Youtube comments of Harry Stoddard (@HarryS77).
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In the speech in which Chomsky made the comment that if the Nuremberg Laws were applied, every post-war American president would be hanged, he also pointed out that the reality is worse: the Laws were written to preclude the possibility of prosecuting Allied officers.
"Also, bear in mind, people ought to be pretty critical about the Nuremberg principles. I don't mean to suggest they're some kind of model of probity or anything. For one thing, they were ex post facto. These were determined to be crimes by the victors after they had won. Now, that already raises questions. In the case of the American presidents, they weren't ex post facto. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself what was called a 'war crime'? How did they decide what was a war crime at Nuremberg and Tokyo? And the answer is pretty simple, and not very pleasant. There was a criterion. Kind of like an operational criterion. If the enemy had done it and [one] couldn't show that we had done it, then it was a war crime. So like bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a war crime because we had done more of it than the Germans and the Japanese. So that wasn't a war crime. You want to turn Tokyo to rubble? So much rubble you can't even drop an atom bomb there because nobody will see anything if you do, which is the real reason they didn't bomb Tokyo. That's not a war crime because we did it. Bombing Dresden is not a war crime. We did it. German Admiral Gernetz—when he was brought to trial (he was a submarine commander or something) for sinking merchant vessels or whatever he did—he called as a defense witness American Admiral Nimitz who testified that the U.S. had done pretty much the same thing, so he was off, he didn't get tried. And in fact, if you run through the whole record, it turns out a war crime is any war crime that you can condemn them for but they can't condemn us for."
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@siyiroancreint We went in to do what we thought was right?
Note the euphemism, "we went in." No, we invaded, we conquered, we committed war crimes, we installed a government amenable to our interests.
That doesn't get to the question of "right." States cannot just do what they think is right. They must abide by international laws and norms. The legal grounds for the invasion of Afghanistan are more ambiguous than for the invasion of Iraq, which was obviously illegal, but I have never been able to see the justification for invading a country because they wouldn't extradite a terrorist, a non-state entity, without proof, which is what the Taliban asked for and the US refused. (The Taliban were supported and funded by the US in the war against the USSR.) I can't imagine the US invading Germany or, say, Ecuador, because they refused to extradite someone to the US without proof of a crime.
The US didn't invade Afghanistan for some lofty notion, because we thought we were doing "the right thing." The US wanted revenge, it wanted to remind the world of its power, no matter the cost in human lives. It invaded Afghanistan because it could: Afghanistan was a weaker nation militarily, and it was a nation of non-white people.
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Also, like, gee, why wouldn't I let the pigs search my car after pulling me out, failing to state probable cause, gaslighting me on multiple laws and rights, holding me up for hours, and false alerting me with a K9 unit? Hmm, real chin scratcher that.
When interacting with the cops, everything can and will be used against you. The cops aren't trying to mete out justice or determine what's right. They're there to make an arrest if possible, even (or especially) if that means twisting your words, actions, and possessions (actual or planted).
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They say she could have come out a long time ago, but what would have happened if she had?
What if she'd come out with her allegations when Kavanaugh was nominated to the D.C. Circuit? Well, why is she coming out now? Why didn't she do it earlier, when he was clerking for Ken Starr? That party was 20 years ago.
Or how about when he was a clerk for Ken Starr? But then the same excuse arises. Why didn't she do it earlier? That party was 10 years ago.
And we'd keep backpedalling like this until we're left with the only possible option: she "should" have come out right after the incident. So why didn't she? There is an abundance of testimonials from victims of sexual assault that explain why they didn't come forward. We know that most rapes and other forms of sexual assault go unreported. Or you could look at what happened with Brock Turner. How did the court perceive the case? Nice college kid, bright future, good at sports, so what if he raped some girl? This happened recently, in this climate of increased scrutiny of sex crimes, and there are plenty of similar examples. Or think of the Cosby trial: it took the word of 50 women or whatever it was to finally convince people to take the charges seriously.
Ford would have been making her allegation in the 90s when women were believed even less than they are now. For Republicans the dynamics of the situation haven't changed in the 30 intervening years, her word against the word of altar boy scholar athlete virgin Brett Kavanaugh.
So when Republicans ask why she didn't come out earlier, flash them a mirror. They're the goblins that keep stuff like this in the dark.
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Part of the problem with people like PSA is that they have way way too much faith in the "institutions" of America, so even if Trump is evil and incompetent, they can still support the Venezuelan coup because they trust the military, the generals, the Department of State, and the CIA to uphold standard procedure, not realizing 1) how infected those institutions are with Trump's malevolence—Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams—and 2) that those institutions have always been horrible, at their core, and often conducted themselves in tragicomically incompetent fashion.
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To think that Bernie is a communist (even though he said in a debate with Clinton that he supports capitalism and advocates for political revolution/reform instead of social revolution) only indicates the extreme degree to which this country has been so overtaken by the right and has assimilated into its consciousness the opinions of the corporate and business class, a group, as one early critic of capitalism observed, "whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
Far from being the herald of communism (or, indeed, even of socialism), Sanders more resembles a figure like FDR, whose accomplishment was "to save capitalism from itself," that is, a progressive reformer of capitalism.
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@unknownsample9280 In the midst of the Floyd protests, activists were rounded up by police. Federal officers essentially kidnapped protestors off the street. Note the media double standard in praising, for instance, the Hong Kong protestors as "pro-democracy," while activists fighting in the US for racial/gender equality or labor rights are never characterized as "pro-democracy," but often as disruptive enemies of democracy who at best may have a legitimate grievance but have "taken things too far" by doing what it is the prerogative if not the duty of every activist—transgress the boundary of what is acceptable to power.
Then there's people like Snowden, Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning who faced or are facing years of trauma, torture, and persecution for exposing the government. And if you happen to be a country that defies the US, expect crippling economic sanctions, embargo, or invasion.
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@cwx8 I wonder if JBP has seriously undertaken the task of rigorously studying climatology and made contributions to the field or if he's making sophomoric, ignorant, superficial, specious arguments to uphold the status quo.
It's the latter. Climate scientists are well aware of the complexity of the system. That's why they study it and why some random yahoo with no qualifications or expertise, like Peterson, isn't fit to make sweeping generalizations about the discipline.
The fact is that's what Peterson has done the entire time he's been in the spotlight, make generalizations about disciplines he doesn't understand, whether it's philosophy, history, literature, critical theory, law, and now climate science. He's a charlatan.
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I've tried reasoning with some of these anti-mask people, and it's impossible. There's always some new piece of cherry-picked evidence, some new faulty line of reasoning, straw man, misconception, misrepresentation, tangent, tu quoque, junk science, propaganda, or errant reading for them to retreat to. I think for a lot of them the only way they'll learn is the same way conservatives have to learn anything: it has to first negatively impact them or someone they know and love.
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5:00 For the longest time, "democracy" was synonymous with a chaotic, disorganized, unruly society. Some reactionaries still use it that way, eg the hyper pedantic types who insist well akshully we're not a democracy; we're a constitutional republic.
Republic also used to be a contentious word in the age of late feudalism and monarchy.
When people on the left uncritical accept the reactionary framing that socialism is a spooky word that scares normies away, they miss that reactionaries and the average indoctrinated person aren't bothered by the word. They're afraid of what the word represents—true democracy, worker control, the abolition of class. You have to change people's minds about the substance and associate the things they already like—free healthcare, college, workers' rights, etc—with the longterm socialist struggle.
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DJ Williams/Adan Lopez For all his flaws (e.g. neoliberal economics), in terms of foreign policy, Carter may have been the last decent president. Carter even came out and stated his support of Bernie Sanders. LBJ was horrible in terms of foreign policy, incredibly violent and brutal.
JFK, on the other hand, belongs up there with the worst in modern history. Total warhawk, used the CIA as a tool of international terrorism, instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly brought the world to nuclear catastrophe, and championed not a single significant piece of legislation. I don't know why people buy into this bogus "Camelot" narrative. On the personal side, he was super wealthy, had little experience, and philandered: sound like anyone?
Harry Truman is also, in hindsight, a pretty mediocre, if not damaging presence in American history. An insecure but pugnacious man, a Democratic yes-man, he's one reason we had the Cold War. Had FDR lived, or Henry Wallace gotten the VP slot, America's relationship with Russia would likely have been much better. Truman also centralized the intelligence community and created the CIA, a criminal organization if there ever was one. Then there's the monumental (and I think criminal) decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan (perhaps there was a reason no one told him about the project until after he became president).
Obama is very mixed. On the one hand, he has the "dreamers," on the other, he deported more immigrants than Bush 2. On the one hand he advocated for transparency in government; on the other, he attacked whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden with the Espionage Act, as well as journalists, and rejected FOIA requests. On the one hand he passed the most significant piece of health care legislation in decades; on the other, it was a massive giveaway to republicans, insurance companies, and big pharma. On the one hand he's supported equal pay for women; on the other, he supported the TTP. Then there's the Wall Street bailout, the drone assassination program, the modernization of the nuclear arsenal, the modernization of the Smith Act, the inability to close Guantanamo, the chaotic aftereffects of Libya, and his unwillingness to do anything serious about climate change. People perhaps get too caught up in the glamour of Obama, his family, his historic significance, to see his presidency for what it was, kind of like how people look at JFK as some great leader.
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Yemen is one of the most important and serious world events right now. It's despicable how little coverage corporate media is giving it. All the other things you cited are also very important. What the media chooses to cover and emphasize—and also what it neglects and downplays—says a lot about their priorities. For weeks there's been wall-to-wall Weinstein coverage, and while that story is important, it simply doesn't compare to things like Yemen and the tax plan.
Democrats moan about how Trump and his cronies constantly deflect onto other issues. Agreed, but then the Democrats spend all their time chasing this alleged Russian hacking scandal—for which no proof has been made available for public scrutiny; only assurances by the intelligence community, recalling other quagmires—instead of going after what matters, Trump's policies, in a progressive way that mobilizes citizens.
The truth is that while there are important differences between Trump/GOP and the Democrats it's a difference of degree, not of kind. Both want private healthcare insurance; both support endless war, regime change, and the drone assassination program; both are okay with an economic system that disproportionately benefits the rich, creating a neo-aristocracy, and exacerbating unprecedented levels of income and wealth inequality; both have tried to cut Social Security and other social benefits; both conciliate to big banks and big oil; both have augmented our nuclear arsenal; both support an inordinately expensive and vast military-industrial complex.
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@diallo1347 I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher...an economist, a botanist, a child psychologist, a chemist, a mechanic, a computer scientist, an engineer, a historian, a sexologist, a food safety expert, a tailor, a cobbler, an architect, a plumber, a craftsman, a mariner, a master tactician, an avant garde choreographer, a materials scientist, a forensic pathologist, an ordained minister, a black belt in all styles of martial arts, including the ones I invented, a lawyer, a political consultant, an arborist, a soils expert, a climatologist, an electrician.
But above all, I am a man.
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@samuelmerkel2888 You think the government's negligence causing the deaths of 250k people isn't a dangerous precedent to set?
You keep acting like no one else figured out how to deal with covid better. Basically every other country did a better job than the US. Some places, like China, Vietnam, and New Zealand managed it very well. Vietnam has fewer cases and deaths than my county. —County. It took masks, a lockdown, quarantine for certain individuals. It's not a mystery.
You keep ignoring that the recovery is stalling out. Citing GDP (and only the half that sounds nice) doesn't mean dick when more people are entering poverty, wealth inequality is growing, there's a looming eviction crises, and we're entering the second wave, with massive increases in the infection rate. GDP isn't a good way to measure what the economy is like for the average person and it doesn't measure the health of the economy, as Simon Kuznets, the inventor of GDP, has argued.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-reopening/us-data-suggest-economic-recovery-may-be-weakening-idUSKBN27S2H1
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It's not the MSM narrative; it's Donald's narrative. He talked about doing a muslim ban all through the campaign. He even consulted with Giuliani regarding how to go about it legally (not like that helped). But then when he actually fucking does it, people try to make up excuses.
This is how bigots operate. When they can't openly discriminate, they create laws that indirectly target minority groups based on some overlapping criteria, thereby giving them a degree of deniability. Recall the "literacy" tests of the Jim Crowe era or the voter suppression laws of our own day. In the case of the former, politicians argued that the tests were necessary to ensure a population of educated voters, which sounds, at least on the surface, like a good thing, right? But we know what the actual purpose was.
In the case of the muslim ban, the bigotry is more obvious because Trump had to choose a very large overlapping criterion: place of origin. (It's illegal to ban people just based on their place of birth or residence, but apparently the "law and order" candidate doesn't respect the law.) Trump is also trying to pass a blanket ban off as an anti-terrorism measure, even though he didn't ban Saudi Arabia, the place where the 9/11 attackers came from. Again, the reason is obvious: we want the Saudi's oil and Trump wants to protect his business dealings in the other non-banned countries.
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That's kind of the problem. The public is inculcated to imagine that cops spend their time fighting crime. We see it in TV dramas, in movies, in the news—to the point that even when the police are dealing with petty "offenses" like this, we think back to that imaginary crime they should be fighting. If only they had been dealing with those actual crimes, we tell ourselves, things would be better.
The reality is that the overwhelming majority of police work is spent patrolling, filling out paperwork, writing tickets, responding to noise complaints, harassing black, brown, and unhoused people...they're essentially bureaucrats with guns.
We don't need a "better" kind of cop who's out there fighting "real" crime. No cop is going to fight the roots of real crime—poverty, capitalism, bigotry, war. What we need is fewer and fewer cops.
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@andrewwells6323 Should I be shocked that I have to walk r/iamversmart poster through this line by line, or that you still won't have a clue what you're talking about even after I do?
>you've quoted almost an entire article...
I quoted a few examples from the article. There are more, and more besides what that one article contains. The purpose of quoting from it was to show that Brown took vastly larger sums from corporate interests, PACs (ones with conservative leanings), and Republicans. This directly addresses and contradicts your framing that Turner taking $1250 and Shontel Brown taking and benefiting from huge infusions of corporate and GOP money are somehow equivalent, or that because Turner took that money, somehow Brown isn't a corporate candidate. (Still funny that r/iamverysmart can't spell "corporate" lol.)
>Your entire argument is that they have "Republican" in their name.
In whose name? What? No group in the above had Republican in their name. The argument is about Republicans, Republican donors (both individuals and lobbying groups), and corporate interests donating to Brown. If that's what you meant, then, yes, that is the argument. And?
>No one said they had "Democratic" in their name
The reference to groups that even have "Democratic" in their name was obviously to DMFI, a pro-Israel, pro-apartheid lobbying group—Democratic in name only. So much for your reading comprehension.
>all you have as evidence...
You clearly didn't read the article lmfao! Roger Synenberg, former chair of the Cuyahoga County Republican Party, is "allegedly" a Republican, according to you. Man, you're desperate. No, donations to and from a pro-apartheid lobbying group are not "irrelevant."
>$1000
Read the article again. Sound out the words if you have to. Kraft alone—a Trump supporter who gave $1 million to Trump's inauguration—gave the maximum donation of $5800 to Brown, and his family donated $20,000. The pro-apartheid lobbyist DMFI spent $1.2 million on ads supporting Brown. My math may be wrong, but that seems like more than $1000.
>a registered superPAC
Namely, one created by the Working Families Party. We've been over this. Do you think taking money from a PAC created by a minority, pro-worker party is equivalent to taking money from Republicans, Republican donors, oil interests, or a pro-apartheid lobbying group? Please answer that so I can just write you off as a complete clown.
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@sr2291 They literally don't cost too much. I can cite plenty of studies which have found that providing resources, like housing, food, mental health services, and job placement are not only effective; they're cheaper than our current strategy of merely managing and punishing the problem with a kladge of police, anti-loitering ordinances, and disparate charities or government programs, which are often underfunded, overwhelmed, or restrictive.
This is called "housing first," and it's based on the pretty well established fact (and common sense) that it's very difficult to deal with mental health issues, drug abuse, and other problems when you don't have a stable living situation. Last year, Finland became the first country to adopt this policy.
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@bobpope3656 I don't think you understand how economists classify middle class. Yes, someone with 5m net worth is way outside the middle class.
Here's BI estimating that a millionaire will he considered middle class by...2215 at best or 2609 at worst.
https://www.businessinsider.com/when-will-the-typical-american-be-a-millionaire-2019-8?amp
So much for that.
What you're noticing is that more wealth is held the higher up you go in society. The top 10% owns most of what the top 20% owns, the top 1% owns most of what the top 10% owns, the top 0.1% owns most of what the top 1% owns, etc.
Just because a millionaire owns less than Bill Gates doesn't ipso facto make them middle class (although that is certainly what they seem to think, according to polls). https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/30/70-percent-of-americans-consider-themselves-middle-class-but-only-50-percent-are.html
"We’re a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment bankers, M.B.A.s with opaque job titles, and assorted other professionals—the kind of people you might invite to dinner. In fact, we’re so self-effacing, we deny our own existence. We keep insisting that we’re “middle class."" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
According to the NYT, a net worth of 1m puts you around the top 10%. A net worth of 5m puts you in the top 5%. https://nyti.ms/2YUwEtr
It boggles my mind that I have to spell this out for all the out-of-touch bootlickers here thinking most Americans are millionaires. Pure ideology, man.
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iHost I see this sort of comment on every video criticizing Saagar, and I think it misses the point. Asked point blank if he's conservative, Saagar will say he is. Recently he's been very vocal about his conservativism, eg calling for the military to confront protestors.
But go back a year or two. Look through the comments of Rising videos, MR and TMBS videos, etc, and you'll see scores of people writing as if Saagar is a progressive liberal, or at least a new kind of hip conservative ally who believes in progressive policies.
So Saagar may not have denied being a conservative, but the critique the left has of him is that the format of Rising, and Krystal's complicity, whitewashed his staunch, retrograde conservatism and authoritarianism, and by proxy may have rehabilitated the image of the "liberal with a woke conservative friend" trope seen so often among centrist liberals, but now on the liberal left.
Nathan J. Robinson has a few good articles on Rising and Saagar. One of them is a review of Krystal and Saagar's book wherein they allegedly lay out their vision for the country...except Saagar never really says what he wants; it's all just the duplicitous railing about elites and corporations you see from Tucker Carlson; and that very absence of an agenda can make it seem, to an unfamiliar reader, as if Saagar agrees, if not in detail or scope then at least in principle, with Krystal's progressive outline. That strikes me as a kind of tacit and deceitful denial.
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Sugar Shane That is mostly true. Since WWII there's been a recession every 3-5 years, but those have tended to be minor. They've resulted from things like monetary policy, post-war contraction, interest rates, deregulation.
The 2008 Great Recession was the deepest and longest recession since the Great Depression. It's no coincidence that it came on the heels of sweeping deregulation in the financial sector. While the period between 1945 and 2008 was subject to the business cycle of capitalism, the reforms and regulations put in place by the the FDR administration, like Glass-Steagall, likely prevented a Great Recession type event from occurring sooner and more frequently.
The two other significant economic crashes, Savings and Loan and the Dotcom Bubble, were presided over by Reagan and Clinton, two presidents who deregulated industry, encouraging unrealistic and unsustainable growth. So it does matter who's in power. Having a reformer like FDR doesn't fix the excesses inherent to capitalism—to an extent it enables them—but it does soften the blow when a recession inevitably comes around.
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@kolt45gaming A few things. All your "points" just speak to the fact that we're talking about different kinds of viruses, that covid is highly contagious, and that knuckledragging dunderheads (and 1st world hoarding) are keeping us from reaching levels of herd immunity that those other vaccinations benefit from.
A highly contagious virus, like covid, is going to mutate much faster, possibly rendering certain versions of the vaccines less useful over time. This situation is made worse by vaccine refusers who are more likely to contract and spread the disease, allowing the virus more opportunities to multiply and mutate. You're contributing to the very problem you're complaining about. It's also simply not true that each variant has occasioned a different booster. The most recent and only booster came well after Delta was endemic, and that had to do not with Delta itself but with waning immunity, a predicted possibility from the beginning.
The notion that vaccines do nothing to stop transmission is built on a wildly simplistic half truth. They don't stop transmission in breakthrough cases (though some evidence shows they decrease viral load and time of contagiousness), but they do vastly decrease the chance you'll ever get sick in the first place and be able to transmit the virus. Thus, getting the vaccine prevents transmission, significantly.
Some vaccines do require many doses. I think polio takes three or four. Tetanus has to be boosted every ~10 years, the flu every year. This has as much to do with how different these viruses/bacteria are as with how the body responds to immunization. I'm sorry that you both want scientists to wait ten years or whatever for a vaccine and also to have everything figured out yesterday, but those contradictory desires aren't realistic during a pandemic. In the real world, we have what is for all intents and purposes a very good, if not bullet proof, vaccine for preventing the worst outcomes, including contraction, transmission, hospitalization, and death. You need to take an extra 20 minutes to get a shot. Bfd. Stop being a weenie.
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I remember a lecture given by French novelist and filmmaker Alan Robbe-Grillet in which he discusses his method of filming. If it's a rainy day, but the script calls for sunshine, most directors would postpone shooting, but Alan said that he would instead alter the script, make the story conform to and reveal the conditions of its production. The expediency and flexibility of CGI allows the conditions on set, or even the existence of a set, to be irrelevant, divorced from reality. Its improvisation is not organic, dynamic, and fortuitous (the squirrel jumping on the tree stump in Seventh Seal) but, ironically, premeditated.
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Is that what he said? I'm pretty sure he's said,
"What is the fucking point of having more Muslims in your society? It seems perfectly rational to say, We don't want any more. We have enough, right? And certainly increasing the percentage is not a help to anyone who loves freedom of speech or any of the other liberal values you and I just spoke about maximizing. It's not worth the trouble, and if we can figure out some way to keep the number of muslims down in any society—whether we're honest about this or whether we do this covertly clearly it's rational to do this. And this is a place where someone like Robert Spencer would say, Amen. This is not an expression of xenophobia; it's an expression of statistics."
"We have enough, right?" Of course, now that I've directly quoted him at some length I open myself to being called a bad actor who misrepresents his arguments in bad faith. To me, this is pretty typical Sam Harris. Begin with emotional outrage (what is the fucking point?), proceed to characterize that emotional response as "perfectly rational... an expression of statistics," malign the opposing side as a bunch of utopian do-gooders, and explicitly say racist and xenophobic things while superficially denying that that's precisely what he's doing, all with that hyper-considerate, ASMR voice. (If Harris said the exact same words, but in a raving tone like most conservatives, I have no doubt that people on the "left" would see him for exactly what he is on this topic; conversely, if the conservatives wised-up and couched everything in "rational," "polite" decorum, we'd be horribly fucked.)
He;s also stated that while he thinks the discourse around Middle Eastern refugees has problems on the Democratic and Republican sides, he basically blames "liberals" for the right-wing's crazy ideas (while saying that it's only the far right and fascists who have the correct take on this subject, as if that didn't fuel their popularity) and flat out says that the most significant factor when accepting refugees is the threat of converting the West to Sharia Law, which is a patently neocon scare tactic.
Harris refuses to acknowledge that refugees are people fleeing an unlivable situation, not covert infiltrators out to take over Western society; that refugees and immigrants usually integrate into their new society rather than changing it to suit their previous experience; that most refugees just want to return home; and that demonizing people who deserve compassion is a great way to produce jihadists. He has an incredibly narrow understanding of what causes someone to become a jihadist or religious extremist—Islam. Period. When confronted by experts in the field of religion, religious ideology, and terrorism, like Scott Atran, Jeremy Scahill, it becomes readily apparent that Harris cannot formulate a nuanced view of the topic, instead preferring to cast everything under the shadow of Islamofascism and Sharia Law, concepts that do not require him to develop a comprehensive understanding of the region and peoples (plural) that he's talking about. It's a deeply reactionary way to look at the world.
If I can make a final point. Observing the New Atheist/Neocon/Neoliberal response to Muslims over the past 15 or so years, I'm constantly reminded of the kind of rhetoric produced by the conflict between the US and Imperial Japan. There's a very good book on the racial propaganda of both countries called War without Mercy by John Dower, if you haven't read it. His motivation for the book was a need to examine how two sides that wanted to exterminate each other during the war could become partners and allies very soon after. His answer is that both paradigms exploited and molded pre-existing traditions, conceptions, and logics, just to different ends. Therefore only the superficial images had to change (domineering to paternal, subhuman to obedient) within a constant logic of race, virtue, and power.
There are passages of that book that could read true today with a few substitutions of "Japanese" for "Muslim," etc. I think Harris and his ilk are falling into the same trap as public figures did in the war period, only because society has become more civilized in its discourse, you can't say or really think the same sorts of overtly racist and exterminationist things people felt completely at liberty to espouse in the 40s, but the basic logic and narrow view of the world remains.
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"Why didn’t you quote the whole quote?" There it is! Right on cue. As someone who has a bit of training in writing, I have to confess that I'm quite unaware of the practice of quoting entire articles, discussions, books, etc. as an academic, let alone casual, standard. Of course—of course—any failure to understand the full rational, multi-book length discourse that Sam Harris has produced is misrepresentation. On the other hand, the suggestion that Sam Harris and his followers should understand a modicum of the context into which they've inserted themselves is identity politics, liberal hand-wringing, etc. It's a double standard with an important difference. One of them results in hundreds of thousands of casualties, destabilized governments, loss of culture, the spread of extremism. The other results in Sam Harris whining on his podcast and threatening to publish email exchanges.
I quoted Harris at length. You didn't deal with any of the content of those statements. Instead of actually addressing those points you deflected to a characterization of the context of the utterance. Yes, some people will have a knee-jerk reaction to terrorism. Yes, we should consider how to engage with people who have been victims of terror or perceive themselves to be at risk for terrorist attacks. That is not controversial.
That's also not the substantive point that Sam made, which is that it is perfectly rational to limit honestly or covertly the Muslim population of a given society because Sharia Law poses a real threat to the integrity of Euro-American democracy. His praise of the fascist/alt-right for understanding the importance of controlling immigration was so stupid that it even earned the rebuke of Christopher Hitchens.
To your point. Yes, Harris, like anyone who tries to portray themselves as rational and above the fray, positions himself as non-partisan, neither right nor left, only an objective interpreter of Truth. But I think you have to be careful to distinguish what Sam Harris says he's doing from what he is doing. To give a stark example, it's not uncommon to hear white supremacist, KKK members in America say that they aren't racist: they don't hate black people; they're just proud of being white, or whatever. Most people, I think, can see through this. I think most people can also discern that the DPRK is not democratic, despite its name. Professions of one's intent and attitude, even if sincerely believed, do not always align with action and follow from the content of belief. Sam Harris is not the KKK and he's not the DPRK, but I think his constant reminders that he's not racist, not xenophobic, etc., ring hollow when he says things like "What is the fucking point of having more Muslims in your society." Even if he's trying to characterize someone else's position, it's clear that this is also what he believes. To be clear, I don't think Sam Harris is a racist like the KKK are racist. I think he says and thinks things that are racist in the subconscious, structural sense.
