Progressives (Liberals)

Jesus Christ.

Canvassing results:
10 won’t answer door
4 she/he doesn’t live here anymore
1 big dog, barking
2 No Trespassing signs
6 contacts’ homes torn down for new businesses (gentrification)
1 psychotic Trump supporter
1 former convict, who likes Bern but cannot vote
married to a lady who “likes Bernie, but is Biden”
1 Tom Steyer 🤪(******* commercials!)
2 Bernie or Die
1 new Bernie
1 lean Bernie

I have learned to adjust my expectations and I’m going to be hitting the streets like mad til primary day.

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@blatham,

I've briefly met Cheny (while he was out of office and President of Haliburton), but have never been in his office. I did interview with Senators Harry Reid and Pete Domenici, just before a Joint Venture company I then led took over operations at a large Energy Dept. nuclear site. Nothing personal involved: the two were both major figures in the Senate Committee overseeing the Energy Dept. and, as I learned, were merely marking their territory for a new, minor player in their game. Perhaps that is the source of your confusion. Reid was memorable for his rasping voice and his finger wagging demand that I do nothing to jeopardize the budget for the Yucca Mtn. Waste storage project, located in the former Nuclear Weapons Test site in Nevada. I was merely bemused, as I had zero power or influence over the matter, and was astounded a decade and $20 Billion later, when the project was completed, the utterly cynical (and corrupt) Reid singlehandedly prevented its opening.

The crowd to which Blatham was referring is far more ordinary and diverse than Blatham implies, includes lots of left wing types and many entertainers as well, and is decidedly " nonelite" in its behavior.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

The crowd to which Blatham was referring is far more ordinary and diverse than Blatham implies, includes lots of left wing types and many entertainers as well, and is decidedly " nonelite" in its behavior.

No one is expecting Blatham to tell the truth about anything.

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@georgeob1,

Thanks for data clarification.

Quote:

The crowd to which Blatham was referring is far more ordinary and diverse than Blatham implies, includes lots of left wing types and many entertainers as well, and is decidedly " nonelite" in its behavior.

Let's take a look at security (the following from wikipedia's page)

Quote:

The Bohemian Grove is protected by a sophisticated security team year-round. The Bohemian Club employs ex-military personnel to help secure the area. They utilize high-end security equipment, including thermal/night vision cameras, motion detectors, and vibration sensing alarm systems. The level of security is particularly heightened during the time periods that members are on-site. During these times, the local Sheriff's office,[23] California Highway Patrol, and, if warranted by the guest-list, the United States Secret Service help to secure the areas and roads surrounding the encampment.[1]

When most of us go camping, different circumstances attend. And I've yet to sit down with a supreme court justice or the head of a major corp like Halliburton or with a Senate majority/minority leader, etc.

The point that was under discussion was the uses of the term "elites". In modern political culture and discourse, such as here, those uses are almost always lazy, shallow, unreflective, and convenient for the user. I brought this Bohemian Grove issue up as a means of pointing to your description of me. It strikes me as rather transparently downside up, george.

Let's look at the definition of the term

Quote:

1 (often used with a plural verb) the choice or best of anything considered collectively, as of a group or class of persons.
2 (used with a plural verb) persons of the highest class:
Only the elite were there.
3 a group of persons exercising the major share of authority or influence within a larger group:
the power elite of a major political party.

We're not in this discussion speaking of, say, the best violinists or actors or sculptors or physicists. It's definitions 2 and 3 that apply - social class and proximity to levers of power and influence (with the obvious overlapping of those two).

Sure, I may be a paradigm of wit and among the most savage of male monsters in the bedroom, but my status as "elite' goes little further.

1 Reply

@blatham,

The Wiki stuff is very familiar, but highly exaggerated. The New York Yacht Club has tighter security.

I've been fortunate enough to have a variety of challenges in my life, and they have led to some interesting encounters. However, I don't for a moment consider myself to be a member of any elite (except perhaps that of Navy carrier pilots). However even there the status is more in the eyes of the participants than many others.

There are however self-appointed (and undeserved) elites in American politics and much of our public media. They form the core class of the often irrational opposition to President Trump. It is that to which I was referring.

1 Reply

Experts Say Vast Deserts, Absence Of Life, May Indicate Mars Was Once Run By Conservatives

3 Replies

@hightor,

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@hightor,

Quote:

Experts Say Vast Deserts, Absence Of Life, May Indicate Mars Was Once Run By Conservatives

So you are saying a Democrat would be elected on Mars. Good to know. Send Bernie.

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Quote:

Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globe Monologue Shredded Every Hollywood Sacred Cow and It Was Glorious

Hollywood is full of lunatic progressives. High time someone told them they are seriously out touch and full of ****.

Quote:

If ISIS started a streaming service you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?

https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2020/01/05/760597/

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@Lash,

They sure didn't feel that way when Obama was using bombs and drones to kill US citizens who were terror suspects, they gave him another round of approval by re upping that provision in the NDAA. These leftists don't care about that guy who was killed, they only care about who gave the order.

1 Reply

@Baldimo,

I’m sure their hatred of Obama was quite healthy due the drone murders. Killing is killing, in my opinion.

My greater concern about this very high profile of an assassination of the beloved, number two man in their government is retribution.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

Quote:

The New York Yacht Club has tighter security.

Interesting datum. Though it does little damage to my point - that your life intersects with the upper-crusty sorts to a degree that applies to no one else here and certainly not me.

Quote:

I've been fortunate enough to have a variety of challenges in my life, and they have led to some interesting encounters.

I know that. And I can honestly tell you that I envy many of the life situations you've had and which you've considerately related to me. I don't think any of that makes you a bad guy. But, where you or Mitch McConnell or Hannity or Trump might toss of the term "elites" while pretending some university professor matches the term while you guys don't - that's just willful blindness or purposeful rabble rousing.

