Mandos's blog

The process chicken and the policy egg

Mighty Corrente Building Manager Lambert brought something up in the comments to this post by bringiton that I thought deserved its own, entirely new thread. Maybe; it’s part of the “What To Do With The OFB” issue that I think is a fairly important matter.

Anyway, Lambert quoth:

How about they go fuck themselves?  Read more 

The casual poetry of a structural issue

It’s become a political cliché in this election season that Obama and his campaign have been largely about process issues (“politics, not policy”) and that there is a large segment of the Democratic Party that is surprisingly passionate about process issues and see in Obama a way to bring process issues to the fore. This attitude towards process issues stretches back to the Dean campaign. Whether this attitude is justified is another matter, but it’s becoming clear that it’s not an issue that is likely to win a general election, and that the Obama campaign’s focus on meta issues has been at the expense of issues that matter to another important voting bloc, and this might even cost him a nomination that for a time seemed to be practically his.  Read more 

Got inner turmoil?

skdadl at pogge reminds us that certain parties regularly get away with spinning their regular wrongitude into a larger, more noble narrative of rightness.  And that those who were right never get the credit for it.

Look: the point is that Iggy and company may have been wrong in the observable, normal universe—-what you or I might call "reality"—-but they were wrong in a noble, beautiful way.  The kind of wrongness to which they fell victim is the kind of wrongness that allows one to cover ones eyes with the back of one’s hand, stretch out the other hand, and sigh, "Ah, me!"   Read more