Examples of GOP Leadership

Bagginski

Bagginski

Well-Known Member
cannabineer said:
So much to say to or about this. I’ll restrict myself to a subtopic.

First, I may have misunderstood your original post which asked that national proceedings be conducted more honorably. This leads me to the history of trying to encompass honor’s roommate virtue, or perhaps virtuous living in a healthy society, by codification.

This leads to two different historical examples in my mind: the Pharisees and sharia law. While the common element is religious, that is incidental to my hypothesis.

The Pharisees undertook the comprehensive codification of personal and social conduct in what the translations of the New Testament I’ve seen call the Law. Let’s stipulate that the Pharisees observed reality, warts and all, and attempted to write a Manual Covering Every Possibility. It became a descent into fractally infinite detail, with fractally infinite instances where the rules did not work, leading to another iteration of expanding the code.

It failed hard enough to foster the emergence of a fairly radical offshoot of Judaism, one of whose tenets is the abolition of the infinite corset of the Law on the principle that (John notwithstanding) God is greater than the word, and thus codification.

On to sharia, or more accurately my not-very-educated take on it. It is a simpler codification with a different associated procedure: it defines a few moral absolutes, and brutally punishes perceived defiance of or deviation from them. The complexities of real human conduct are forced through the undersized door of the sharia code, with restrictive outcome.

Both approaches were undertaken with the highest and most noble goals in mind to improve the human condition (similarly, the architects of scientific socialism tried for the same ideal).
But the invariable outcome was institutional injustice and bottomless human misery.

At this point, I do not think good behavior can be effectively codified, and I saw your post as a call for that.
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What a lovely response, thank you!

I see where you went & how you got there…I was on a different track.

You’ve really struck gold with virtue, tho, I gotta say. It & honor are the two sides of behavior - and honor is the least of the two. Call it “the outward and visible sign of an inward, spiritual grace” - that grace being virtue (waves at libraries filled with works on or adjacent to virtue(s)).

We *need* virtue - civic virtue, at least - in us as citizens, and how to define it & inculcate it is a whole swamp of its own; we’re in this fix (partly) because we’ve become corrupt as a society. We value words over deeds, we accept performance as a proxy for every virtue, we accept the Christian guilt trip every time we distract ourselves over questions of malfeasance, malevolence, and accountability.

So what I was really thinking about is: if we realize that we can’t trust performative displays of ‘honor’ masking, then we need to REPLACE that/those filter(s). We’re already doing without a working filter, which def plays into the wild-west power struggles we see on all sides.

“We never thought someone so unqualified would make it so far”.

Federalist papers are pretty specific on what kinds of characteristics were considered disqualifying for public service; reliance on honor and the electoral college has been…revealing, so how do we guard against bad actors in our midst without going either medieval or ‘Brazil’?

Not an easy question, no simple answers, but holy fuck do we need to grapple with this shit before it really DOES have us by the throat
 
cannabineer

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
Bagginski said:
What a lovely response, thank you!

I see where you went & how you got there…I was on a different track.

You’ve really struck gold with virtue, tho, I gotta say. It & honor are the two sides of behavior - and honor is the least of the two. Call it “the outward and visible sign of an inward, spiritual grace” - that grace being virtue (waves at libraries filled with works on or adjacent to virtue(s)).

We *need* virtue - civic virtue, at least - in us as citizens, and how to define it & inculcate it is a whole swamp of its own; we’re in this fix (partly) because we’ve become corrupt as a society. We value words over deeds, we accept performance as a proxy for every virtue, we accept the Christian guilt trip every time we distract ourselves over questions of malfeasance, malevolence, and accountability.

So what I was really thinking about is: if we realize that we can’t trust performative displays of ‘honor’ masking, then we need to REPLACE that/those filter(s). We’re already doing without a working filter, which def plays into the wild-west power struggles we see on all sides.

“We never thought someone so unqualified would make it so far”.

Federalist papers are pretty specific on what kinds of characteristics were considered disqualifying for public service; reliance on honor and the electoral college has been…revealing, so how do we guard against bad actors in our midst without going either medieval or ‘Brazil’?

Not an easy question, no simple answers, but holy fuck do we need to grapple with this shit before it really DOES have us by the throat
Click to expand...
I have a different take on honor. Lois McMaster Bujold (whose Barrayar series I wholeheartedly recommend) said it thus:

Reputation is what others know about you.
Honor is what you know about yourself.

Perhaps this is the basis of my diverging from what you were saying.
 
cannabineer

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
Bagginski said:
What a lovely response, thank you!

I see where you went & how you got there…I was on a different track.

You’ve really struck gold with virtue, tho, I gotta say. It & honor are the two sides of behavior - and honor is the least of the two. Call it “the outward and visible sign of an inward, spiritual grace” - that grace being virtue (waves at libraries filled with works on or adjacent to virtue(s)).

We *need* virtue - civic virtue, at least - in us as citizens, and how to define it & inculcate it is a whole swamp of its own; we’re in this fix (partly) because we’ve become corrupt as a society. We value words over deeds, we accept performance as a proxy for every virtue, we accept the Christian guilt trip every time we distract ourselves over questions of malfeasance, malevolence, and accountability.

So what I was really thinking about is: if we realize that we can’t trust performative displays of ‘honor’ masking, then we need to REPLACE that/those filter(s). We’re already doing without a working filter, which def plays into the wild-west power struggles we see on all sides.

“We never thought someone so unqualified would make it so far”.