Quote:

However, I don't for a moment consider myself to be a member of any elite (except perhaps that of Navy carrier pilots).

I also know this to be true. And I know that you don't for a moment consider it.

And that's kind of the problem. I understand that you don't see yourself that way. You don't aspire to be that way, for the most part. It's not how you measure yourself, for the most part.

But non-recognition of privilege or unusually elevated status and relative proximity to power is not an objective measure of the thing.

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@hightor,

Quote:

Experts Say Vast Deserts, Absence Of Life, May Indicate Mars Was Once Run By Conservatives

That made me laugh.

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@blatham,

Interesting points, and I agree I have enjoyed degree of proximity to the types of folks you have been pointing out, both in the Navy & subsequently. However their numbers are fairly small, and most such encounters had much more to do with what I was doing at the time, and not myself personally. Most members of the club in question are quite ordinary, but accomplished folks … pediatricians, architects, bankers, CA central valley farmers (big farms), musicians ( a few well-known), artists (painters & sculptors), a fairly large contingent of academics, mostly from Berkeley & Sanford, and a scattering of senior government & military types and businessmen, many retired. I've lived in the Bay Area at least on & off, for a long time, and, starting it out with Command of a locally based aircraft carrier, turned out to be a marvelous introduction to circles I likely wouldn't have encountered otherwise. That's about it.
I also believe our uses of the word "elites can be a bit misleading. We both use it as a pejorative; you for a cabal that you assume exercises excess power over our lives and economy; and I, in a somewhat similar way, for a class of politically inclined academics and journalists whom I similarly assume, believe in their exulted status, and seek to control the lives of other people though power and influence in excessive governmental control over the rest of us. I suspect in both our cases the truth of our concerns is likely a good deal more prosaic than we imagine. They're all just people with the same faults, fears, insecurities, and usually transparent pretenses, as the rest of us.

Age and life are great levelers.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

I also believe our uses of the word "elites can be a bit misleading.

Right. Pretty important point, isn't it? Just one more example of how language - if we are careless in use - can muddy rather than clarify.

I find that almost all uses of "elites" that I run into in political conversations are shallow, thoughtless and cliched. And, of course, framed in a manner convenient to or matching our personal political notions.

But still, the term has real world application. The palace at Versailles, the homes in Beverly Hills, the wierdos who plunk down the big bucks to hobnob at Mar a Lago, the DC/New York restaurants that host media giants and GOP/Dem bigshots, or that docks in Ibiza that moor 500 foot yachts, etc constitute clear evidence that we humans organize ourselves in hierarchies of wealth and power.

But I'm afraid I must reject any suggestion that a professor of archaeology or Early English literature or political science can spread waves of influence in the manner of those I've just listed.

The charge against university denizens pretty obviously derives from resentment by those who have had no opportunity to attend such institutions or who have different sorts of minds/skills or who luck has simply not been kind to. Thus university/academic/intellectual types are often described as "snooty" and "arrogant" and "think they're better than me".

That's all understandable, but that doesn't mean it's rational.

And then there's the matter of authoritarian regimes commonly, perhaps universally, attacking universities and the intellectual class because they are predictable sources of challenge to existing notions, and thus, to existing structures of power and dominance.

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@blatham,

The very definition of "elitist" is Donny Johnny tRump!

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@BillW,

Quote:

The very definition of "elitist" is Donny Johnny tRump!

And that statement is the very definition of stupid.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

They're all just people with the same faults, fears, insecurities, and usually transparent pretenses, as the rest of us.

Shhhhh — I don't think you were supposed to reveal this.

0 Replies

@blatham,

Well, we all have an understandable human tendency to cling to our achievements, whatever they may be, and whatever the merely good fortune that may have attended getting them. I've found that it isn't very hard to find people who are smarter, better off, and better at the things I treasure in myself, than am I. The really strongest people I have met or gotten to know tended to be very aware of that, and aware of their own limitations. Humility is indeed strength, and the self-promoters of this world often don't have it.

I agree with you about the careless use of language and have been guilty of that myself.

I finished four years of grad school with a dim view of many academics, and that was in the relatively prosaic areas of Mathematics and Engineering. I have since learned that the best of them are usually the least inclined to self-promotion, pretense and vain posturing. My (superficial) impressions of Scalia marked him as one of the very best.

In general I believe these character traits dominate the worth of people in all the walks of live I have encountered. The potential for the exercise of power or influence can, of course, magnify the good or harm that can result.

While people do indeed tend to congregate in hierarchies, as you suggest, these hierarchies come in diverse forms involving many things beyond just raw power or wealth. Moreover, I strongly believe that individual traits and behaviors generally count for far more than the facts and mere perceptions of the group, values, behaviors and identities that are so fashionable today, including the presumed class values that so pervade modern political discourse.

While wealthy and powerful people can indeed exert influence on government policy and action, it is easy to see that they are distributed fairly widely across the divides of most current political issues (Koch bros. vs Soros, etc.). The same goes for non governmental institutions, including corporations, labor Unions and foundations of various types with respect to political contributions. I believe the most prominent exception to this is with contemporary academic institutions (particularly those in the so-called political and social "sciences", and a large fraction of the various media institutions. These appear to be decidedly biased towards materialism and increased government managed control of individual behavior.

1 Reply

@Lash,

Lash wrote:

I’m sure their hatred of Obama was quite healthy due the drone murders. Killing is killing, in my opinion.

It's not murder when soldiers kill each other on the battlefield.

Lash wrote:

My greater concern about this very high profile of an assassination of the beloved, number two man in their government is retribution.

Mr. Trump's capability and willingness to escalate greatly exceeds Iran's capability and willingness to escalate.

1 Reply

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