Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by minime » Fri Mar 23, 2018 10:15 am
Elvis » Fri Mar 23, 2018 1:14 am wrote:minime » Thu Mar 22, 2018 9:08 pm wrote:Why would anyone want to choose either the right or the left exclusively.
Why choose Liberal over Conservative?
Democrat over Republican?
Socialist over Communist?
Catholic over Protestant?
Christian over Jew over Muslim?
You are all of those; you are none of those.
Why be less.
I say, why not be more than all of those?
by Elvis » Fri Mar 23, 2018 10:05 pm
by minime » Fri Mar 23, 2018 10:24 pm
Elvis » Fri Mar 23, 2018 8:05 pm wrote:I choose socialism over capitalism because (for one thing) as a practical matter, fewer people would go hungry, homeless and uncared for. That might loosely translate to preferring Democrats over Republicans. Political parties in general seem like a good idea, but not a one-party state. There is no "end of history."
by Elvis » Sat Mar 24, 2018 4:16 am
by Elvis » Sat Mar 24, 2018 4:28 am
minime wrote:A common complaint in Russia after the Communist takeover was that, without the motivation of self-interest people, were reluctant to work.
minime wrote:Would it be different now? For example, is the relatively advanced state of technology a gamechanger?
by minime » Sat Mar 24, 2018 2:23 pm
I choose socialism over capitalism because (for one thing) as a practical matter, fewer people would go hungry, homeless and uncared for. That might loosely translate to preferring Democrats over Republicans. Political parties in general seem like a good idea, but not a one-party state. There is no "end of history."
Elvis » Sat Mar 24, 2018 2:16 am wrote:Of course it's complex. And what I'm getting at is not so much a regime as a change in values, attitudes, priorities, consciousness, yada yada.
The OP calls for a response to the Trump victory (not so much Trump himself), presumably to include a better result in the next elections, and for me, one good response is to sustain what Bernie Sanders started: calling out crimes of the corporatocracy (alliteration not intended) and electing more socialists.
But you knew that, right? I guess that, in your own mildly obtuse way, you're trying to lead me to some kind of breakthrough in understanding, but so far it's mostly escaping me.
by Elvis » Sat Mar 24, 2018 4:49 pm
minime wrote: The question of whether one is preferable to the other absolutely, to the exclusion of the other, is not a practical consideration.
by minime » Sat Mar 24, 2018 5:07 pm
Elvis » Sat Mar 24, 2018 2:49 pm wrote:minime wrote: The question of whether one is preferable to the other absolutely, to the exclusion of the other, is not a practical consideration.
I don't think I ever said that, and if I seemed to say it, it's not what I meant. I'm not a big absolutist, and I enjoy some good old fashioned commerce myself.
I've been reading lately about how the Greek city-states (and the "Greek people" themselves) came into existence and how they arrived at this new way of getting along together, mainly for the purposes of survival. Today, I think we've lost something of that spirit.
So I guess you don't want a Bernie Sanders as U.S. president and you don't care for socialism. That's cool.
by Elvis » Sat Mar 24, 2018 6:30 pm
minime wrote: Don't need any more 'isms', even anarchism.
minime wrote:
Think local; think global. Act local.
by American Dream » Mon Mar 26, 2018 8:48 am
Beyond Fake News
by Richard Greeman March 25, 2018
1. “All Governments Lie”
As 1950s investigative reporter I.F. (“Izzy”) Stone famously stated: “All governments lie.”[1] Fake news has historically been the weapon of the rulers, especially when in need of excuses for military aggression.
The mainstream media have traditionally gone along with the official line. For example, in 2003 in order to invade Iraq, the Bush administration falsely asserted that Saddam Hussein was complicit in the September 11, 2001 attack on the U.S. and that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Despite public evidence to the contrary, the mainstream media propagated what was soon revealed to be fake news. Fifteen years later, the U.S. is still mired in Iraq.
