Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

[SonicG]

I got called a "cuck" for the first time on social media for jokingly using "problematic" about Cernovich on Johnstone's twitter feed- obviously a joking understatement. Worse than Cernovich's et, al. horrible "stances", it is the fact that they are just con men. It isn't even the idea of finding some "common ground to fight the deep state" but rather being too willfully naive or just plain dense to see the whole con man aspect of those dildos that is troubling. I can well see the arguments about not over-focusing on the Russiagate stuff, but nevertheless, what is the pwogwessive Left really doing now then? Who is organizing mass protests over Yemen?

[norton ash]

Caitlin takes a very easy path. I'm always disappointed to see the mighty Wells link to her on his FB page... sitting there in his safe Torontonian home. When all of us could write her columns, this is nothing new.

[Belligerent Savant]

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"when all of us could write her columns" -- yes but how many of us are actually doing that OUT THERE, outside of this forum (or related forums)?
You mention a "very easy path" -- to me, the "easy paths" are taken by the 'journalists' writing for the major media outlets, paid to shill the language of the status quo.

I've no firm opinion on Johnstone, as my exposure to her work -- with the exception of the OP article -- is limited only to instances where she was cited within this forum. Haven't been following the shouting matches from entrenched voices on either side, or any of the related white noise that tends to reach fevered pitches during times of tension/volatility. Been largely avoiding it, in fact. Have yet to ascertain the merits of paying mind to such rabble.

As such, I'm no arbiter on the topic of Johnstone. Worse, I'm largely ignorant on the details -- One can argue I've no business typing any of these words, in fact, given all the above.

That said, If anyone here is willing to provide a "Cliffs Notes" version of the concerns around Johnstone, I'm all ears. Particularly the part about calling a blog author "problematic" (unless, of course, she's a secret agent, in which case... yea, that's problematic.)

In the meantime, I'll dig around the net during my spare time in an attempt to glean a bit more insight into this topic.

(a few moments/clicks later...)

Here's one I happened across, from one of AD's frequently-traveled sites: Counterpunch --

Disclaimer: I've committed the faux pas of posting an article I've only skimmed through. Dreadful thing to do, I know, and certainly a far remove from the standard operating procedures 'round these parts.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/20 ... johnstone/

As a political activist, I have a love-hate relationship with CounterPunch ("CP"). All in all, the balance typically comes down on the side of love, for as a leftist activist, I find information and analyses in CP that are vital to what I do, and that would be hard to find in other sources. Plus, a generally savvy attitude of iconoclasm and suspicion toward power reigns at CP that, beyond being useful, is plain good fun.

But like most people—and probably most human institutions—CP has the vices of its virtues. And sometimes, these vices are as exasperating as the faults of a beloved spouse: the most intimately experienced, the faults that get most under your skin and have you ready to scream at the person you love most, “How the hell did I marry the world’s biggest asshole?”

While I’m not “married” to CP to the point of feeling that sort of pure (and fortunately temporary) blind rage, I am sufficiently involved, as a religious reader and sometime writer, to occasionally feel something akin to spousal exasperation. With sufficient provocation—and CP’s two recent hit pieces (see here and here) against “rogue journalist” Caitlin Johnstone certainly provide it—I’m forced to view the traits I find most infernally galling in my “beloved” and think, “Jesus F. Christ, there she goes again!”

For those unacquainted with the CP attacks on Caitlin Johnstone, it’s important to realize that they’re also (and perhaps even primarily) attacking long-time Green Party activist and former GP presidential candidate David Cobb. Being ill acquainted with the history of why Johnstone attackers Yoav Litvin and Joshua Frank feel such evident bad blood toward Cobb, I disqualify myself as a competent judge of that history. So, I defend Cobb only to extend of defending his embrace of Johnstone’s journalism—an embrace (despite specific disagreements with her) I emphatically share. Despite Johnstone’s provocative desire to fish in troubled waters—doesn’t CP itself like to court controversy, as any “muckraking journalism” worthy of the name should?—I see nothing in her writings to justify Frank’s wildly overblown claim that Cobb is “attempting to destroy the Green Party” by endorsing her work.

