Beto is seriously nah

[Sounder]

Beto has the support of both the smart money and the stupid money and that is hard to beat.

[Grizzly]

Well, colour me surprised, Cult of the Dead Cow, you say?! CDC ¡¡¡ Those dudes were the shit... I had no idea. But do we want him as ㄥƎpISƎɹd¿¿ mINISTER OF !ytiruceS

[RocketMan]

His extremely spontaneous and not at all marketing workshopped thing is to stand (and awkwardly crouch) on café counters, apparently...

https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/beto-oro ... rtops.html

[JackRiddler]

Beto has the support of both the smart money and the stupid money and that is hard to beat.

Let's wait and see how much of this $6 million dollar man's first-day haul turns out to have been variations on him and his wife and a few bestest friends funneling cash, possibly also from last year's Texas defeat fund, into the presidential self-promotion.

Also, if we revise that to smart people and stupid people, I have trouble seeing anything other than an already maxed-out appeal to either group.

I am seriously thinking that none of Beto, Biden, and Harris are going to cut it, and the Never Berners are eventually going to be looking elsewhere.

Snap judgements, the usual caveats apply.

[Elvis]

Beto opposes universal single payer healthcare. Next.

[Elvis]

Pretty good piece here:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wh ... e-believe/


fivethirtyeight has some good stuff, partly because they're all about data. Worth checking out.

[stickdog99]

My working assumption, of course, is corporate money coming through straw buyers as individual donations

No doubt.

The Beto phenomenon looks pretty brilliantly engineered so far. He's going to win.

Betomania

[JackRiddler]

.

Prediction: Beto's incapable of serving a function other than early stalking horse, a John the Baptist for the as-yet undetermined Player To Be Named Later. His function will be to distract the right-wing heat for a while, then to melt quickly.

Viewing the field for potential ABBs (Anybody But Bernie, which it is superfluous to say is also ABBOTG), and excluding the two governors on late-life benders who might have had a shot in the atmosphere of circa 1980, I had a hunch:

The Betomaniac, Prosecutor Harrisment, and Old Monster Buyed-In may become preludes to sweet young Mayor Booty Kick (actually pronounced Buddha Judge, which is even better) as the Jimmy Carter of 2020. Brainy, sophisticated and contemporary in his triangulation, with RFK-style rhetorical flourishes, he seems to believe what he says, including the bullshit position on Medicare for All and the ultra-bullshit on the Question of American Force.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a ... interview/

Also, he apparently groomed himself for the role when he signed up as a reservist and took an Afghanistan tour. Sorry, does that sound cynical? Don't tell me the son of the Gramsci scholar and Harvard man was not already thinking Presidential.

He seems to have not yet actually been corrupted afaik, but what do I know about politics in South Bend, Indiana? (I'm not checking that: Did I get the town right? #newyorksplaining) But he signals there is little chance he won't be forced to give in, should the right sponsors call with an offer he can't refuse. In Carter's case, that was the Trilateral Commission. (Remember: Carter won, before he lost.) In Buttigieg's case, or rather for anyone in 2019, one would expect the call would be from some group in Silicon Valley. Interestingly he was at Harvard with Zuckerberg, and then entry level at McKinsey, and he goes into tech politics in depth here, again quite intelligently:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/ ... igieg.html

Now who here wouldn't enjoy the following worked into a speech to the DNC?

You're a big James Joyce buff. Is running for president more like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake?

Definitely more like Ulysses than it is like Portrait. Finnegans Wake is dream speak. Ulysses is consciousness meeting reality. But here's why I think Ulysses is extremely relevant. People believe Ulysses is this complex, difficult, inscrutable text full of references. And it is a difficult text, but its subject matter couldn't be more democratic. It's about a guy going about his day for one day. That's the plot of Ulysses. And, to me, that's what makes it very touching. You're in this guy's head, and you're kind of seeing life through his eyes, and at the end through his wife's eyes.

I wonder if he ruminates on the words written thirty years ago by his recently deceased father?

From the detailed and concrete analysis of culture carried out in
the notebooks one discovers that it is impossible to blame solely reaction-
ary elements for the rise of fascism. More important, one also comes to
realize that the socialist and even specifically Marxist antagonists of the
dominant culture did not, indeed could not in many cases, offer a coher-
ent and persuasive alternative-i.e., they could not effectively articulate a
counter culture-because they themselves were lacking in rigor and un-
critically adopted methods and paradigms from the dominant culture. The
clearest evidence of this is found in the pseudo-scientific "sociologism,"
the unexamined positivism to which many notes attribute the debilitating
distortions that vulgarized Marxism and rendered its most widespread ver-
sions ineffectual.