Similarly, in August 1964, the Johnson administration deceived Congress into voting a blank check to escalate the war in Vietnam by playing up a fake news story about two North Vietnamese naval attacks. This emergency “Bay of Tonkin Resolution” was the legal basis for eleven more years of particularly bloody, unwinnable war wreaking havoc on millions of Vietnamese civilians North and South. Only two Senators, and writers like I.F. Stone questioned the fake news.
The first North Vietnamese “attack” was a brief skirmish between U.S. destroyer Maddox patroling close to the territorial line. It later came out that the U.S. vessel fired first damaging the smaller two Vietnamese PT boats, which may have fired back as a single bullet hole was found in the hull of the Maddox, otherwise undamaged. Since this incident failed to generate sufficient war hysteria, LBJ came up with a second attack, this one, as Sec. McNamara, later admitted, was entirely imaginary. But it did the dirty job.
The classic historical example of fake news is the famous “Ems telegram” of July 1870 when Prussia’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck tricked French Emperor Napoléon III into declaring war on Prussia, by leaking to the newspapers a provocatively insulting telegram adressed to the French Emperor. The Prussians were already mobilized and prepared to fight; the French, hardly at all. France was soon over-run and Napoléon III captured.
The paradox of today’s situation is that Donald Trump, arguably the world’s biggest liar, has appropriated the term “fake news” to discredit the New York Times and other “legitimate” mainstream media. Up until Trump’s declaration of war, the “failing” Times had consistently backed up the U.S. government’s lethal lies, including Bush’s WMDs, JFK’s “secret” Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba, and LBJ’s fake news Bay of Tonkin attack. Today, since Trump declared them “public enemies,” they are at least fact-check official pronouncements more, and Trump gives them plenty of opportunities. At least as far as the Administration is concerned, the mainstream media have stopped acting like lap dogs, although they are still hardly watch dogs on issues like “national defense.” Long before Trump came along, people were growing more and more cynical about the establishment press’ elitist bias, and Trump’s accusations of “fake news” seemed plausible to many.
To add to the confusion, foreign governments like Putin’s Russia have injected fake news stories designed to spread confusion, discredit the Democrats and aid Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine has also managed to bamboozle a large section of the western Left into supporting Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria with fake news characterizing the White Helmets volunteers in Syria as CIA operatives and presenting Bashar a-Assad as a progressive anti imperialist leader. Amid all this confusion, who to believe? Many Leftists active in the blogosphere have naively assumed that if the U.S. imperialists are lying, the Russians must be telling the truth. In their indignation at frequent U.S. aggression, they have succumbed to the fallacy that “the enemy of our enemy is our friend.”
But I.F. Stone had it right in the first place: “all governments lie.” In 2016, Putin’s Petersburg troll factories obviously did inundate U.S. social media with disruptive posts designed to discredit the U.S. system and help Trump win the election. This is just business as usual. Remember that in 2014, it was the U.S. under Obama who massively intervened during revolution in Ukraine in order to impose hand-picked candidates on the new government. What’s new? Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and America are back to playing Cold War propaganda games. Back then, America sponsored Radio Free Europe and the CIA financed anti-Communist intellectual journals, while Stalin’s Communist agents financed The Daily Worker and influenced a whole generation of writers including Hemingway. During the 1930s Hitler had supporters all over the U.S., and Mussolini’s fascist government spent millions buying up French newspapers and flooding them with Italian propaganda designed to soften up France for the coming invasion.
Today, Putin’s trolls manipulate social media and the blogosphere. Big deal. How many Americans actually believed the crude, ungrammatical, mechanically-produced Russian postings on which the Kremlin spent a few million dollars during a campaign when U.S. billionaires, using the most sophisticated PR firms, were spending billions? Few today believe the Russians actually succeeded in influencing the outcome of the election.
