In These Times

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• • 06 Oct 09
  • 11:57 pm

  This article nicely makes its own contributions to our inability to separate fact from PR, an outgrowth, I think, of the poor factual content of too much political discourse. For example, like much of the press, the author oversimplifies the position of those with whom he disagrees: "Tea Party protestors vehemently deny that patients will be given a choice of insurance provider under universal healthcare proposals that statutorily preserve said choice": Tea Party protestors are not denying what is in the current spate of densely worded bills making their way through the system (since it is unknown what the final law …

  Posted to Mad Men 2.0

• • 07 Oct 09
  • 8:40 pm

  To Robert Meyers, point taken about my "elimination of choice" remark: I fell into the sloppiness of conflating health care with health insurance, although I am not sure "single-payer" means what you say it does. "Public option," I would agree, could mean multiple sources of insurance, but to use "single-payer" to designate a system in which there are multiple payers to health-care providers is to further confuse the discussion. I guess it is a legitimate use of the phrase to say that the single government payer funnels money to multiple insurance entities (profit or non-profit), who then provide coverage for patients …

  Posted to Mad Men 2.0

• • 07 Oct 09
  • 9:17 pm

  One more point: the capacity for choice under the public option should not be measured only against the current system. There are proposals afoot to increase individual options for securing health-care coverage, but single-payer, of any form, does not seem like one of them.

  Posted to Mad Men 2.0

• • 21 Jun 08
  • 11:02 pm

  Wow, Zizek is willing to make explicit the Communism (in the historic sense of a totalitarian system of social, political and cultural control) that is implicit in his argument. He seems to think that bandying about the sort of abstract buzzword-infested bloviation that passes for analysis in the groves of academe while ignoring the details of history is sufficient to develop some original thought. But, really, his analysis of the legacy of '68 reflects the same failed categories that informed the New Left of '68. And although he complains that the French suburban riots were devoid of vision, what vision is …

  Posted to The Ambiguous Legacy of ‘68

• • 03 Jul 08
  • 1:53 am

  I can agree with Kenbrociner that the Democrats are not Socialist, but I think we can all agree the party's full spectrum is left of center, and that of the two major parties, the Democratic Party contains the higher percentage of genuine socialists among its voters, so if we substitute "leftish" ("leftist" being a little loaded) for scorps "Socialist," his argument still stands and strikes me as historically accurate: Americans, and especially American working class members, don't vote for those they consider "leftish." And Obama's rush to the right, toward the center (at an unprecedented speed, in my perception) rather reinforces …

  Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change