ObamaBits
As a change from the relentless, pounding "Illuminaughty! Israel! Marxists! Oh My!" Drumbeat of Doom, I offer up this smorgasbord of links and clips suggesting that instead of a swamp of complaint, we are actually living in an adventure of possibility since June 3, 2008.
This site delves into Obama’s chart (now with “clean” info because his birth certificate from Honolulu was found and scanned).
http://raginguniverse.blogspot.com/2008/05/obamination.html
The 21st Century and the First Global Representative
There's a lot going on -- many facets to this stunning political event. This odd man, Barack Obama, seemed to materialize out of nowhere representing a unique mix of race, religion, and ethnicity, come to represent the new cyber-connected global community. The idea that a guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama, a guy with deeper colored skin than what is normally placed on the skeleton of the leader of the western world, could be the president of the United States is pretty much unbelievable. The joyous reaction worldwide is an indication that he really is a leader for all of us, not just this country. The first one, I feel, for the modern time.
It's a different world we live in now. Previously, humans fought one another on an earth that seemed to be abundant into eternity. But now the earth herself has become the adversary encouraging a planetary effort to think about cooperating and together saving our precious resources; working in tandem with natural cycles. Man against nature, or with, as it will have to be.
Obama's message of unity could be the symbol of what is required to solve our earth's problems now. The oil situation is certainly going to affect geo-political affairs as is water supply. His man-of-the-worldness is a symbol of the cross cultural exchange that has reached grand proportions. He's a good one to facilitate communication and understanding. He speaks a universal language. But he's the end result of a long series of events and is merely filling a slot. I speculate that his best accomplishment so far has been his role as agent in awakening the collective to it's need for active participation in government, while Pluto goes on to the advanced 4th quadrant and the end of the Age of Pisces.
I always wondered what I was doing here since I stubbornly refused to get online for years and years.
But it captured me.
I think the blogosphere has been part of a preparation as the Uranus-Neptune mutual reception forged new pathways in the universal mind through the use of the Internet. The community was created in the last years and then came the community organizer. We're ready.
Yeshe here! This is the first comment on Haloscan after that post. It is for critics who say, “But he hasn’t accomplished anything!”:
I live in Chicago so I'm well versed in IL politics. Obama took the issue of videotaping interrogations and was able to find people on the other side, convince them that such a "liberal" idea was really in the best interests of law and order. He listened, he respected, and he was able to enact a serious piece of progressive legislation. That's what he does -- he did it with the Lugar/Obama Non-Proliferation bill -- the only progressive piece of national security legislation to make it through Congress and get Bush's signature.
The last I heard a transportation union guy on the Ed Schultz radio program telling a similar story of getting transportation legislation through the IL Congress. You have no idea how contentious that is every single year. But Obama listened to the "other side", got to know guys like this union guy (who had enthusiastically supported Barack's opponent for the IL Senate), and marshalled the funding bill through. You really have no idea how difficult that is in IL. It was a remarkable achievement.
57andfemale
The interrogation bill was opposed by all the Republicans at first and from what I understand, it passed unanimously.
Obama finds shared values and forms coalitions. He has said publically that he disagrees with definitions of bipartisanship that have meant compromises which sell out policies and move people to the right.
sarakandel
Yeshe here! And this is the article she links to at the end of the comment –
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_theory_of_change_primary
And this is a clip from the end of that article, after the wonky political science stuff:
… Now for the cosmic explanation: What I find most interesting about Obama's approach to bipartisanship is how seriously he takes conservatism. As Michael Tomasky describes it in his review of The Audacity of Hope, "The chapters boil down to a pattern: here's what the right believes about subject X, and here's what the left believes; and while I basically side with the left, I think the right has a point or two that we should consider, and the left can sometimes get a little carried away." What I find fascinating about his language about unity and cross-partisanship is that it is not premised on finding Republicans who agree with him, but on taking in good faith the language and positions of actual conservatism -- people who don't agree with him. That's very different from the longed-for consensus of the Washington Post editorial page.
The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won't be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It's how you deal with people with intractable demands -- put ‘em on a committee. Then define the committee's mission your way.
Perhaps I'm making assumptions about the degree to which Obama is conscious that his pitch is a tactic of change. But his speeches show all the passion of Edwards or Clinton, his history is as a community organizer and aggressive reformer (I first heard his name 10 years ago because he was on the board of the Joyce Foundation in Chicago, which was the leading supporter of real campaign finance reform at the time), and he has shown extraordinary political skill in drawing Senator Clinton into a clumsy overreaction. If we understand Obama's approach as a means, and not the limit of what he understands about American politics, it has great promise as a theory of change, probably greater promise than either "work for it" or "demand it," although we'll need a large dose of hard work and an engaged social movement as well.
Yeshe here! This is from the site linked in the next comment, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_soft_art
…In short, Obama displayed the abilities of a practitioner of the "soft" combat arts. Eastern martial arts are divided into two broad groups: the "hard" arts such as karate and tae kwon do, which emphasize powerful attacks with hands and feet, and the "soft" arts such as judo and aikido, in which the practitioner concentrates on redirecting the opponent's energy to use against him. Soft techniques tend to be more subtle than hard ones, and require more time to achieve proficiency. In martial arts as in politics, even a sloppy kick or punch can still do damage, while turning an opponent's attack into a painful wrist lock requires a combination of speed and precision.