The real scandal behind the release by the Russians (among others) of the Democratic National Committee’s secret emails was the truthful news that the Clinton leadership was secretly sabotaging the primary campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the surprizingly popular socialist insurgent threatening their noe-liberal hegemony. Ultimately, the DNC’s vicious and ultimately fatal interference in the U.S. electoral process, the open Primary, did more to get “President” Trump elected than Russian interference. How many voters who went for Bernie Sanders in the primaries ended up voting for Trump?
With his hypocritical accusations of fake news, Trump has seized upon a classic populist demagogue’s bullying tactic — ridiculing his critics, accusing them of lying, and discrediting their liberal world-view as an elitist conspiracy. By declaring war on the mainstream press (which remains devoted to the ‘normal’ capitalist political establishment in whose name it excoriates Trump’s excesses) and by raising the issue of “fake news” perhaps Donald Trump has inadvertantly done the American public a favor.
by American Dream » Tue Mar 27, 2018 1:24 pm
What does Jordan Peterson believe?
Peterson’s political ideas are most cleanly laid out in a two-and-a-half-hour lecture he’s given, titled “Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.” His upload of one of the speeches, at the University of British Columbia Free Speech Club, has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube, with other copies and excerpts from it racking up similarly large numbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfH8IG7Awk0
In the lecture, Peterson weaves together an incredibly broad set of topics — ranging from Soviet history to the biblical story of Cain and Abel to Nietzsche to lab experiments that involve feeding rats cocaine — to produce a kind of unified theory of modern politics. At base, he argues that that Soviet-style communism, and all the mass murder and suffering it created, is still a serious threat to Western civilization. But rather than working openly, it seeps into our politics under the guise of “postmodernism.”
Peterson’s argument starts with a vivid denunciation of Marxism. Human society, like all animal kingdoms, is in Peterson’s mind defined by certain biological truths — including the reality that some people are naturally more gifted than others, and that life will always involve suffering. Marxism, he believes, is rooted fundamentally in the hatred of people who succeed in a capitalist economy — and thus will always result in violence when one attempts to implement it.
“Are these Marxists motivated by love or hatred? Well, is it love or hatred that produces 100 million dead people?” he asks in the speech, rhetorically.
Peterson believes that the failure of Soviet communism has not actually deterred communism’s fans in the West, who still secretly cling to the old hateful beliefs. He argues that they do so under the guise of a school of thought he refers to as “postmodernism,” which he sees as his archenemy.
“Western leftist intellectuals are [fundamentally complicit] in the horrors of the 21st century,” he says. “It’s not that they’ve learned anything since; they’ve just gone underground. And that’s what I see when I see postmodernism.”
Peterson uses the term postmodernism fairly loosely, but he’s referring to, roughly speaking, French philosophers working in the middle of the 20th century, most prominently Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
He argues that these philosophers, famous for their skepticism about objective reality and emphasis on the social construction of human society, were actually crypto-Marxists. The difference is that they change the language — instead of arguing that society is defined by class oppression, Peterson says, they argue that it’s defined by identity oppression: racism, sexism, gender identity, and the like.
“How about if we don’t say ‘working-class capitalists’ we say ‘oppressor/oppressed?’” he says, summarizing the alleged postmodern line of thinking. “We’ll just think about all of the other ways people are oppressed, and all the other ways that people are oppressors, and we’ll play the same damn game under a new guise.”
This makes postmodernism, which he believes has quietly permeated Western culture in the past 20 or so years, a tremendous threat.
“The Marxists aren’t just wrong: They’re wrong, murderous, and genocidal,” he says. “The postmodernists don’t just get to just come along an adopt Marxism as a matter of sleight of hand because their Marxist theory didn’t work out and they needed a rationalization, because it’s too dangerous — it’s too dangerous to the rest of us.”
by Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 27, 2018 7:43 pm
by American Dream » Tue Mar 27, 2018 8:36 pm
Can information technology save global fisheries?
It’s clear that pollution and habitat destruction, overfishing and warming waters linked to climate change are damaging the world’s oceans. What’s harder to see is how we can clean up the ravages of capitalism, prevent further damage and save the ecosystems that we all rely on.