But to revert to my “spousal vice” analogy, I see CP’s attacks on Johnstone reflecting three characteristic CP vices that are the flip sides of its (normally substantial) virtues: 1) intellectual and credential snobbery, 2) excessive suspicion, and 3) inadequate regard for the activist perspective.

Believing Johnstone practices a brand of journalism of crucial contemporary relevance, I will devote the rest of this article to challenging CP’s rather snobbish, misguided attempt to “poison her wells” by questioning her journalistic qualifications and credentials. In a second piece, I’ll show how CP’s besetting vices of excessive suspicion and disregard for on-the-ground activism—vices intimately tied to its substantial virtues—have contributed to its unjust attack on Johnstone.

Misapplied Meritocracy vs. Desirable Pro-democracy Bias

A perennial—and inevitably vexing—question is determining “who has the goods”: determining who, in short, is qualified to perform a socially valued function. And while competence is clearly an important matter—where medical or Sherpa guide competence is concerned, it’s frequently a life-or-death one—competence does not obviously lie with those with the flashiest or most impeccably official credentials. As someone substantially influenced by the radical institutional critic Ivan Illich—above all, by his bombshell educational book Deschooling Society—I’m pretty apt defend the practitioner rights of those who acquire their socially valuable competence through less approved or completely unofficial channels.

Given CP’s typical editorial interests and commitments—above all, in light of official meritocracy’s current glaring failings—it seems strikingly strange that CP writers should apply such a rigorous meritocratic credential check to Johnstone.

In speaking of CP’s “editorial interests and commitments,” I think especially of chief editor Jeffrey St. Clair’s abiding interest in various genres of nonclassical music—fields which are virtually a resounding affirmation of Illich’s views on the value of informal education and virtually an outright refutation of credential-check meritocracy. Exactly how many world-renowned bluesmen, or how many world-renowned exponents of the rock music they influenced and help create, acquired their “chops” through formal credential-bestowing schooling? When Johnstone does, for starters, have an Australian journalism degree, it seems distinctly odd for CP to sit in judgment over the quality of Australian higher education. But it seems utterly contrary to CP’s characteristic subversive spirit (a spirit deepened, I imagine by St. Clair’s love of subversive music) to be applying such sniffy, snobby scrutiny to her journalistic creds.

But in citing “official meritocracy’s current glaring failings,” my suspicions of official meritocracy and its sniffy credential checks run much deeper. I think above all of three glaring (and somewhat intersecting) instances where official meritocracies have set public policy and launched our nation on a crash course with catastrophe: 1) mainstream economics, 2) “professional class” control of the Democratic Party, and 3) neocon and liberal-interventionist domination of foreign policy. Even if it were my chief purpose, I’d have a hard time citing the abundant evidence for these failure of official meritocracy in a single article; I must trust the leftist viewpoint I share with most CP readers and writers to solicit consensus that these failings of official meritocracy are important, ongoing, and real. But as a quick primer on the subject, readers can refer for evidence to three books I’ve read: James K. Galbraith’s The End of Normal on the failings of credentialed mainstream economists; Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal on the failings of Democrats’ “professional class” meritocracy; and Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State on the failings of the neocon and interventionist liberal foreign policy establishment.

These three current, glaring failures of official meritocracy provide striking evidence that we mustn’t automatically make distinguished establishment credentials our litmus test of actual competence. But these three “epic fails” have a common root that make them even more relevant to Johnstone and journalism as her chosen endeavor. Namely, they—like journalism itself—are not disciplines of hard science where scrupulous attention to the behavior of the physical world is a key determinant in arriving at the needed truth about one’s subject matter. While hard, unchanging facts certainly play a role in journalism itself (as in the cited disciplines where meritocracy failed), what counts just as much is the correctness of one’s bias—whether one’s value system is a good fit with the (in large part social) world being studied, written about, or made the subject of policy. And if it hadn’t been clear previously, it should be obvious now that not all biases and value systems are created equal: that certain ones deeply menace social harmony and quite likely the very survival of the human species.