So Harris is capable of criticizing the left and right. I don't think his critiques are equally valid, since his characterization of liberals as struthiously ignorant is particularly rich given what I've already described as his incredibly simplistic knowledge of the topic. By criticizing "both sides" Sam appears like the middle ground. But that middle ground so constructed reflects increasingly reactionary, right wing, even fascist views on race and immigration.
I do think we should have a screening process; in fact we do, a rather rigorous one. I don't think that screening process should be tied to racial quotas or predicated on the desirability of certain kinds of ethnic groups. Imagine if he had said "black" instead of "Muslim." He would say, "Why the fuck would you want more black people in your society. Statistically black people cause more crime" and extrapolate from that that the number of black people should be kept to a minimum. This isn't really that hypothetical, because this has basically been the right-wing position about race for decades. It's not racist; it's just the facts—whadda gonna do?
Harris is concerned about upholding liberal values, at least that's what he says. But I think liberal values should show concern for the plight of refugees, especially when our government has contributed to the preconditions of their plight.
I really do think you should read through that Dower book. I think it can be difficult to see through ideological bias when you're steeped in it but easier to see when it concerns events, ideas, and emotions in the past. The reliance on characterizing Muslims according to certain interpretations of Islam is almost identical with the reliance on characterizing the Japanese according to Bushido. It's a very crude analysis either way. And, opportunistically, it was in part the culture of Bushido, which before was the guarantor of Japanese violence and backwardness, that became the rationale for Japan's quick adoption of liberal democracy and capitalism.
The Calais jungle is something I can't speak to extensively, but it's a complex issue. These were people coming from dire situations into substandard, cramped living conditions, with little to no stability. That there were problems with them from time to time is trivially a product of their living situation, which was exacerbated by mistreatment by law enforcement and the system in general. But as I said, I can't speak to specifics. I just wouldn't expect people living in that situation to act like polite citizens at all times. I wouldn't either.
I also don't like to get too hung up on self-congratualtory rhetoric about being a "moderate" country that respects women and so on. For one, it plays into Harris's ahistorical view of the Middle East and Islam as forever opposed to women's rights. Actually, before US interventions, Iraq and Iran were relatively liberal with regard to women. Qasim overthrew the pro-US, anti-woman monarchy and enacted sweeping reforms, including gender equality. How much coverage of Syria is devoted to Rojava and the incredible expansion of women's rights there, a region of secularists, Christians, and Muslims? Virtually none. How often has Sam Harris championed that development? Never. I don't take his concern for women's rights seriously. I especially don't take it seriously when our government supports Saudi Arabia, which not only is repressive to women in its own territory, but whose current barbaric war against Yemen, executed with US weapons, threatens the entire population with famine and disease. You can't have women's rights when there's no respect for life at all. How much does Sam Harris spend talking about this? None. For a simple reason: it doesn't fit his narrow preconception of Muslims.
The selection of what constitutes "news" or "debate" can be as revealing as the content. The fact that Sam Harris ignores huge swathes of past and present political history betrays a neoconservative bias toward the Middle East, despite some cursory humanitarian qualifications.
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@intuitionz1198 Then you must not be paying attention.
When De Blasio wanted to effect a stay-at-home order, Cuomo said, "It cannot happen legally. No city in the state can quarantine itself without state approval and I have no interest whatsoever and no plan whatsoever to quarantine any city."
A study, "Differential Effects of Intervention Timing on Covid-19 Spread in the United States," found that:
"In the New York metropolitan area, the epicenter of COVID-19 in the US, 209,987 (183,607–223,199) [80.0% (70.0%-85.0%)] confirmed cases and 17,514 (15,293–18,878) [80.3% (70.2%-86.6%)] deaths would have been avoided if the same sequence of interventions had been applied one week earlier (Fig. 2c-d)."
As for the numerous (what is it, 11?) allegations of sexual harassment, some of which ARE ON VIDEO, they were credible enough for the NY AG.
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@Mintberrycrunch982 The complaint against JP is not that he's a recovered ideologue returning to warn all of us of its dangers. It's precisely that he is the exemplar of the ideologue, the man who claims to be speaking Truth untainted by ideology (like it or not, bucko!), but Peterson's views on life, sexuality, society, when they aren't just triviality gussied up as wisdom (pet cats, clean your room), are saturated with ideology, particularly a conservative, quasi-Christian, patriarchal, hierarchical ideology.
Ideology is not some great evil or confusion to be avoided. People who believe they've escaped ideology and only encounter reality "as it really is" are often the most prone to dogmatism and the more pernicious aspects of ideological thinking. Peterson seems to be one of those people. Instead of confronting his own ideological position, he says he's not ideological. His ideas are supported by a "nature" that he's carefully butchered to conform to his design while ignoring the abundance of evidence that falsified or at least complicates his antiquated worldview.
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@anti-corporatecapture3844 Is that the only vaccine to compare things to? Why pick a vaccine that benefits from significant herd immunity? About 95% of Americans are inoculated with the polio vaccine. We're not even close to 95% of Americans being fully vaccinated, not to mention boosted, against covid19. Also recall that the polio vaccine is actually 4 shots.
We're also talking about a disease, polio, that was wiped out in America because of vaccination. In other words, today polio vaccines benefit from there being no polio around (or at least very little, in cases where it's imported from another country). That isn't comparable to the current pandemic.
When the polio vaccine was first released, it was only 70% effective, much less than the 90-95% effective mRNA vaccines. Should people have not taken the polio vaccine because iT diDnT wOrK, or because they had to get boosters, or because breakthrough cases happened? Is that the argument you want to make?
Polio isn't a comparable disease or situation, and the history of the vaccine undermines the point you're trying to make.
Not all vaccines are equal, and no vaccine is magic. If your standard for a vaccine is that it stops all infections, you've set up an impossible standard and a false dichotomy. Vaccine effectiveness can vary depending on the pathogen, the kind of vaccine, the environment (how much of the virus is circulating), vaccination rate, and the individual's immune system.
In reality, we see that there's a significant difference in infection, hospitalization, and death rates between the unvaccinated and the vaccinated. The vaccines do work. We also have a pandemic, with a lot of virus circulating and mutating, necessitating additional doses and probably new vaccines at some point. This isn't all that different from flu vaccines, which have to be updated and administered annually. It seems like such a first world problem to complain about taking 20 minutes to get a free vaccine to keep oneself and the community safe.
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Rio Stover I'm not sure I understand. How could your first sentence be considered lying by omission?
To give a real example, Foreign Policy has reported that Wikileaks declined to publish leaks from the Russian Interior Ministry because Wikileaks did not have resources to deal with anything else during the election cycle, on which they were singularly focused. Given Assange's professed desire to undermine American hegemony and the grudge he bears Hillary Clinton/ Obama, it's not surprising that he chose the Podesta/DNC emails as the priority, but it is disappointing.
It's also a little disappointing to have it more or less confirmed now that they timed their releases for maximum effect—a technique often used by governments to disseminate propaganda—and perhaps also to cover for Trump. They weren't simply releasing information as they were able to, or when it was ready. They acted in a calculated way to influence people's perception of the candidates—which on a certain level is fine, if the information is accurate, but I think they strayed beyond that into a gray area of manipulation.
If that is the case, and they had information ready and available during the primary, that means that they chose not to potentially aid a stable candidate like Sanders but instead to throw some measure of support toward Trump in the general. Lots of people suspected that Wikileaks was holding out, and now it seems like that might have been true. It certainly fits Assange's MO of disrupting the government's conspiracy of authority. I don't think he wanted Trump to win; he most likely wanted Clinton to win and for Trump to delegitimize the political system.
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@Stupidlamb2 "Well, maybe in a true open market, only the safest manufacturers will remain at the end. I mean after so many deaths and accidents so that the demands would only pick those safer."
There are major problems with this way of thinking and I'm kind of shocked it needs to be said for the benefit of people like @Harsh . D .
It is in the interest of companies to conceal information about their product, meaning that it is impossible to have a market that is "free" and transparent. How can consumers make "choices" when they do not have adequate information? Do you think Boeing is going to volunteer to disclose the fact that its planes are malfunctioning? The only reason we know about it now—that there are only hundreds rather than thousands dead—is because there does exist a regulatory apparatus that world governments can use to intervene in industry—ground flights, call for redesigns, etc.
There's another issue. Can you imagine how onerous it would be to have to research, in depth, the production history of every good and service you want to buy? Having to research that your food isn't poison, that your electronics won't blow up, that your house isn't made of flammable material, that your car is safe to drive...
Even if markets were perfect—and they aren't for reasons I've mentioned—no one has time to both be an exploited worker AND a vigilant super consumer.
Saying that eventually the market will sort itself out may be true. It may be. But how many thousands upon thousands of people will have to get sick or die before some faulty product is discovered? The regulations we have today weren't invented out of thin air. Often they were invented in response to a crisis that the market could not correct—because markets are about short term profit, not making "the best" product—or in response to the very foreseeable crises that could arises. Think of something like Thalidomide.
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+Jason Kerby It sounds to me like the old idea that the poor lack moral fiber. They just don't have the character that money bestows People earn money by being responsible, honest, and upright. How many times have you heard of investors, CEOs, managers, and other upper class workers acting in bad faith, embezzling, conspiring, defrauding, avoiding regulation, etc? Never.
The other problem I see with your justification is that we already have a way to determine work responsibility--references. As the segment points out, there is no data correlating credit scores with job performance, so it's just a cultural supposition. It sounds like it could be true, and so we all pretend that it is.
Credit scores are a way to de-individualize applicants by reducing them to a number. It's supposed to be less messy, more objective. But with so many errors and a dubious connection to performance anyway, maybe it isn't so objective.
The segment also points out that a lot of debt exists for reasons beyond our control. There are health costs, student debt, care for elderly parents. The reason people with more money have fewer credit problems isn't because they are necessarily more responsible; they just have the means to afford and dissolve the debts inherent to modern life; but the poor do not, and so they have to accrue debt, use payday lending, and other things to get by.
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@levihuerta9393 Communism advocates for the free association of producers, so no one would be forced to make anything. A planned economy requires that demand is indicated through workers' federations and communities. It's important to recognize that what is called "demand" in capitalist economics is not actually a measure of demand as need but demand as possession of resources. A homeless man needs a house, but his need has no impact on the market demand for a house, nor can it stimulate the construction of new houses.
And of course communism intends to abolish money and the wage form, so no one is "paid" anything. It's also unlikely that people would take on single professions—one is a coal miner, another a poet. A major concern of classical Marxists and anarchists was to eliminate the division between manual and intellectual labor. In that sense, something like Parecon's balanced work profiles, where workers in an industry assume both menial and empowering tasks, might be desirable.
You can't understand communism by expecting it to behave like or meet the constraints of capitalism. Because then it wouldn't be communism; it would be capitalism. The point of proposing new paradigms, as Raymond Geuss says, is not to answer the questions of the old system but to dissolve them and pose new questions. Asking how people will be paid in a communist society is a bit like asking an 18th century capitalist how capitalism will address ownership of serfs or the divine right of kings.
It always strikes me as strange that when addressing the issue of providing necessities for everyone, so many balk at the idea that the currently well-off might not be able to own their own personal boat, fancy car, McMansion, etc. I'm sure these are not the concerns of Bangladeshi garment factory workers, Mexican farmworkers, African miners, or the average American pulling minimum wage. Even if communism precluded the production of boats for personal, recreational use, but could provide for human sustenance and culture, it would be worth it. To put more value or address more concern to the boatless seems immensely cruel, and exactly what the capitalist notion of "demand" instructs us to think: those with money have a greater innate value.
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@coletrain546 They're pretending that we can erase values from political or social decisions and have "objective" ways of knowing and deciding what to do. They just follow data or science or common sense without acknowledging how those things still reflect our biases, priorities, commitments, and beliefs. What they don't say is what those "rational" things are for, who benefits, and why.
Graeber:
"Neoclassical economics is notorious for making this kind of move. When an economist attempts to prove that it is “irrational” to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say “irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, or the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage.” There is absolutely no reason why one could not rationally calculate the best way to further one’s political ideals through voting. But according to the economists’ assumptions, anyone who takes this course might as well be out of their minds.
In other words, talking about rational efficiency becomes a way of avoiding talking about what the efficiency is actually for; that is, the ultimately irrational aims that are assumed to be the ultimate ends of human behavior."
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@carlitaticconi6655 Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting, NEJM
"Results: In the vaccination analysis, the vaccinated and control groups each included a mean of 884,828 persons. Vaccination was most strongly associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 3.24; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.55 to 12.44; risk difference, 2.7 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 1.0 to 4.6), lymphadenopathy (risk ratio, 2.43; 95% CI, 2.05 to 2.78; risk difference, 78.4 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 64.1 to 89.3), appendicitis (risk ratio, 1.40; 95% CI, 1.02 to 2.01; risk difference, 5.0 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 0.3 to 9.9), and herpes zoster infection (risk ratio, 1.43; 95% CI, 1.20 to 1.73; risk difference, 15.8 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 8.2 to 24.2). SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantially increased risk of myocarditis (risk ratio, 18.28; 95% CI, 3.95 to 25.12; risk difference, 11.0 events per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 5.6 to 15.8) and of additional serious adverse events, including pericarditis, arrhythmia, deep-vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, myocardial infarction, intracranial hemorrhage, and thrombocytopenia.
Conclusion: In this study in a nationwide mass vaccination setting, the BNT162b2 vaccine was not associated with an elevated risk of most of the adverse events examined. The vaccine was associated with an excess risk of myocarditis (1 to 5 events per 100,000 persons). The risk of this potentially serious adverse event and of many other serious adverse events was substantially increased after SARS-CoV-2 infection."
In other words, the most prevalent negative side effect was myocarditis, which has an incidence of about 0.00001% (risk ratio 3.24), which most people recover from, and which is more common in covid patients (RR 18.28).
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There are a couple things there. I'll try to be concise, but it's not my strong point.
The first is that capitalism has been 10 years from ending poverty for the last 200 years. There are a lot of things to discuss here that I just can't for the sake of space, but one thing to consider is that recently, I think if you read some of the literature over time, there's a shift in emphasis from ending poverty to ending "extreme poverty," or some variation of that. That itself is telling, a contraction of ambition.
There's a recent book by Alan Mayne called Slums. In it he talks a bit about the UN's project to end global poverty (extreme poverty) by 2030. One of the things Mayne and others have pointed out is that 1) such a project is a victim of its categories. If the UN or other organization defines poverty a specific way and then abolishes it but leaves behind other kinds of poverty, has it really ended poverty? 2) part of the success of the UN's program, just to stick with that example, has come from methods that remove the appearance of poverty—bulldozing a slum and redeveloping—without actually improving the lives of the former slum-dwellers. They're still basically where they were before, only now they don't even have substandard housing; they can't afford to live in the new houses. So while these neoliberal/capitalist attempts have produced some results and improved some lives, they've also resulted in negative results for many many others while enriching the corporations and entities responsible for securing development contracts. There are other ways to rebuild disadvantaged communities, ones that involve the community and don't exploit it.
The second thing is that the main reason why I think capitalism is unable to ultimately vanquish poverty is that poverty is a critical part of capitalism. Capital requires that some people are under threat of starvation and homelessness in order to coerce them to work. What sane person would work 15 hours in a sweatshop making overpriced NIkes for 10 cents a day unless they had to just to barely survive? While the situation in the developed world is not as extreme, it has been, and the fact that it isn't now is possible only because of the immoral exploitation of the third world. Take that away, and the world economy is in turmoil. Moreover, every capitalist is constantly trying not to raise wages but to reduce them through more efficient production and through automation. They don't want everyone to be poor, of course, because then no one can buy their products, but they also need a class of the poor or very poor to exploit, whether domestically or internationally. The problem of employment and automation is just going to get worse in the coming decades, and the capitalist solutions to it so far are so far unconvincing. Rather than being something separate from capitalism, that can be extirpated and eradicated, poverty is part of the capitalist system.
But supposing that capitalism can end "extreme" poverty, won't that mean that capitalism is a fine system? Did ending some of the toils and uncertainties of hunter-gatherer life make feudalism a just system? Even imagining that feudalism had itself solved the issue of scarcity and poverty, would it be a just system, a system of royalty, aristocracy, stratified social classes? It's a curious thing to judge the merits of a system by the bad things that it is not. Marx has this line in the Grundrisse I think about how one form of wage labor can ameliorate the faults of another, but no wage labor can ameliorate the evils of the wage system itself. I think something similar applies here. Even if capitalism manages to end poverty (it won't, though), there will still exist inequality such as we see in the United States. Currently the eight wealthiest people own as much wealth as the bottom ½ of the world's population. That's unprecedented as far as I know. There's good evidence to believe that such gross inequality leads to more social turmoil, a weakening of democractic institutions, and conflict. It is not a stable situation, but it is one that capitalism reprises over and again. One hopes that a socialist society would not only provide for the necessities of life as a guarantee, but also allow for a more equal, more just society in which individuals and communities can develop their sense of identity.
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Yeah, maybe we should, uh, do something about workers not owning the products of their labor. Crazy idea. Get rid of the masters.
I really want to drill down on this false equivalency thing. You think an actor throwing out the entire script of a movie and telling off the director is like an athlete kneeling—not disrupting, not streaking across the field; kneeling—for 2 minutes, on the sidelines, like a veteran recommended he do out of respect, during a weirdo military ritual best left in 1930s Italy, that was paid for by the US military to brainwash foster pro-American sentiment—and then standing up and playing the game normally are the same?
I'm trying to figure this out. One example derails the entire production. The other doesn't. What's the connection, man? All I see is you're saying "respect authority because reasons." And, fuck that.
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"With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names--liberty and tyranny." Abe Lincoln, April 18, 1864 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=88871
He's obviously talking about slavery here, but it's not that far off from capitalist wage labor: "for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor."
It wouldn't surprise me that part of the resistance to abolition was the fear that a line might be drawn from a notion of liberty that derives from its anti-thesis to slavery to a critique of wage labor as "wage slavery." In other words, abolition potentially could not have just meant an end to slave labor but also potentially a disruption of labor as it had evolved in the North.
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Yeah. It's a vague, ill-defined, and incoherent term. And, I think, an essentially right-wing, classist framing.
Even if we just take the example of JK Rowling, was it "cancel culture" when the right criticized her for gay Dumbledore or black Hermione? No. It was only when people in the trans community and allies criticized her for a pattern of transphobic remarks.
Was it "cancel culture" when David Wright was suspended and then demoted? No. But it was cancel culture when protesters barred Charles Murray from speaking.
The fact is that no individual, not even an entire ideology, is owed this or that platform. Every outlet exercises editorial control, and, ironically, in the mainstream that editorialism tends to hew to the right or to the status quo.
If anything, this letter reveals an anxiety among traditional shapers of opinion - columnists, academics, novelists, journalists - about the ability of the public to directly criticize them and to try to hold them accountable however possible in absence of some ready-made, institutional recourse for criticism and accountability.
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@MrHammerman97 "The proximal origins of Sars-CoV-2," KG Anderson, Nature.
"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."
"Scientist opens up about his early email to Fauci on virus origind," NYT
"Over the past year, Dr. Andersen has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the theory that the coronavirus originated from a natural spillover from an animal to humans outside of a lab. But in the email to Dr. Fauci in January 2020, Dr. Andersen hadn’t yet come to that conclusion. He told Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, that some features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered, and noted that he and his colleagues were planning to investigate further by analyzing the virus’s genome.
"The researchers published those results in a paper in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, concluding that a laboratory origin was very unlikely. Dr. Andersen has reiterated this point of view in interviews and on Twitter over the past year, putting him at the center of the continuing controversy over whether the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab."
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@Steven Boyd I don't know, couldn't you take this statement...
"Condoms are nearly 100% effective at preventing pregnancies so if you end up impregnating someone but never wanted the burden of fathering a child then chances are you were just being stupid or irresponsible"
...and flip it around? Contraception is the business of both parties, yet abortion is (rightly) available, but only to one. Setting aside cases of rape and medical necessity, women still have the option to abort as a basic bodily right (however encroached upon), even if they made a poor decision and got pregnant unintentionally. The way you frame it, it's as if the woman is some helpless victim with no agency in the matter. She's also present for sex, and can decide (again, except for rape, abuse, or coercion) whether or not to have unprotected sex.
I guess I don't see why abortion should be the prerogative of one party but not the other. Since the man has no control over the woman's body, and since he does not physically carry the child, it seems to me that the only fair alternative is to allow a window for opting out of parental rights and responsibilities. If the man opts out, the woman can choose to abort or go through with the pregnancy. That way the man and woman have the opportunity to have sex with contraception or not, and they both have an opportunity to legally opt out should an unwanted pregnancy occur. Is this an ideal solution? Probably not, but it's not an ideal situation either. At the very least it strikes me as more fair than what we currently have.
It's also worth considering that unwanted pregnancies do happen. It could be that a couple wanted to get pregnant initially, and did, but for whatever reason no longer wanted to stay together or raise children together. That happens.
@ItsCatwomanB1tch Selina Not to call out one person, but I thought the issue at hand was whether men could "abort" or relinquish parental rights and responsibilities WHILE the woman has an opportunity to abort. I see a lot of posts claiming that the issue is that men should have that opportunity AFTER the child is born, and I think that's incorrect. That's absurd and obviously unfair to the mother and the child.
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+Jeff W The truism is that there must be an innate, more or less discrete cognitive structure associated with acquiring human language, otherwise other creatures raised in human environments would acquire language like we do.
That assumption is motivated by what he called the "poverty of stimulus," which doesn't have to do with the number of words that children hear (there aren't more than 500,000 words in English, so the 42 million is either an exaggeration or a result of duplication) but with the fact that they don't hear many of the utterances they produce. I don't have any stake in whether or not it's true, but that's my understanding of it based on reading some of his technical and non-technical books five or six years ago. (I think he's undoubtedly wrong about the evolutionary development of the language faculty across the animal kingdom.)
As I said, the newer theories like the usage-based acquisition championed by Tomasello maybe have some interesting insights, like observing how other faculties contribute to language learning.
One problem with UG is that it relies too much on ideal speakers and listeners. (Although, there is a reason that physicists don't do particle experiments under a tree in the quad.) But in many ways Cognitive linguistics and UBA seem like a step backwards. Instead of pointing to an LAD, they postulate a system of general learning that somehow (it isn't explained as far as I'm aware) we humans have but other animals don't. One thing UBA relies on is the ability to categorize. But of course a great deal of categorization comes from and perhaps is impossible without language, so I'm not sure how that's any help. I also come across the word "generalize" a lot in newer theories, but of course a theory should explain how children generalize from one sentence to another. So, maybe a step backwards, though sometimes that's what needed.
But all of that is beyond irrelevant in a discussion of Chomsky's political statements. It strikes me as just a way to get a jab in.
Finally, the Slovenian jester. Can we take a moment to appreciate the irony in criticizing Chomsky for a potentially false scientific idea and then in the next breath citing the ramblings of someone like Slavoj Zizek, a Lacanian by way of movie reviews and softcore Leninist for the masses? Okay, let's get into that pitiful excuse of a retort.
The title is taken from his opening salvo (not quite opening: he genuflects a little, like a fighter bowing to an opponent): "I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever!" I want to draw attention to the phrase, "in his descriptions in his whatever." I realize that this is an off-the-cuff remark by a non-native speaker, but is that the level of specificity* we want, "in his whatever"? It doesn't get any better.
Next sentence: "I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge." Note the strong word, "defended." He continues, "And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that. And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know. But I totally reject this line of reasoning."
That's pretty damning. Chomsky "defended" the Khmer Rouge. He thought they were "the nicest guys in the universe" and had to be "compelled to admit" otherwise. Again, it's an extemporaneous remark, no one expects Zizek to have quotes memorized, but how does that stack up against what Chomsky and Hermann wrote? Well, in the immortal words of Chomsky, if you actually read what they fucking wrote, they said nothing of the sort.
It's worth drawing this out, because Zizek likes to portray himself as a free-wheeling maverick intellectual, a master manipulator of ideology. And here he is repeating the same third-rate muck the right wing has been flicking their tongues over for the past half century.
It explicitly was not Chomsky's aim to establish the facts of mass murder and genocide in either East Timor or Cambodia, but to demonstrate the selectivity of the Western media in singling out a noble victim, the Cambodians under Pol Pot (whom it later turned out, the US had a large part in allowing to ascend to power), but ignoring the victims of a US client state, the Timorese, who were being killed in vastly greater proportion.
The point was not to say that the Khmer Rouge were "nice guys," but that the media of in powerful countries routinely ignore the victims of their and their allies' atrocities. Maybe a 12 year old can understand that, because Zizek apparently can't. It's sort of like today when one criticizes US foreign policy in the Middle East and gets branded a terrorist sympathizer who relishes when ISIS beheads people. It's easy to see how disingenuous that line of pseudo-reasoning is. One can criticize a superpower and how it turns a blind eye to its atrocities (we have no problem doing this to other nations) without cheerleading the actions of some other malefactor.
Here's Zizek again: "For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there."
It's hard to know where to begin with this mess. Zizek started out by criticizing Chomsky for being empirically wrong—and now he's arguing that you don't have to empirical at all. You just have to listen to the discourse. That's real evidence. I suppose one could also listen to people in America rail against White Genocide to know that something is wrong. After all, you don't need any evidence of such a thing; merely that people talk about it. The other disingenuous thing is that he pretends like Chomsky (and Hermann) were only concerned with hard evidence, photographs and so forth. Which is not true. They were reviewing the journalistic literature, which was largely based on eyewitness testimony, government and third party estimates, etc. In other words, a range of data, including more subjective and more objective measures.
Equally egregious is that Zizek takes Chomsky to task for not critiquing ideology...but that's what Chomsky and Hermann were doing in their comparison of coverage of the Khmer Rouge and East Timor atrocities, addressing how ideology informs and shapes what gets covered, just without the Lacanian windowdressing.
I wish I could go on, but I really don't see the point. Zizek is all over the place.