Faced with these crises, it can be difficult to remember that capitalism is the most productive system ever created and this is the great contradiction at its heart. We now produce enough food to feed every person on the planet. Millions live with chronic hunger and malnutrition because they haven’t the money to buy food, not because there isn’t any.
Many people look to solutions in new technology spawned by capitalism’s only reason to exist, to make profit. Individual capitalists compete to be more profitable than their rivals by introducing new technological developments to produce more—of whatever it is—more cheaply than their competitors. So oceans, seabirds and whales fill up with plastic because single-use packaging is cheaper to produce and more profitable than recyclable cardboard and glass.
by American Dream » Wed Mar 28, 2018 7:19 am
I'm a college philosophy professor. Jordan Peterson is making my job impossible. • r/enoughpetersonspam
I’ve been teaching philosophy at the university and college level for a decade. I was trained in the ‘analytic’ school, the tradition of Frege and Russell, which prizes logical clarity, precision in argument, and respect of science. My survey courses are biased toward that tradition, but any history of philosophy course has to cover Marx, existentialism, post-modernism and feminist philosophy.
This has never been a problem. The students are interested and engaged, critical but incisive. They don’t dismiss ideas they don’t like, but grapple with the underlying problems. My short section on, say, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex elicited roughly the same kind of discussion that Hume on causation would.
But in the past few months internet outrage merchants have made my job much harder. The very idea that someone could even propose the idea that there is a conceptual difference between sex and gender leads to angry denunciations entirely based on the irresponsible misrepresentations of these online anger-mongers. Some students in their exams write that these ideas are “entitled liberal bullshit,” actual quote, rather than simply describe an idea they disagree with in neutral terms. And it’s not like I’m out there defending every dumb thing ever posted on Tumblr! It’s Simone de fucking Beauvoir!
It’s not the disagreement. That I’m used to dealing with; it’s the bread and butter of philosophy. No, it’s the anger, hostility and complete fabrications.
They come in with the most bizarre idea of what ‘post-modernism’ is, and to even get to a real discussion of actual texts it takes half the time to just deprogram some of them. It’s a minority of students, but it’s affected my teaching style, because now I feel defensive about presenting ideas that I’ve taught without controversy for years.
Peterson is on the record saying Women’s Studies departments and the Neo-Marxists are out to literally destroy western civilization and I have to patiently explain to them that, no, these people are my friends and colleagues, their research is generally very boring and unobjectionable, and you need to stop feeding yourself on this virtual reality that systematically cherry-picks things that perpetuates this neurological addiction to anger and belief vindication–every new upvoted confirmation of the faith a fresh dopamine high of how bad they are.
I just want to do my week on Foucault/Baudrillard/de Beauvoir without having to figure out how to get these kids out of what is basically a cult based on stupid youtube videos.
Honestly, the hostility and derailment makes me miss my young-earth creationist students.
by American Dream » Thu Mar 29, 2018 7:18 am
26TH MARCH 2018
WOMEN’S STRIKE ASSEMBLY COMMUNIQUE #1
BY PLAN C LONDON
We republish here the first communique from the Womens Strike
The International Women’s Strike in the UK began with women coming together to explore our visions of the red feminist horizon – what it could look like and how we could get there. The Women’s Strike is not a one-day event set to coincide with International Women’s Day each year – it’s not an activist campaign or a women’s project. In the UK and across the world we are witnessing an emerging international women’s movement that is experimenting with and struggling for a feminist future. We are not the first generation, nor will we be the last, to know in our gut that women’s liberation must be central to all social movements. We are not asking for our fair share under capitalism, we are seeking to destroy altogether a system that is designed to divide and oppress us. We already know women’s liberation to be at the heart of the struggle. To be clear: there will be no revolution until women’s lives and our labour are central to every political question.
