Politics LIVES

Cambridge Dictionary says 'the body politic' is "all the people of a particular country under a particular government".

Merriam Webster says 'the body politic' is
1/ a group of persons politically organized under a single government authority
2/ (archaic) corporation
3/ a people considered a collective unit

And this is an interesting historical perspective:

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/444-the-public-option-a-toni...
[excerpt]
The conceit of society as a living body can be seen as a particular subgenre of hylozoism, the idea that all matter is in some way alive. The Middle Ages saw the development of both secular and religious analogies of societies-as-bodies. The basic trichotomy of medieval society was explained thus: the clery were the far-seeing eyes, the nobility the delicate and/or firm hands and the peasants the plodding feet of society. The Church emphasised its role as a mystical body of which all Christians were members, with the pope at its head – and as its head, literally and figuratively. For a long time, kings and popes competed for the honorific epitheton of ‘head’ of Christendom, the European monarchies’ increasing power eventually reclaiming the metaphor from the Church. Corporeal analogies crop up in Milton and Shakespeare (5).

Over the centuries, the advancement of science (particularly biology) progressively undermined the comparison, exposing it as a vain attempt to find analogy where none existed. Also, the ‘organic’ model of governance ceded to the idea of the relation between rulers and their people as subject to a ’social contract’: the state retaining certain natural rights from its citizens (like absolute freedom) in exchange for the dispensation of certain advantages (like security and justice).

If the hylozoic analogy survived, it was in significantly altered form. Hobbes summarised this shifting view of society-as-body in Leviathan (1651), where he described the state as an artificial body, a human construct. He calls this the Body Politique, as opposed to (instead of analogous to) the Body Naturall.

Where kings themselves were once deemed to be the body politic, as literal embodiments of their function’s power, majesty and reach, Hobbes redefines the body politic as a territory with a government. ‘Body politic’ soon becomes an expression devoid of somatic analogy, simply meaning ‘political entity’ – although the phrasing of the metaphor will always imply some sort of organic harmony. Present use in our democratic, all-inclusive era could be said to define the body politic as a representative expression, encompassing all segments of the population and political institutions of a given political entity.
[end excerpt]

The Death Rattle
Submitted by Crank Bait on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 2:32pm.
New day in sederville
Submitted by taozen on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 9:30am.
the plan is working perfectly

The left side of the blog has all the freedom it needs to speak up against the old democratic approach. let sleeping blue dogs lie...

...If I comment that there aren't a lot of blacks participating in the blog I am ignored...
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Submitted by taozen on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 10:35am.
...cent I dedicated a song to you and you couldn't comment.?I guess you want to keep your radio gig?
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Whistling past the graveyard, taozen? You are the self-appointed poison expert. Surely you recognize the symptoms of a dying corpus.

Congratulations. You and your tiny fact-free cabal have bored a number of bright people into flight by playing the same tune over and over again. Unending repetition is an effective torture for an active mind.

This thread covers 48 hours during the historically high-paced end of a workweek. It has a grand total of twenty participants including one post each from me, ellwort, dan, Kevin and smcgee as of 4/10/10 at 1:12 pm.

There are 233 posts of which 183 belong to you, gloryoski, Alice and ghettodefender. That's 79% of the blog posts dedicated to a four-person echo chamber.

If Alice and ghettodefender are entirely removed from the statistics, then 67% of the posts belong to you and gloryoski.

A Wall Street conference call has more diversity.

Your "taozen" moniker is as laughable as it is pompous. You aren't transcending anything. The only change you seek is to change your environment into a mirror image of yourself.

It's much more comfortable for you when no one questions your veracity or your methodology or your sources or your motives, isn't it?

I understand. Nothing can ruin a Believer's day like a contradicting fact.

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Getting From A To B
Submitted by Crank Bait on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 7:09pm.
Crank is just saying last rites over the blog...prematurely.
Submitted by cent on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 3:15pm.
this blog will survive without any of us...no one, or group, leaving will change that...none of us are that important...
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Sam's blog will survive until Sam decides to end it. An unmoderated blog is a rarity that attracts people for different reasons that orbit around its open quality.

A few people, including me but excluding cent, have watched this blog evolve since its first days. It has been at its most lively and compelling when several people are engaged in a discussion collectively winnowing the chaff from the wheat.

One must be comfortable in one's own skin to concede points in the course of a discussion. The participants who are strictly trying to sell a preconceived conclusion are exposed pretty quickly.

I recall many discussions during which people have posted, "Slow down! I can't keep up!" You know you are part of something special when you are reading and refreshing a page filling with cogent reasoning faster than you can formulate and type your own comment.

More than once I have read, for hours, a discussion in progress without posting because most of what I wanted to say was already being stirred into the mix, or because the discussion was a lot more thought-provoking than anything I had to add. Discussions of Israel's policies come to mind. The issue is a lot more complicated than any one person's stalwart opinion is likely to resolve.

Another discussion I have witnessed over the years is the nuclear threat from all quarters. We all know that nukes are horrible. What we don't know is how to ratchet the threat back in the real world, nationally and internationally.

Conversely, I have witnessed many discussions (and individual posts) that involve people who are trying to sell an idea without any intention of examining their own reasoning. If "Israel is wrong" or "Nukes are bad" is as far as your thought process goes, you will never contribute your brain power to anything resembling a resolution. Identifying the problem is the easy part.

For anyone who is hell-bent on holding simplistic ideas, I can save you a lot of trouble. All bad stuff on this planet emanates from human beings. Kill all of the people and all of the bad stuff will end. Until you succeed, the rest of us will be trying to work through the problems with less draconian measures.

