The cancer infecting the political Left

[pbrower2a]

(12-07-2020, 01:50 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Who said if you don't vote for me then your not black and then picked a running mate strictly on basis of their race and gender?

Which white person said the opposite? It certainly wasn't John McCain or Mitt Romney, who did run campaigns against Barack Obama. Neither called attention to Barack Obama being black. The 2008 and 2012 elections really were run on the merits of the opposing candidates, and nothing else. Barack Obama never attributed voting against him as racism. Never. 

I am white (in case that matters to you) and I had misgivings about Obama as a presidential nominee because as a black man he would be able to get away with far less as a politician -- and I don't mean corruption or despotic behavior.  America was in deep trouble, and it needed pervasive reforms to solve the mess that got America where it was -- the worst economic meltdown in nearly eighty years. I thought that America needed a fiery populist to unite poor whites with the middle class in a common effort to make America a more just and equable society. Obama was the worst candidate possible for winning over poor whites in the Mountain and Deep South, as the electoral map showed. 

But in general, outside the Great Plains states and the Mountain and Deep South, Obama won with Reagan-like margins where he won but lost by McGovern-like or Mondale-like margins in most places that he lost in 2008 and 2012. Democrats from the Clinton era were still Senators from Arkansas, Missouri, West Virginia, Florida, and Louisiana. Now there is only one Democratic Senator from any one of those states. The Republican Party in the South basically stands for the economic inequality of the Jim Crow Era without the ugly symbolism of racism. Most of the South has gone Prussian. That is an improvement over slavery, but that is still horribly flawed.  

Quote:Obama was a savvy con man and a privileged little dickhead who claimed that we were racists for knowing and understanding that about him.

A statement like that, so fundamentally false, says more about you than about your enemy. Remember well that every evil that the Nazis attributed to the Jews was absolutely true -- about themselves! The word for that in psychology is projection, attributing to others one's worst tendencies as a person. 

If one has command of the facts and can present them well, one is simply convincing. That is necessary in law. If I am overweight and my physician cannot convince me to change my eating habits and do more exercise (or perhaps go from a sedentary job to one that requires genuine toil) then I do not have a good physician. If I attend a church yet beat my wife after drunken debauches as I drink away my paycheck in a saloon and the preacher cannot convince me to change my ways then I need to find some other house of worship in which the preacher can tell me that -- maybe I am headed to Hell for such egregious sins as drunkenness and spouse abuse.   In some cases competent salesmanship and advertising depend upon honest and competent presentation of objective fact. Many people can't be snowed with unadulterated falsehood.  

Don't underestimate the value of salesmanship and advertising. Capitalism could not work without it. But know well: much else really is salesmanship. That includes teaching. What I learned about selling in a department store when such was the only work available to me in the early 1980's was good for teaching as a substitute. I was not teaching: I was selling.  I was selling the worthiness of learning to spell and to use proper grammar. I was selling the idea that drudgery in math work was worth the effort. I was selling the idea that history and civics are worth the effort. I was selling the idea that science solves problems. I was selling the value of learning as a necessity for a good life in America. 

Some black kid complained to me that I was asking him to act white because I insisted that he do his appointed tasks. I responded that there are plenty of white losers who don't take learning seriously and that they get the same results as black losers who don't take learning seriously. I told him that I wanted him to act.... like a more typical Chinese-American.

Barack Obama is a trained attorney, and by all accounts he has a superb legal mind. He went to Chicago where he thought that he could be a very good DA or judge... and I could imagine him as a nightmare for criminal defendants who might have gotten away with facing less competent legal minds. Barack Obama may be a liberal, but he is also one of those do-the-crime-and-do-the-time people. That is what I want in a prosecutor or judge for the simple reason that I have no empathy for criminal predators. 

The Chicago machine didn't want him around and got him into electoral politics. That solved one problem. Sure, he might have become a federal attorney or judge... and that would have made him a monster to gangsters and crooked pols... and other shysters. Obama learned early that criminality is a choice -- a bad choice even in the worst slums. Commuting twenty miles in each direction to a job as a fast-food worker or as a box-store clerk in the suburbs is a far better choice. 

I think I understand Barack Obama as well as anyone can. Most people find him easy to understand because he makes his points clearly and effectively. That is a necessity for a well-trained attorney, and something well honed in law school. He is certainly easier to understand than some lunatic or drug-addled loser, isn't he? 

Can I understand the arcane knowledge of law that he has? That takes legal training, neither of us possessing. Barack Obama is privileged only to the extent that he has earned it. It is like the violinist who seems to make playing the instrument look easy. Malcom Gladwell




yes, this fellow

explains that and much other high-level achievement as 10,000 hours of dedicated preparation starting in childhood. That includes Dominicans in American baseball. That includes classical musicians. That includes the typical PhD, attorney, or physician. That includes the Beatles, the slickest and most versatile of pop musicians ever. That includes singers and actors. That is about how long it takes to be a master at something like selling insurance effectively. Raw talent isn't enough. It doesn't take so long to be a raw laborer or clerk. Read his book Outliers some time. If I were a school principal I would push it. Barack Obama is definitely an outlier. 