For the Italian Marxism of Gramsci's era, substitute any current change politics approach. It would apply. I wonder if there is any way out of this conundrum?

The way to avoid making such blunders, the prison notebooks suggest, is
to remain true to the methods of criticism and philology. These methods,
as they are employed in the notebooks, also function simultaneously as a
weapon and a shield against all forms of dogmatism and mystification. The
theory and practice of philological criticism found in the notebooks consti-
tute in themselves a most important contribution to the elaboration of an
anti-dogmatic philosophy of praxis.

Now that's beautifully utopian.

All power to the Philologists!

Or is that: Free words for all?

Gramsci's Method
Author(s): Joseph A. Buttigieg
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 60-81
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/303565

.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

You'll have to pardon me for dumbing-down the flow here, especially after JRiddler's output, with a link to the NY Times. It is a useful endeavor as a frame of reference for how the cardboard cut-out 'liberals' think -- or rather, are conditioned to think -- however.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/opin ... -2020.html

A fawning presentation as a 'Bama 2.0, no less. An attempt at grooming.

WASHINGTON — The heavens part. The light shines down. The rise in the oceans begins to slow. The world is once more bathed in the mystical glow of a messiah. Our redemption from Donald Trump is at hand.

We have The One again, a New One — another lanky, bookish, handsome man with an attractive young family, a thin résumé, an exotic name, a hip affect, a rock star aura, an enticing smile, a liberal press corps ready to fluff his pillows and a frothing Fox News.

Let Elizabeth Warren knock herself out with policy proposals. Let Kamala Harris be the adult in the room. Let Bernie Sanders bellow away.

The magical man-boy, Beto O’Rourke, has come back from his 40 days in the desert — vlogging, contemplating, floating in and out of a funk — to share his gifts.

He has given us the blessed news: “Man, I’m just born to be in it.” He told Vanity Fair that his words at a Texas campaign stop when he was trying to unseat Ted Cruz were pulled out of him “by some greater force,” musing: “Everything that I said, I was, like, watching myself, being like, How am I saying this stuff? Where is this coming from.”

Annie Leibovitz advised Beto to wear a blue button-down shirt for her Vanity Fair cover shoot if he was going to run. And now we can hear, as Hillary Clinton noted sardonically about Barack Obama in 2008, “celestial choirs.”

Beto floats above the fray, staying vague on nettlesome issues. The 46-year-old offers the politics of feelings.

“I don’t have a team counting delegates,” he told Vanity Fair, adding, “It’s probably not the most professional thing you’ve ever heard about this, but I just feel it.”

Joe Kennedy built his family’s political myth on good hair, white teeth and glossy star quality. Why shouldn’t Beto?

After all, during his 2008 campaign, Obama merely went back to Chicago to see Malia perform in “The Odyssey.” Beto loved the epic so much, he thought about naming his son “Odysseus,” settling instead for “Ulysses.”

Wandering alone, as Jesus, Barack and Beto did, is part of the hero’s journey defined by Joseph Campbell. Beto loves Joseph Campbell and “Star Wars,” which was inspired by Campbell’s work.

The last One, about the same age when he jumped into national politics precociously aiming to usurp his elders, was also a uniter who went on an odyssey of self-discovery in New York while at Columbia.

The last One also sold a cult of personality, offered himself as a symbol of modernity, sparked Oprah’s interest and had a preoccupation with being cool.

Indeed, Obama told David Axelrod recently on “The Axe Files” that Beto reminded him of himself.

The One anointing the New One. Joe Biden, pushed aside by Obama in the last election, was understandably irritated.

Just as reporters once swooned when Obama made like Jay-Z and brushed imaginary dirt off his shoulder after a tough primary debate in Philly in 2008, reporters were entranced when O’Rourke air-drummed “Baba O’Riley” by the Who at a Whataburger drive-through after his debate with Cruz.

To many, Beto’s appeal is his persona as a quasi-rebellious ’90s suburban teenager, a skateboarding punk rocker who seems to have modeled his campaign logo on the spicy ketchup logo at Whataburger.

But others are less charmed. A satirical video on Twitter by skaters mocked “bad-skater Beto” as the kind of middle-school poser who “went to Zumiez and spent $27 on stickers.”

In a new Reuters story, Joseph Menn reveals that while O’Rourke was still a teenager, he was a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, a stealthy hacking group named after an old Texas slaughterhouse. A kind of Neo-lite, he used the handle “Psychedelic Warlord,” looking for free video games. (Socialist alert!)

