I’m with Ta-Nehisi Coates and against Digby on this:
The notion that “slut-shaming” and “nose-cutting” have the same deeper meaning–presumably a fear of women’s sexuality, though Digby doesn’t say this–is true as far as it takes you. Likewise the notion that black people should be slaves, the notion that they should be shipped back to Africa, that they should be segregated in communities, that they should not be allowed to intermarry, also have the same root cause–that blacks are unequal to whites. At varying points, Abraham Lincoln, John C. Calhoun, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses Grant held one or all of these views, and all probably died thinking blacks were unequal to whites. But that doesn’t make them interchangeable. Lincoln and Grant aren’t “less evil” versions of Calhoun.
That’s quite right. When assessing political movements it’s crucial to be attentive to both similarities and differences. The view that we should regulate carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce the odds of a climate catastrophe has some points in common with the eco-catastrophist views that inspired a guy to hold the Discovery Channel hostage yesterday, but for most purposes the differences outweigh the similarities. Similarly, all orthodox Muslims share some values with al-Qaeda but every liberal I know understands that in most contexts the argument that orthodox Muslims everywhere are only slightly different than Osama bin Laden is not a serious effort to explain the world. To simply note that right-wing American Christians share these exact same values too is not better.
So, yes, the Taliban is misogynistic and so are most religious traditionalists. And, yes, the Taliban is nationalistic and so are right-wing political parties in most democracies. And, yes, the Taliban is enthusiastic about war-fighting as a way to achieve policy aims and so is Bill Kristol. This is all true and somewhat important. But it’s also true that American progressives and American conservatives are peacefully coexisting in a functioning republic, whereas the Taliban is waging an extremely violent military campaign against its ideological antagonists. Even though that’s only a “difference of degree” between two strands of religiously inspired populist nationalism, it’s actually a lot more important than the “difference in kind” between secular cosmopolitan Americans and are religious nationalist antagonists.
from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/matthewyglesias/~3/_3dxCYvvfnA/
Two years ago, as I listened to the escalating rhetoric of hate in the international media, I became haunted by the thought that Christians, Muslims, and Jews are going to blow up the world. I was passionately engaged in AIDS-related…
from: http://blog.sojo.net/2010/09/02/hope-for-the-holy-land/
I’m 100 percent on board with Jon Chait’s argument that there’s no reason to think that abandoning the Affordable Care Act would have improved Democrats’ political standing heading into the midterms. Insofar as ACA is unpopular, that’s largely a consequence of the general decline in public esteem for the party currently overseeing a grinding recession. The specific subject of health care is, along with the environment, one of two topics on which Americans currently say they trust Democrats more than Republicans:
As Chait says, the more interesting idea is that perhaps they “should never have taken up health care in the first place, and used their time pushing some kind of economic stimulus issue.” I think assessing that depends really on what you mean by “the Democrats” and “should.” If it’s actually the case that by agreeing to not pursue the ACA in the 111th Congress, Barack Obama could have persuaded the legislative pivot points to embrace a much larger and more effective stimulus then I think that, yes, he should have done that. But I don’t see any plausible argument that this would have worked.
But here’s a more plausible tactical counterfactual. The administration decided, as a matter of political strategy, that it was not only crucial for the bill to “bend the cost curve” over the long-term and reduce the long-term deficit, but also to score as deficit-reducing within the 10-year CBO scoring window. Given that the law is largely structured such that its main components don’t even phase in until 2014, the 10-year score is basically irrelevant on the merits, it’s just a kind of political talking point. If the administration had not been committed to a strategy built in part around this talking point, then it strikes me as plausible that ACA could have been written so as to be a vehicle for substantial short-term stimulus, primarily by doing something with Medicaid funding. As best I can tell, however, nothing along these lines was seriously contemplated on either the congressional or presidential end. Instead, there was near-universal agreement on the dubious proposition that the deficit talking point was of critical value.
from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/matthewyglesias/~3/j85op8IxnRo/
