More on Whole Foods and Engaging the Left

Some of you may wonder why I keep tabs on DailyKos and occasional other leftist type blogs. You may be surprised that it is not so much to see what they are up to, as to understand what type of arguments might get them to rethink their positions. Further, my libertarian leanings sometimes offer some common ground on which to launch a discussion.

A recent example was a recent DailyKos diary about Afghanistan that I found hard to understand the point. But a commenter made the point that the cost of war there would "break us." While I think that is hyperbole given Obama's 9 trillion, 10 trillion, heck it's only zeroes, deficits. But I do believe that the Vietnam War helped fuel inflation in the 70s and that the Iraq War has had negative economic consequences. So I commented that:

The stagflation of the 70s can be directly traced to the deficits we piled up fighting the Vietnam war. There is no doubt in my mind that the huge spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to our current economic mess.

This comment receive three positive ratings. But note that I have taken their reflexive anti-war attitude and introduced the concept that deficits hurt the economy. I'm not explicitly exploiting the opening, just prepping the battle space.



I recently received an email from a left of center blogger, Simon Owens, pictured, who thought my readers would be interested in how the left used social media to rally against Whole Foods. Please read his piece for yourself. Simon is a self styled media critic, but I note that he utterly uncritical and provides no counter point to the boycott organizers' perspective. Two quotes:

“[The op-ed] lit a fire under me,” Rosenthal said. “This person was using his company as a sort of Trojan horse for a bunch of discredited, bad ideas that we have said no to over and over again.

They’ve begun posting user-submitted photos from people who are taking pictures of receipts from other grocery stores they’re shopping at and on the blog they’re listing boycott events that are taking place around the country. But they’re doing very little to actually organize these individual events.

I noted in a previous post, I quoted a DailyKos piece as to how some on the left itself realize how fickle they themselves are. If you read Simon's post, you will see that even this initial modest success lacked much energy. To quote KT from the comments:

In any case, the guy's post boils down into this: "We're a bunch of children."

But I still seek to persuade, because it keeps me sane thinking that ultimately not everyone on the left is insane.