A hacker might be refreshing after a president who refers to Tim Cook as Tim Apple. Still, Menn writes, “it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money.”

The 15th entry in the Democratic race is at the nexus of many tricky issues for a party desperate to oust Individual 1 from the White House.

Is it better to nominate a celebrity like Obama with a slight record that cannot be targeted or someone with established credentials? Should the nominee spring from the far left, the vector brimming with electricity and fight, or is that suicidal in a national election?

Can white men jump in, or is this post-#MeToo era the time when Democratic and independent women will demand a woman at the top of the ticket? Will Democratic voters longing for another Obama and the minority voters who strayed from Hillary want an African-American?

Can pugilistic progressives stomach a rich kid like Beto at a time when the country is in an eat-the-rich mood? Will they tolerate candidates like Beto and Biden, who speak well of Republicans and have a history of working with them?

As The Wall Street Journal reports, O’Rourke tried to please Texas Republican business leaders when he “opposed Obamacare, voted against Nancy Pelosi as the House Democratic leader and called for a raise in the Social Security eligibility age.”

The fever is running high in his party. Will Beto turn out to be born for it or borne away by it?

[stickdog99]

.

Prediction: Beto's incapable of serving a function other than early stalking horse, a John the Baptist for the as-yet undetermined Player To Be Named Later. His function will be to distract the right-wing heat for a while, then to melt quickly.

Viewing the field for potential ABBs (Anybody But Bernie, which it is superfluous to say is also ABBOTG), and excluding the two governors on late-life benders who might have had a shot in the atmosphere of circa 1980, I had a hunch:

The Betomaniac, Prosecutor Harrisment, and Old Monster Buyed-In may become preludes to sweet young Mayor Booty Kick (actually pronounced Buddha Judge, which is even better) as the Jimmy Carter of 2020. Brainy, sophisticated and contemporary in his triangulation, with RFK-style rhetorical flourishes, he seems to believe what he says, including the bullshit position on Medicare for All and the ultra-bullshit on the Question of American Force.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a ... interview/

Also, he apparently groomed himself for the role when he signed up as a reservist and took an Afghanistan tour. Sorry, does that sound cynical? Don't tell me the son of the Gramsci scholar and Harvard man was not already thinking Presidential.

He seems to have not yet actually been corrupted afaik, but what do I know about politics in South Bend, Indiana? (I'm not checking that: Did I get the town right? #newyorksplaining) But he signals there is little chance he won't be forced to give in, should the right sponsors call with an offer he can't refuse. In Carter's case, that was the Trilateral Commission. (Remember: Carter won, before he lost.) In Buttigieg's case, or rather for anyone in 2019, one would expect the call would be from some group in Silicon Valley. Interestingly he was at Harvard with Zuckerberg, and then entry level at McKinsey, and he goes into tech politics in depth here, again quite intelligently:

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/ ... igieg.html

Now who here wouldn't enjoy the following worked into a speech to the DNC?

You're a big James Joyce buff. Is running for president more like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake?

Definitely more like Ulysses than it is like Portrait. Finnegans Wake is dream speak. Ulysses is consciousness meeting reality. But here's why I think Ulysses is extremely relevant. People believe Ulysses is this complex, difficult, inscrutable text full of references. And it is a difficult text, but its subject matter couldn't be more democratic. It's about a guy going about his day for one day. That's the plot of Ulysses. And, to me, that's what makes it very touching. You're in this guy's head, and you're kind of seeing life through his eyes, and at the end through his wife's eyes.

I wonder if he ruminates on the words written thirty years ago by his recently deceased father?

From the detailed and concrete analysis of culture carried out in
the notebooks one discovers that it is impossible to blame solely reaction-
ary elements for the rise of fascism. More important, one also comes to
realize that the socialist and even specifically Marxist antagonists of the
dominant culture did not, indeed could not in many cases, offer a coher-
ent and persuasive alternative-i.e., they could not effectively articulate a
counter culture-because they themselves were lacking in rigor and un-
critically adopted methods and paradigms from the dominant culture. The
clearest evidence of this is found in the pseudo-scientific "sociologism,"
the unexamined positivism to which many notes attribute the debilitating
distortions that vulgarized Marxism and rendered its most widespread ver-
sions ineffectual.

For the Italian Marxism of Gramsci's era, substitute any current change politics approach. It would apply. I wonder if there is any way out of this conundrum?

The way to avoid making such blunders, the prison notebooks suggest, is
to remain true to the methods of criticism and philology. These methods,
as they are employed in the notebooks, also function simultaneously as a
weapon and a shield against all forms of dogmatism and mystification. The
theory and practice of philological criticism found in the notebooks consti-
tute in themselves a most important contribution to the elaboration of an
anti-dogmatic philosophy of praxis.

