Our tribal natures combined with our newfound ability to occupy the entire planet has led to some fascinating but ultimately dangerous dynamics. Now if we can just get past the current age without blowing the whole thing up. Or (worse yet) ceding control to people who think that blowing the whole thing up is a GOOD thing!

I would have seen Che's post before sending my last (over-simplistic), and would have deleted unsent. Sorry.
Probably genetic.
Life on the Internets,
Ginsberg

The point is, without a comprehensive ideological and organizational framework within which to struggle against these massive forces of reversion, we will be dragged back into the darkness.

I'm not far enough along in Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, yet, to know for sure, but I think he may be trying to suggest such a framework. Have you already read his book, or are you planning to?

It would be great to have a discussion of it here, on one of these never-ending threads, while we're waiting for Glenn to post something new. Better yet, maybe he'll adopt the "open thread" method for giving us somewhere to go in between times.

Just now returning to the discussion.

bucky1 wrote: "It is as if they are afraid --- they can attack others, but not put forth anything themselves."

That's interesting. I wonder if you could say more about that. I'm not sure where you got that impression; as others have noted, there have been plenty of contributors here who have made proposals and espoused positions. Your comment also suggests that the reason you do not seem to find what you seek here is fear, yet I have seen no evidence for that.

You also stated that perhaps contributors are waiting for Glenn to endorse a candidate ("and how sad is that?" you followed), implying that the posters here have no volition of their own, and are merely awaiting word to "come down from the mountain," as it were. Are you suggesting, in fact, that the contributors here are lacking in opinions of their own?

It may be that people simply don't want to share such information as you have wished for, or that some of the individuals are private people, or are here to discuss other concerns, or that it's none of your business (voting, in particular, is a protected privacy. It used to be, at any rate). To presume it's fear (or only fear) strikes me as speculative at best. To presume posters have no decision-making ability of their own just because they don't all stumble over each other in an effort to be first to inform you of their allegiances strikes me as condescending.

The larger point, though, is that contributors here have been supporting candidates, researching policy, highlighting successes, and cheering positions for a long time - certainly as long as I've been visiting Unclaimed Territory, since before Glenn moved to Salon.

As an aside, just want to extend end-of-the-week greetings to the NSA agents assigned to monitor Salon: have a good weekend! Enjoy the nice weather and try and get outside from the surveillance room if you can!

No kings,

Robert

There is an intriguing line in an article about Saudi Prince Bandar in today's FINANCIAL TIMES. It says that that Bandar may have failed to communicate the extent of King Abdullah's anger at Washington for its failure in Iraq.

Excuse me? What, precisely, gives a Saudi king the right to be "angry" at our military failure? Anyone care to speculate? (Disclosure: I've been speculating about precisely this all along, as I have long believed that our military is essentially functioning as mercenaries for the Saudis in Iraq. The other oil producers in the region were scared witless of Saddam, and for good reason.)

I know I'm way behind on this discussion of metaphor and logical though progression, but there's no new threads and my work is crying to be postponed.

Is this not sort of a "nature of the universe" question, if I'm understanding it correctly? Physicists keep smashing matter to discover ever-smaller particles, while astronomers seek a wider vision of the shape and age and nature of the universe in its entirety. They're looking for the same things from the top and the bottom, or maybe different angles or even dimensions.

You can apply the same "essentialness" vs. "wholeness" to almost anything: mathematics is poetry (the discrete as opposed or related to the connected).

When it comes to language, this is the essence of Socratic dialogue -- the more specifically you try to define something, the more indefinable it becomes. And the harder you try, the more you see that a word/concept is only definable by the speaker's and listeners' ideas of what it is not, or what it is opposed to. A political discussion where there are ten different views of what "liberal" and "conservative" mean is bound to go not-much-anywhere until the interlocutors can agree on basic assumptions about the words themselves.

If you haven't read Proust yet, I vote for it being more of a tea-and-fire type of book than summer and lemonade.

Well, bugger. That should be "effervescence."

... Atlas Shrugged...

Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, was published in 1957. Due to the success of The Fountainhead, the initial printing was 100,000 copies,[22] and the book went on to become an international bestseller. (The frequent claim[23] that Atlas Shrugged was later found to be the "second most influential book in America, after The Bible,"[24] may be an exaggeration of the findings of one 1991 survey; however, it has been cited in numerous interviews as the book that most influenced the subject.)

The Holey Babble and "Atlas Shrugged". Two religions, based on two works of fiction.

I agree that libertarianism/Libertarianism/"Libertarianism" ends up side-tracking waaaaayyyyy too many serious discussions. Like Godwin's Laws, many a time once a libertarian gets going in a thread about "political theory", the thread is dead. So I have assiduously avoided essentially all such "conversations" for the last fifteen years. While I may agree with libertarians on many specific issues (but certainly not all), I find the theoretical underpinnings (which the Randers cling to like religion) to be woefully shoddy and wholly unnecessary, and the libertarians in general waaayyyy too dogmatic. We can have libertarian/liberal views without needing more than a curt "because liberty is a good thing" to back it up. Anything more is window dressing ... or salad dressing ... or cross dressing ... or worse.

Cheers,