One such menacing bias, quite arguably, is the corporatist or pro-plutocrat bias, largely responsible for the three cited failings of mainstream economics, Democratic Party politics, and neocon and neoliberal interventionist foreign policy. The same bias, by the way, that tends to shape the current meritocracy of professional journalism and make it a propaganda-spreading menace to the common good. To which CP’s pro-democracy alternative journalism and Caitlin Johnstone’s pro-democracy “rogue’ journalism are welcome and desperately needed antidotes. Rather than focusing on Johnstone’s official “meritocracy” credentials (these days, largely one’s license to be a presstitute), CP should be focused on the far more relevant question of her pro-democracy bias and her competence in 1) analyzing events in terms of that bias, 2) persuading readers to view current reality in terms that bias, and 3) motivating activists who already share that pro-democracy bias. If these are—as there’s reason to think there should be—the most relevant criteria of competence, Johnstone’s given ample evidence of having the needed journalistic chops.

Johnstone’s Got the Needed “Chops”

That as normally subversive a publication as CP should take potshots at Johnstone’s (supposedly “infra dig”) Australian journalism degree, or her lack of substantial prior reporting in her own nation, strikes me as misplaced meritocratic credential snobbery that CP fails to apply to many writers (yours truly included) who have graced—and hardly disgraced—its own pages. Many of us, unlike Johnstone, can’t claim journalism degrees of any sort.

And more crucially, what special relevance does a high-prestige journalism degree or a substantial reporting history have to opinion journalism—which is predominantly the sort of writing that Johnstone does? Beyond a certain basic competence in using language grammatically and readably, and a basic honesty in questions of fact, what more can those of us who feel a pro-democracy bias is now crucial ask of an opinion journalist than to be a persuasive practitioner of and advocate for such a bias? Even for those who don’t share that bias, Johnstone accomplishes an important mission: showing clearly and logically how events—and the world generally—look to people who share her bias. Understanding how politically important constituencies understand the world is itself important information for free citizens; given the biased, largely amateur, and highly polemical nature of journalism at the time the Bill of Rights was written, her model of journalism is quite close to what the First Amendment framers meant to defend in specifically protecting freedom of “the press.”

Given media technology and a concentrated ownership of media by special interests our First Amendment’s framers never could have imagined, the highly polemical “rogue” journalism of writers like Johnstone has vastly increased in importance as a counterweight to the prevailing consolidation. But for those of us who regard a pro-democracy bias (all other factors being equal) as a contributing factor to greater realism, having that bias amplifies the importance a journalist gains by simply being rogue.

Why a pro-democracy bias should render a journalist (all other things being equal) more realistic is a deep, fascinating philosophical question—touching on both social and political philosophy and epistemology—whose surface I can’t even begin to scratch here. A rough-and ready answer would argue that deliberative democracy has emerged as the best model of government for human beings and relate democratic citizens’ collaborative political truth seeking to scientists’ collaborative truth seeking about the natural world. Every good journalist, like every good scientist, is submitting an argument about the way things are for “peer review” and realizes that the best hope for collectively arriving at the truth lies in vastly expanding the number of qualified peers. So a good, truth-seeking journalist strives to expand political literacy—and therefore the number of competent critics of his or her own work—as much as a good scientist strives to expand scientific literacy.

Intelligence is humanity’s glory, and deliberative democracy recognizes that by giving human intelligence its maximal chance to guide human affairs. And in that regard, Caitlin Johnstone models in her journalism a new—and ideal—sort of democratic citizen: utterly impatient of official bullshit, skeptical and feisty to the point of belligerence toward those in power, and intelligent in a natural, artless way that makes her intelligence extremely easy to underrate or overlook. For me, her special value abides in making consistently astute political analyses (often the same one finds at CounterPunch) in a style so populist it seems easy to mimic—until one actually tries. Johnstone combines intelligence that assumes no airs about being intelligent with good writing that makes no bones about being good writing. In a society as regrettably anti-intellectual as ours (have you seen our president?), Johnstone is actually a Trojan horse for the intelligent left: who better to trick the “unwashed masses” into intelligent thought than a writer who speaks their language with so little apparent strain? (And if there’s little actual strain, her writing is pure untutored genius.)

As Naomi Klein has convincingly argued, the political left—the biggest advocate of deliberative democracy—is marginalized at a time when humanity needs our voices most. The worst of CP is everything that contributes to the marginalization. Such as “poisoning the wells” of so effective voice for our cause as Caitlin Johnstone by seeking—without adequate reason—to utterly discredit her as a source.