Now that's beautifully utopian.

All power to the Philologists!

Or is that: Free words for all?

Gramsci's Method
Author(s): Joseph A. Buttigieg
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 60-81
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/303565

.

Sounds like the lessest of seven evils. But the question then becomes, how do you protect philology from Dr. Philology?

[stickdog99]

Just for anyone wondering about them, proto-liberal standard bearer Gavin Newsom is a Getty Oil adoptive-heir and Kamala Harris is a Willie Brown protege (and mistress).

They both took turns batting clean up in the minor leagues of the Feinstein/Pelosi wing of downtown San Francisco anti-progressive neoliberalism. That both were being groomed for greater things was self-evident from the moment each was introduced to the audience. Each step along the way, they have bull-horned their allegiance to socially liberal causes while simultaneously voting as the Chamber of Commerce directed. Had Newsom not been caught fucking the wife of his best friend (and campaign manager), I have no doubt that he would have leapfrogged his current purgatorial sentence as Hotel Manager.

With saviors like these, who needs Republicans?

[Grizzly]

The Cult of the Dead Cow
March 21, 2019
Enter the cow

America might be mad at the elites, but is it ready for a 31337 president*? Last week, Joseph Menn, author of the forthcoming book Cult of the Dead Cow, broke the news that freshly minted Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke was a member of “the original hacking supergroup” in high school.

cDc, as the cool kids call it, was born in the era of bulletin boards and dialup and has survived into the age of broadband, pioneering the hacker ethos and coining some of its most familiar terms along the way. Beto (as he’s best-known) was not one of its most technologically cutting-edge members, and ceased to be an active participant before some of its most significant exploits, but the group helped launch his tech career and gave him a front-row seat to the development of philosophies that permeate the modern digital world.

cDc isn’t a hacking group in the popular sense of tech prodigies sneaking into networks (though it includes that); small in size but large in scope, it has embraced writing, art, and politics and helped define online culture. What does the Cult have to teach us today? Log on and find out.
* “31337” means “elite” in 1337-speak, or “leet speak,” an online quasi-dialect which may have originated with cDc, too.

[JackRiddler]

Nathan Robinson had the same idea I did about Mayor Pete on the rise as the Smart Beto. He has really prepped himself unbelievably well -- the portions about the campaign autobiography are so revealing of how the form works (going back to way before Dreams from My Father) and the look at Real South Bend is hair-raising.

This guy has been grooming himself for a lifetime.

Robinson's is an extremely thorough treatment, for which I am grateful. (Also because as usual he makes it about a lot more than just Mayor Pete.)

MARCH 29, 2019

ALL ABOUT PETE

Only accept politicians who have proved they actually care about people other than themselves…

by NATHAN J. ROBINSON

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/all-about-pete

[RocketMan]

I happened upon this one day, and check out Beto there next to Tulsi. I mean what is the matter with this guy, he's like a high school kid on Friday afternoon.

[JackRiddler]

Called it first on RI that Mayor Pete is rising as the likely ABB. He is now outpolling and more importantly out-fundraising the other corporate, fake-progressive commodity candidates.

A group of five former ambassadors who served under former President Obama are lining up behind Pete Buttigieg, giving the South Bend, Ind. mayor a jolt of institutional fundraising support amid his meteoric rise in the Democratic presidential primary.

The Obama diplomats - Timothy Broas (Netherlands), John Phillips (Italy), Tod Sedgwick (Slovakia), David Jacobson (Canada) and Bill Eacho (Austria) – raised millions of dollars for the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41656&p=672954#p672954

I'm not even going to bother, but on one's resume "ambassador" usually is preceded by "rich asshole."

I doubt it's going to work. Mr. Harvard,-Rhodes,-and-went-to-McKinsey is way smarter and cannier and wittier as well as more "presentable" to the mainstream than O'Rourke or Harris, and I believe his particular form of identity-add-on has become advantageous in recent years, although not so long ago it would have sunk him. But he is still transparent. Personally he is a fake, as how could almost anyone playing these roles not be? Politically, the house-demolisher of South Bend is full of the same old Clintonian bullshit, which in 2019 is really to say: a folding table. A man of no courage, no conviction, and so conformist that even now, when everything is so dire and exposed and points to the possibility of winning on a true change platform, he just can't try that, and be real? And honestly, why does the mayor of South Bend want to bother? Why the hell would he ever believe the world out of everyone in it needs him and his spiceless pablum?

.