In moving towards a red feminist horizon we continue the work of our feminist mothers and grandmothers in destabilizing ideas of womanhood. We refuse to be divided into good and bad women. We are not interested in reproducing a version of feminism that only makes some women visible, namely those who are white, middle class, cisgender and heterosexual. Nor is there anything stable, inherent or natural about being a woman. As Chandra Mohanty so forcefully argued 35 years ago, the relationship between “Woman” – a cultural and ideological construction and “women” who are real material subjects of our collective histories is one of the central questions that feminism seeks to act upon. We have to confront the reactionary and patriarchal ideas of what it means to be a woman today. Like that we are ‘naturally’ caring, that we all want to be mothers, that most of the time we are asking for it and the rest of the time we are in need of protection. Simultaneously, this confrontation must revalue care work and emotional labour, to support people who have children and combat the structural and systemic forms of violence and exploitation that harm so many women.
Reducing what it means to be a woman to a set of biological characteristics and reproductive capacities and claiming that women’s oppression and exploitation is the direct result of having a certain genital configuration recognised at birth is a specific form of reactionary and misogynist politics that we have no interest in. From decades of black feminist thought we have learnt that universalist claims of what it means to be a woman serve the interests of some women at the expense of others. Such claims actively work against the possibility of meaningful connections and solidarity being forged between women who experience womanhood in different ways.
The red feminist horizon demands that we have full and final say on the meaning of our bodies, what they do, how we labour and what is done to our bodies. At the heart of that fight for bodily autonomy is reproductive justice: the right to reproduce when and how we want. For women to be free, we require full and free access to pregnancy termination, contraception and social services for children, parents and carers. But we also need full and free access to sperm freezing before trans women undergo hormone replacement therapy which results in infertility. We call for autonomy over our biological reproductive processes, whether they constitute a tendency to reproduce or, a tendency not to.
We are no longer interested in the faux-debates of whether sex work is ‘real’ work, whether the millions of hours we spend caring and cleaning is ‘real’ work, if the Women’s Strike is a ‘real’ strike or if trans women are ‘real’ women. Attempts to undermine the strength of our movement and thump the table about ‘authenticity’ say far more about those that seek to reduce women to our biological functions and confine us into victimhood, than it does about the vibrant and militant movement we are building. By looking to the wealth of knowledge produced by black feminism, transfeminism and sex worker rights movements we know who our sisters are. We know that trans women and sex workers have a central role to the play in dismantling the capitalist patriarchal systems of power that oppress us all.
We began the Women’s Strike as we intend to proceed. On the morning of the 8th March 2018 we organised a defiant direct action at the Department of Health to demand urgent action on trans healthcare. In the afternoon, 1000 people assembled for over four hours in central London, arriving from university picket lines in their hundreds and walking out of their offices, homes and factories. A social reproduction collective of mainly men organised collective childcare and cooked food to feed the whole assembly. We stood in solidarity with our Kurdish sisters, making it clear that we will defend the revolution in Rojava because their liberation is bound up with ours. Later on, we picketed pro-life religious organisations, joined striking cleaners who occupied Topshop to highlight their disgusting treatment of workers.
In the evening we took over the streets of Soho and marched behind sex workers who were on strike for the decriminalisation of all forms of sex work. The strike4decrim rally began with a minute of noise to remember the late Laura Lee, a fierce fighter for sex workers rights in Ireland. We heard from migrant sex workers who were arrested and humiliated during ‘anti-trafficking’ raids that did nothing for women in the sex industry and everything for property developers. We listened to strippers who are organising in their workplaces against being made to pay to get work and are denied basic employment rights. Our evening ended with hundreds of comrades, including sex workers and trans activists, joining the Picturehouse workers who have been striking and protesting for over a year to demand the living wage and decent working conditions. In bringing together service workers, sex workers, Kurdish women, single mothers, students, university workers, domestic workers, cleaners, artists and refugees we demonstrated our collective power. we exceed the narrow categories of womanhood forced upon us and make good on our promise to make feminism a threat again.
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