EDIT: I have to add one more thing. Zizek mentions Stalinism and how you don't need photographic evidence to prove that the gulag existed. Maybe it's a lapse of memory on his part, but the gulag existed long before Stalin or Stalinism. In fact, by some measures Stalin didn't oversee the worst years of the gulag (Anne Applebaum writes about this; I can't locate the book presently). For decades, the Marxist-Leninist, Mao Thought left ignored the gulag despite an equally damnable "public discourse" and plenty of first-hand accounts of "something terrifyingly pathological," if not...photographs. So much for Zizek's rigor. If I were you, I wouldn't take anything he says seriously without first researching it.
_____________
Here's Chomsky's reply: https://libcom.org/library/fantasies-noam-chomsky
While not the text usually cited (from The Political Economy of Human Rights) this is a close approximation, available online: https://chomsky.info/19770625/
You can also find Bernard Hermann responding to similar accusations in the NYT.
*We all have little things that trigger our BS alarms. One of mine, rightly or wrongly, is when people use words like "precisely" all the time without being precise. That's Zizek.
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@Darren So after looking around a bit, all I could find was an especially snide Fox News story op-ed (oh boy!) about this, which is based on a BP study (OH BOY!).
The Fox article attributes most of the decrease in CO2 emissions to an increased reliance on natural gas, which I shouldn't have to say is not a viable, long-term solution to climate change and causes its own share of environmental harm.
According to the BP report, the US emitted 5129.5 million tonnes of CO2 in 2016 compared to 5087.7 million in 2017, a negligible difference, one that could be a random fluctuation. For instance, 2008-2009 saw a sharp drop of 400 million tonnes of CO2, and 2010 the emissions jumped back up and began to decline slowly. One data point, especially without any context backing it up, doesn't tell you much.
If you look at the bottom of the study, there's some fine print, which basically says that these numbers only account for oil, gas, and coal burning, which means that they don't account for other industrial processes like concrete production. The fine print concludes, "Our data therefore is not comparable to official emissions data."
Meanwhile, there are countries that are actually doing something to create the technology, infrastructure, and systems that will lower their emissions in the future.
Incidentally, the "expert" cited by the opinion piece is H. Sterling Burnett PhD, who has the very official and prestigious-sounding title of "senior fellow for climate and environment issues at the Heartland Institute." Except that if you look it up, his PhD is for "applied philosophy," not for climate science or any adjacent field. He's not an expert on this subject, and he's not a scientist. The Heartland Institute is also of course a far right think tank that publishes all kinds of junk.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/us-cuts-carbon-emissions-more-than-foreign-nations-that-criticize-trump-environmental-policies
https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/en/corporate/pdf/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2018-co2-emissions.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/11/few-countries-are-meeting-paris-climate-goals-here-are-ones-that-are/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a97c6c1415cb
https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/h-sterling-burnett
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@alze3359 I'm not a progressive, so I can't personally speak to that, but I would say you're mischaracterizing them. Is someone pro big pharma because they recognize big pharma manufactures life-saving medications that treat heart disease, cancer, mental illness, or covid? Is someone pro big ag because they recognize the necessity of having food to eat? It's possible to recognize corporations have usurped vital functions and services and produce useful goods but also to critique the corporation as an institution.
What anti-vaxx extremists on "the left" (though it's funny how often those types sound just like and sometimes collaborate with the far right) seem to think is that because they can generalize about negative aspects of big pharma, therefore nothing big pharma does has any value. This goes beyond initial skepticism to outright denial of reality. It's fine to be skeptical initially of a new medicine or treatment given big pharma's history; but that initial skepticism isn't sufficient. Just asking questions isn't sufficient. You have to actually do some work to see if there are answers and then be able to accept those answers. We have lots of data from trials, RCTs, and observational studies to show that the vaccines are safe and effective. You can't argue against the science by wailing about narrative this and narrative that, or about something some pharmaceutical company did years ago. Those things are irrelevant to the question of vaccine efficacy and safety.
That's not to say that progressives and those on the left don't have issues with big pharma regarding the vaccines; we just acknowledge the science that the vaccines do what they're supposed to do. The real issue comes down to patent control and vaccine inequity, an issue that affects everyone, because no one is safe until everyone is safe. If you think you're remotely on the left, that's what you ought to be concerned about, not whether the vaccines work—they do, safely—but the greed of big pharma preventing global herd immunity. Control over life-saving or even life-improving treatments, whether it's insulin, EpiPens, vaccines, etc should not be left in the hands of a few for profit. That position is pro-medicine, pro-science, but anti-big pharma. Your irrational position is just anti everything.
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@DanDelos The problem with that argument is that it assumes that rich people behave like you or I. When we need something done, we have to learn how to do it, how it works, and then do that work ourselves. If you want to game the tax code, for instance, you'd have to sit down and learn the tax code, maybe start a petition, talk to your representatives...
If you're a rich person, you just hire people to do stuff for you. Let's take Trump as the holotype. Do you think that when he says, "I don't pay my taxes because I'm smart," he means that he actually studied tax law? No. He means he hired someone to do his taxes and fudge numbers. Do you think Howard Schultz understands economic theory? It's clear he doesn't, or he's doing a very good job of playing really really dumb.
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@ Social Liberal Pepe
"identity politicians on the left are just like the identity politicians on the right"
No, they aren't. This statement alone demonstrates your carelessness with words, their meanings and history.
"you blame straight, white men for all of the world's problems."
He didn't.
"to blame all white men"
He didn't. At most he tied a blanket, knee-jerk rejection of idpol to the tactic of straight white men on the right. Which, agree or disagree with idpol, that is the tactic used by that group.
"to demonize anyone who disagrees with you as a racist, sexist, homophobic, ect bigot"
He didn't. In fact, he said the opposite: "I don't want those issues tainted by association with this neoliberal bullshit where you can't disagree with them without an ulterior motive."
"without having to actually address what they're saying."
Quoth the raven to the crow.
So, Social Liberal Pepe, what's your acquaintance with idpol? Beyond youtube videos, I mean.
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@andrewwells6323 Turner didn't "receive" money from SuperPACs. WFP ran an independent ad campaign for her. The same can't be said for Brown, who redboxed DMFI into spending $1.2 million on ads which didn't explicitly concern Israel (though arguably did concern their mission to support Democrats who support the apartheid state of Israel). Candidate and superPAC coordination can be difficult to prove, but what Brown did comes very close to an FEC violation.
You can make any kind of excuse you like, but at the present, in America, in big party politics, "supporting Israel" is always tantamount to supporting apartheid. What person in their right mind would've said that a lobbying group promoting South Africa during apartheid wasn't really supporting apartheid? Israel is an apartheid state. Any support for it supports apartheid. Toothless, gormless Democratic statements about "supporting Israel but not the occupation," which we permit and fund, have no meaning. So yes, DMFI is de facto a pro-apartheid lobbyist.
Ethical principles have to be understood in light of context. You're taking an overly simplistic, leveling view of the situation in order to pretend that what Turner did is on par with what Brown did and deserves the same kind of response, and that's not the case. It is absolutely possible to oppose the influence of PACs in politics while recognizing that not all PACs are equal, that a PAC supporting pro-labor policies is at least a little to the side, morally, of a pro-apartheid lobbyist, and that benefiting from 150k in ad spending is quite different from 1.2m in money from Republicans, Republican donors, and corporate interests.
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Here's how you answer that universal healthcare question:
Unions have fought for health plans for workers precisely because something like M4A did not exist.
The private health insurance industry increases the cost of care relative to what we see in countries that have single payer systems, and because costs for care are increasing at a rapid rate, employers try and often succeed, every time contracts are renewed, to cut coverage.
That means that the great healthcare you had in the 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, was is the 00s good, in the 10s decent but becoming less affordable—higher copays, higher deductibles, etc.—and in the future will be further eroded into the most basic and burdensome gesture toward insurance.
The way to obviate this development is through a single payer plan that will in the long term control costs and puts everyone into the same pool.
So if you are happy, right now, with the standard of care offered by your employer, the only way to maintain that standard is through M4A.
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Taylor Phoenix Scientists couldn't actually image an atom until very recently, and because of the nature of how things work on those very small scales, atoms don't really "look" like anything. Some images at the atomic level aren't even processed with optical methods but instead use other means to interpret data as an image.
Before these scanning methods were developed, how did scientists form an understanding of how atoms are structured? Probably because they weren't interested in how they looked, but in how they behave. By performing experiments, they were able to discover an atom's mass, charge, spin, and how it interacts with other atoms.
The discovery of the double helix was the opposite: discovering its structure through imaging elucidated aspects of its function that we previously couldn't have known about. In the case of the Watson and Crick, we have a record to show how they came to discover the double helix. No such record exists in the case of the ancient Chinese or any other peoples.
Instead, JP would have us believe that the knowledge of DNA is somehow inbuilt into the human mind thanks to Jungian archetypes. There's no evidence for that, and quite a lot to the contrary. If early cultures had had an intuitive understanding of DNA all along, it's unlikely that they would have developed medical practices based around the absolute desperation of remedies, herbs, powderized animal parts, blood magic, cannibalism, incantations, and spirits. Most damning of all for JP's hack theory is that the image of two braided strands is NOT a representation of the double helix, which has its strands twisting in parallel, NOT crossing over each other as in the picture of the serpents.
The knowledge that the Earth is a sphere was not "lost" after the Greeks.
https://www.thoughtco.com/did-medieval-people-believe-in-a-flat-earth-1221612
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Nobby Heads For one, DPRK's position as socialist is theoretically dubious. More concretely, basically no socialist in America is proposing to implement a DPRK style siege socialist, military dictatorship. Again, when people bring shit like that up, they're deflecting from substance to aesthetics. Your job is to bring them back to issues of substance where they might agree.
The other example I sometimes use is LGBT rights, like marriage equality. Would changing words like "homosexual" or "LGBT" have made reactionaries any more receptive to gay marriage? Even shit libs like Bill Maher made lame ass jokes about the LGBTQALMNOP, as if the "ridiculous" name was to blame for oppression and inequality.
But attitudes about homosexuals have changed a lot in the past decade. It didn't come from changing the names of things, like some vapid PR stunt, or by making being gay more aesthetically normie friendly. It came through struggle, protest, legal battles, consciousness raising, friends and family members sharing painful or joyful coming out stories.
Much the same could be said of virtually ever major struggle of the past few centuries, women's rights, civil rights, labor rights.
If you get people to talk about the substance of socialism, of a more just, more democratic society, they won't give a shit about the DPRK.
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If you think that one sentence is so important, you're welcome to quote it and explain how it radically changes the content of what follows. I'm not going to quote it because it doesn't, in my view, alter his opinion, "What is the fucking point of having more Muslims?" As I already explained, I also don't think it's a requirement to quote Sam Harris, self-proclaimed philosopher and dubious neuroscientist, as if his words were scripture. In that sentence you're talking about (maybe this is the right one; you're so arch about it, I kind of wonder if I'm going to forever be chasing Sam Harris's "real" opinion), Harris sets up the conversation around the German bus attack which was perpetrated by a man claiming to be a refugee. You apparently have a different view, but I don't think this is essential to his point because this event didn't galvanize some change in Harris's view of Muslims; he'd long thought these things, and at different times he would have used some different incident to support them. Surprising that Harris would have an ahistorical perspective on reality, divorced from material and geopolitical conditions, I know.
The substantive part of his argument, as I've already said, is that radical Muslims are the real Muslims, and their espousal of Sharia Law poses a danger to the integrity of Euro-American society if we allow too many (how many? any?) Muslims into our countries, even if our reasons are superficially humanitarian, like hosting refugees. That's the part I've quoted and the part you'd rather dance around. Note that Harris isn't even concerned with overt violence, as the context of the bus attack might suggest. Instead, his concern is preserving "freedom" and "liberal values." If the issue were security, the answer would be to find ways to improve it, hopefully ways that still allow refugees access to a safe haven, and probing questions as to the cause of violence and large-scale immigration, questions whose answers are not amenable to tidy answers like, Islam is evil, and will inevitably include not only reform to Islam as practiced in certain areas but also reform of how the West relates to the Middle East, a topic Sam is reluctant to broach but also the only one in which we Westerners have some say.
Sam doesn't advocate moderation or proportionality; he advocates the Cheney doctrine: if there's a 1% chance, we have to treat it like a certainty; it's not about our analysis: it's about our response. We already know where this line of thinking leads, to things like Order 9066, the internment of the Japanese, which was justified by intellectuals and policymakers in ways very similar to what Sam Harris has been doing regarding Muslims, although to Harris's credit he has not yet gone so far as to advocate universal detention for Muslims. But the logic is the same. If a member of a group poses a threat, our response should be to treat every member of that group as a potential threat. Take no chances. It's an inherently dehumanizing way of looking at things.
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@siyiroancreint What a bunch incoherent nonsense.
"you are steeped in your echo chamber"
Says the guy parroting American exceptionalist propaganda and war apologia.
"the us didn't go it alone"
Again with the euphemisms. We invaded. The UN never gave authorization. America and Britain first engaged in a bombing campaign which distinguished legal scholar Marjorie Cohn called "patently illegal," in violation of article 51 of the UN charter (and therefore, as a ratified treaty, also in violation of the US Constitution), because the US never obtained UNSC authorization and "the attacks in New York and Washington D.C. were criminal acts, not 'armed attacks' by another state." Any other country which joined the US in the illegal bombing and invasion of Afghanistan—like Britain and Australia—therefore also did so illegally and in violation of international norms.
"A multinational coalition of UN forces attempted to rebuild a region"
This is pure delusion. The ISAF was created only after the invasion and did not legitimate it post hoc. The notion that the US invaded Afghanistan to "rebuild a region" is pure propaganda and laughable given developments over the last 20 years. The US invaded to secure a hold in the Middle East, to siphon money to the MIC, and as a reprisal for 9/11—even though Afghanistan did not perpetrate the attack.
"maybe we did inevitably hurt ourselves"
We killed, directly or indirectly by invading, hundreds of thousands of people. That should be first on one's mind.
"THOUSANDS of years of war"
This is a common dunderheaded, ideological approach to the problem. Those Muslims in the Middle East—all they know is war. What can we, with the white man's burden, possibly do to civilize them? But we don't need to go back thousands of years. We can go back a few decades, e.g. to when the US funded the mujahideen (like the Taliban and Bin Laden) against the Soviets. The most egregious thing about this framing is that Afghanistan did not start the war with the US—the US invaded Afghanistan. We were the bellicose ones. Not them. The US hasn't known peace for even two cumulative decades in its entire history.
"people you ignorantly call extremists"
Please cite where I used the word "extremists." You can't because I never did.
"we did not conquer"
We did. We overthrew the government, installed a puppet regime, and kept troops there for 20 years. I realize you like euphemisms, but this was a conquest.
"we tried to play world police since the international laws you speak of are toothless"
I need to repeat that in this case we were not the "world police." We were the criminals. We broke international laws. In fact, we broke the most serious international law, aggression against another state. We did not have the authority, moral or legal, to invade a country for revenge. There were legal, institutional avenues toward resolution which the US did not avail itself of, instead choosing to expedite its reprisal through an unauthorized war.
"if these so called "extremists" take the country, its important to remember its their country"
It isn't their country. The country belongs to the people, not to a gang of religious whackos (that goes for the US, too). Polling shows the opinions of most Afghanis to be in opposition to the Taliban on a host of issues, like women's rights. The Taliban regime will be repressive, as it was before the US invaded in 2001.
"and its important to remember they did it largely without firing a shot."
More misinformation. There've been many battles on the road to Kabul in addition to revenge killings, torture, and executions. Do you think this was some kind of velvet revolution? Do you think those AKs the Taliban fighters are holding are props?
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Or, maybe, just maybe, that we should take a holistic approach to change rather than thinking A policy choice will fix what are complicated, interconnected issues. Like education—it's a vector for so many problems in the country, including housing, jobs, food security, healthcare. Finland has successful schools in part because it has more successful institutions built around those schools while in America, schools have to shoulder the burden of teaching, feeding, clothing, and providing other assistance to children And yet so often the retort to "Finland does X" is another punitive, draconian, means-tested policy that we already know won't work. More No Child Left Behind, ESSA, teacher accountability, 1st grader coding, etc. Sometimes we can do the things a country like Finland does—for instance, developmentally appropriate, integral education—and have it still be worthwhile. The idea isn't that we should do one thing one country does but to enact many reforms which build strong social programs.
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You're asking me to do the thing I didn't want to do? Assuming I'm not being trollcepted, in brief,
1) those European countries have strong unions—hardly something that keeps the corporations happy from a free market pov. (Speaking of Crowder, when he had that debate with that kid and mentioned a bunch of countries that don't have minimum wage laws—that's why: strong unions and collective bargaining.)
2) European growth rates are comparable to US growth. Also, the assumption that what we need is more and more growth.
3) a clear lack of understanding of what socialism is; equating socialism with social democracy. The former is anti-capitalist, the latter, pro but with safeguards.
4) As Dan Sanger points out in the post above, the policy of lowering taxes across the board (and particularly for the wealthy and corporations) has been tried, and it failed. It led to larger deficits, more economic inequality, and it did not substantially boost growth. Growth was at the very least not impeded in the 50s when the top marginal rate was 90%. The entire neoliberal record on growth (Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama) is rather dismal.
There was also that time Sam Brownback tried to create a free market utopia in Kansas. How did that turn out again? https://www.salon.com/2018/04/17/revisiting-sam-brownbacks-tax-cut-disaster-how-does-kansas-feel-about-his-experiment/
5) Economies do well when workers have money to spend, not when the rich have money to hoard. When Trump passed his tax cuts, what did many large companies do? Invest? Pay workers living wages? No, they spent much of their increased profits on stock buybacks.
The one thing Derp Jesus is right about is pointing out the symbiotic relationship between business and government, but even then he says a lot of junk.
6) The government does innovate. Many of the products of hi-tech and medicine are the outcomes of basic research conducted by public universities and public grants.
7) The preferred way to cut costs is to eliminate labor costs. That's most of where the "innovation" of business is directed, not in producing better products. But now companies don't even have to innovate to cut labor costs. They can just outsource jobs and pay starvations wages.
8) Derp makes the assumption that government should be run like a business. It should cut costs and balance budgets. I think there's a much better argument to made that government ought to be run in the interests of its people. That means providing education, healthcare, etc. Those benefits have an upfront cost, but they ensure that people can be healthy and productive, saving money down the line. Business is not willing to make those investments, and individuals cannot possibly shoulder them.
9) That bit about Clinton creating social engineering policies and funding them with money from big banks and that led to the 2008 crash...is so weird. This is one of those places where there's a glimmer of truth concealed in a lot of crap. Clinton probably does bear an amount of responsibility for the 2008 crash because of the repeal of Glass-Steagall among other (de)regulations. But Derp's explanation is borderline conspiracy nonsense.
10) "Where is the biggest innovation in the world? In the USA, where companies have the means to innovate. In Europe you do not see that." I love this quote. What Derp is doing is equating being a large company like Apple or Facebook (yay...Facebook) with being innovative. It is possible to make a lot of money without innovating. That's essential what equity firms do. It's also possible to innovate but not become a giant corporation. This is sort of a joke, but I tried to google "most innovative countries" and the first site that came up was this https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235756 . And I'm sure you can find other sites or studies or whathaveyou saying that this or that country is the most innovative by some metric a guy with too many neckties came up with. Still.
Do I need to say more?
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EDIT: For muh grammar.
Darren First, actually, you're wrong. According to the USDA, 40 cents of every SNAP dollar are spent on basics, 40 on sundries like rice, dairy, beans, pasta, and 20 on sweets like soda and dessert. https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/ops/SNAPFoodsTypicallyPurchased-Summary.pdf
In regard to food deserts, the problem is a bit more complex than you're letting on. Food deserts do not only create a scarcity of fresh, nutritious food, but they create habits of unhealthy consumption.
Where food shelters have been set up to serve communities that have no nearby stores, activists and organizers have found that the community is slow to respond to the availability of fresh food in part because that would require a change in eating habits. People become used to eating high fat, salt, and sugar foods, which are very addictive, cheap, and easy to prepare. Food deserts allow these foods to become pervasive, and once there, they're hard to replace; impossible without addressing the broader issue.
People in food deserts need access, education (what's in season, how much to buy, nutrition profiles), and training in how to prepare fresh food. There are plenty of unhealthy (high fat, salt, sugar) foods sold in cans. Limiting access to only canned food won't necessarily fix the food-related health issues of the poor, but it will attach greater stigma and sense of shame while restricting options for those that want it.
This totally dumbass plan to cut money (but increase "defense" spending) is just another case of Republican hypocrisy. They cry incessantly about government intruding into people's lives and the evils of more bureaucracy, but then turn around and suffocate disadvantaged people with more and more bureaucratic supervision. Fuck. them.
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I respect a lot of what Nader's done throughout his career, but he has a few really bizarre ideas, and this is one. There will not and should not be a left-right alliance against corporations. For one, the right has no coherent critique of corporations or of the capitalist system that produces them. The absence of such a critique creates the need for some kind of nationalist and/or scapegoat narrative, and we see that constantly with ideologues like Tucker (and probably Saagar). Sure, corporations are bad, but they're bad because of women, black people, immigrants, Muslims, trans people, SJWs, poor people, etc etc. Wouldn't everything be better if we could make corporations serve American (white) citizens again? Why would anyone remotely on "the left"--from liberal to progressive to socialist--want to ally with that?
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@patrickbooth5091 University and college didn't used to be so expensive. That it costs tens if not upwards of a hundred thousand dollars to get a degree is not a natural law but the outcome of contingent policies and strategies probably going back to the Reagan years and which extends even now into every facet of public education.
Saying that people should be responsible and not take a loan they can't pay back misses several important issues. First, it ignores the astronomical increase in the price of college tuition, books, housing, etc. Second, people without college degrees do not make as much as people with them. A bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma. Third, college is an investment that people make in the hope that they will have a better career and life. Fourth, if people behaved in the manner you suggest—only taking out loans they know for certain they can pay back—you'll end up with a highly stratified society based on access to education. That is not the basis of a vibrant, democratic society. Fifth, your comment completely ignores the wider economic environment. For many people leaving college just after the recession, there wasn't a lot of work for them. Add to that the fact that many jobs we desperately need filled by trained professionals—like teaching—don't pay enough. There is, in other words, a disconnect between what a decent society needs and what the market says we need, and that has ramifications for education and student debt.
What you're saying sounds tough-minded and responsible, but it's actually quite narrow-minded.
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@TulsiBot Between the comment and the username I can't tell if that comment was ironic, but it's because
1) the war on terror has no clear end goal. This isn't a conventional war against another nation. It's presented as a war against an ideology or a concept, and whether it's the war on poverty or drugs or terror, it's not clear how we defeat those things with an army and bombs.
2) the war has extremely broad legal limits. Originally, it was used to justify fighting Al Qaida, then the Taliban, and now ISIS. The last two had nothing to do with 9/11. It's a clear case of mission creep.
3) the war on terror fuels extremism and has destabilized the region. Many of these conflicts are no closer to being solved than they were almost two decades ago.
4) the war on terror is exacerbating the war on drugs. Techniques, material, personnel, and companies involved in the war on terror have been exported to Latin America, causing increasing turmoil there through killings, dislocations, territorial disputes, and crackdowns against the public, especially leftists and workers.
5) at its worst, the war on terror has been a thinly veiled attempt at a racist, classist, anti-Muslim war for oil and geopolitical positioning.
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@blackflagsnroses6013 Calm down. Listen to yourself. If you're defending Yang's UBI as "libertine" (you might want to look that word up before using it again), you're defending welfare statism of a different sort...one that happens to harmonize closer to right wing capitalist proposals by the likes of Milton Friedman, extolling the virtues of individualism, consumption, and market "choice," than anything remotely socialist.
If you pay even the barest amount of attention, I wasn't defending welfare statism; I said that Yang's UBI was a worse proposal than what we have now, it would enhance vulnerabilities for many people. As an anarchist I do recognize that it is both inhumane and tactically stupid to go out of my way to deny people the small purchase of comfort they have in this rotten system—while still advocating for a deeper and longer struggle. Flippantly dismissing the real struggles people are engaged in because their goals, of whatever scope, will still inevitably be located within a system of domination is foolish and cruel.
But if you have a plan to usher in communism in the next few decades, I'm all ears (so long as it doesn't include patently capitalist nonsense like the Freedom Dividend).
Here's Graeber on Yang: "Real (Left) UBI aims to expand the zone of unconditionality (free health care, edu...), in society; Right UBI is meant to contract it. Alas, looks like @AndrewYang is a right UBI enthusiast. His rejection of free higher ed is a give-away. Stop him before he destroys the brand!"
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@aarn700 If you're talking about Wisconsin, there are a few things you're willfully ignorant of.
1) Clinton never campaigned in Wisconsin despite urging from staff and Bill Clinton. Shocking that she lost a state she didn't bother to visit.
2) It's not certain GP voters would have voted for Clinton. That's a baseless assumption.
3) But let's assume it's not. Clinton gets all of Stein's voters and narrowly beats Trump by about 10k votes. Of course, if Stein's voters go to Clinton, Gary Johnson's should go to Trump, putting him in the lead by almost 100k votes. So...
4) Trump won pivot counties (counties that voted for Obama previously) by 580k votes and an average margin of victory of over 11%.
5) While I can't find information specific to Wisconsin, nationally 5% of Democrats voted for Trump. 1% of all voters voted for Stein, only a fraction of which would've been registered Democrats. It stands to reason that with so many pivot counties, the number of Democratic Trump voters was at least the national average if not higher.
I could keep going on, but it should be obvious that microfocusing on GP voters is a narratively bankrupt, numerically illiterate, and politically inept attempt to scapegoat a tiny fraction of the electorate and to avoid dealing with substantial problems that Democrats actually have control over.
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@intuitionz1198 Maybe no liberals wanted to believe, but leftists have known about Cuomo's many issues for a long time. When his history of harassment was brought up very publicly, liberals and the press (including Cuomo's kid brother) swept in to neutralize it. Of course women don't want to come forward if that's the result. Who would? Only when Cuomo became a liability, after it was revealed that his administration covered up nursing home deaths (Cuomo having ordered people into them) and he threatened an official for exposing it, was it possible to criticize a man Democrats had spent the better part of a year shamelessly glorifying.
But your deflection is just another common tactic apologists for power love to deploy. If this was such a big problem, why didn't it come up sooner? Oh it did come up? Then why did no one take it seriously? If these women were really harassed, why did they continue to meet with or work for Cuomo? They must have wanted it, or they're lying, or they're doing it for attention.