As I recall, he said of violinists at the Berlin Conservatory of Music in a near-quote (with some of my conclusions)

'Violinists fit neatly into roughly three categories. Those who had done about 2000 hours of preparation typically ended up as violin teachers at Germany's equivalent of K-12 public education. At 8000 hours of preparation one gets the greatest violinists who play in small-city orchestras or in stage orchestras, or perhaps teach at a college level as at the Conservatory itself. 

Classical music is an inextricable part of the culture of the German-speaking world, and the German educational system pushes that heritage. People who have truly refined ears may not be the sorts who have the patience with which to teach beginning violinists. 8000? You are good, but not that good. 10,000? Welcome to the Berlin, Vienna, Cologne, Leipzig, or Munich Philharmonic, orchestras of Amsterdam or Rotterdam ... maybe London... or you are a soloist or a member of a great string quartet. But consider what it takes to have 10,000 hours of preparation playing the violin. That is a thousand hours of playing the violin, learning musical theory, taking lessons, hearing concerts every year from age eight. That is two hours a day including K-12 learning of orchestral play. Who gets to spend two hours a day at the dreary exercise of scales and dreadfully didactic exercises on a beginner violin? Maybe your mother plays for the Staatskapelle Dresden and knows how that goes.    

 
...if you want to know what your projection about Obama says:

Quote:Obama was a savvy con man and a privileged little dickhead who claimed that we were racists for knowing and understanding that about him.

then I could alter it as in a commonplace exercise in learning a foreign language (substitute words so that one has to change others to agree in number in the verb and agreement with pronouns and (in al Romance languages, German, and all Slavic languages gender)... changing the facts to fit is easier:

Donald Trump was a savvy con man and a privileged overweight dickhead who claimed that we were un-American intellectuals for knowing and understanding that about him. 

I saw his record as a businessman, and it doesn't impress me. Really-good entrepreneurs do not dabble; they go deep and specialize in one zone of activity. This is not John Davison Rockefeller II, Sebastian Kresge, A. P. Giannini, James Cash Penney, Roy Kroc, Sam Walton, T. Boone Pickens. Ross Perot, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Warren Buffett stayed clear of high technology because, even if it was potentially lucrative, he didn't understand it. Fools and gamblers invest in what they don't understand. John Rockefeller II didn't toy with banking or retailing. Roy Kroc didn't try to add gasoline pumps to his fast-food places.  Ross Perot didn't buy newspaper publishers. James Cash Penney didn't go into the grocery business. Jeff Bezos isn't in the financial industry. Wise people know their limits, and Donald Trump does not know his. 

Good people do not brag about grabbing people in their genital areas. Lyndon Baines Johnson may have been a savvy politician, but that he spoke of grabbing men (figuratively) by their "manhood" was an ugly metaphor that only a nasty person could use. Grab her by her (kitty-cats)? At least LBJ had a record of political achievements. Still, the Military-Industrial Complex grabbed LBJ figuratively by his manhood... and got us into the profitable, but discreditable, war in Vietnam. 

Good people do not cheat on their golf scores. I would admit that I am not good at it for reasons that have nothing to do with 10,000 hours of dedicated preparation (if you lack the talent you will give up long before you put in the needed 10,000 hours for mastery  of anything at the slick levels for distinguished achivement in our time). 

Politics may look easy -- but Arthur Rubinstein made playing the piano look easy, too. Abraham Lincoln made his speeches with mathematical precision, and only someone has adept as he would dare repeat the word "dead" so many times and the syllable "dead" in the word "dedicated" that he pounded into the Gettysburg Address. Churchill claimed that he didn't quite master Latin, but he certainly drew upon the finest rhetoric of ancient Roman politicians against the "Carthage" of his time. Only so masterful a rhetorician as FDR could tell us that "We have nothing to fear... but Fear itself!" at the time that Hitler and Stalin had fear as their most powerful tool of control. That is the 10,000 hours for you. 

Quote:Yes. You could build a wall or iron curtain and trap everyone within or behind like the Soviets did with Berlin or the Nazi's did with the German people before the Soviets took over after World War II. Barrack and his elitist friends and professional colleagues have a pretty good gig going for themselves these days. It's to bad they're going to find themselves stuck and being overwhelmed by the anger and resentment that they've been feeding, creating and building up among their own for generations.

Barack Obama is a superb speaker, and he is impeccably honest. There was a book out called Assholes, (yes, that is the title, and the title is clearly intended to offend, and it explained clearly that much of what is wrong with America is people whom one can call "anal sphincters" for their vile treatment of other people -- in creative activities, in entertainment, and in politics. The author mentioned George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump (this is before his dabbling in politics) extensively... and plenty of business people. I forget whether he mentioned Harvey Weinstein, but that man was a certifiable asshole. He said of Barack Obama that the notable thing about him is how little the word applies to him. He does not want such people around him. 

People around Barack Obama are very much in demand in American Big Business because integrity is a virtue in some settings. It prevents some serious problems. I'll take the scandal-free Obama administration, even with slight achievements (OK, that is because the opposition party was able to stymie him) over the sickening vileness of Donald Trump. Surely you saw my overlay map between Barack Obama and Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a conservative and a traditionalist, and Obama is a liberal and a modernist. The next effective conservative President (ruling out a despot of the type that Donald Trump wishes he were) will be a conservative version of Barack Obama. The American political pattern goes that way after a Crisis Era is over. Obama is much more a portent of such than a parody.