goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit.

well, i just spent my last hour of work-related boredom writing this huge bitch of a post about this article, and it got somehow erased, never again to be retrieved. dammit, and it was insightful and interesting and everything good too. in any case, the gist of it was that bush sucks, conservatives suck, liberals suck, and everyone is wrong except me.

fuck.

here's my brief recap, anyways. for those too lazy to read the whole article in question, it's essentially about how the white house is the single biggest manufacturer of propaganda in the world. my response to that, as best as i can remember it is this (it'll get long, too, i'm sure):

political distinctions are becoming ever more meaningless, largely because liberals and conservatives alike are totally in the pocket of corporate donors and business interests. there's no such thing as opposition anymore. the proof? the total lack of attention that such blatant propagandizing gets in the mainstream media. it's the job of the democrats to raise a stink about this shit, and they just plain don't. why? because they do the same damn thing themselves, or at least did while clinton was in power. this isn't even radical-academic stuff á la manufacturing consent corporate self-censorship, this is just straight goebbels shit.

a real leftist should hate this propaganda stuff with a passion because it destroys the ideal of a free and vibrant social discourse, which every bleeding-heart liberal parrot should know is the foundation of a democratic state. and a real right-winger militia fanatic type should hate it just as much or more because he or she knows that this proves big government will do anything to justify its parasitic existence through control of information.

me and george bush are in agreement about one thing. in a post-partisan and increasingly centrist political world, the ideal government needs to pragmatically pick and choose its policies from both sides of the political spectrum.

bush's problem is that in his populist-hegemonic fervor, he's picking and choosing the worst aspects of both sides (or his staff is doing it for him). from the liberal end, we've got a love for bland sound bites and ambiguous talking points, and a maternalistic desire to intrude into individual actions in the private sphere. we've got a thing for bloated bureaucracy, a hatred for meaningful reduction of bureaucracy, and an unabashed penchant for blatant doublespeak. from the conservative side, in turn, we've got a love for backward moralizing, fundamentalist religion, and inflammatory rhetoric. we've also got a hatred for social programs, a serious fetish for private enterprise, and a savage tribal hard-on for war. not to mention truckloads of money. i'm talking fucking bales of money, and an endless line of corporate donors all looking for a return on their investment.

and his pragmatic choices are devoted to what end? nothing less than the absolute consolidation of neoconservative ideals with the goal of maximizing corporate profit at the expense of individual liberty and civil rights.

what, then, do i think the perfect government should have? i thought you'd never ask. from the liberal side, we need that commitment to vibrant social discourse, by which the sentiment of the populace can be adequately expressed - so, no propaganda, and no absolute corporate control of media. we also need a consciousness of the need for social programs in order to shield us from the inadequacies of the capitalist mode, and thereby to allow a fuller, more productive, and more satisfying participation in that mode for everyone. then from the conservative side we need that innate distrust of obese bureaucracy, for we all know that bureaucracies look after their own interests. government needs to look after our interests, not its own, or it isn't doing that job. we also need a strong sense of the value of individual freedoms. the government needs to recognize that the acts of consenting adults in the private sphere are none of its damn business.

and my pragmatic choices aren't for hegemonic purposes, but instead have the intention of reforming government into something that serves the people, rather than the other way around.

so there you have it, a recondensed version of my political philosophy. i could go on for days about the hobbesian social contract, enlightened self-interest, and the implications of existentialism for public policy, but god knows there isn't a single member of ye olde Hypothetical Audience that gives two shits about that. even less so about how the ethics of democratic government have shifted from a teleological ethics to a deontological one, and the negative implications of such a shift. alas, perhaps another time and another place.

this is why i'm not a liberal blogger, or a conservative blogger. cos i'm not a liberal or a conservative person. if i absolutely needed a label, perhaps social libertarian would be best? but i don't need a label, and nor do you. political loyalties are outdated.

in the end, i'm a critical theory blogger. a deconstructionist, a pseudo-intellectual weenie picking away at the mythos by which we structure and constrain our perceptions of reality.

or, for brevity's sake, an asshole blogger.

c'est tout.

p.s. i lied about it being shorter.