These are precisely the things people said in defense of Cosby and Kavanaugh and Biden. And they're deflections which have nothing to do with the reality of sexual harassment and assault, especially when it comes from someone who wields enormous power and influence.
After interviewing 179 people and reviewing 70,000 pieces of evidence, the NY AG found that Cuomo had in fact credibly harassed 11 women and facilitated a sexist environment. Maybe you know something the AG doesn't.
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@NewNormalWorldOrder You're right: I can't refute crackpot conspiracy theories. For two reasons.
First, they're not falsifiable. Any evidence that contradicts them is either dismissed, baselessly derided as a cover up, or ignored while piling on a mountain of additional misinformation, JAQing off, cynical doubt, bad sourcing, miscomprehension, etc.
Second, those theories aren't about making true claims about the world. They're the pathetic attempt to wrest some degree of control back from chaotic and bewildering events by condensing vast systemic processes, historic contingeny, and random acts into a legible, human-scale Dan Brown novel.
So, no. I'm not going to bother refuting anything. It's already been done countless times. If you weren't willing to change your mind then, I can't make you change it now.
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@floopsiemcsoops6008 It's like you didn't even bother reading my comment. Conservatives believe in leftist concepts like abolishing private property, dismantling the state, having a commitment to equal protections for social minorities, and reorganizing society on a non-hierarchical basis? Really? Which poll showed that? I must've missed it.
Politics isn't merely a matter of shuffling around some signifiers until people's beliefs match their material needs. One has to attend to the meaning behind the word and the long-inculcated, highly propagandized notions of what is necessary for society—competition, hierarchy, ownership, use of force. The people who reject socialism reject it for particular reasons. They may not be good reasons, but they must be grappled with. If anyone's underestimating "the average voter" (not sure why "voter" is the unit of analysis) it's you.
That you think some conservatives agreeing with a modicum of social democracy (built on third world exploitation) speaks less to their willingness to budge left as it does to the lengths to which you had to go to put the left within their reach—not by making an appeal to the meaning of "socialism," not by overturning fundamental assumptions, not by dispelling double consciousness,but by bringing socialism more in line with capitalism.
Thinking that politics is primarily a matter of branding is a peculiarly liberal way of looking at things, as if we were trying to sell soda or launder a reputation. It doesn't require action. It doesn't require a transformation of personal and social consciousness.
Imagine that you had said to people in the black or gay rights movements that their real problem was branding, and if only they used different language and different tactics, the public would be on their side. In fact, people did just that, and they were wrong. People didn't change their minds about these groups because of a change of label. They changed because of repeated, provocative, enduring exposure, violent repression, and because of association with people in their own lives. They had to change the way they thought and related to black and LGBT people.
If you start calling socialism "workplace democracy," you're either not really being true to the aims and commitments of socialism, or you're just being dishonest with people. And what's to stop reactionaries from simply associating "workplace democracy" with socialism, just as they've done with countless other terms and subjects regardless of their connection to socialism?
If you're not aware of the (by now) centuries of conservative propaganda against democracy, I don't know what to tell you. Just about any Republican would be thrilled to inform you that we have a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
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I wouldn't frame it the way you do, but there is a fair amount of cognitive dissonance in their arguments. I don't think it's because they're scum, but more probably because they're reacting strongly to an environment that has been for a long time opposed to women in these situations. There's no denying that women have had the (much) shorter end of the stick, and I think that's partly why some have a hard time recognizing potential unfairness in the man's position.
Rather that castigating them and calling them scum, it may be helpful to remind them of the benefits that will redound to women if men have the legal, documented ability to reject fatherhood early in the pregnancy. For instance, it allows women to make more informed decisions about whether they want to keep a child. And because this proposal only works granted that women have unhindered access to abortion, it means that perhaps more men will see it in their interest to advocate for abortion rights for women in places like Arkansas. I mean, they should do it anyway, but this may be an extra incentive.
It's also important to acknowledge downsides. This is a heavily religious country. A lot of people, men and women, oppose abortion in words if not actions. So we have to ask, would allowing men to opt out create a situation where women are economically burdened with raising a child by themselves because they can't abort for religious or ideological reasons, whether internalized or imposed from without? If we're really interested in equality, we have to address the possible outcomes, not just some abstract notion of fairness.
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@Steven Boyd " the issue we're discussing at the moment is on the male's perspective." Well, yeah, but you can't just pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist.
"A woman can decide to have unprotected sex, but not at the expense of a man because he can always insist on using a condom or else opt out of sex."
And a woman could also insist that he use a condom, or no sex. We allow women to have abortions either way.
"So it's ultimately pointless to "flip" the "burden of contraception" " I wasn't suggesting that we flip "the burden of contraception," a phrase a never used. I don't think it makes sense to put that responsibility on one person. The point of doing it was to show that there is what I see as a contradiction in your argument, that, hypothetically, if a woman has sex without contraception she's somehow not at fault because she can still abort the pregnancy, but the man is because he can't. What we accept for one, we should accept for the other because in that situation they have equal amounts of agency.
"This can also happen even if you date for years, then marry, have a child or two who reach grade school age and THEN realize you didn't really love each other, or are no longer in love with each other, or realize you didn't really want to have kids."
Why is it so tempting to keep coming back to an issue that is not and never was and never shall be on the table? We are not concerned with what happens after a child a born. That's settled. Those children are alive and breathing and heart beating. What happens when the child is still just a fetus? Should the woman have more rights to disown parenthood (reasons don't matter, it's a right*) than the man? I don't think so and I see no reason why there should be a legal asymmetry for a mutual act between consenting adults.
*Sonnera has made the argument that this has less to do with rights as a potential parent and more do to with bodily rights. That's certainly been the argument of abortion advocates, and there's nothing wrong with it. But as much as I hate these kinds of things, consider a thought experiment in which, some decades into the future, human babies can be carried to term outside the mother's body in a kind of artificial womb. Such things already are being tested to further incubate premature babies and have been tested on goats. Would the parents have the right to abort a 5 week old fetus in an artificial womb? In this case, the woman has no bodily claim to the fetus since it does not rely on her, and yet I feel intuitively that the answer is yes. Abortion is a medical issue, but it's obviously also a legal issue, as evidenced by all the laws and legislation and debate surrounding it.
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Compare the CEO's reasons to what early industrialists said regarding the onerous impossibility of the 8 hour workday, weekends off, safe working conditions, minimum wage, benefits, payed vacation, etc. etc. Almost identical, word for word.
I don't know what Hannah is talking about regarding the workers' increased skill set due to automation in the industrial revolution. The exact opposite was the case. First, automation was late-in-coming to industrialization. For a long time, industrial labor involved craftsmen and -women working from their homes and workshops. The loom brought workers, mostly women, into a centralized location to operate machines, and over time that concept and technology spread to other manufactured goods.
When automation and mechanization became more prevalent, workers and political writers began to decry the stupefaction of the worker, the demotion of the artisan and craftsman to the level of the machine. Skill was reduced to the repetition of menial tasks and the care taking of the new producers, machines. Eventually there was an increase in the skill set, but I wouldn't attribute it to the industrial revolution's automation. There obviously is a causal link of some kind; I just think it's less direct. Automation may have provided the possibility for an increased skill set, but the necessity? The more advanced kinds of products and the higher output of automation can increase a country's wealth provided there are certain things in place, like an adequate tax system that provides revenue for institutions like public schools. But I'm no expert, so maybe there's something I'm missing.
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Here's the email in question.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2038
If you actually read the Newsweek article, and not just the headline, you'll see that Eichenwald's point is that:
"The Russians were quoting two sentences from a 10,000-word piece I wrote for Newsweek, which Blumenthal had emailed to Podesta. There was no mistaking that Blumenthal was citing Newsweek —the magazine’s name and citations for photographs appeared throughout the attached article" [emphasis mine].
His assertion is that the Russian press cherry picked a few paragraphs, misrepresenting the argument of Eichenwald's report, and falsely attributed it to Blumenthal in order to smear Clinton. Eichenwald suspects that this is yet more evidence that Russia was behind the attack because their news organ, Sputnik, came out with the story so quickly, and because Trump knew about the Russian misrepresentation despite its receiving only brief coverage in the Russian and Turkish press.
He never once asserts that the email is fake, only that it is misrepresented. If it had been fake, his case would have been that the email text itself was in Blumenthal's name, but as stated above, it was clearly attributed to Eichenwald.
I'd heard that Trump had a 4th grade vocabulary level; apparently his supporters have a 1st grade reading level.
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@cereszin The authoritarian deviations like Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism (maybe to a lesser extent), Social Democracy, Shining Path, etc. All demand arrogation of power to some hierarchical structure which substitutes itself for "the people" or "the workers," usually in the name of some combination of security, efficiency, or historical necessity. Lenin and Trotsky, for instance, were quite explicit that workers were not to be entrusted with managing production themselves.
In short, they tend to favor utilizing the state, maximizing production along a rational, Western basis (speaking historically here), and limiting direct control of social and material production by society itself.
The youtuber Anark has a series called "The State is Counterrevolutionary" which has plenty of insightful citations in the description.
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Obviously possession is not a valid medical diagnosis. Someone may experience relief after an exorcism, but not because they were actually possessed by a demon; rather because they believed that they were. I'm also unaware of exorcisms curing epilepsy, schizophrenia, Tourette's, and illnesses like them, because those are problems with the brain that can't be suggested away.
And it isn't "one single practice," it's pretty much the entire ontological framework that nonbelievers have a problem with. Maybe you're just pontificating, but no one here's said that one fault in religion makes it "omg evil." It's not a question of whether it's evil (a religious concept, anyway), but what effects it has on people. Is it better to understand mental illness from a bio-chemical and psychological perspective, or by reading a two thousand year old book? Is it better for people to skip the chapel and get medical treatment right away? Like I said before, things like confession and exorcism, at best, were primitive responses to psychological care and maintenance.
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@Jeff Belding Your own critical thinking is irrelevant when it goes against the data.
"The left," by which I assume you mean liberals, aren't refusing the vaccine because of spurious connections to Trump. I don't know where you got that idea.
Doctors and other experts aren't changing their minds on "a whim." It may look that way, but, aside from some really stupid policies, like the CDC's early discouragement of masking, opinions change when new data provokes a revision. Early in the pandemic, there was less data; now there's more. Nothing to date has shown the vaccines to be unsafe (beyond the normal risks of any medication) or ineffective, exactly the opposite, and the more data has come in, the more confident we are that is the case.
Covid is deadly. It's killed 600k+ in the US alone and 4m+ worldwide. It's not a "mild flu," as many conservatives claim. You personally might be okay, but consider the ramifications. Every person who gets sick risks infecting others, must take time off work, and in severe cases, which can occur in otherwise young, healthy people, using up hospital resources. Not to mention that unvaccinated populations are driving virus mutation, leading to new strains which are more contagious, could be more virulent, and reduce vaccine efficacy.
If there's another dominate strain after Delta, but worse, the vaccines may not work. We may need new ones, and we're going to have to go through this over and over, never getting to herd immunity because some boomers are on facebook too much. Let's just be done with this shit.
The number of people who absolutely cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons is vanishingly small, and of course accommodations have to be made for them. Your typical white evangelical anti-vaxxer is not that person.
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@margueritewilliams5864 I read what you said, and it's not correct. Paying taxes is not a requirement for voting, so why are you bringing it up? It has nothing to do with the conversation about voting rights for prisoners. You could, theoretically, earn no income and pay no taxes of any kind and still have the right to vote, because taxes have nothing to do with voting, nor should they, for reasons I've already stated. Being a citizen who is a legal resident above the age of 18 is sufficient. You don't need to tack on some requirement about taxes, which may only end up being redundant, muddying the waters, or potentially excluding some people.
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The 99% But to answer your question...
Socialism is most often theorized as the "lower phase" of communism - communism before it has shed itself of old institutions and customs, like the state, and so it's not worthwhile thinking of it as a distinct, permanent form.
Anarchism and communism are in the broad sense identical or at least similar enough - a stateless, moneyless, classless society.
They both oppose the state in general and the nation state in particular, both of which have come to be regarded as the only viable forms of government. Taken in the broadest sense, a government is whatever society organizes for its own safety and reproduction.
In that sense, a communist society would have something that may do some of the things our governments do now, but not constituted by the bourgeoisie for their minority interests and to perpetuate hierarchical social relationships. If you want to call federated free labor and communities a "government," that's fine, but that doesn't make it a constituted authority like our present nation states.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-10-17#toc43
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Yeah, you're right, that lady's nuts, but she's right insofar as the journalist should have added [...] at the end of the quote, or just provided a block quote, unedited. There is a difference in meaning. With the edit, it sounds more like he's saying that he is admitting that he has a pro-Russia bias, whereas without the edit, he's saying that Clinton et al. attribute to him a pro-Russia bias. He may have that bias either way, but the edit does change the meaning of the statement. Printing the full text, or providing an ellipse, is appropriate. The fact that the journalist misrepresented Assange's words does not give him a free pass on anything; it's just kind of sloppy and dishonest.
If you're still not convinced, maybe as a demonstration I'll just say that I won't be responding any further to comments by Rob McCune because I don't want to be associated with a "pedophile."
...which is how people are always slandering him.
There's a difference in meaning, isn't there?
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@kimber1911 If the root cause is the human condition, why should we want a system that exacerbates and rewards the worst aspects of that condition—greed, selfishness? Wouldn't the correct response be to create a system that rewards pro-social behavior like cooperation and accountability while disincentivizing anti-social behavior.
I agree that hierarchical arrangements in production and politics create problems. We should get rid of those too. No more CEOs, no more boards, no more politicians, no more lobbyists. Instead democratic community and regional federations, democratic workplaces. (A government is not a corporation. I think you know that.)
Lastly, is it not impossible, considering how malleable human nature seems to be, that our conception of it is shaped in large part by the present conditions of global capitalism? That is, not only do we mark different features of some generalized nature but that that nature itself changes as conditions change. A peasant from the 11th century will have a wildly different appreciation of human nature than you do. Saying that human nature is identical to humans living under capitalism—and therefore greedy, selfish—is no less an error than to say that human nature is identical to humans living under feudalism or slavery where different features were exaggerated or repressed as that society required.
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Yes, that's a major part. An interesting case is the current regulatory disparity between taxis and ride "sharing" services like Uber. The regulations on taxis exist because people got fed up with overcharging, unfair wages, poor cab conditions, assault, etc. The same sort of thing is happening with the less regulated ridesharing services from both the perspective of employees (currently classed as independent contractors) and consumers. Predictably, the right wing libertarian response is to turn back the clock and deregulate the taxi industry so that it is "competitive" with Uber, Lyft, etc. It's probably true that taxi services can't compete with ridesharing because of regulation, but a regime of deregulated competition would just reproduce the original situation where consumers and workers were underserved.
http://time.com/3592035/uber-taxi-history/
But the other significant part of regulation is the part that corporations and interest groups lobby for and that work in their interest. The hard conservative notion that regulations are unilaterally imposed on business by government just isn't true. There are certainly times when the public will and political will (often two very different things) align, but I would suspect far more typical is the alignment of corporate interest and political will to pass regulations that can serve business with a very narrow public benefit, if any. Words like "regulated" and "deregulated" don't really tell us enough. We have to always ask, "for whom?"
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Well, he gave two examples, DACA and the Iran Deal, which Trump today revoked. So Brooks did not "literally" say that Clinton is preferable to Trump because of one issue. He gave two examples; there are others he could have given.
The two examples Jimmy Dore consistently gave to show how bad Clinton is were TPP and Syria. How do they hold up? Trump initially pulled out of the TPP, but he's been talking about renegotiating it, and he's bombed Syria multiple times, instigated conflict with Russia, and is currently deciding whether or not to arm Trident missiles with nuclear warheads.
Dore contended repeatedly and vociferously that the left would only grow under an oppressive government, like Trump's, and would wilt under a "centrist" Clinton one. There has been some movement toward progressivism on the political left, but I think that's less an effect of Trump's presidency than it is a result of Bernie's candidacy and continued action.
Brooks contends that moments of real social change and even revolution occur when things are actually getting somewhat better, and when desire for a more just and equitable society outpaces the ability of the old system to meet those demands. There's a long line of thinkers from Toussaint L'Ouverture to Murray Bookchin who agree with Michael, and plenty of historical events to corroborate, the already mentioned Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the American Revolution. Dore's counter-example, that the left faltered under Obama, was really only true when you look at elite circles, like the media. It also doesn't help his argument that the left was hardly radicalized by Bush 2's presidency.
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@gargola1887 No, she won't. Go read what she's said on the topic and take it seriously. She may end "war" but she has no interest in ending war. She's basically playing semantics. Take this example: "When it comes to regime change, I'm a dove; when it comes to the War on Terror, I'm a hawk."
That doesn't sound like an end to war; it's just a realignment of values and signifiers. If anything, her version of foreign policy may be worse. Regime change wars theoretically have an end, even if in practice those wars can be protracted. Her foreign policy is exactly the kind of "forever war" her supporters think she's against. Maybe she doesn't support, for instance, sending aid to India in some kind of multilateral counter-terrorism operation (the precise nature of that terrorism never adequately defined) that ends up toppling the Pakistani/Kashmiri government.
How would that amount to anything different from current "regime change" wars? The regime would be ousted, in the name of fighting terrorism and keeping "American interests" secured, and a new one installed. Maybe we wouldn't be the ones footing the bulk of the bill, but the nature of that conflict would not be radically different from what it is now.
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The point you bring up is discussed quite a lot in the Marxist literature. First, America isn't like European countries in that it is a former colony, so it doesn't have the same kind of infrastructure and history. Second, what is most important is a sufficient level of economic development. Marx assumed that capitalism was needed to create the kind of development needed for a socialist society, and while it's conceivable that that could be the case, it's not a law of nature. The economy could be developed through other means. Third, even if it were the case that some period of capitalist accumulation is required before the transition to socialism, it is not required that every country recapitulate this process, certainly not on the same time scale or by the same means. Once one country has transitioned into the next stage, it becomes easier for other countries to do so as well. It's even possible for a country to skip a stage, as outlined in the theory of uneven development.
Trotsky writes, "The privilege of historic backwardness—and such a privilege exists—permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages."
This is especially true for global capitalism. Rudolf Hilferding writes, "Just as a newly established industry today does not develop from handicraft beginnings and techniques into a modern giant concern, but is established from the outset as an advanced capitalist enterprise, so capitalism is now imported into a new country in its most advanced form and exerts its revolutionary effects far more strongly and in a much shorter time than was the case, for instance, in the capitalist development of Holland and England."
And Gramsci argued against the stage theory because Russia had "already passed through these experiences in thought."
Turning to the Soviet Union, it was certainly not communist, not even socialist. By Lenin's own admission, the USSR was a "worker's state," that is, a state in which the proletariat had seized state power through a revolutionary vanguard, creating a dictatorship of the proletariat that would steer the country through a period of capital accumulation rather than subjecting the population to the control of individuals owners. Contrary to what you asserted, pre-revolutionary Russia was economically very backward; most of the population was still living as peasants. Put simply, the USSR did not, as Gramsci had hoped, skip capitalism. It also never transcended it.
Getting back to America, Neil Davidson writes, "It is true that capitalism was uneven in the colonies. In some parts of North America, beginning in Massachusetts where the English Puritans first settled after 1630, it was from the beginning very far advanced indeed—perhaps in advance of England itself, since the structures of feudal absolutist power were far weaker. In others, such as the royal colony of Virginia after 1624 and particularly after 1642, the Cavaliers who ran it were intent on re-creating precisely the form s of social organization that was being destroyed across the Atlantic, first with white indentured servants, then black African slaves." Davidson goes on to relate other attempts at feudalism in the colonies: "Feudal projects collapsed in the seventeenth century, not because America was too progressive to endure them, but because it was too primitive to sustain them." So while feudalism may not have been the dominant mode in early America, neither was it absent. Again, I want to stress that America was a colony of England. Many colonists did not merely consider themselves to be English subjects, but English in their own way. America shares the feudal history of its parent country, England.
The stages theory (which derives from earlier Enlightenment thought) is a useful abstraction to begin thinking about how and why one form of society on a global or historical level gives way to another, but it isn't a law of nature and the future won't die because—oh no—we skipped a stage on accident. n lieu of feudalism, America had slavery, which was the basis of a large part of its economy. After the Civil War, it would seem that the South transitioned directly from slavery to capitalism, skipping feudalism once again. Your complaint about the stages theory doesn't imply that socialism is impossible; but that capitalism is impossible because there was no feudalism to transition from, which is patently absurd because we obviously do have a capitalist economy of some kind. (Your unique and anachronistic classification of "Mussolinian capitalism" at best puts the cart before the horse, but is also both historically and ideologically inaccurate.)
Most importantly, if the stages theory turns out to be wrong in some regard, if it does not match up with observations, then change the theory. We don't have to throw up our hands and abandon socialism when the real world doesn't align perfectly with a description made several hundred years ago.
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They're a joke in part because of the push for privatized education. Privatized education does not improve accountability, outcomes, or transparency. Even the WSJ (in March 2018, iirc) ran a story about how privatized, voucher schools had the overall the exact same levels of outcomes according to standardized testing as public schools. Some private schools did better, but only because they took in fewer voucher students and thereby had a larger private-voucher ratio, which means that had more revenue from private students (whose parents pay the full amount) and fewer losses from voucher students (whose voucher may only be half of the tuition).
Students in well-funded, private schools don't do better because the structure of private school is radically different. They apply the same "banking model" of education as public schools. They do better because the school is well-funded. How can public schools ever function adequately if they're constantly being strip-mined of their resources for the benefit of private schools? Don't think private schools devote most of their resources to education; in many cases, their administration has ridiculously high salaries.
We know public education can work. It does so in many European countries. Take Finland. They attribute the success of their comprehensive education program in part to the absence of private schools, which steal resources from public school students and create an unhelpful atmosphere of competition over cooperation.
Education shouldn't be a business. It's a public good. It isn't for individual improvement, but for the benefit of the community. Everyone benefits when we're all educated and taught to think critically.
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In attempting to uphold scarcity, toil, poverty, and subjugation against the growing potential for post-scarcity, leisure, abundance and freedom, capitalism increasingly emerges as the most irrational, indeed the most artificial, society in history. [...] On an ever-greater scale, potentiality begins to determine and shape one's everyday view of actuality, until a point is reached where everything about the society - including its most "attractive" amenities - seems totally insane, the result of massive social.
-Murray Bookchin
It is not when a society goes from bad to worse that people revolt, but rather it is when a bad government attempts to mend its ways that it is in greatest danger.
-Toussaint L'Ouverture
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@floopsiemcsoops6008 Framing is sort of irrelevant. What needs to be changed is the way people think. Changing a word won't do that, and most people aren't so stupid as to not notice the bait-and-switch. If you've talk to normal people about how work is organized, you'll find that many have deep-seated suspicions about "workplace democracy" and even their fellow workers (not unexpected in a heavily surveilled, restricted, and competitive society), that work can be productively carried out absent a managerial hierarchy, and that people will want to work without coercion. Opposition to socialism isn't built on a word which people associate with vague, negative connotations; it's built on a deep distrust of people and a faith in hierarchy.
Malatesta recognized the hollowness of the PR approach to the label anarchism:
"Nor is the phenomenon without parallel in the history of words. In times and in countries where the people believed in the need for government by one man (monarchy), the word republic, which is government by many, was in fact used in the sense of disorder and confusion — and this meaning is still to be found in the popular language of almost all countries.
"Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.
"Those who say therefore that the anarchists have badly chosen their name because it is wrongly interpreted by the masses and lends itself to wrong interpretations, are mistaken. The error does not come from the word but from the thing; and the difficulties anarchists face in their propaganda do not depend on the name they have taken, but on the fact that their concept clashes with all the public’s long established prejudices on the function of government, or the State as it is also called."
David Graeber also points out that even today, there's a prevailing distrust of democracy as something fragile, not to be trusted to certain groups, or liable to lapse into ochlocracy.
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@floopsiemcsoops6008 You can go ahead with "packaging" and branding and selling socialism, like it's another commodity. Good luck with that liberal wordgame.
You've had no substantive response to any criticism I've had except to reiterate that the left doesn't understand branding. For instance, if the problem is that "socialism" is a tainted word (despite a resurgence of popularity and interest), what prevents conservatives from associating whatever new term you introduce with socialism, and the next term, and the next? Look at how conservatives regard "postmodernism," "critical race theory," "nationalized medicine," "welfare,"and so on, some of which have only a marginal if any relation to socialism. You can't nullify the effects of ideology by changing a label—for reasons that I explained at length and to which you gave no reply.
The fact that you think socialism being conflated with communism is a problem (when the two had long been synonymous and are treated that way today among many socialists) speaks volumes, as does your fixation on appealing to a minority of reactionaries rather than unorganized people who could have more radical politics given enough exposure and conditions, not a mere name change.
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@TCt83067695 The problem here is that everyone to the left of center has bought into the reactionary framing of freedom of speech as a social issue, which leads to a lot of incoherence and confusion. It also leads to many holier-than-thou defenses of right wing ideology while left wing ideas can be routinely marginalized. Chomsky at least is consistent and is vocal about defending left speech, eg his defense of Finkelstein. But for the most part these calls for free expression serve to enhance reaction and the status quo.
Just consider the fact that the loudest voices on this issue are people like JK Rowling--people who have a lot of power, influence, prestige, and a national if not global platform, and who are not being "silenced" by governments. They may complain, as the Dave Rubins and Ben Shapiros are wont, that liberal ("liberal") corporations like...Facebook are taking away their precious speech, but I've never heard one of them defend the average worker's speech when they are, say, encouraging unionization in their workplace.
No one is "rescinding" the speech of these reactionaries. Those bigots, TERFs, white supremacists, etc in many if not most cases still have their power and platforms. They're not being silenced. They're being criticized, and they can't fucking stand it. Too bad. And if more and more people are persuaded to not listen to their junk ideas, well, that's just the invisible hand of the marketplace of ideas working its magic.
All I'm saying is that there's no need to participate in and legitimize their cynical handwringing.
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Yul Bahbo Free markets in capitalism tend to be disastrous to all except the extremely rich. One example I'm currently fond of is the control/deregulation of price controls for grain in the 2 decades leading up to the French Revolution.
The problem I see with arguments like yours is that "pure capitalism" is defined in such a way that all unsuccessful implementations can be dismissed as crony capitalism and the like, making "capitalism" an abstraction that cannot inhere in the real world. Maybe that's okay for a philosophical discussion, but it's not very useful regarding implementation.