This analogy may be an imperfect one; Obama certainly knows how to attack, and Hillary Clinton, for one, showed that she too could turn defense into offense. But of all Obama's strengths, this may be the one that troubles Republicans the most. They have gotten used to skittish Democrats, ready to flinch every time the GOP raises a fist. Yet a martial artist schooled in the soft arts doesn't fear being attacked, he welcomes it. In his decisions, his rhetoric, and his attitude, Obama doesn't display fear. Republican attacks only reinforce his central argument, that he is indeed the candidate of change and hope.
Yeshe here! and now here is an excerpt from the comment thread that came with the blog I cross-posted down thread, [ http://www.groupnewsblog.net/2008/06/that-was-week-that-was-part-two.htm... ] titled “Street and Trenches.” It is an interesting theory indeed!
“I think that up until last Tuesday, Obama's goal wasn't to be president. Sure. That would be great and all that. But that was a secondary goal.
“What he wanted to do, was to change the way politics was done, win or lose. And on that he was successful. He wasn't afraid of losing, and that's why he won.
“Now it's a slightly different story, which may make things a bit tougher. As he has said, now there is no other option but to win.
“But at the end of the day, Barack Obama is a political MythBuster, creating a huge explosion just to see how it'll play out. His movement is the gunpowder, bringing people into being active and aware in their politics. That could play out any number of ways, good or even bad.
“I don't think you can take that out of him. That's just who the guy is, that's his roots, he gets people involved.
“But the big boom should be very interesting. But I remain convinced, that at least in the beginning Obama was in it more for the boom than thinking he could actually win. And you know something else?
“That makes him a very good candidate.
“Karmakin | 06.12.08 - 5:33 am | #”
Yeshe here, one last time! Finally, here is Obama speaking at a huuuuuuge church, on religion and diversity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg8lCLumByw
A moral psychologist takes on the same subject, noted on http://www.unfogged.com/ and the blogger lizardbreath comments at unfogged.com:
Dirty, Disrespectful Outsiders
POSTED BY LIZARDBREATH
ON 06.11.08
Bloggingheads had a segment the other day with Jonathan Haidt talking about his work as a moral psychologist. His big insight is that people experience moral intuitions along five axes: harm reduction, reciprocity and fairness, purity, respect for authority, and in-group loyalty. Of those five axes, highly educated upper-middle-class Westerners, and in that group liberals more than conservatives, tend to define only the first two axes, harm reduction and fairness, as really about morality, and think of the other three as being matters of personal preference or emotional reaction rather than right and wrong; in contrast, most people outside that fairly small class feel that all five axes are of comparable moral importance. In political matters, he argues that liberals are disadvantaged by speaking this impoverished language of morality: most people feel that in-group loyalty, purity, and respect for authority are matters of fundamental importance, and liberals don't give those concerns the weight they deserve - to create a more appealing message, liberals would need to talk more about those issues.
[ http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11740?in=00:11:24&out=00:13:06 ]
Descriptively, I can buy this as a characterization of liberal versus conservative morality, and agree that conservatives are more in tune with most people than liberals in this regard. But the advice to focus on the three neglected axes of morality, particularly in the US, is nutty and unworkable. Liberal morality doesn't focus on harm reduction and fairness arbitrarily, it focuses on them because they are the only bases for morality that function reasonably when you are trying to consider the claims of people outside of your own ingroup.
In principle, any two people can agree on what actions are fair or cause least harm, regardless of their affiliations. ("In principle" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, I admit.) But when you start talking about 'purity', you find that there's not just a conflict between people who think purity is important and those who don't, there's a conflict among any of the million possible standards for bodily purity: non-smoking vegetarians don't have common ground with Orthodox Jews despite the fact that they both have strong purity-based moral feelings about what they eat. The same thing with ingroup loyalty: the essence of ingroup loyalty is treating people inside your group better, or at least differently, than people outside it. Two people who have a strong belief in ingroup loyalty aren't going to be able to sympathize with each other on that basis unless they're members of the same ingroup. Same with respect for authority - it all depends on the identity of the authority to be respected.
And the US is very much not a homogeneous society for these purposes (very, very few countries are - maybe Samoa and similar, but nothing much bigger than that - but the US is one of the more heterogeneous societies out there). Any political program focusing on, or giving any real weight at all to, purity, respect for authority, and ingroup loyalty is going to have to select a favored ingroup, and disadvantage everyone else: not purity in the abstract, but purity by that group's standards; not loyalty generally, but loyalty to members of that group; not respect for authority generally, but respect for the leaders of that group. Taking this seriously, it's a horrific idea: if the favored group isn't liberal upper middle class New Yorkers, I'm going to hate it, and suffer from the effects; if is, most of the rest of the country will hate it and suffer.
Highly educated upper-middle-class liberals have strong values relating to the purity (vegetarianism! second-hand smoke! bottled water! organic food!), ingroup loyalty ("Keep Austin Weird"), and respect for authority (Al Gore is teh shit!) axes, just like everyone else. As a political program, though, we try (imperfectly) to recognize that we live in an incredibly pluralistic society, and where policies based on our values can't be justified by harm reduction and fairness, imposing those particular values on other groups is wrong. Impoverished my political morality may be, but I can't see any way that a 'richer' morality, based on all five axes, doesn't turn into xenophobia and oppression if you base a political program on it. And I'd really rather not participate in that, either from the underside or on top.