three it could just be perceived as widely held by those in power. And even though those in power don't particularly agree with it they go along with it because that is what they think the public wants. Then it isn't really held widely in the public or even just by the few and powerful. That's how perceived public opinion really fucks things up. In Somalia there was polling evidence to support retaliation against Aideed; but the Clinton administration thought the public wanted us to get the hell out before something else went wrong. This perceived opinion weighed heavily on their decision making process.

[feras]

frankly i'm for the candidate that will allow capitalism to flourish and let big companies fail. This 700billion dollar bail out is socialist excess at its worst. F that.

[volemaster]

I largely agree. Frankly, we've benefited from the excesses that led us to this point... we probably deserve to suffer for it, too.

(And on a related note, I think that the regulators are largely responsible for the current problems due to the regulations that they imposed on the banking industry (in particular). Being forced to embrace pro-cyclical accounting standards (mark-to-market accounting, etc.) and being prohibited from building a fortress-like balance sheet (with adequate provisions for loan and lease losses that are built up during times of few losses in preparation for a period of greater stress and losses) while, at the same time, imposing capital requirements vs. assets that are so high that the force banks to move assets off-balance-sheet is more than half of the problem.)

[snowspinner]

I would have thought that investing large portions of the global financial market in securities that were backed by mortgages to people who obviously couldn't afford them was a larger problem.

Or, at least, certainly the problem that is more straightforwardly a bad idea 100% of the time.

[volemaster]

I think that's a largely overstate part of the problem, quite frankly... and also, to some degree, a symptom of the problem rather than its cause