Now, your definition is kind of aberrant. I doubt a Chicago School economist would recognize a system with regulations as "capitalism," because regulations are considered distortions. But let's assume that that's not a problem.
Real existing capitalism creates a symbiotic relationship with big government. Business needs a strong government to safeguard its property rights and to arbitrate disputes among business interests. If a strong government doesn't exist, business will create one. As a result, real existing capitalism tends to consolidate wealth and power. I can't stress this enough, because it's a point that's often neglected. It's assumed that business and government are inherently separate and antagonistic entities. Big business without a big government is called Fascism, and in that case big business IS the government.
Moreover, capitalism in its more successful permutations has historically arisen thanks to protectionist (anti-capitalist) measures, as in Great Britain where the king protected against things like imported wool and corn, and in the US. In places where strict free market policies are imposed, particularly in the modern world, the economy has floundered. Ha-Joon Chang has a good book on this called Kicking Away the Ladder.
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"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." IV.ii
Did you read the book? Yes, it's about how maximizing self-interest will ultimately lead to the general benefit but within in the context of protecting domestic industry. Smith (and Ricardo in his discussion of comparative advantage) believed that people would choose the most socially desirable outcome (i.e. domestic production and manufacturing) merely by seeking their own self-interest, thereby effecting the outcome of protectionism without the need for tariffs and embargoes. They relied on assumptions that were in hindsight pretty silly. For instance, in that same chapter, Smith acknowledges the capitalist will prefer domestic over foreign production "provided always that he can thereby obtain the ordinary, or not a great deal less than the ordinary profits of stock" while assuming that "the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society." To be fair, capital was more immobile in his day, and he has a point about the preference of the owner for a factory that is close-by and that he can oversee personally, but neither of those things is really true in our age of cheap transportation and instantaneous communication.
I did, however, overstate things when I said that it was "protectionism from national pride" because Smith thought it would happen regardless of what one thought and felt about their country of birth.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/25/this-is-what-adam-smith-meant-by-invisible-hand/#34e340926694
Regarding South Korea, you have to look at how they got to where they're at, namely through protectionist measures like tariffs, local content requirements, and restrictions on foreign investment. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but South Korea faired worse economically (as did most countries) when it pursued a strategy of neoliberal free trade than when it used some protectionism to develop industry to the level that it could compete internationally. But South Korea is not exceptional. Every developed nation has followed that trajectory.
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I think the democratic party might've got caught crying wolf too many times, and now that there is a wolf, some people don't want to recognize it. Romney and McCain, and all the others would have been bad for the country, but Trump would be an unmitigated disaster--for women, for minorities, and for the middle class generally. It's hard to imagine a worse candidate for president.
Jimmy's wrong because of the timing and focus of his comments. His focus is on winning the presidency, as if that's a new strategy for the progressive left. Instead, the progressive left disappoints itself when it continues to hope for a silver bullet, especially one with such a short expiration. You're not going to get to the top of the mountain by trying to jump really really high.
Timing is also an important factor in Jimmy's argument. It's six weeks from the election, and Jill Stein has a negligible share of the vote. At least with Bernie would could say that he was making good headway, but Jill is not. That's not entirely her fault, but it's true nonetheless.
Gary Johnson (whom I think would be worse than Clinton) has only a slightly greater, but still insufficient, share, and lately he's been fumbling in the media. So count him out.
These third party candidates would need a miracle to win anything close to 20%, and even then they would still lose. And what did Jimmy do when Bernie was on the verge of losing? He kept railing on about how Hillary might be indicted or how one of her other scandals would remove her from the race, in other words, that something miraculous would happen.
It didn't. Those kinds of comments are fine as speculation, but they aren't constructive. The notion that the electorate will suddenly flip on the two-party establishment (without the necessary pre-election foundation and propaganda, but from the sheer exhortation to do so) can only lead to false disappointment when we should be optimistic about the political future.
Even though Sanders lost, he showed that you could mount a strong left wing political campaign without appealing to the donor class. That's a powerful idea, and we're already seeing other progressive campaigns using it. The 2018 election is going to be incredibly important since so many democratic seats will be open.
Again, if you'd asked me a few years ago, or even during the primaries, I would have said that voting third party is valid, but there has to be some point when you cut your losses, and I guess mine was sooner than some other people's, and it started a little after the time Bernie lost and Trump won. I happen to live in a securely blue state so I may still vote for Stein, but I'll have to see. Jimmy's vehemence and self-righteous indignation are entirely misplaced.
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@Sonnera If you want to see some fallacies and wildly misinterpreted remarks, look no further than your last post.
In point 2 you say: "a father opting out financially during the middle of a pregnancy is exactly the same as after birth". First, the idea is to have an opt out window that coincides with the period for an abortion procedure. "The middle of pregnancy" isn't the issue here; it's whether or not the woman can access abortion when the man opts out. And no, they obviously are not the same before and after. If the man opts out during the time in which the woman can get an abortion, then the woman does not have to accept total financial responsibility for the child when it's born: she can get an abortion. She cannot get an abortion after the child is born. It sounds like you're saying that the man has a parental future obligation to the fetus (it's not a child yet), which sounds a lot like how abortion opponents argue against a woman's right to choose, that is, she is obligated legally and parentally to a fetus. Actually, you do come close to saying as much in one of your comments (quoted below) when you say that both parents are responsible after the child is viable (you add "then born"). And I kind of agree with that. Once the fetus, not child, is viable, however that's medically and philosophically construed, say 18+ weeks.
In point 3 you say that I proposed something that the OP never did, even though I quoted him directly, and then say that I suggest that "the women would have to consent to father negating parental responsibilities," which I never did. By saying that the woman would have a full understanding of situation, I meant that she would know that the man had no plans to help support and raise the child, and that that would inform her decision to abort, if she did not want to raise the child alone, or continue the pregnancy, if she did. It would be aboveboard, legal, binding, non-ambiguous.
In point 3 you also make some comments that are factually incorrect. You say that "[The woman] is financially on the hook exactly like the dad is" and "If they can't afford it, we should have social programs to support them, but if they can, why would they get the option not to because they just don't feel like it? Again, THE MOTHER CANNOT DO THIS EITHER." Which is just not true. There are lots of ways that women and men can opt out of raising a child after it's born, such as adoption, that we don't stigmatize—or at least not as much. There are procedures in the US for giving up parental rights (just remembered that this is a plot line in Matilda, so...). The "just don't feel like it" comment is rather odd because it smacks of anti-abortion rhetoric.
For more straw men, see your comment "Once a child is viable, then born, THE CHILD gets certain rights, and BOTH the mother and father have legal and financial obligations. Fathers cannot financially 'opt out' anymore than a mother can, because its about the rights of the child at that point, not that of the parents" which is irrelevant because that's not the issue. Everyone accepts that as true and you're trying to make it sound like the real issue and that irrelevant issue are one and the same, and because people accept the irrelevant issue as true, they also have to accept the real issue as true. It's disingenuous arguing.
It's not a fallacy, but I love your opening in point 4. "BOTH MEN AND WOMEN should be able to get any medical procedure they deem fit for themselves, this includes abortion for women, of which there is no equivalent for men, simply do to biology." Sure, men and women have equal access to medical procedures...but, oops, men don't have a comparable procedure, sorry : P. You would like to say "get a vasectomy," as you did previously (can't find the comment for some reason) because what you said is obviously false (that it's easy to reverse and doesn't impact fertility whatsoever).
"If men are the primary caregivers, women are on the hook financially as well." In this statement the consequent doesn't follow from the antecedent. Allowing men to opt out should only be permitted if and only if women also have the option to via abortion.
Your point that asymmetries in biology do create legal, moral, and financial quandaries which can never be made totally fair is well taken. No matter what how we choose to treat abortion legally, the fact remains that women carry fetus to term and give birth to children. They have an innately greater investment in the child, and I can understand the impulse to level the field by compelling men early in a pregnancy with legal and financial responsibilities. Women's concern is medical, men's is legal. But to me that's a rather old fashioned way of looking at things. It contains elements of truth, but it could be updated for modern society.
Which is why I think a "temporal" approach is better. At each step in the timeline, both parties have the ability to make comparable decisions. They can both choose to have sex, however they choose to as consenting adults, and once a pregnancy occurs, they can both choose to accept the responsibilities of parenthood. Because of biological asymmetries, the woman's opt out is abortion and the man's is through legal termination. The woman's is inherently more burdensome, there's no doubt, and perhaps there can be a split of the cost of abortion (I'm sure policy makers could also find a way to charge a fee to the man for filing a termination of rights, and use that money for sex ed or some such).
We allow women to terminate pregnancies no questions asked (or we should in places where we don't...Arkansas). That means that currently men have two chances to reject fatherhood, before and during sex, while women have three, before and during sex and during the early part of pregnancy. Yes, abortion is about the woman's right to her body, but it's also about not wanting to carry a fetus to the point that it's a child.
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Nationalization of the railways is a popular policy in the UK (⅔ support). Privatization of that industry has led to less efficient schedules and routes, resulting in artificially higher costs for riders. Industries that rely heavily on ownership of infrastructure and/or serving the public good tend to perform better under nationalization or some kind of natural monopoly with government oversight.
Bernie is right to recover the word "socialist" from right-wing demonization, and he does so by touting successful, wide-spread social democratic policies and historical American figures, like Eugene Debs.
Where I personally disagree with him is that I wish he had a capital 'S' Socialist position, i.e. not state socialism but worker control. In the end, Sanders is a capitalist who supports private property. Doesn't matter much whether the state functions as a capitalist or private entities do. It's sort of like the difference between feudalism where land was owned by barons versus feudalism (sometimes called absolutism) where ownership and control primarily resided with the state monarchy.
I think in some ways Sanders's "socialist" identification, while reawakening some people to forgotten aspects of political history, entrenches the misunderstanding, by now a century old, over what Socialism, the political theory of a democratic economy through worker self-management and federation, means, a misunderstanding that the right used to demonize socialism in the first place. His brand of socialism is a concession that keeps the powerful in power, much like FDR's "socialist" policies that "saved capitalism."
Corbyn is certainly more left than Sanders, but I don't think he qualifies as a Socialist-Socialist, as shown by his commitment to increasing funding for police and surveillance. Moreover, unlike the US, Europe has a long history of Socialist and Communist parties. Calling yourself a socialist there is not at all uncommon.
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Piper Tipurts It is gross, and you're right, it really is a liberal thing. I think it has something to do with the fact that democratic voters tend to belong to lower turnout populations, namely the young and minorities, so Democratic politicians feel insecure peddling their neoliberalism. The Republicans, however, can rely on their base of older, white evangelicals, an alliance that wasn't even seriously questioned when Romney, a Mormon, ran. In fact, Romney earned 1 million more votes than McCain.
However, there is currently one instance of the "vote stealing" narrative on the right, Evan or Ethan whatever-his-name-is in Utah. You know, the puppet of the Mormon mob/ shadow-cabal...
Have you noticed that no one blames the 300,000 Democratic Floridians who voted for Bush? Somehow Bush didn't "steal" those votes. In other words, that shift, the shift to the right, is legitimate and shouldn't be questioned, but the shift to the left, toward labor, toward anti-corporatism—that is illegitimate and has to be stomped down.
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For Harris he's a token Muslim. Nawaz is also a fake.
For Harris fanatics there is no such thing as "the full quote." As I said before, the notion that every sentence of a statement must be present in order for a quote to be valid just doesn't exist in any realm of discourse. Now if I had omitted a sentence that clarified, contradicted, or otherwise radically altered the content of the quoted passage, then there's a reason to complain.
So, what was this magical next sentence that is supposed to reveal the real and true meaning behind Harris's other odious words?
"and the fact that it's only rational not to want to live in a world that looks more and more like Jerusalem at the height of the Intifada."
That's it. He just repeats what he said before. And then Nawaz speaks. Harris repeats that it's rational to discriminate against Muslims and does it with a rather bizarre reference to the Intifada, as if that had anything to do with Syrian refugees. (I assume Harris is talking about the Second Intifada, because it would be even more bizarre to invoke the First.) His statement doesn't contradict anything he previously said, or hedges it, or anything. So why didn't I quote it? Because there was no point in doing so. It reveals nothing of substance, unless you think Harris's fear-mongering comparison to the Intifada is "substance." Harris isn't walking, breathing scripture. It's okay to not quote him by chapter and verse.
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Capitalism has been 10 years away from ending poverty for the last hundred years. It's NEVER going to happen. In fact, it's made it worse in some places. When are people going to realize that capitalism needs a population of impoverished people and that its goal is to concentrate wealth, thereby creating a less equal, less democratic society? A society that can only be "saved" by the very strong men and captains of industry who pillaged it in the first place.
Now it is true that some people are lifted out of poverty, but they do so only to enter a system of economic exploitation. Bill Gates doesn't have a trillion dollars without such a system. And he doesn't have it without establishing a virtual monopoly on the OS market. Rather than contenting ourselves with ending poverty (that is, having it ended for us by the capitalists), we should aim to raise a decent standard of living worldwide, not through wage labor but through a democratization of work even more thorough than the political democratization begun in the late 18th century.
While the sheep ask, "Why can't some people be rich?"—and by the way, Gates is already far above rich; he's super rich on track to becoming ultra rich—we should demand, "Why can't people be satisfied with a good life?" How much money does one person need? Let's stop pretending like billionaire philanthropists like Gates and Zuckerberg are going to save the world, or that there's something noble or meritorious about such enormous inequality. I think it was Mandela who said, we want justice, not charity. Even the average person—even conservatives—think that wealth should be distributed more equally.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequality-it-s-far-worse-than-you-think/
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+The Movie Dealers
That line is the same kind of market mysticism that Burke spouted in the 18th century:
"Market is the meeting and conference of the consumer and producer, when they mutually discover each other's wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflection what market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled" (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity).
But while markets, that is, markets in a capitalist context, are great at providing loads and loads of stuff (dog beds, 20 different fragrances of handsoap, 100 kinds of SUV) the market is very inefficient at providing other things, like meaningful choices, a clean environment, fair working conditions. For example, say that people in some Third World island nation have a demand for maintaining their coastline against the encroachments of climate change—will a supplier appear?
It isn't just a question of available technology, but the kinds and uses of technology that a capitalist arrangement is prepared to invest in. The easy profit of the internal combustion engine delayed with catastrophic consequences the invention of cleaner locomotion; broke up the nation's public transit (a conspiracy for which GM had to pay pennies); and segregated people into self-contained packages—the suburb, the car itself— not unlike the products for which they shuffle to the store to buy buy buy.
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Water is also poisonous at high enough levels, as is just about everything—vitamin C, folate, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon. The only thing that isn't is truth, and Nye was laying down mad levels of truth.
I just want to reiterate, because some people (+The Internet) have a misconception about what a poison/toxin is: We arbitrarily label "poisonous" or "toxic" that which causes adverse or deadly reactions in humans at low or extremely low doses (parts per million or billion), but any substance can be poisonous given a sufficient dose.
Nye's point is about the level and rate of CO2 entering the atmosphere, soil, and water. CO2 is an important and necessary part of life on this planet, but Earth can no more sustain the introduction of massive quantities of CO2 and still remain habitable for humans and other creatures than you or I could guzzle gallon after gallon of water and expect not to die from overhydration.
The problem is not humans expelling 2 lbs of CO2 daily; it's factories, cars, livestock, and so forth expelling CO2 at a historically unprecedented rate.
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"[T]he annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much as he can, both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce maybe of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security ; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it."
This explanation of capitalistic markets has always struck me as analogous to traffic. A swarm of people cubbied away in their metal boxes, vying for their own interests, with poor lines of communication and no formal planning. Couple of jackasses swerving between lanes trying to get no where faster than everyone else. Drunks. People on their phones. Causing congestion, gridlock, accidents. A jackknifed semi that shuts down the road. The difference is that everyone accepts that we need traffic laws. Imagine if someone said that everyone cares about preserving their life, and that that self-preservation would contribute to the preservation of everyone in traffic, and so traffic would be conducted as if by an invisible hand. That person would be laughed out of town. But if you're an economist and you say those things, you get a professorship.
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I think I might not have made the point of the analogy clear. It doesn't matter what the child chooses, if they have any choice in the matter at all. The point is, how do we, society, judge the situation? Do we complacently say, 'well, but, you know, at least the kid had the material basics, even if they are being abused' and let it slide? No one can do that and claim to be civilized. I think you're in agreement with that.
That gets to my larger point, one that I think is often excluded from discussions about labor choice (as in Friedman and Hayek); that is, are there meaningful choices or are there merely false choices? Every choice is constrained by forces outside our control. But there's a non-trivial difference between the choice between starvation and a wage-slave job that pays nothing and forces you to work in unsafe and stressful conditions and the choice to work as a schoolteacher or as an electrician or a farmer. For most people working in garment factories in places like Bangladesh, they have a severely constrained set of choices—so much so that it's dubious whether it can be called a choice at all.
Some economists take the mere act of doing one thing instead of another as a choice without ascertaining whether it's a meaningful choice. In the spiegel article, the woman says that her bosses tell her she can either come to work and get paid or stay at home and take care of her kid. If she doesn't go to work, the family won't have enough to get by and certainly not enough to afford her children's education. If the family moves back to the village (she mentions that some people are very tempted by that*) they also won't be able to pay for education and the cycle will just keep repeating itself. The system is such that there is only one choice she can make, and that doesn't sound like "choice" to me; it sounds like coercion on a broad level. There's a difference between making a choice in sound mind and making one out of desperation.
In one sense you're right, most of those people only have two options—work in a factory or starve. Small wonder that most people "choose" the factory. All I'm saying is that at a minimum our response shouldn't be "well at least they have a job at all" just as we shouldn't say "well at least that child has food." There are other options, but they exist outside the current paradigm and are therefore harder to enact, things like boycotts (kind of ineffective in my opinion), rewriting trade law, supporting unions, especially internationally, encouraging the migration to hi-tech industries. If those reforms fail, the only solution for people in the exploited third world is to revolt. That may happen next week or in 50 years. It's hard to predict, but it will probably be set off by an event like a factory collapsing and by the inability of the current government/business community to cope with the stresses of the system.
It seems like we agree in the main (re: solutions) but the difference is around framing.
*It's not a silly point because we don't choose the circumstances of our lives. I don't know what the situation in Bangladesh is like, but here in America, or in England and France there were powerful forces motivating people to migrate to cities and take factory work despite the fact that they loathed it and saw it as dehumanizing—including the promise of better material conditions for their children, the enclosure of the commons, the privatization of land, starvation and famine brought about by poor governmental and economic policy, etc.
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Why did you choose Lanza and Roof as examples? Why not someone like George W Bush, who's responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, or Henry Kissinger, who oversaw one of the largest and most indiscriminate bombing campaigns ever? If those aren't extreme cases, I don't know what would be. Capital punishment is for the poor, for the mentally ill, for minorities, for the homeless, and only very rarely for anyone of the upper class.
If money were not a question, would it still be okay to execute people? Maybe I'm being too idealistic, but I balk at the idea that we should kill people, even murderers, because it represents an economic inconvenience for us. If money itself were really such an issue, and not the notion of spending money to support an alleged murderer, there are far easier ways to cut spending, such as decriminalizing drugs, prostitution, etc.--measures that, moreover, would have a positive effect on society, as has been shown in places like Belgium.
Last point. The problem with swift executions is that the only reason we know about false murder sentences is because the accused had time to appeal and to reappeal and rereappeal. The average prison term served by exonerated men is 14 years. That's the average; some have served much longer. By cutting the time to appeal, we risk the state killing innocent people. Every police officer, every judge, every jury, every victim's family is certain they got the right man—until they're proven wrong.
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Violence is what happens when people are too stupid to come up with a better response.
David Graeber, Utopia of Rules:
"History reveals that political policies that favor “the market” have always meant even more people in offices to administer things, but it also reveals that they also mean an increase of the range and density of social relations that are ultimately regulated by the threat of violence. This obviously flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught to believe about the market, but if you observe what actually happens, it’s clearly true. In a sense, even calling this a “corollary” is deceptive, because we’re really just talking about two different ways of talking about the same thing. The bureaucratization of daily life means the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations; impersonal rules and regulations, in turn, can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.32 And indeed, in this most recent phase of total bureaucratization, we’ve seen security cameras, police scooters, issuers of temporary ID cards, and men and women in a variety of uniforms acting in either public or private capacities, trained in tactics of menacing, intimidating, and ultimately deploying physical violence, appear just about everywhere—even in places such as playgrounds, primary schools, college campuses, hospitals, libraries, parks, or beach resorts, where fifty years ago their presence would have been considered scandalous, or simply weird."
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Can everyone be a millionaire inventor? Or will there have to be people to sew clothes, pick up trash, pave roads, care for children? If so, should they be condemned to a life of long hours, low pay, and minimal if any benefits? Or should the promise of society be that everyone, especially in a wealthy country, can live a decent, productive life with time for leisure and personal growth? If the 50s were the Golden Age of the US economy, and we're producing roughly double of that now, why do we have to work the same hours for lower (adjusted) wages? It's because of the insane logic of growth that says we have to compete or perish, that we have to rush headlong to the edge of the cliff before everyone else.
In a capitalist system, businesses and corporations hold power. Unless laborers unionize, their individual power is negligible compared to the corporation. It's the corporation who decides who to hire and the terms for hiring (when have you ever presented a company with a contract or list of demands?). Governments at their best can intercede on behalf of the working population, to whom they are accountable.
If we've forgotten the usefulness of governments when it comes to curbing the private tyranny of (big) business, it's because we've grown accustomed to government protection, much as anti-vaccers take for granted the herd immunity they're intent on compromising.
The question of "merit" is problematic, even though it is often appealed to as a conversation ender. Surely we can all agree that people should be judged, at least to an extent, on their merit. But it's clear that our capitalist system, in its many permutations, has rarely operated on merit. Does Mark Zuckerberg really merit his billions in wealth? He made Facebook. Does he really merit more than a doctor or civil rights lawyer or a physicist? Merit is not a substitute for value.
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Robert is evidently still too butthurt over HRC's loss to comprehend a basic argument. This is NC's argument:
If you look over the record, any time America engaged in nefarious foreign policy--e.g. Nicaragua, Greece--you can find the Western press pushing a narrative of Soviet threat to cover our own misdeeds. That may or may not be true--it's probably mostly true--but that's his argument.
Robert's trying to make it out like NC's is saying the opposite, viz., take any instance of Soviet aggression and you'll find underneath it a corresponding American aggression, which has obvious methodological problems besides failing to address the problem of how politics and the media work together to conceal American atrocities and rogue behavior.
And when I said butthurt, I meant butthurt. His posture is reflexively defensive. He spends all his time criticizing others over whom he has almost zero control (Trump, Putin), splitting hairs, and apologizing for power ("but they're worse," "they do it too!").
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Ditch, no. Rely on solely, no again. Feminism, idpol, and social justice rightly belong on any platform on the left. The problem occurs when politicians exploit the rhetoric of those movements without also addressing the economic and hierarchical inequalities, corruption, and jingoism that undergird our system, or without showing how things like feminism impinge on the anti-war movement (Hillary, for instance, was very chauvinistic) or universal access to healthcare via single payer, since women are disproportionately affected by an inefficient and compromised health system.
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+TheMattd546 You have to read the whole text. For one, the quote you supplied doesn't exist, which makes me think that you don't know anything about this topic.
The part you're referring to says "being necessary for the security of a free state." Secondly, the right to keep and bear arms exists BECAUSE the government deemed a "well regulated militia" necessary to preserve the country—at a time, by the way, when we weren't the world superpower, when the Army was not the juggernaut it is today, when we were 20 years away from being re-attacked by England, when we were surrounded by the Spanish, French, and Indians.
Just to reiterate, the people were granted a constitutional right to guns BECAUSE of the need for militias. That last part is not optional.
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Taxes existed as a practice in slave economies, in feudalism, in capitalism. Political economy is not like natural phenomena—it is not discoverable somewhere "out there," but constructed within human activity—so it's a false analogy to compare socialism to gravity as you did. It may be true that some socialist tendencies have existed as part of human behavior across time (most people behave toward their friends not as capitalists but as communists or anarchists), but those tendencies did not constitute the prevailing social organization, and certainly not with modern material conditions.
Socialism, as it was conceived in the 19th century, is the control of production by the workers in an industrial economy. Socialist theorists pointed to concurrent or older peasant and religious communes as partial examples, not as models of imitation.
"Taxes on production and laws regulating production amounts to ownership and control of production."
No. I can't even imagine how you arrived at that conclusion. Taxes and regulations qualify ownership; they do not constitute it. And again, taxes on production predate any socialist theory or praxis by hundreds if not thousands of years. Not only that, but they are an instrument used by governments/economies highly antithetical to socialism, such as absolutist monarchies, slave economies, and capitalist economies. Was Henry VII a socialist because he put restrictions on the wool trade? Was Louis XVI a socialist because he instituted price controls on grain? Was the church socialist because it collected a tithe? Stop misusing words to make a bad argument.
Moreover, it's not even clear that a socialist society would rely on taxation as a method of funding, especially in one that tends toward the abolition of currency. In a sense, the persistent need for taxation in capitalist society points to a failure of the distribution system, which socialism attempts to amend. If an adequate, just, and egalitarian distribution system exists, there is no need for taxation. Another point of confusion: it's also not clear that a socialist society will have a "government" as that term is usually understood, but instead, workers' councils, federations, syndicates, etc., focussing on production, perhaps with a separate distribution council. The reason you see taxation in the so-called "socialist" countries of today, like Norway, is that they are "social democracies," that is welfare states, or capitalist countries that strive to compensate for the more deleterious side-effects of capitalism through government spending. The operant word there being "capitalism."
Also, fuck this new comment format.
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@morenitomoreno1282 Maybe it's like how the military has recruits read anti-war literature, or the Church has its congregation read books by atheists—only for the purpose of debunking them, never to take their arguments seriously. I think Chomsky says something somewhere about the indoctrinating effect this has.
What's the CIA afraid of? In a highly propagandized society like the US, inundated with information, who's going to notice? They're watching Jack Ryan from The Office save us from terrorists. And if they do notice, what're they, impotent like Byron the Bulb, going to do about it? Nothing. And if they're joining the CIA, they already know that information, to some degree, and still believe in the civilizing mission.
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@FEV369 Your argument is built on the shaky (but by now, unfortunately, common sense notion that there are two separate entities, the state and business, which are always in conflict), and what business does is capitalism and what the state does is socialism. This scheme is rife with historical potholes and fails to account for productive relations, which any economic theory ought to do.