Federalist papers are pretty specific on what kinds of characteristics were considered disqualifying for public service; reliance on honor and the electoral college has been…revealing, so how do we guard against bad actors in our midst without going either medieval or ‘Brazil’?

Not an easy question, no simple answers, but holy fuck do we need to grapple with this shit before it really DOES have us by the throat
Click to expand...
About performance. Not the public-show sort but the getting-things-done sort (as in performance evaluation).
Imo that is a decent proxy for virtue, or at least a civic-minded work ethic. “By their works shall you know them.”

Of course, that requires that I as a voter (my one power of evaluating their performance) keep current on who’s doing what to whom. The temptation to be lazy is great. A major consequence of civic laziness is to apply an ideological filter to what our elected public servants are doing.
Double lazy score is achieved when we let the propagandists, the marketers of a packaged and (at least simplistic, at worst false and evil) ideology do the thinking for us. I’m thinking of Fox or Meidas consumers.

That is how “someone so unqualified” can work the system and win. Populism sells. Fox is making money hand over fist pandering to the Beleaguered Patriot (who, of course, is neither).

Bottom line: no easy answers, no silver bullet, and a recommendation to be wary of the Cliff’s Notes/education by soundbite garden path.
 
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D

doughper

Well-Known Member
cannabineer said:
Populism sells. Fox is making money hand over fist pandering to the Beleaguered Patriot (who, of course, is neither).
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Both you guys are way smart. Damn where' d you guys learn to write, huh? I have to read your stuff real slow, and
still barely understand it, if at all. I confess that I'm an example of over-educated idiocy, not proud of it, but hey,
i'm proof the phenomenon exists. Got a BA in journalism, I did, but never really worked in the field other than as
a student reporter/editor. Waste of time for me, because I'm really not all that interested in news, that is, I just
never had a "nose for news." I wasn't really interested in it. You can't do well what you're not really in to. After
school I went to work in construction, not that there's anything wrong with that. Now to address your posts:

Devolution, i tell ya. We're going back to the Dark Ages where literacy rate was 1% if that, and thought control
was easy as falling off a log. Only now we've got the requisite access to more media and information (known as
Information Age) than ever thought possible. Yet we're dumber and more easily controlled than were
people in the Dark Ages. Maybe if it's easier now it's due to lack of ethics, morality, or codification of the law that we
adhered to more faithfully then than we do now. Only those unscrupulous types would take advantage of this.
What'd H. Clinton become famous for calling them, The Deplorables? I'm going nowhere with this.
 
cannabineer

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
doughper said:
Both you guys are way smart. Damn where' d you guys learn to write, huh? I have to read your stuff real slow, and
still barely understand it, if at all. I confess that I'm an example of over-educated idiocy, not proud of it, but hey,
i'm proof the phenomenon exists. Got a BA in journalism, I did, but never really worked in the field other than as
a student reporter/editor. Waste of time for me, because I'm really not all that interested in news, that is, I just
never had a "nose for news." I wasn't really interested in it. You can't do well what you're not really in to. After
school I went to work in construction, not that there's anything wrong with that. Now to address your posts:

Devolution, i tell ya. We're going back to the Dark Ages where literacy rate was 1% if that, and thought control
was easy as falling off a log. Only now we've got the requisite access to more media and information (known as
Information Age) than ever thought possible. Yet we're dumber and more easily controlled than were
people in the Dark Ages. Maybe if it's easier now it's due to lack of ethics, morality, or codification of the law that we
adhered to more faithfully then than we do now. Only those unscrupulous types would take advantage of this.
What'd H. Clinton become famous for calling them, The Deplorables? I'm going nowhere with this.
Click to expand...
I could not be a journalist. They have to have an accessible style: mostly one-syllable words from a short list, to get the point across without overworking the reader. I cannot resist the verbal origami.
 
D

doughper

Well-Known Member
cannabineer said:
I could not be a journalist. They have to have an accessible style: mostly one-syllable words from a short list, to get the point across without overworking the reader. I cannot resist the verbal origami.
Click to expand...
Origami. Well, yeah. But we were taught to not write above 8th grade reading level, unless it was
for major papers, Times, Post, etc. Also, we were taught no sentences longer than about 30 words,
and no words longer than 4 syllables. And I'll go on, so that even you, too, can have a degree in
journalism: Write with salient point first, answering questions on a story using 5 W's and H, and
ummm, that's about it. If you can do that you can be a reporter. Any monkey can do it. AI, well sure.

But then how interested are you? That's why we need these people, for those gifted with social,
political awareness to reveal wtf's goin' on to the rest of us. How you think they stopped Nixon?
So it is good to be informed, to inform the citizenry. It is bad to propagandize, however.
 
Fogdog

Fogdog

Well-Known Member
Santos lies so much he can't keep track of when not to lie. For example, campaign finance reports.

Several Of George Santos Campaign Contributors Don't Appear To Exist: Report
www.huffpost.com

Several Of George Santos Campaign Contributors Don't Appear To Exist: Report

Mother Jones reported being unable to locate the names or addresses listed on Santos' campaign finance filings.
www.huffpost.com www.huffpost.com

The Washington Post reported Friday that the Department of Justice had told the Federal Election Commission to hold off on any civil enforcement action regarding possible Santos campaign violations. It’s the clearest signal yet that the Justice Department has already launched its own criminal investigation into Santos’ campaign finances, the Post noted.
Santos could not be reached for comment.
 
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