Blog of the Union

by Matt Stoller, Mon Jan 30, 2006 at 05:59:01 PM EST

This is my BOTU.

The State of the Union is tragic. We debate the merits of torture. We debate the merits of illegal wiretapping. We debate whether we have a king or a President. Meanwhile, the temperature rises, pandemics get ready to lash out, and the intellectual nightmare of our failed leadership is coming closer to reality as we eat through our credit and our oil stocks.

No, the State of our Union is not good. And it is worsened by the river of apathy that overflows among all of us. But we can get through it, and rebuild the moral prosperity that undergirds who we are. That is our purpose, and that has always been our purpose.

What's your Blog of the Union?

Tags: Blogosphere, sotu (all tags)

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Re: Blog of the Union

My Blog of the Union is that this year's SOTU is one of the most historically-significant: it will highlight the dawning of the American authoritarian state, following hard upon the death of our "democratic experiment."

Like it or not, it's a new country now, a land where one leader will have absolute, unchecked power over each citizen's life and freedom. The fact that said leader may change every four to eight years, and may even be a member of the Democratic party on occasion, does not lessen the magnitude of the sea-change we've gone through.

The fact that recent polls have shown a majority of the public is in favor of the acts of this administration (from warrentless surveillance to Alito) is merely the icing on the cake. Americans have become frightened bunnies, ready to embrace anyone who will promise them protection, n matter the cost to their liberty. Although I'm far from a fan of any of the Star Wars films, I cannot help but recall the line from the most recent episode, which went something like "this is the way freedom dies -- to thunderous applause."

by JDWalley 2006-01-30 07:04PM | 0 recs

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river of apathy? moral prosperity?

I'm with you that the state of our union is not good. as a matter of fact i think we are in the shitter... but, river of apathy? I'm not sure where you are going with this? I strongly suspect that you don't think of yourself as apathetic, but see others who are not with you in your particular brand of non-apathy as apathetic. This is the same problem we talked about with Tom Franks book and Kansas. By atributing the actions (or in this case non-actions) by others to apathy in this case there is an implicit blame placed on them that somehow "IF ONLY THEY SAW THINGS MY WAY" we would all be better off. So no, in my view it is not that others are apathetic, it is that others are apathetic to the fashion in which you (and by extension me) are telling the story of what is happening to our country.

To take a semi-non-political story here for a second, lets look at avian flu and your well known fear on this subject... You are right. others do not share your fear. but why? is it because they are apathetic? or do you read their lack of fear as apathy, when in fact it is a perfectly reasonable response on behalf of a set of rational individuals who are working from a fairly well ordered world view with a reasonable set of facts.

That is to say, it makes sense that they aren't worried about the bird flu... So, IF you believe that they should be worried about the bird flu, the answer, i think, is not to ascribe 'apathy' to their response, but rather to think about what are the underlying pieces of knowledge which these so-called apathetic folks have that is making them rationally behave in the way they are behaving.

By working to alter these underlying facts we can work to change the dynamic which leads to what you perceive as apathy and i perceive as simply rational beliefs that are counter to mine based on a different underlying preference function and different set of base facts. While it is hard for me to change people's preference functions (and man would life be boring if we all had the same preference functions), we can work to change the underlying set of facts under which we all operate.

Now this isn't to say that I am in the "if everyone just knew what i knew" camp. I prefer to think of it somewhere along the line of: we have no hope of winning if our central argument is that there is something wrong (apathy or other) with those who disagree with us, or don't support us fully.

More on this later and as for your line on moral prosperity, i just don't really get it...

by Marc Laitin 2006-01-31 03:48AM | 0 recs

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Re: Blog of the Union

here's mine:

larger version:
http://www.politicalswitchboard.invision zone.com/blog/images/stateoftheunion.jpg

by goplies 2006-01-31 04:40AM | 0 recs

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Re: Blog of the Union

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