It's also quite a modern idea. Early liberal theorists of the state, like Thomas Hobbes, saw the state as the necessary guarantor for the security and stability which business needed to prosper.
If we accept that any government interference in the market is S O C I A L I S M, we quickly find that laissez-faire capitalism has never existed, and we're forced to accept the seemingly absurd conclusion that the railroad and automotive industries, computer and biomedical industries, and so on—the pillars of industrial and late stage capitalism were not really capitalism at all, since the government, as a major source of money (theb"national capitalist" in Engels' words) had a heavy hand on their development, but actually socialist!!!
Not only that, but, according to Michael Perelman, even the father of laissez-faire capitalism, Adam Smith, is a socialist because he favored government interventions—not market mechanisms—to enclose land and discipline the inchoate proletariat. Was Adam Smith advocating for socialism? No, he was using a tool of the capitalist system—the statw—to further capitalist interests.
We should reject the idea that government is somehow equated to socialism, especially when no further account has been made of the productive relations of society. It's an ahistorical view of socialism which at best assents to the views of the most wayward of the social democratic offshoots of socialism, which more interested in appeasing and managing capitalism than in social revolution.
We're much better off accepting an argument like the one posed by Nitzan and Bichler in Capital as Power (versions of which trace back at least to Friedrich List), that the state and capital are codependent manifestations of the same system of power.
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@FEV369 Uh...what a laughable comment. Nothing you said re: capitalism and socialism was correct. Citing the source of arguments isn't "name-dropping" jfc. That's actually normal when people make arguments that aren't just based on received wisdom and ideology, which is what you're doing. To the extent that you could even be said to be making a point, I addressed it. If you can't recognize that, that's on you. I gave historical counter examples, and I pointed out areas of deficiency in you argument, namely that it dubiously posits government and business as entities in conflict, representing different economic systems, and fails to even take into account the relations of production—which are identical whether Musk makes money from private individuals, shareholders, or government contracts. In a capitalist economy, the government can function like an especially large investor. Maybe you're used to talking to people, like you, who don't know anything about what socialism is?
If you think your comment about Adam Smith is some kind of deft riposte, consider what LITERALLY ANY SOCIALIST thinks about Elon Musk. He's not engaging in socialism because he happens to get his income for his capitalist firms from one source rather than another.
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The difference between the first two and the last three is that the former really existed, were systemic, and had significant, dire consequences for millions, and the latter are basically the product of manufactured, conservative, selective hysteria of elites who don't like public accountability.
Yeah, exoticism, othering, and orientalism have a historical context, not just in art history but in real socio-political history, and it actually was oppressive and tyrannical.
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No, there is no "balance of power" with nuclear weapons in the world. Mutual Assured Destruction, rather than keeping us (?) safe, put the world in jeopardy multiple times. The instance of Stanislav Petrov is well known, "the man who saved the world." Less well known is the case of Vasili Arkhipov, the flotilla commander during the Cuban Missile Crisis whose sole dissenting vote of three prevented a nuclear strike against the US that would have automatically triggered all-out nuclear war. There are other "near misses." The very existence of these weapons constitutes a threat that no attempt at reinstating MAD or "modernization" have alleviated. Just the opposite: they exacerbate the problem.
Moreover, Stone is being propagandistic. Russia has long had the ability to overwhelm US anti-missile systems. Sarmat does not herald a new paradigm, but it makes good copy if you say it does. What Sarmat does do is make the threat of the use of nuclear weapons more real by generating hysteria and an arms race. The US will develop a strategic countermeasure, perhaps nuclear, perhaps conventional. It will see this as a restoration of the balance of power. Russia will develop its own counter-countermeasure and see this as a restoration of the balance of power. This can only lead to the increase of nuclear weapons in the world (because smaller states will want their own to safeguard themselves from either the US or Russia) and/or the increased likelihood of their use, either purposely or, more likely, accidentally. This isn't a hypothetical scenario. It's precisely what we've seen happen in the 20th century.
It should not be up to one person, or a group of people, to decide whether or not the world survives. No one should have that power, and the only sane thing to do is support and advocate for nuclear disarmament. Then, and only then, will the world be safe from nuclear weapons.
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>I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies. After trawling the web for a while, I came across an obscure blog that told an arresting story: “One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip ... Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
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@vinniemcclung693 I'm sorry you don't understand how math works. I'll help you. This vote was never meant to pass M4A.
First, the House has 435 members. Of those, 118 support M4A, meaning that the bill would not even pass the House. In the Senate, while the Democrats now have a slim majority, they do not have the 60 votes needed to avoid the filibuster, and Democratic leadership is unlikely to nuke the filibuster for M4A. That's assuming every Democrat votes in favor, but of course, conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin, and those taking money from Rx and health insurance industries, will vote against.
So the grand strategy Dore proposes hinges on leveraging a lot of political capital for a symbolic vote. Some force the vote advocates then claim that the vote could be used against Democrats who vote Nay in upcoming elections.
There are several problems with this theory. First, even if every Democrat were replaced with a M4A proponent, there would still not be enough votes to pass the House, and Dore thinks the Democrats will lose seats in 2022. Second, the theory assumes that voters will base their decision on what an incumbent did during a symbolic vote several years in the past. That may be a factor for some people, but there's no reason to think it would be salient, let alone decisive. Last, there's nothing stopping House Democrats from symbolically voting in favor of M4A if they think it will help their election chances while opposing it when it stands a legitimate chance.
I'd encourage you to spend less time listening to the slurred rantings of a third rate youtuber who refuses to do basic preparation for his show and has been consistently wrong about pretty much everything.
So Dore is expecting progressive Democrats to leverage their vote for Pelosi to secure a quixotic House vote for M4A that wouldn't even yield a symbolic victory. Small wonder no one serious wants to go along with such a dubious proposal, even leaving out his unhinged tirades.
And again, this has nothing to do with my original comment, which was about Jimmy hypocritically demanding to be "courted" for his influence and platform. So...let's hope your next comment is on topic.
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@NJ-wb1cz You'll notice I never supported Jimmy Dore. In fact, I said I didn't think Jimmy was taking the position OP laid out. I don't think Jimmy has a principled, coherent, or informed take on this issue. He's only offering apathy and impotent discontent, which is a major problem. That's far from what I'm saying. What I agreed with was OP's notion that the state and the power it represents is a corrupting and moderating force on progressive politicians.
This debate would be much shorter if you took a few seconds to actually read and understand what I wrote, rather than flying off the handle with preconceived ideas of what you think I said.
The policies you're laying out, like M4A, are not bad reforms. What I'm arguing against is an over reliance on reformism, incrementalism, and insurgent politicians to substitute for work that is better reserved for—indeed, can only be accomplished by—the organization of people to act on their own behalf. Even Sanders, who favors the incrementalist approach, has said that M4A will require the mass mobilization of the working class to push through Congress. What I'm saying is, why prematurely limit the horizon of action at a temporary political agenda? Why not instead build mass movements that can as a byproduct exert pressure on politicians but have as their main goal the development of autonomous, decentralized, democratic institutions which can provide the framework for a possible world post-state and post-government?
Traditional politics is where radical movements go to die, where they are moderated and coopted by larger and contradictory forces within the state. This is why I said it is important to have a systemic analysis of power, not to just rely on the good intentions of individuals.
History has shown that the social democrats of the past, who were far more radical than today's progressives, were capable of reformism; but they were also capable of destroying the labor movements in their countries—France in 1910 in France, 1918 in Germany, 1936 in Spain, 1945 in England, the 60s in France, the 70s in England, and virtually the entirety of the early 20th century in America.
By becoming part of the political machine of repression, and stewards of incremental improvement, they inherit the values and interests of the state. To even operate and propose their agenda, they must compromise with the very system they should be fighting against. AOC's Green New Deal is a good and needed reform; but it is, like its namesake, another way of reconfiguring and preserving capitalism, the very thing which provoked the climate crisis.
Progressive politicians who do not play by the rules find themselves unable to act in a way that is meaningful for their constituents, because the power of the srate and capital are over determined. Yanis Varoufakis is a great example of a socialist politician who simply could not enact needed reforms because, despite being the only sensible reforms, they were deemed impractical by the EU.
Alexander Berkman laid out this process of cooption:
It is power which corrupts... Moreover, even with the best intentions Socialists [who get elected]... find themselves entirely powerless to accomplishing anything of a socialistic nature... The demoralisation and vitiation [this brings about] take place little by little, so gradually that one hardly notices it himself... [The elected Socialist] perceives that he is regarded as a laughing stock [by the other politicians]... and finds more and more difficulty in securing the floor... he knows that neither by his talk nor by his vote can he influence the proceedings ... His speeches don’t even reach the public... [and so] He appeals to the voters to elect more comrades... Years pass... [and a] number ... are elected. Each of them goes through the same experience... [and] quickly come to the conclusion... [that] They must show that they are practical men... that they are doing something for their constituency... In this manner the situation compels them to take a ‘practical’ part in the proceedings, to ‘talk business,’ to fall in line with the matters actually dealt with in the legislative body... Spending years in that atmosphere, enjoying good jobs and pay, the elected Socialists have themselves become part and parcel of the political machinery... With growing success in elections and securing political power they turn more and more conservative and content with existing conditions. Removal from the life and suffering of the working class, living in the atmosphere of the bourgeoisie... they have become what they call ‘practical’... Power and position have gradually stifled their conscience and they have not the strength and honesty to swim against the current... They have become the strongest bulwark of capitalism."
E: also note that I raised the BPP to counter your claim that these dual power organizations receive "no pushback" and are "the path of least resistance." In your next comment, you dodge addressing this for a new bizarre claim—the BPP didn't get universal healthcare passed...Which is bizarre on multiple fronts. For one, the BPP wasn't a reformist political pressure group. Its primary goal was never to eke support from a hostile political elite. It was a revolutionary group for the self-empowerment of the black community through direct action. Direct action means meeting the needs of people through self-orgsnization rather than by pleading with bureaucrats. But despite that, the BPP did appear to have provoked the government to make some positive changes, eg by setting an example with their children's lunch program.
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Venezuela's government had its problems. I'm sure its decline had nothing to do with the repeated attempts to launch right-wing, pro-corporate, military coups. No, no.
Look. It was well understood by the progenitors of modern capitalist democracy that their system could not survive if it were encircled by hostile feudal states who would take advantage of every opportunity to quell the inflammation of divergent beliefs. The same has also been understood to apply to socialism and communism, going back at least to the Paris Commune.
Also consider that Venezuela's economy was dependent on oil—the apparent reason for its fragility. And there's some truth to that, but also a lot of missing context and double standards. For instance, Saudi Arabia is also dependent on oil, and it is guilty of major human rights abuses, both against its own people and other nations, but Saudi Arabia is an ally of the United States, and so in addition to being under our aegis, being granted weapons, having markets open to it, it's also free from the exact same squealing criticism people are leveling at Venezuela.
Are the people at Mondragon waiting in bread lines and eating rats? I seem to remember the people in America doing that after its period of greatest capitalistic freedom. I also seem to remember that it was sensible social policies coupled with restrictions on the excesses of capital that helped restore Americans to a decent standard of living.
In America we don't have bread lines, but we do have tons of people on food stamps, on housing subsidy, people who can't afford their medicine. The only thing that keeps these people afloat is not capitalism,; it's social policy, which is different from socialism.
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@stephj9378 How would you enforce that? I don't see how you could without creating a vast, oppressive and costly bureaucratic apparatus to police parents' abilities to teach at home. The big problem here is that that approach, while it sounds fine in theory, is inevitably going to impact poor, working class, and minority families the most—families that already struggle to find the resources and the time to pay for or personally administer the ideal amount of care and instruction. Instead of individualizing the problem, we should (and could, because other countries have) find solutions that 1) socialize the care of children and 2) alleviate economic burdens from workers so that parents have the time and money to spend on their kids.
As for "close supervision," there is research that suggests that too much supervision, i.e. helicopter parenting, can deprive children of the opportunity to learn to self regulate and gain independence. The point should be to remove children from the environment of control, supervision, and surveillance that constitutes the modern school system and place them in an environment in which they can learn to express their ideas, feelings, and interests while still gaining socially valuable skills.
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@Nobu Nee YT deleted my comment, probably because of links.
Re: PCR cycles, it seems like you didn't take a moment to check the misinformation you were reading online and to find out that there's a much less nefarious and technical reason for the Ct value (Politifact "CDC did not change its criteria")
As for "skyrocketing" cases, it's not happening because of vaccinated people. There has been an increase in new cases, even among the vaccinated, largely due to the Delta variant, but the total case number is far below what we experienced before the vaccine.
It's also not surprising that as the vaccinated population increases, more new cases will be among the vaccinated. Vaccines aren't magic—some percentage of people will get sick. It's just a smaller number, with less serious infections, than without the vaccine. If 100% of a population were vaccinated, 100% of cases would be among the vaccinated, but that's neither surprising nor alarming by itself. So if Israel has an 80% vaccination rate, it's likely to have a greater number of vaccinated people get sick.
The vaccines do seem to be less effective against Delta, but that efficacy is still above the mandated threshold. Getting vaccinated will also help prevent the mutation and spread of more infectious, virulent strains later. And the vaccines greatly lower your risk of serious disease and hospitalization in the event that you do get Delta after being vaccinated. This is how vaccines have always worked.
And yes, 1% of new cases, at least in the US, are vaccinated. 99% are not. We see that play out geographically where, particularly in the South, there are large areas of vaccine denial and more and more people are getting sick. The major, serious spikes are happening in places like Louisiana because of vaccine refusal.
Recent data shows that vaccination yields an 8-fold reduction in disease and a 25-fold decrease in hospitalization and death.
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"Since government today has the power, through the legal system, to regulate daily life and to broaden or restrict the liberty of the citizen, and because we are still unable to tear this power from its grasp, we must seek to reduce its power and oblige governments to use it in the least harmful ways possible. But this we
must do always remaining outside, and against, government, putting pressure on it through agitation in the streets, by threatening to take by force what we demand. Never must we accept any kind of legislative position, be it national or
local, for in so doing we will neutralise the effectiveness of our activity as well as betraying the future of our cause."
Errico Malatesta
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Emeril Lugosi Also, it bears mentioning, if we're talking about constituents, the CB is often defended on the basis that black leaders and communities asked for the government to do something to reduce crime. Left out of that exculpation is that those communities also asked for jobs programs, social assistance, housing, drug rehab, parks, better schools - in short, the things that should be part of a crime bill but which didn't con ffg orm to the tough-on-crime and "welfare reform" postures of the era assumed by Democrat and Republican alike. These politicians didn't have their arms twisted to pass that bill. It reflected their racial, class, and ideological biases, preferences, assumptions, and goals.
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@kimber1911 "Look at how quickly society breaks down to base survival and greed when "power" is absent."
I think you're confusing an absence of power with a power vacuum. There's a rich anthropological record of egalitarian societies. Hierarchically organized states have only existed for somewhere between 0.005% and 0.02% of human evolution. They are not the default of our species but a monstrous aberration.
A power vacuum occurs when an existing power structure is suddenly and often violently displaced. It's akin to citing the emotional and psychological crisis that can occur when someone loses their faith in a religion as evidence that agnosticism or atheism are inherently unstable. The fault for the crisis lies not with the loss of belief but with the prior belief that created false expectations. So a power vacuum tells us very little about what life in a horizontally organized society would be like. Instead it tells us what life in a vertically organized society would be like if that organization were suddenly removed.
"Yes, a government is not a corporation on it's face but the workings are the same. "
They're not. A corporation exists to maximize profit, a state exists to (among other things) maximize the wellbeing of its citizens. Therefore a state can run deficits, print its own money, enact laws: corporations can't do most of those, and certainly not on the scale of a country. The country as corporation only makes sense if you ignore basic reality and treat those entities on the most vague metaphorical level.
"As far as capitalism goes, how do you provide incentive for labor, creativity, trading or purchasing of goods and services under an individuals free will?"
This Boeing tragedy is an example of how capitalism does not do those things. It did not stimulate creativity because Boeing was in a hurry to get to market with a product that could compete with Airbus. Furthermore, there's a growing body of research showing that creativity isn't strongly incentivized by personal monetary profit; in fact, more money and other material rewards can hinder creativity. Neither are hierarchical work structures, with levels of management and ownership dictating to workers below, ideal. What seems to stimulate productivity and creativity best are 1) having one's basic needs met, like shelter, healthcare, food, clothing, education in addition to some kind of meaningful cultural life (the income range is around $70,000 per year) and 2) work that is self-directed, autonomous, and seen as fulfilling.
So the question to ask is twofold. First, does capitalism meet these requirements, and it's obvious that it does not. It assumes that people are motivated primarily by profit and self-gain when most people's experience and academic research suggests otherwise—that what people actually need is a life free from financial stress coupled with meaningful work that they control. If human work were about making as much money as possible, we'd all be Wall Street traders or corporate lawyers, when in reality many of us must, out of economic exigency, take on menial, pointless work or pursue work that is meaningful (teacher, artist, social worker) but not lucrative. The standard capitalist story has nothing to say about the human nature underlying most of our choices and motivations with regard to work.
Second, we should ask what kind of system caters to human need, meaningful work, and autonomy, and the answer is to decommodify (which my spellcheck refuses to recognize as a word) the economy and radically expand democracy, not only improving and restructuring political democracy beyond perfunctory representation but expanding it into the workplace where we spend most of our lives, ensuring that production and distribution answer to human need rather than to the calculations of maximum profit.
Will such a system be perfect? Of course not. Humans have an inherent need for improvisation and change, which is why we're always modifying our language, clothes, gestures, and so on, communal and economic life being just other forms of socio-cultural activity. But this system will be better than what we have now, a system that reconstituted the old injustices of aristocracy and privilege under new guises, and allow us to discover new ways of improving human life that are now invisible.
That such a society does not now exist under a hegemony of global capitalism—which has always warred against its alternatives—is trivial and no argument against the necessity of this alternative—less an alternative than a fulfillment of the Enlightenment promises of liberty (understood not in the narrow sense of private property), fraternity, and equality which capitalist democracy betrayed. At some point in history, capitalism did not exist either, and yet that did not prevent it from coming into being.
Still, there are examples of such a society existing—fleeting, inchoate, but vital: Paris Commune, Spain in the 30s, Mondragon, Rojava today, hundreds upon thousands of worker owned and managed business across America and the rest of the world. When these experiments failed, it was not due to some socio-economic flaw but because they were up against hostile concentrated power.
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@dianecastellon6227
You're wrong about some details, but I'm not going to belabor that.
I think it's more accurate to say that we have the 22nd Amendment because elites were fed up with FDR New Dealism. To suggest that it was ratified out of some principled defense of democracy ignores historical context - the deep resentment business had for FDR, even going as far as to contemplate a coup, if Smedley Butler is to be believed; the expansion of democracy under FDR; the machinations that nominated the Dixiecrat Truman as VP instead of the more left-wing Henry Wallace; and the desire for economic revanchism. It's important to consider material conditions and context rather than merely appealing to (what we think are) trans historical pronciples. In this context, the 22nd was a response not to an autocratic, corporatist, right wing president but to FDR's social democratic project and therefore an attempt to undermine democracy by preventing or making it difficult for another FDR to stay in power long enough to complete reforms. There isn't a moral equivalence between 8 years of conservative rule and 8 years of leftist rule.
In general I think some kind of limits and rotation are good, but ultimately they're arbitrary, and it's more important to look at the actual situation. They're good because they may prevent a certain amount of power from consolidating around an individual, though I think this is a problem even in countries with term limits. Obama, for instance, "only" served two terms, but he garnered from that enormous political capital and influence which persists even now that he's out of office. Term limits only address part of the unequal distribution of power. They're also good, from the perspective of constituted authority, because they ensure that a party is reproducing itself instead of relying on a charismatic or entrenched and futureless gerontocracy.
In Bolivia's case, it may have been better if Morales had not run. It appears MAS had potential candidates who could win election. But ultimately the choice came down to corporatist and fascists versus a pro-labor, pro-indigenous candidate. To handwring over process in that situation seems to me the worst kind of mewling liberalism - and indeed liberals were quick to celebrate the military coup by a far right, religious fundamentalist government while extolling the return of democracy.
The last thing is that I think it's important to push back on this narrative that Morales, who had won all of his reelections, was a dictator because it's extremely rare to see that logic applied to white leaders of western nations. It is, like it or not, imperialist rhetoric. You may think Angela Merkel, Higgins, Sommaruga, and Netanyahu are dictators, but they are never framed as such in the media despite their protracted tenures. Nor is the Supreme Court, with its lifetime appointments, framed as an authoritarian, despotic institution.
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@blackflagsnroses6013 While Proudhon may've been the first to call himself an Anarchist, he only gets mentioned in connection with the same two or three quotes—slogans really. His economic ideas aren't taken seriously. Mutualism isn't remotely in the mainstream of anarchism... anywhere.
So essentially what you're doing is citing a few men who today would fall well outside the mainstream of anarchism in order to pretend you have a point. The fact is, if you're hedging your theory on classical economics, Georgism, and block quotes by Mill, you're not a libertarian socialist, an anarchist, or a communist.
If you couldn't understand the argument I made regarding welfare and priorities, I'm sorry, but I can't make it any simpler, and your comments only betray multiple misunderstandings.
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TheEvolver311 The theory of evolution is a good example of how a theory can reveal something true about the world and yet be to a degree directed by ideology. I don't think it should come as a surprise to anyone that Darwin's formulation of evolution is tinged with a certain Victorian capitalist framing of the world in terms of competition.and struggle with and mastery over nature. He was less likely to emphasize instances of mutual aid and symbiosis.
To be clear, I absolutely accept the theory of evolution, but I also think it's a mistake to believe that scientists have this magical power of abstracting their politics from their scientific practices. A theory can both be right insofar as it reveals something about the world and be articulated by one's prior political understanding of the world. It isn't an easy relationship to understand; you can't use it like a hammer to bludgeon every sentence in the Origin of Species; but when it's staring you right in face, as with Murray, it behooves you to look back.
The problem for me with trying to abstract fact from worldview is that facts don't come to us from Heaven etched in a stone tablet. They aren't prior to the world. They aren't even prior to society. The kind of society you live in is going to have some—some—influence on the kind of scientific knowledge produced. The way to transcend bias, if only somewhat, is not to ignore sources of bias but to try to be more aware of them.
One other thing to note is that heritability does not tell you whether or not the expression of the trait can change. Murray, however, believes that low IQ scores among (disadvantaged) groups is a sign that they can't be changed by any social policy, therefore UBI. Again, the heritability, as far as I understand it, doesn't tell you about the mutability of the trait. As you point out, height is heritable, yet height has increased over time due to changes in environmental conditions. It is a trait that is both highly heritable AND changeable.
Ramiian IQ tests don't test general intelligence. They test certain traits that are valued by our society, verbal skills, spatial reasoning, analogy. As noted in the Atlantic during the Richwine controversy in 2013, "This, then, shows the limits to IQ tests: Though the tests are good measures of skills relevant to success in American society, the scores are only a good indicator of relative intellectual ability for people who have been exposed to equivalent opportunities for developing those skills - and who actually have the motivation to try hard on the test." As the author of the book Measure of Failure argues in context of standardized assessments in schools, the socially significant work of these sorts of tests lies beyond their measure of any sort of ability and in the degree to which they measure how willing you are to take this sort of thing seriously. Are you the kind of person who takes SATs seriously and studies and takes prep tests? Are you the kind of person who takes IQ tests seriously? If you aren't, if you don't value the test, the society it reproduces, or the abilities it purports to measure, then of course you won't perform well by its metric.
The Atlantic continues, "To grasp how culturally contingent our current conception of intelligence is, just imagine how well you might do on an IQ test devised by Amazonian hunter-gatherers or medieval European peasants."
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I think that's pure fantasy. Nomiki's point is well taken. If the establishment wins, why would it make concessions or be "pressured?" And pressured to do what? Some half assed, white moderate, needlessly complex, bureaucratic plan that, like Obamacare, is better but still unsustainable.
If Biden wins in a landslide, he'll claim a mandate and use that as a shield to ignore progressive "pressure." If he only ekes out a win, he'll say the country is fractured, we need unity, and progressive ideas are too radical and divisive. Has no one payed attention to how these people operate?
You can also be sure that Biden will be pressured constantly by myriad special interests, with whom he already shares goals, assumptions, and even personal ties.
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@alexxa5584 I never said anything about pressuring Trump. You can keep banging at that straw man if you want, but it's irrelevant.
I think one sign of how broken people's brains are by Trump is that they can't have any political discussion without doing what you just did, resorting to a shoddy binary logic. If Biden isn't amenable to progressive pressure, that must mean I prefer Trump!
Uh, no. What it means is precisely what I said, that the notion of Biden being moved to the left is unrealistic and fantastical. It doesn't mean Trump is better. It means that the ability to pressure Biden is a misguided reason to support him, one that I think could backfire in a number of ways, perhaps most importantly the fact that that framing reorganizes organic, autonomous, grassroots movements away from direct action and protest and toward the sphere of traditional politics, which is what Biden's good at.
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Cornel West has one of the more succinct definitions: privatize, financialize, militarize. It doesn't capture everything, but that's the big picture. Like Sam and co. point out, there's a hardcore faction of neoliberals within the establishment and another faction that takes the premises and assumptions of neoliberalism at face value but wants to provide moderate protections. People like Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris etc. etc. are, for all intents and purposes, neoliberal. When Cory Booker pushes charter schools, he's doing the work of neoliberalism.
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@Iyas kelu Gaza—an open air prison choked off by Israel, regularly bombed and raided (the expression is "mowing the lawn"), with an average age of 18, 70% unemployment, no airstrip, only occasional power, where children are right now being killed.
The West Bank—a separate, dislocated territory under military occupation, with settlements being regularly built, dispossessing Palestinians of their homes, strategically cutting off areas of the West Bank from each other.
What fantasy land are you living in? Why do the Palestinians need the munificence of the Israeli government to grant them (tenuous, always liable to be revoked) access to their own land, land which in many cases is only a refuge for people who were dispossessed of their homes during the Nakba?
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@sandrad9695 Almost everything about what you said is untrue. Please see the above or read the HRW report. Colonizers always spuriously claim that the land they're seizing was "unoccupied" or "undeveloped." This isn't new.
Saying that Jews lived in the area thousands of years ago isn't a justification for present day occupation and apartheid. We don't erect states based on biblical accounts and ancient lineages; we base it, in the best cases, on the self-determination of people living there, something Palestinians cannot do while being systematically displaced.