[American Dream]

https://postthirdpositionfascism.wordpr ... n-fascism/

Post-Third Position Fascism

Welcome to Post-Third Position Fascism. The purpose of this blog is to provide resources regarding recent permutations of Third Position and New Right fascist movements, especially in the U.S. – as well as groups that are influenced by these trends or work in alliance with them. These include, but are not limited to, groups like National-Anarchists, Attack the System, New Resistance, and others. We’ll also look at the attempts to appropriate radical left symbols and slogans by European groups like Casa Pound and the Autonomous Nationalists.

Third Position fascism is a lesser-known type of fascism that is anti-capitalist, believes in racial separatism rather than racial supremacy (and therefore can unite white and POC separatist groups in what we call reciprocal ethno-separatism), and is often interested in ecology and animal rights. The origins of the Third Position are in Otto Strasser’s wing of the original Nazi party; Strasser condemned Hitler for being “too moderate.” The term itself arose in the 1970s around the Italian “Nazi-Maoists.” These ideas became influential on British groups like the National Front; Russian groups like the National Bolshevik Party; and later on U.S. groups like the Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR), the American Front, the White Order of Thule, and the National Alliance.

More recently longtime fascist activists, many of whom were involved in groups like the European Liberation Front, and the associated LCRN, have continued to develop and change their ideology. (As right-wing monitor Chip Berlet points out, these are not just followers of similar ideas, but participants in a close-knit, international network of postwar fascists.) These include far right activists like Britain’s Troy Southgate, America’s James Porrazzo, and Russia’s Alexander Dugin. They have developed in different directions, sometimes embracing a Eurasian superstate in opposition to liberal international capitalism, while at other times endorsing a micronational ethnic separatism and even fusing with racist, antisemitic elements of the Ron Paul-wing of libertarianism. All of them deny being “fascist” – while continuing to promote the same ideas they have held for decades.

We’ll keep track of all of them, and expose their attempts at “entryism” in the left; their promotion of holocaust denial and other conspiracy theories; and their attempts to justify and endorse White Nationalists’ supposed “right” to Jim Crow white racial separatism.

We stand in opposition to white supremacy and white separatism; anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish views and conspiracy theories; patriarchy and homophobia – and to capitalism and all authoritarian forms of statist and religious rule.

[SonicG]

To be clear, I joked that Cernovich and Posobiec were "problematic" because I really meant they are con-men assholes and therefore thought it was ridiculous to talk about any reaching out to them. Why not the Paleos at AntiWar before the legion of Alt-Right scamsters? Other than that Johnstone just has similar CPunch progressive ideas and sits firmly in the OMG deep state wants war in Russia camp..."I hope John McCain dies..." was another one of her controversies...Good for her.

[liminalOyster]

I like reading what Caitlin Johnstone is thinking about. I'm glad she's out there as one problematic voice among many others mostly equally so.

edit: From her response to Yoav Litvin and Joshua Frank:

The centerpiece of both articles is the fact that I cited Mike Cernovich as someone on the right I might be able to collaborate with on some issues, the primary grievance being some weird rapey remarks Cernovich has made in the past. I don’t know if Yoav Litvin or Joshua Frank have ever been victims of rape, but like many women I am a survivor of several rapes and I can say that Cernovich’s views on the matter are one of the many, many areas on which we disagree. Interacting with Mike Cernovich is not going to make me think that rape is okay or suddenly transform me into a rape culture apologist.

I would like to take this space to offer that the ideas I’m sharing about collaborating with the right in the areas where our goals converge are not new; Ralph Nader has written an entire book about it. I’m speaking to an American political landscape which has shifted quite a bit since Nader’s Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State was published in 2014, but in my opinion it has shifted in a direction which allows for more collaboration. Obviously the neocons, the white nationalists of the alt-right, and your typical Fox News baby boomer won’t have a lot to offer in terms of collaboration, but that still leaves the libertarians, the paleocons, the ancaps and the various factions within Trump’s base who, for example, were outraged over the president’s missile strikes on a Syrian airfield in April.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/cait ... a0d74183c7

[Belligerent Savant]

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Appreciate that added excerpt, LiminalO. It further underscores my dismay at some of the sentiment here Re: Johnstone's output.

SonicG: to clarify, I was referring to the usage of the word 'problematic' in a prior page of this thread, not your usage of it.