For taozen: I was a young person when the late 60's and early 70's Back To Nature movement attempted to revamp the food pipeline in the U.S. Little was accomplished beyond "Natural" being included in the description on the box of every processed food and supplement. The problem was not educating the populace. The problem was capitalism and the economy of size in production and distribution.

The only way the food pipeline will ever be decentralized is through political means. It's a battle with capitalistic constants, not with the education of the eaters. People will eat whatever is available (see Anthropology) and the only way to change the available foods is to go against the grain of capitalism, which requires political power.

Will it ever happen? I doubt it but it's a noble cause. For every person growing and eating their own bean sprouts, there are ten thousand people shopping at WalMart. A substantial number of them know that they are eating crap. Until crap isn't more available than good food, they will not change their ways. And before good food will make a difference, its production has to be decentralized, which is a battle with the economy of size in capitalism.

The only entity strong enough to battle capitalism is government. Government is entirely political.

You think I hate you because you relentlessly post items of nutritional "education" (some of which are bullshit, but that's beside the point). Where we disagree is on how to make it possible for good food to exist. You can educate people until you plop down in your grave but most of them are going to eat what is cheap and available, especially during economic times when the gap between rich and poor is growing, not shrinking.

The argument could be made that solving income disparity would do more to increase the market for (and availability of) healthier foods than any other single effort.

We will never narrow the income disparity gap without political influence.

So I don't hate you. I just think that you are spinning your wheels just as I believe that nora and ghettodefender are never going to affect any noteworthy change with their approaches. cent often references a coming revolution in the streets which I also see as useless bravado and unlikely, barring an overwhelming event that shakes the core of our society. I have experienced a devastating hurricane on an island and witnessed the collapse of societal boundaries. It ain't pretty and the people on the bottom rungs emerge from it a couple of rungs lower than they went into it.

Revolution, historically, is followed by decades of awfulness for the common man while the "new" system resolves itself into something useful. By then, it has become an entrenched and slow-moving system with an entirely new set of problems not far removed from the old set of problems...which places society back in the position it was in before the revolution except for the bloodletting.

There are a few exceptions like the Black Death which ended feudalism in Europe thanks to the reduced number of laborers, but a plague is hardly the sort of revolutionary idea that reasonable people would promote.

I like the idea of rapid, mutually-beneficial societal change as much as the next frustrated citizen but I am resigned to the fact that the world doesn't work that way, nor ever has.

Despite what nora and ghettodefender and many other people believe, we have more opportunities to affect positive changes in our society than the vast majority of people who live, and have ever lived, on this planet. Unfortunately, if you reject our messy political process, you'll always be on the outside looking in.

It's worth reminding you that, despite its open design, this is a political blog created by a guy who is fascinated with the political process. When Sam Seder speaks in public he's talking politics. From my perspective, anyone who uses Sam's blog to reject politics as an unspeakable evil is doing something akin to borrowing Sam's car and returning it with an empty tank.

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Response to Crank's words above:

Well, I must admit it would take a load off to be able to accept your pronouncements as The Last Word; life would be tidier. There are often kernels I agree with here and there in Crank posts, but it is not in my anti-authoritarian nature to agree with everything pronounced just because some of it reads well to my inner ear.

For instance, what you write here sounds so clear:
The only way the food pipeline will ever be decentralized is through political means.

However, the impetus that will trigger that political action could likely be something like drought, or flood, or depleted top soil, or lack of bees, ecological poisoning by pesticide use, and so on. It is not so closed a system as to be 'just' politics (do I sense some absolute-ism here in your writing again?). Afterall, didn't the Dust Bowl years lead to certain political actions?

You write:
It's a battle with capitalistic constants, not with the education of the eaters.

Here I differ with you, too. It is my view that no factor is expendable. My favorite analogy for this is color: A color can be made to appear more intense by the presence of another particular color. To pretend that any issue is locked in a closed system and will remain impregnable forever is erroneous, no matter how well written the pronouncement is made and laid out. What looked like an intense blue under a bright sky, may now look dull gray near altered coloring around it. This is the science of light and color and perception. Again, true science considers AS MANY FACTORS AS POSSIBLE.

Politics is not a dirty word. I never said it was.

I think most of us are HERE at Sam's blog BECAUSE we are thrilled that politics ALSO can be our primary choice for daily 'entertainment' via radio and tv programming even! We found Sam's political awareness and his personal ability to combine his interest in politics with his other talents -- INCLUDING his talent to create his blogsite(!) to be as politically stimulating a spot as any pub or salon or coffee house of the past! -- something that enhances and enriches our lives.

I think making politics a dirty word might happen easily because of the likelihood that politics can easily disappoint those who confront an often (usually?) over-rigged system (school, workplace, government). And making politics a dirty word obviously serves some who would rather see fewer and fewer citizens of the Planet participate in how things come to be run, some who would rather see fewer and fewer citizens of the Planet participate in how power is "wisely distributed, maintenanced, and exercised".

Still politics is what we've got. I would never advocate that politics is disposeable or degraded (and have posted about politics being what we make it, even posting the dictionary definition for clarification in an old archived post that sits somewhere).

Crank, I get the feeling once again you place yourself in the role of mind-reader, or the master who knows-all/sees-all, or one with some kind of powers that allow you to KNOW and thoroughly understand individuals whom you do NOT know. I have no idea what your level of political participation has been and wouldn't claim to know; and so, I am puzzled how you can have an idea what mine has been and move to state with such authority, confidence, and unworried ignorance my history.

And, thanks for the topic, as usual. It is always enjoyable trying to understand and sort things out.