If Palestine didn't exist as a nation-state before the modern period, neither did Israel. Neither did Poland, Ukraine, any number of other countries—all countries, in fact, because they're all social constructs, not objective, eternal entities, and it happens that Israel is, by all accounts, behaving as an apartheid state.
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Police etc. have weapons because they have authority, which grants them exceptional status from certain laws. Police can run red lights, but you can't. Police can confiscate property; you can't. Police can imprison people; you can't. Citing police as lawful owners of guns is a poor argument because police by their nature are excepted from many laws and behaviors that ordinary citizens are expected to follow.
The fact that owning a weapon is not a crime is a fact about the law, a fact that could be otherwise. If owning a gun was made to be a crime, then owning a gun would be a crime. You're confusing criminality with morality, only the latter of which is debatable.
The notion that focusing on guns will produce no results is objectively untrue, as demonstrated by all the countries that have significantly reduced mass shootings and killings following the enacting of strict gun control laws. The United States is far and away an outlier with respect to the rest of the developed world. Gun control will not solve the underlying causes of violence in America, but it will make it much harder for mass murderers to kill 10, 15, 20, 50 people in a matter of minutes. It will provide people with greater safety while we address those underlying causes, which are likely very complex and deeply ingrained in our culture.
It is obviously NOT a matter of individuals: this is a systemic problem that could take decades or generations to resolve; and in the meantime, how many more children, how many more people have to die so that you can enjoy the recreation of pulling a trigger? To me, the placement of my enjoyment over another person's life is the definition of immorality. As a gun owner you should be glad to forfeit your weapons if it means that society as a whole could be safer.
You're arguing against a straw man since very few people want a total ban on all firearms. Instead, what is being urged is a restriction on the types of firearms and paraphernalia that can be owned and who can own them. Moreover, a majority of Americans support gun control legislation, including universal background checks, closing gun show loopholes, banning high capacity magazines and AR-15 type weapons. This is not a controversial issue.
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Oh that's easy, disaster capitalism. The disaster comes and goes, and we don't really have any control over it. But capitalism isn't a force of nature; we have a choice whether or not to let it rule our lives, and once we accept it, once it takes over and digs its claws into the fabric of everyday life, it's very hard to get rid of. It lingers for years, decades; its residual effects haunt generations. It not only conditions how people live and the kinds of opportunities they have, but it limits what they think can be possible.
Take a look at what has happened to places like New Orleans after Katrina. New Orleans is an interesting case because its education system was already incredibly fraught, plagued with racial disparities. By the time Katrina had landed, it's been estimated that the infrastructure for black schools trailed spending for predominantly white, more affluent schools by $1 billion with a B. After Katrina, that problem could have been ameliorated by the influx of aid money. Instead, it got worse. The erasure of elected school boards, the replacement of the neighborhood school with charter schools, the attendant emphasis on high test scores, zero tolerance, and creaming—all so that charters can market themselves as "college prep" schools with high graduation rates—has led to low scores, more complicated work-life schedules, students who can't think critically, and a deficit of democracy. Katrina may have battered New Orleans, but disaster capitalism is eating it alive.
Obviously, I'm not equipped to solve the fossil fuel problem. If I were, I wouldn't be on the Internet talking to you. You know that. I would prefer that the solutions to fossil fuels empowered communities over capitalists whose interests (as the great communist, Adam Smith, observed) seldom align with them. Framing the discussion as a choice between a few profiteers and fossil fuel gluttony is disingenuous.
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Brexit Refugee It's always shocking to me how poor and/or dishonest people's reasoning becomes when they broach this topic.
Basically no one seriously argues that Russia had zero influence. That certainly wasn't the claim Sam made. If you stopped the Russiagate chatter in your head for two seconds and listened, you'd know that Sam said there is no evidence that Russian influence was decisive.
That's just a factual statement supported by data on how much the Russians spent, the timing of the ads, the quality and content of the ads, how people interacted with them, and the greater context. Whatever effect Russian ads played in the election, it's almost impossible to disaggregate it from the political context, and it's much more likely that corporate influence, Clinton's decades-long bad public image, feeble campaign strategy etcetera played decisive roles.
It's also objectively false that everything Trump has done benefited Russia over the US, from his placing tariffs on them, expelling diplomats, and launching strikes against its allies. Trump has shown a high degree of permissiveness toward Russia and other authoritarian countries, but the claim that he's only acted in Russia's interests is silly liberal nonsense that seeks to personalize politics rather than to understand it as a system, which exists with a certain degree of overdetermination.
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Brexit Refugee I don't care where you're from. If you're looking for the idiot in this conversation, find the nearest mirror.
I didn't mention any news sources; in fact, I didn't mention the media at all, so if anyone's got a wee little battle going on in their head, again, it's you buddy.
Interesting bringing up the French election though, because if Russia's Facebook memes were "decisive" in the US election, surely they'd've been in the French election...oh wait, no, they weren't, not even close. It's almost like their real effect is negligible and that we should be paying proportionately more attention to immediate, endemic, systemic problems. Huh...
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@TCt83067695 Now you're shifting the goalpost. Your objection to my examples is that they aren't "analogous" (whatever that means) to the vague statement about so-called cancel culture made in the letter, but your original request was for examples of when free speech can be rescinded, and that is what I replied to.
I gave examples of when free speech CAN be rescinded. That doesn't mean that in every case I agree that it OUGHT to be. In the first case, I generally don't think it is appropriate for a corporation to wield its power to muzzle its employees. That goes for minor issues like a trade secret or patent and for more serious issues like whistleblowing precisely because I do not think corporations, as hierarchical institutions, are legitimate. But we can still recognize situations even in a socialist context where employee secrecy may be necessary to compel, eg regarding the production of a potentially dangerous biological agent.
The other issue you have is that some of these cases are already covered by law, but that's begging the question. Yes, some kinds of speech, even non-violent speech, are not protected against government prohibition, which means that there are kinds of free speech that can be rescinded.
If we simply made it illegal to say that gays shouldn't marry or that trans folk aren't the gender they say they are, would we have put the debate to rest or would the very reactionaries who feel persecuted for their bigotry continue to decry the infringements made on their speech?
Remember that this whole debate really kicked off with Jordan Peterson claiming that Canada's Bill C16 made it punishable with incarceration if he misgendered people as he preferred to do. Of course, he lied sensationally and hysterically about the content, implications, and consequences of the rather symbolic law. But what that shows is that appealing to the illegality of a certain kind of speech can't be a rejoinder, as you thought it was, since that very legal status (or, less dramatically, social acceptability) is the crux of the question. That's what people are arguing over!
To give another example, many religious people would like for teachers to proselytize in schools. They regard that sanction on speech as illegitimate. Responding to their argument with the fact that that speech is illegal doesn't answer the argument of whether it should be and why (eg the establishment clause).
Finally, another confusion you and a lot of people make is in conflating free speech as a matter of protection against unjustifiable government censorship and as a matter of social mores and discourse. In just about every recent case I can think of, it's been the latter, reactionaries who're sore that they're finally being criticized for their views. That's not a violation of free speech. That's the left winning the argument.
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The truth is that there's hardly a legacy there. Name one piece of substantial legislation that JFK got passed.
There's none. Little things, sure, not totally meaningless, but nothing deserving of the term "legacy" or the absurd "Camelot" narrative. He has no abolition, no Social Security, no Civil Rights Act, no Medicare, not even an ACA. The best you could say is that he pushed for the Apollo program, although it had already been underway since the Eisenhower administration, so his role was contributory, not revolutionary.
Meanwhile, his foreign affairs record is a fucking disaster. From the Cuban Missile Crisis (during which we came within moments of all out nuclear war), to supporting a coup in Iraq (boy, that didn't have repercussions down the line), to the botched Bay of Pigs, and his role in creating turmoil in Vietnam, he showed himself to be the consummate blundering neoliberal war hawk.
Actually, maybe that's why they like him.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/11/22/americans-think-john-f-kennedy-was-one-of-our-greatest-presidents-he-wasnt/?utm_term=.c00314ba7500
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@sunshine6522 You're not understanding. That was a rhetorical statement, because I'm not wrong. You can't occupy land that isn't yours for decades, strip away basic rights and freedoms, treat people like cattle, and act like you're a democracy. You can't have politicians calling for genocide and a second nakba, kill tens of thousands of people, decimate the land they lived on, have riots in support of torturing and raping prisoners, and call yourself the most moral army in the world. On one hand you've got a battalion of propagandists and zionists saying Israel can do no wrong, and on the other are human rights organizations, lawyers, international bodies, victims of South African apartheid, and scholars (many of whom are Jewish and/or Israeli) pointing out clear examples of apartheid and genocide. Please join reality.
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As with the commons, so with the Internet.
"THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
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Just to prove Robert's point, in the most recent election, there was a Green candidate running for I can't remember what--a local position of some sort. The Republican and Democratic candidates had several paragraphs of information about them in the voter pamphlet, but the Green candidate had only her facebook profile listed. Not only does that look unprofessional, but it shows a lack of interest in informing the voters.
Jimmy was also distorting the argument when he kept emphasizing the Iraq vote, because there are a lot of crazy things Trump would do beyond starting wars that would hurt the US domestically. As bad as Clinton is, she wouldn't condone policies that overtly target racial minorities, like stop and frisk, and she would at least be somewhat amenable to public influence. I'm not sure the same could be said of Trump.
The other aspect is that Clinton would block at least the most egregious of Republican legislation, which is important because as Robert tried to point out, Republicans have successfully taken over the majority of local and state government, partly because of unpopular democratic policies, yes, but also because they ran winning local campaigns. Trump, however, would let those bills through.
If we'd had a serious, sustained discussion and push to elect a third party a few years ago, we might have had a shot. But Stein is polling at 2-4% 6 weeks from the election. There's no way she's going to have any influence this time around. It's a case of too little too late.
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+Jeff W Zizek is sputtering buffoon and his objections in that video amount to little more than gross misreadings of the kind one is used to hearing from the right. He likes to say things that sound radical and iconoclastic, but if you break them down, there's not much there.
As for Chomsky's linguistic theories, the language acquisition device is not really a theory; Chomsky himself actually hasn't written about or researched it in detail but relies on the work of others, particularly researchers studying child acquisition; it's merely an assumption—what he regards as a truism—that undergirds his rationalist approach to linguistic theory.
Linguistics is such a young science, it's to be expected that its founder would be wrong about many, if not most, things. At the very least Chomsky set the field in a more scientific direction. I'm not a linguist, but the newer theories, like usage-based, don't strike me as being much better.
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Villain Voice Their version of minimum wage is "the lowest price the market will allow," which, as we learned in the video, is basically tips. It's internships, it's the contractor, "gig" economy mindset that trumpets freedom and opportunity while passing costs on to the employee. They'd love to pay their workers nothing and rely on the charity of consumers.
RE: unapologetic dog, they are earning; they're working full time; they deserve to not live a shitty life. Large corporations and lobbyists bemoan what will happen to mom-and-pop stores if we raise the wage--and maybe that is something to consider. But is that really what they're concerned about?
The capitalist class has managed to label itself as the "producers," the "makers," the "job creators," but any book on economics I've read is pretty clear on the fact that it is the workers who make things from the capital of the owners. That is the fundamental arrangement. It's only in our financialized environment that money produces money without a material intermediate.
Without the workers, the capitalists don't produce anything. These large corporations are able to pay their CEOs 400x what the lowest paid worker makes and pass on huge profits to shareholders because the worker produced for them. Those workers are responsible in part for the success of the company and they should share in that success, economically. Instead, they're treated like disposable chattel. They are treated as a means rather than an end.
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Electrons Dimension old Okay, but if Mcdonald's (and it's not only fast food chains that pay minimum wage) is making a profit, the worker should have a fair share in that profit.
Do you actually think that we pay people according to the value, prestige, or social benefit of work?
That's not what the "laws" of demand say, and it's not what the advertising industry has built itself on.
Does the CEO of a tobacco company make a pittance? Is Mark Zuckerberg in the poor house? What is the highest paid public employee in the country? In all but I think one case, it's a college sports coach. Do any of these contributing something vital to society?
Rich people are thought to be industrious because they have money and they can invest. Poor people don't have money, so they need work to rescue them from the scourge of idleness. But what if you just paid the poor a decent wage, and then they could invest in their education, their families, their communities...?
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First, take your hand off Shift+1. Global warming is a part of climate change. They are different. What you're doing is like calling a staircase a building. One is only a part of the whole.
Climate change is a broader term that encompasses not just global warming, but also the side effects, like increased rains, hurricanes, etc., things we don't normally think of as "warm."
You shouldn't ask a geologist about "global warming," you should ask a climatologist. Would you ask a particle physicist his opinion on bee populations?
There are two polar ice caps, the Arctic and Antarctic. The latter has increased substantially—however, not enough to offset the loss of ice in the Arctic. According to satellite imagery, the Arctic has lost much of its old ice, that is, the ice that does not need to be replenished every winter. The less old ice there is, the less new ice can be formed to make up for it, which leads to an overall loss of ice in the Arctic. The flow of frigid water not only raises global sea levels, but also disrupts the Gulf Stream.
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Let's see what NASA has to say:
Headline: Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record Maximum
Editor’s note: Antarctica and the Arctic are two very different environments: the former is a continent surrounded by ocean, the latter is ocean enclosed by land. As a result, sea ice behaves very differently in the two regions. While the Antarctic sea ice yearly wintertime maximum extent hit record highs from 2012 to 2014 before returning to average levels in 2015, both the Arctic wintertime maximum and its summer minimum extent have been in a sharp decline for the past decades. Studies show that globally, the decreases in Arctic sea ice far exceed the increases in Antarctic sea ice.
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum
As for "global cooling," you can read about how that term came to be in this Scientific American article:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be/
In that article, Mark McCaffrey draws a distinction between what scientists think would happen in a natural world absent human industrial intervention and the world as it is, in which humans are a "force of nature":
"Even today, "there is some degree of uncertainty about natural variability," acknowledged Mark McCaffrey, programs and policy director of the National Center for Science Education based in Oakland, Calif. "If it weren't for the fact that humans had become a force of nature, we would be slipping back into an ice age, according to orbital cycles."
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Moh Moony It's amazing and frustrating that we can't spend more on programs that would actually cure the world of violence, namely, anti-poverty, healthcare, education, basic research, and real foreign aid (not arms deals).
Perhaps you know that pre-WWII, the DoD was called the War Department. Straightforward, unequivocal. Of course, you couldn't have something like that in a post-nuclear, post-Geneva, post-propaganda world. It's like a mobster claiming "protection" money instead of an outright extortion tax.
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"How about giving people the freedom to choose which drugs they want to take?"
Already happens. Well, to an extent. Markets are actually pretty inefficient when it comes to providing choices for commodities. In the case of the drug industry, it's well known that certain drugs--low or one time dose drugs, or drugs for serious but rare conditions--just don't get researched. It should also be obvious that capitalism encourages investment in the least risky endeavors (least risk for most reward), which some researchers have claimed is an impediment to curing cancer: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/health/research/28cancer.html
Also, how will patients know which drugs they want to take? Most people don't have sufficient medical knowledge to make that kind of judgement. Instead, patients take the medicine that their doctor prescribes. One problem in medicine is that the drug companies lobby doctors to prescribe their drugs, which, while it may be good for the companies' profits, is not always so great for the patient.
"Considering that government costs more,"
False. And misleading. Private enterprise often piggy-backs on the risks taken by the public sector, thus avoiding a huge portion of the cost of R&D. The private sector also doesn't have to provide the land (by conquest), the roads, the municipal infrastructure, and so on.
There are also currently unavoidable reasons why government costs are rising, like the Baumol cost disease, but privatization won't fix that: it's got it too.
"is inefficient"
False. In fact, efficiency, ruthless efficiency is why we don't want the drug companies regulating themselves. As the video points out, capitalist businesses will try to pinch every penny and maximize short-term profit, even if that means sacrificing some of their consumers. Inefficiency can be a product of bureaucracy, and corporations are bureaucracies. Take the private insurance industry, from a medical or healthcare perspective it's wildly inefficient and a drain on hospital resources. A single payer, i.e. government system, would be much more streamlined.
"and takes more time to do stuff,"
Probably true in some instances but demonstrably untrue in others. I've already pointed to basic research.
"it's better to not have them in charge of testing drugs."
As Harrison Henry pointed out, we know what happens when the pharmaceutical industry self-regulates.
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I assume that the drug you're talking about is oxycodone, correct me if I'm wrong. It went from being legal in the 40s, to a Schedule II in the 60s, and now doctors and researchers are rethinking how we treat chronic and acute pain in the wake of the opioid epidemic.
Regulation doesn't provide absolute certainty of safety; it provides a form of (in the best cases) publicly accountable protection against the unaccountable profit-seeking of concentrated private power.
One area that clearly highlights the stakes of abolishing regulation is alternative medicine. Take something like homeopathic remedies. It must be a multi-million, perhaps even billion dollar industry, and its product is nothing more than ordinary tap water, snake oil. If markets were based on rational choice, there's a chance that some sort of deregulation would be okay. But markets are not rational. For one, companies are not compelled to be transparent. But it goes further than that. They purposefully go out of their way to deceive, concoct desire, manufacture need, and create habits of irrational consumption.
I think your last paragraph is well-intentioned, and there are aspects of it that I agree with. What makes it hard to agree with fully is that you seem to propose a kind of liberty/choice (somehow, somewhen, those words became synonymous) that atomizes and individualizes the average person's power while leaving intact the immense power of the drug industry, or car industry or whatever it is. If you want to do away with agencies like the FDA, you need to replace them with some other form of accountability. Markets are not sufficient, not even close to sufficient.
One last thing, since you limited your discussion to adults, what should be done regarding medication for children? Should it be up to the parent to decide what drugs their children do and do not get? What do you make of cases like Christian Scientists who refuse treatment for their children, who ultimately die?
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You kind of are saying fuck people. In the first case, fuck Americans because that factory job no longer exists, and in the second, fuck the foreigner because making a few dollars a day, living in appalling circumstances, having to make their children forego an education to work to help sustain the family is better than nothing (and why is nothing the only other option?)—it's certainly better than not having $7 shirts and CEOs who make hundreds of times what their workers make. Right?
To borrow an analogy, do you excuse a child abuser who takes in a kid living on the street because without him they'd've had no shelter, no food, and no clothes? I hope not. Just because one situation is in some respects better than a hypothetically worse situation does not mean that we excuse all the bad aspects of the former, or call the whole thing a wash. Your outlook strikes me as very elitist, very "have their cake and eat it." The peasants have bread: what are they complaining about? I think you know what eventually happens.
Those Bangladeshis in shirt factories generate a lot of wealth for their companies but earn a vanishingly small amount of those profits. If the situation really were equal, if we had, for instance, international wage standards and workers' rights, then we would have little reason, in general, to prefer that jobs go to people of one nation or another; but things are not equal, and people of the first and third world are being exploited in different ways by large, multi-national corporations for their own profit.
I think we should also question whether their lives are better than when they weren't working 14 hour days in abysmal conditions. Before, many were likely living subsistence lifestyles that are below our standards but at least afford an element of freedom and dignity.
Nor can we justify these conditions as a mere stepping stone to higher standards. For that to happen, we'd have to rewrite our trade laws in such a way that allowed the third world a measure of protection for their infant industries, among other things, none of which the political and business elite are likely to want, mainly because that would lead to more competition and smaller bonuses.
Edit: I just read your last comment, and I think you're making an error in not distinguishing what one does because they want to and what one does because they have to. If you want to read what workers in Bangladesh think of their jobs, it's easy to google and find things like this
"Our working conditions are horrible. We basically never get a day off. If there's a death in the family, the bosses say, "Well, there's nothing anyone can do about that. If someone's dead, he's dead. Why do you want to go there? You can't do anything anyway. If you absolutely want to take the day off, then take it. But you won't earn anything that day."
We only get money if we're at the factory. There's no paid vacation. We sometimes work until 11 p.m., always under pressure, always being told we should work faster so the orders are finished on time. We worked late into the night right before the building collapsed, too -- even though many of us have children. When we tell our superiors we want to go home because our children are waiting for us, they say, "Why are you even coming to work if you have children? Stay at home and take care of them! But if you want children, you can't work for us!" We hear comments like that all the time." http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/bangladesh-factory-worker-discusses-horrible-working-conditions-a-899976.html
Or this:
"Researchers interviewed more than 160 workers from 44 factories in and around Dhaka, including many that supply garments to high streets in North America, Europe and Australia. They heard complaints of physical assault, verbal abuse, forced overtime, unsanitary conditions, denial of paid maternity leave, and failure to pay wages and bonuses on time or in full." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/22/garment-workers-in-bangladesh-still-suffering-two-years-after-factory-collapse
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Here's a very simple thing you can do when someone says that Russia hacked the election. Ask how Russia's alleged hack (because we still haven't been presented with evidence, let alone proof) of the DNC and Podesta tipped the election in Trump's favor.
The hack alone wouldn't have done it, so it must have been the contents of the hack, which I won't rehearse here. If it's the contents of the hack, and Russia is responsible, then Russia still deserves censure for meddling in our electoral process, but the ultimate responsibility lies with Clinton, whose "private" actions, practices, and views, detailed in the emails, voters found disenchanting.
But there's another problem to the MM's Russia-hack argument. The problem is that they hardly covered it. How many outlets ran stories about the Clinton camp's (illegal) coordination with Super PACs? How many ran stories about her comments in paid speeches to Wall Street and other interests? Not many and not often. The MM's coverage was superficial and sympathetic to Clinton. The argument I kept hearing against covering the content of the hacked emails was that we already knew everything in them. They were bland, just the same old HRC. The one exception I can think of is Fox News, sadly. But that probably did little to sway the results of the election since most of the people who watch Fox weren't going to vote for Clinton anyway.
So we're left with a situation where the hack caused Clinton to lose even though the contents of the hack weren't widely publicized (I would even go so far as to say that they were suppressed) and even if they were, Clinton supporters argue, the contents weren't scandalous, which means that Americans voted for Trump over Clinton merely because a foreign entity hacked the Democrats, which, do I even have to say it? is absurd.
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I'm not talking about self-defense. I don't think that's a controversial use of violence. I'm talking about aggressive violence. When the police officer can't get someone to comply, so he beats him into submission or kills him, that's an instance of someone resorting to violence because they couldn't use their intellect to arrive at a better conclusion. When the parent beats the child who won't do chores, not only does the child learn that violence solves problems (if only by perpetuating the need for violence) but the parent never learns how to parent without violence.
But I also believe in prefigurative politics. I think that if you have a violent revolt against violence—corporate, state, whatever—you're almost guaranteed to incarnate another apparatus of violence and inequality, this time beholden to a different class. We saw it happen in Russia, China, Cuba, France, the USA, essentially no country on Earth is untouched by this transformation of the dominant (aggressive) violence of one class into the dominant violence of another.
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You could say the same about feudalism or slavery. As Kropotkin said, if men were perfect, capitalism would be a fine system. No one would exploit one another, though they possessed the means to do so. No one would erect mansions while others lived in slums and on streets. No one would make wars while others starved.
I'm not really sure what to make of your penultimate sentence, but as I see it, capitalism won't accrue money and benefits to society (whose society?) but to individuals who get ever wealthier and more powerful and are needful of more and more violence to protect their wealth and power and to get more of it. War opens access to natural resources, labor, markets, and control of markets, all of which a system based on irrational, infinite growth requires.
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HRC My biggest mistake was...
[oligarchic policies,
accepting wall street money,
laundering money through the DNC via shady loopholes,
smearing progressives on single payer and free college,
not taking a firm stand against fracking,
accepting money from the Saudis,
using the Clinton Foundation as a collection tin,
appointing a CF donor, Rajiv Fernando, to the ISAB,
belittling black activists,
supporting the prison industrial complex,
accepting super PAC money,
choosing a DINO for VP,
not paying attention to working class politics,
ignoring the rust belt,
broadcasting TV ads bereft of policy,
having no central message,
being a warhawk,
promising 4 more years of the same establishment, neo-liberal agenda,
getting previews of debate questions from Donna Brazille,
touting feminist credentials while supporting a right wing, military, corporatist coup in Honduras that lead to waves of repression and gang violence that caused children to flee to America and then telling those children to get lost,
selling weapons to a country that uses child soldiers...]
...the media talking about my emails.
Oh. Okay then.
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BrownBear 59 I hear what you're saying, but it's a stretch.
Take the remark by Creamer, about the chain of command.
PVA: "Hillary is like aware of all the work you guys do I hope.
CUT (no time stamp)
Creamer: The campaign is fully in it.
CUT (no time stamp)
PVA: And then they like tell Hillary what's going on?
Creamer: Well I mean Hillary knows through the chain of command what's going on.
So there are three parts of a conversation. We don't know how they actually fit together or whether the pieces even refer to each other.
When Creamer says, "The campaign is fully in it," does "it" refer to "all the work you guys do," or to something else? Does "all the work" refer to voter fraud (b/c that was established earlier in the conversation) or to a less nefarious interpretation (ads, oppo, etc).
Likewise, we have no idea what "what's going on" refers to. The video leads us to believe that it's voter fraud, but nothing in that conversation, as it's presented, points to that conclusion. If you had only seen that footage of Creamer, without the ominous music, would you have assumed that he was talking about voter fraud?
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+Ti esrever dn ah fuck it. There are plenty of instances of communism throughout history, whether peasant communes, the communes of the early Christian church, or the many instances of people pulling together in periods of chaos. Why do you think that human nature leads to authoritarianism? How is authority more responsive to human nature than communal life? How is wage labor and property relations more natural than democratic workplaces and cooperative ownership?
I think you're misreading the history of the big "communist" regimes. Socialists saw two paths toward achieving a communist society: the first was to slowly build a kind of shadow government of worker councils and other bottom-up organizations, federations, syndicates, etc., which would then naturally replace the state and private ownership; the second was to seize power via revolution and create a transitional, state capitalist phase that would create the conditions necessary for communism. The latter is what we saw in Russia, China, Cuba—the authoritarian communist countries. They didn't start off communistic and then devolved into authoritarianism; they started off authoritarian, and even actively opposed authentic (anarcho-)communist rebellions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_uprisings_against_the_Bolsheviks#Revolutionary_Insurrectionary_.28Anarchist.29_Army)
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+Ti esrever I disagree. First, because I can name at least a few examples. Second, because the suffering that did exist in those examples was very much a product of revolutionary excess and reaction both endogenous and international—which makes it no different than the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century upon which capitalism was founded. And third, the assumption that accompanies this accusation is that little (or at least much less) suffering accompanies the implementation of capitalism; the excesses of the one are exaggerated while the excesses of the other are diminished.
1) The two best examples of communism are the Paris Commune and the unions, syndicates, and collectives that made up the anarchist resistance to Franco in the Spanish Civil War. I know more about the latter, so that's the one I'll provide quotes for.
Orwell describes the general feeling in Catalonia: "It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists...There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being."
Despite the toll of war, "[S]o far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low....Above all there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine."
In Frank Mintz's very good study Anarchism and Workers' Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain, there's an account of Jose Llop, a soldier and member of the Barcelona barbers' collective. He says: "When the whole city was collectivized, not only did the workers belonging to the collective see their wages grow, but the employers did as well. [...] Come collectivization, all of the employers also decided to join the collective—they became just another comrade member of the collective. The collective pulled this off and placed themselves on equal footing with the [other] workers of Barcelona [regarding income], and reduced the working day from eight to six hours. And more work came to the collective because of good organization. The bosses had not been able to do this because of their own interests, troubles, and personal interests, but that the collective managed." In other words, instead of creating or perpetuating misery and inefficiency, collectivization improved conditions. I can't quote the rest of his account but it's worth reading. He goes into problems that he saw with arrangements in other collectives, namely that their "to each according to his need" basis of distribution couldn't have lasted; but this was not the only way workers organized distribution, and a single failing experiment can't discredit the whole project.
2) In the case of the Paris Commune, the workers rejected the authority of the Third Republic over them and they were violently expunged by the National Guard. One of Marx's criticisms of the Commune was that it did not deal swiftly enough with its bourgeois enemies.
In the case of the Spanish Civil War, there were excesses—killings of owners and priests, for example. Modern research has shown that the early reports of deaths of this kind were overstated. Even Orwell points out that, "appalling lies about atrocities were being circulated by the pro-Fascist press" and because both the Bolsheviks and the West were determined to stifle revolution. It should also be kept in mind that in many cases the factory bosses would hire "pistoleros" or armed thugs to coerce the workers, and the Catholic church supported Franco's repression, which resulted in sweeping political retribution for dissidents. Revolutionaries were not engaged in mindless slaughter but were often reacting violently to violent circumstances.
Orwell summarizes the P.O.U.M. position: "It is nonsense to talk of opposing Fascism by bourgeois 'democracy.' Bourgeois 'democracy' is only another name of capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on the behalf of 'democracy' is to fight against one form of capitalism on the behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment." This seems all the more true when we consider how pro-fascist Western businesses from Ford to IBM have been.
Upwards of 50,000 people are thought to have perished in the so-called Red Terror. Many of these executions were emotionally charged reprisals for decades of dehumanization and abuse.
On the other hand, Franco's methodical repression resulted in hundreds of thousands dead, anarchists, communists, republicans, unionists. In a revolution for freedom against such a violent enemy, there is going to be excess and reciprocal violence. There is going to be suffering. Somehow we understand that with regard to our own Revolution, but not in regard to others'.
To give a further comparison, William Doyle estimates that around 30,000 people perished during France's one year Reign of Terror, which, he points out, wasn't even the bloodiest episode in the world at that time.
3) Capitalism—in all its varieties—has been midwifed by incredible savagery. The enclosure of the commons, the coercion of people from their land to work for wages in cities; primitive accumulation; the genocide of the Native Americans and Australian aboriginals; colonialism and imperialism in Africa, China, India, and South America; the slave trade; wars of aggression and expansion; grueling hours in unsafe factory conditions; the rise of the police state; and our own era of regime change, with a roster of pro-Western, anti-democratic dictators.
Capitalism continues to rely on the extraction of wealth from the Third World, the suffering and exploitation of workers, endless war, and the runaway consumption of resources that is leading us to global cataclysm. Capitalism serves the interests of a small minority, a group in whose interest it is, as Adam Smith described, "to deceive and oppress the public." If suffering is the criteria by which we judge a system, then capitalism has a miserable track record. It is a suffering and savagery neatly packaged as all commodities of capitalism are, but that wrap and bit of tinsel shouldn't distract us from the real contents.
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Our fine system--in all its permutations--is broken. I read something a few years ago on, I think Finland, where fines are based not on flat rates, which disproportionately penalize the poor and lower middle class (what's $50 to $400 to a wealthy person?), but on a percentage of monthly income, which makes penalties more proportional. There is still a disparity--someone who makes $200,000+ a year has wealth, not just income, while the poor rely more on income--but it's much better.
I'm not crazy about fining people anyway. I'll admit that for some things I think it's appropriate and retributive, but the logic doesn't make sense. Why do fines exist, just on a city- or statewide level? It seems pretty obvious that the reason is not to discourage or reform behavior but to generate revenue. In essence, most fines are hidden taxes that affect the less wealthy.
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@djfringe1 In "The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler," Robert Payne mentions Hitler's fondness for Bavarian sausages. Other biographers, including Albert Speer, point out that he also ate ham, liver and game.
Hitler banned vegetarian organizations in Germany and the occupied countries, though vegetarian diets would have helped solve Germany's World War II food shortage.
Don't Put Hitler Among the Vegetarians https://nyti.ms/29ugIpt
A 1937 New York Times profile called “At Home with the Furher,” for example, describes Hitler as a vegetarian, though notes that he “occasionally relishes a slice of ham.” (Hitler apparently celebrated Germany’s 1938 annexation of Czechoslovakia with a slice of ham, a Prague specialty.) And in her 1964 book, The Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook, Dione Lucas, who worked at a Hamburg hotel that Hitler frequented, writes, “I do not mean to spoil your appetite for stuffed squab, but you might be interested to know that it was a great favorite with Hitler. … Let us not hold that against a fine recipe though.”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2004/02/was-hitler-a-vegetarian.html
However, one of his food tasters, Margot Wölk later asserted he only ever ate vegetarian. She claimed this 70 years after her tenure, which was only 2 years, so some fallibility of memory is to be expected. For instance, she couldn't even remember whether the food was good or bad:
"And when she had finished eating the bland vegetarian dishes put before her,"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hitler-s-food-taster-reveals-horrors-wolf-s-lair-9738880.html
But in another interview this bland banquet was transformed into "the most delicious fresh things, from asparagus to peppers and peas, served with rice and salads."
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_2680264
There's also sources alleging his cook and physician would slip animal broth in his soup, and upon learning of the treachery, Hitler would would get annoyed and develop a spontaneous stomach ache, indicating his objection was at least as much gastrointestinal, if not hypocondriacal, as ethical.
In Adolf Hitler, John Tolland writes that Ilse Hess claimed Hitler was a vegetarian sometime after 1937, but would still indulge in Leberknödl, a Bavarian dish of liver dumplings.
You'll notice that I never said - as you claimed - that Hitler was not vegetarian at all. I said he was occassionally vegetarian, which is admittedly an understatement for the last 7-8 years of his life, when he was primarily vegetarian, but conflicting sources allege at least occassional carnivorous indulgence.
I've been trying to parse your other remark about "right," and I can't figure what you mean in any way that makes sense. The only time I use that word, as "rights," is when discussing Nazi reforms to animal rights, such as the prohibition on sport hunting. Your other remark, about "history knowing no sides" is a remarkably shallow and asinine deepity, and not worth exploring further.
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It's really not.
Over time the first amendment has been greatly expanded beyond its original scope. The law doesn't inherently reflect what is right, and as people become more aware of how their freedoms are being infringed upon, they push back against unjust or incomplete laws.
While I don't think the Kaepernick situation would even be entertained by a court as a breach of the 1st amendment, the broader discussion is about the right to protest against injustice and the relationship between workers and bosses. "The 1st amendment" gets used as a casual shorthand. It's being used to reflect certain values rather than to invoke jurisprudence.
The fact that the discussion about free speech and protest is being expanded beyond the purview of government censorship and into the censorship of capital is heartening, especially in an age of legalized corruption and bribery, shady campaign finance, abysmal union membership, and as neoliberalism slouches into fascism—and even more so because it's over an outdated, cultish, bizarre, jingoistic and imperialistic ritual like honoring the flag.
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@tuberroot1112 AP reports, "The paper does not conclude that fully vaccinated healthcare workers carry 251 times the viral load of the virus compared to unvaccinated healthcare workers. Rather, it concludes that “viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020.”
"It adds that it found no correlation between vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels, and viral loads or developing symptoms.
"The viral load does decrease faster in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individual, meaning that the vaccinated are thought to be contagious for a shorter period of time, according to the CDC.
"“This study is about the Delta variant and explaining ‘breakthrough cases’ among vaccinated healthcare workers because of the Delta variant,” Ngo said. “There is no focus on unvaccinated versus the vaccinated cases.”"
In other words the study you mention, which of course you didn't bother reading, is about the greater infectivity of Delta in breakthrough cases.
I wish people would apply the same level of skepticism toward memes, tweets, and facebook posts that they have for MSM.
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@RobertHDaGod I'm sorry you got triggered by the phrase "fact check." If you can't look at the evidence the article provides, which shows that the claims in the video you mentioned aren't remotely true, I can understand it might be too painful for you. How you weirdos become hyper skeptical of everything but accept with total incredulity things like random, unsubstantiated, obviously erroneous videos on sites like bitchute is just astounding.
You can even look up the court documents and see that what the video claims is obviously false. The CMOH is responding to its lack of evidence relating to the statute King was later found guilty of violating and compelled to pay a citation for. Court documents state, "The Provincial Court proceeding is about the December 5, 2020 enforcement of the law..., not the rationale for the law." In other words, the CMOH successfully argued that it couldn't be compelled to provide evidence that was legally relevant to the case; the evidence King subpoenaed was irrelevant, the court found.
I already cited several examples of scientists isolating the virus and publishing their findings. I can cite more. Are you really going to believe a sketchy, hysterical bitchute video over an abundance of scientific material? Come on dude, this is sad.
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Yeah, David might. He's in the same sphere as Dore. He has a better grasp of how Dore fits into this media ecosystem, what a daily show like that requires, how particular stories are covered, and what Dore is likely to cover on a given day.
And frankly, Dore is an incendiary, egotistical idiot. He can't inform his audience because he doesn't know anything himself and routinely makes false or misleading statements. He serves as a way for his audience to vicariously vent aimless frustration—but that's it, and a political identity built on that is toxic.
It's nice that he's able to get people like Wolff on—people who actually know what they're talking about. But the problem with Jimmy is that because he lacks both a rigorous way of analyzing the world and many of the basic facts one would need to begin to make such an analysis—in other words, because he really is a populist who sees things narrowly in terms of bad guy elites v. the masses instead of in terms of systems like capitalism, institutional racism, nationalism, imperialism, etc. with their own forces and dynamics, he blunders into these situations where he is more than happy (perhaps unwittingly) to celebrate and encourage right wing coups, revanchism, and movements.
To give just a few examples, consider the absurdity of day after day screaming Fuck You to a progressive representative like AOC* while spending years holding up Tulsi Gabbard as some progressive icon, or blathering about how the left needs to partner with grifters like Mike Cernovich. Or recall that Jimmy greeted the right wing, corporatist Lava Jato operation in Brazil with enthusiasm, wondering aloud if he could get a commemorative t-shirt, all because they claimed to be fighting "corruption," and of course Jimmy is very "anti-corruption," whatever that means when you don't understand the context of the situation. And recently Jimmy wondered wistfully about the good the self-proclaimed white nationalist putscher in Pelosi's chair would do if he were Speaker.
He's a gullible moron.
*I'm convinced a major factor in his political opinions—ie, who gets yelled at and called fuckin sellout vs who gets praise—reduces to whether they'll come on his show. Tulsi goes on his show: she's great, a real champion. AOC won't go on: she's persona non grata.
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@Charles-ij1ow Stop being weaselly by trying to change the subject. Why can't you admit that Peterson routinely exaggerates his accomplishments and qualifications and that his status as a climate expert is at least suspect given that he exaggerated his minor role on a UN subcommittee (which contra JP proposed a slew of strategies to combat climate change) and has, in the past, claimed knowledge of literature, none of which he'd actually read?
For very obvious reasons I'm not going down the rabbit hole of quoting JP's positions. For one, as I said, it's irrelevant. Either he lies about his accomplishments, experiences, and credentials, or he doesn't, regardless of his other opinions. Ive seen and read enough JP to know he's not saying anything that profound, and often the simple truths he recites are contorted to fit his bizarre political and religious beliefs. One reason his fans like him, I suspect, is that he's so vague and general that they can make him mean whatever they like. It also means that anytime someone criticizes him—for his anti-trans views, his views on hierarchy (flatly contradicted by anthropological, archaeological, and biological evidence), his anti-climate change views, his views on gender and women—JP's words can be reinterpreted any way. Like for Sam Harris fans, one can never have read enough, listened enough, or seen enough of JP. He's always being "taken out of context."
What we have here is about 30 minutes of JP flapping about a topic he clearly clearly knows nothing about, which is why scientists have been deriding him for not understanding the basics of how scientific models work, or the difference between weather and climate. You've already got an example of JP's views right here—plus a very probably lie that he read 200 books on ecology (are there even that many worth reading over two years?). Deal with that.
It seems like I'm talking to a brainwashed acolyte.
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That is part of it. There's still debate on why the "crime" wave happened. Lead poisoning is one culprit, and the reality is it was probably a confluence of factors which we'll never fully understand, and I think the neoliberal policies of the 70s and 80s, of which discriminatory housing practices driving lead poisoning were compatible, must be a factor.
But one thing your contextualization takes for granted is the conservative view that crime existed as some entity independent of policy that had to be dealt with.
It misses that the crime wave and the reactions it spawned were related to the decades-long war on drugs and neo-imperialism in South America which drove massive quantities of cocaine into urban areas. Cocaine use was then bisected along racial lines, with blacks getting the punitive treatment.
To make matters worse, the crack epidemic (which was heavily criminalized, unlike powder cocaine or our present day opioid epidemic) generated the myth of the super predator, which became one of the basal arguments for the crime bill, cited by Biden himself on the floor of the Senate
"Super predators" was a concept conceived by conservative criminologist John Dilulio. According to Dilulio, as a result of their parents' crack addiction, so-called "crack babies" wouldn't properly develop intellectually, emotionally, and socially , becoming violent, crazed criminals without empathy. He predicted a fourfold increase in crime over the next decade or so.
But this wasn't a case of sound science getting it wrong. His findings were extreme outliers. That didn't stop them from getting picked up by a press eager for sensational and scary stories and then by politicians, like Biden, who used them as a justification for expanding mass incarceration. At the time, other researchers knew his findings were flawed; unfortunately, it was too late. His theory had already become common sense. In reality, crack babies weren't monsters. Some had productive, noncriminal lives. Rather than a fourfold increase in crime, we saw crime cut in half. The very thing the crime bill was meant to prevent never would have happened anyway.
I add this bit of context because I think it's important to remember that these politicians weren't forced to accept draconian prison reform as a necessary evil. They had other options which better reflected reality, but their actual choices reflected pre-existing class and racial biases.
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+sinistar99 What false stories? The emails that emerged from the alleged hack have never been falsified, and the few attempts by Democratic leadership to discredit the authenticity of the emails have been refuted, as in the case of Dona Brazille first denying then apologizing for leaking questions to Clinton during the primary debates.
One could argue that it is wrong for those emails to've become public, but that doesn't change the fact that the content of the emails, as far as anyone can tell, is authentic and damaging, which is tantamount to saying that the conduct, beliefs, and attitudes of the Clinton campaign were damaging: they just didn't expect anyone to know about that stuff.
For instance, if I recall, several people close to Clinton or the Democratic leadership questioned her decision to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street firms in light of her plans to run for president. She didn't heed those admonitions, and, predictably, people recoiled at her coziness to the financial elite who nearly destroyed the world economy with impunity.
There's also the anti-Sanders comments of several DNC staff that lead to their firing and a public apology. That was real; that happened; it wasn't "fake news."
There's also suggestions in the email that the Clinton camp coordinated with Super PACs, something that I wish journalists would follow up on.
This list could keep going, but one final thing that emerged in part from the emails is the dubious structure of Clinton's fundraising apparatus, a nationwide scheme to funnel money ostensibly for down-ballot races into the Clinton coffers, which to experts resembled a troubling if legal system of money laundering that could be exploited by future campaigns, Democratic and Republican, thereby undermining the democratic process.
So I ask again, what false stories based on the hacks? One can be concerned about possible foreign intrusion into our election process (though that's nothing new from the US's end) while still welcoming the emergence of important information on a candidate. You don't have to pick one or the other.
The KGB hasn't existed since 1991 fyi.
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America didn't pick her. That's why Trump is president. The Democrats could have pushed to amend election procedures while they had power (supermajority), but they didn't. Instead, they chose to retain not only the antiquated electoral college but also their own superdelegates and undemocratic primary procedures (closed primaries, caucuses, etc.). No sympathy. The DNC and Clinton knew what game they were playing and they still lost, in part by their own machinations, to the least favored candidate in the post-war era of polling.
Also, yes, Obama in '12 did get about 60 thousand more votes than Clinton in '16. The numbers I cited were accurate, from the Federal Election Commission, linked below. The fact that you can't be bothered to look up information that is a google search away speaks volumes about how blinkered you are. Ironic that someone caviling about "fake stories" is out here spreading fake information.
Raw numbers are one way to gauge election success, but if you're trying to make a historical comparison, even to races on 4 or 8 years ago, it's much better to compare vote share. Populations can change a lot in that window. In that regard, in Obama's worst election (2012) he got 51% of the vote compared to Clinton's (2016) 48%. All of this has to also be placed in the miserable light of American electoral politics in general, since a president—even saying Clinton did win—is often elected by a minority of the country. If Clinton had won with 48% of the vote and only 54% of voters turned out, she would have won with only about a quarter of the country's support. More Americans did vote for her over Trump (one can only wonder what would have happened had the Republicans had a less polarizing candidate), but many more voted for no one at all, which speaks to the disillusionment of the population with the political system, which is unable or unwilling to cajole them into civil obedience. That is nothing to gloat over. And guess what, in 2020 it's possible that the winning candidate will receive the most votes ever just by sheer dint of there being more people to vote.
Moreover, all of this is just nitpicking. The bigger issue, which you have failed to address, is what you meant by "fake stories" given that by all accounts, the content of the emails is accurate. No specific claims have been made and stood up to scrutiny.
https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2012/federalelections2012.pdf
https://transition.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2016/2016presgeresults.pdf
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I've read the PSC decision and it seems, to me anyway, that you and many others aren't quite representing this accurately.
You're saying that D.A. Castor gave Cosby a deal of immunity so that he could get information for a different case. This is not quite right, according to Castor's testimony and the PSC decision.
In the decision, the Court states that Castor determined that there was insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute Cosby on behalf of Andrea Constand, and he communicated to Cosby's lawyer, Phillips, as much, stating his opinion that because he had no plans to prosecute, Cosby could not take the Fifth in civil court, with which opinion Cosby's lawyer agreed. Castor would have had no role in a civil trial.
In the US, a person cannot be compelled (eg by subpoena) to incriminate themselves under threat of sanction (eg prosecution). Because Cosby did not face prosecution and would be incapable of incriminating himself, the thinking was that he could not take the Fifth.
The agreement was entirely verbal and corroborated by Castor and Phillips. Moreover, in testimony, Castor states,
"So I have heard banter in the courtroom and in the press the term “agreement,” but everybody has used the wrong word. I told [Cosby’s attorney at the time, Walter] Phillips that I had decided that, because of defects in the case, that the case could not be won and that I was going to make a public statement that we were not going to charge Mr. Cosby.
"I told him that I was making it as the sovereign Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and, in my legal opinion, that meant that Mr. Cosby would not be allowed to take the Fifth Amendment in the subsequent civil suit that Andrea Constand’s lawyers had told us they wanted to bring.
"But those two things were not connected one to the other."
I'm not a legal scholar or a judge, but this sounds less like an official agreement than two lawyers sharing a professional opinion, and that's exactly what the trial court thought. The PSC decision seems to be based on the assumption that Castor, by communicating the likely cause-and-effect of his decision to not prosecute—a decision he believed to be absolute but which he did not solidify in any formal document or press release—constituted an agreement. In other words, the mere belief that one possesses immunity, according to the PSC, is enough to grant one immunity. It's a very bizarre decision, and it's no wonder the court was split 4-3.
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+Danilo Vega Case in point, some guy is in the news for having his "life ruined" because he was doxxed after marching with the Nazis. But he explained that he is not a Nazi, he's just a "moderate Republican" who wanted to protest the removal of pro-slavery Confederate leaders' statues.
Moderates don't have any ideology beyond self-preservation. If they can preserve themselves and their property by aligning with the far right, they'll do that every fucking time. They did it during the French Revolution. They did it during the revolution of 1848, dissolving democracy and erecting an emperor. They did it during the 1930s in Germany, and in countless other places across history, Chile, Argentina, Iran, China, Italy, Spain. Moderates pave the way for the radical right and fascism. We're witnessing it right now in America. Also look at the deal Theresa May was willing to make with the DUP, thereby legitimating them, just so that she and the Tories can cling to power.
There's a Survey Monkey poll out today showing that Americans are nearly split between who caused the violence in Charlottesville. Nearly the same number think it was the "alt right" white supremacists as think it was the counter protestors.
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@thursdayaf22 I'm not really sure why Bernie's coming up in this discussion. Can no one stay on topic? I'm going to defend everything he's done, but it is disingenuous to say what you said. Don't deny it. But we're not talking about Bernie; we're talking about Tulsi's garbage centrism masquerading as holier than thou, wrapped in the flag progressivism. And since we are talking about Tulsi, maybe you can explain why, as the anti-war, progressive candidate, she keeps voting for Trump's military budget increases. Here's Code Pink on Gabbard's record:
"But Gabbard’s actual voting record on war and peace issues, especially on military spending, is not nearly as dovish as Sanders’. She voted for 19 of 29 military spending bills in the past 6 years, and she has only a 51% Peace Action voting record. Many of the votes that Peace Action counted against her were votes to fully fund controversial new weapons systems, including nuclear-tipped cruise missiles (in 2014, 2015 and 2016); an 11th US aircraft-carrier (in 2013 and 2015); and various parts of Obama’s anti-ballistic missile program, which fueled the New Cold War and arms race she now decries."
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I think his inability to think deeply or critically is separate from his lack of a college degree.
" since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most “advanced” economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada. As one anthropologist, Sarah Kendzior, puts it:
“The United States has become the most rigidly credentialised society in the world,” write James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield in their 2005 book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money. “A BA is required for jobs that by no stretch of imagination need two years of full-time training, let alone four.”
The promotion of college as a requirement for a middle-class life … has resulted in the exclusion of the non-college educated from professions of public influence. In 1971, 58 percent of journalists had a college degree. Today, 92 percent do, and at many publications, a graduate degree in journalism is required—despite the fact that most renowned journalists have never studied journalism.22
Journalism is one of many fields of public influence—including politics—in which credentials function as de facto permission to speak, rendering those who lack them less likely to be employed and less able to afford to stay in their field. Ability is discounted without credentials, but the ability to purchase credentials rests, more often than not, on family wealth."
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Even worse, the "one time" $1000 bonus for employees gets taxed, and I happen to know that some companies, like AT&T did some squirrelly shit with the way it was dispersed so that employees were lucky to get like half of that.
And then, the $1000 bonus pales in comparison to the $4000-$9000 in increased wages touted by the Republicans and CEOs if they passed their tax legislation.
Lastly, in the case of AT&T, as they payed 200,000 employees that meager bonus, they turned around and laid off thousands of others, so the "bonus" wasn't payed for by the tax cuts, but through lay offs, which hurt many more workers.
Those. fucking. assholes. where's. my. pitchfork!?
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@Nobu Nee Why can't you actually address the facts and data? Why, when shown that the facts contradict your view or that you've misunderstood the facts, do you retreat into personalizing the crisis into fearmongering—in the vaguest possible terms—over spooky, bad experts?
I think I know why. That style of argumentation doesn't require you to know anything. You just have to have a vague suspicion of experts, sometimes based on legitimate concerns but always overgeneralized. In fact, not knowing is a virtue for this style of argument, because experts know things, and since we've already stipulated that we can't trust experts (unless that expert is telling us covid is fake and to buy their supplement), it makes sense that knowing things is bad too.
But I'm not appealing to experts. I'm appealing to the overwhelming consensus of data. The two are not the same. The data would be more or less true regardless of the moral character or trustworthiness of whatever expert referenced it. Sometimes it's useful to consult expert opinion on the interpretation of data in a field we aren't trained in, as I showed above when someone misleadingly argued that ARR is THE correct way to understand vaccine efficacy, but that's not blindly trusting experts.
So, again, why can't you address the data, which overwhelmingly supports vaccination? Why can't you change your mind when it's readily demonstrable that you overlooked or misinterpreted something? If you're not basing your anti-vaxx opinion on data, but on conspiratorial presumptions, why should anyone listen to you?
I'm an anti capitalist and an anarchist/communist, so I think it's safe to assume that I'm not a shill for the state or corporations. As I replied to someone else, there's only a false virtue in the kind of reflexive contrarianism you're doing. It's just a way to avoid thinking. One can have a critique of how the crisis has been managed—eg vaccine inequality and apartheid, patent law, etc—but still recognize that vaccines are an important public health measure and that the data supports their efficacy.
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My original contention was that Vaush dishonestly represented and quote-mined passages from Lenin and Marx to support Vote Blue No Matter Who. As you admit, that seems to be the case, though we only discussed one example. BadEmpanada (anarchist) and Hakim (ML) both did good videos covering Vaush's other misuses of Lenin and Marx.
So I don't know what else there is to say about that. I said in an earlier comment that it's possible to make an argument for strategic voting, but not while misrepresenting radical texts in order to make one's position seem more radical and acceptable than it really is.
The idea that we can infer Lenin's position as if by reading the negative or shadow of his words seems dubious. Lenin was careful to stress the ways in which strategy must be contingent upon divergent material conditions, and our conditions are not a simple negation or expansion of his own. On the other hand, one of the earliest arguments against "Infantile Disorder" is precisely that Lenin failed to take account of the material conditions of a Europe long petrified by bourgeois politics and instead insisted, as he was wont to do, that other nations more or less emulate the Bolshevik's success. So perhaps Lenin today would prescribe just that.
The other problem here is what Lenin does say - that even in the most counterrevolutionary governments, even when the tsar threatened the dissolution of the Duma, the Bolsheviki participated and did not fold themselves into the bourgeois parties. Is Trump more a threat than the Tsar?
A last thing that I didn't mention before and that Vaush didn't seem to grasp. There's a fundamental reason the words of Marx and Lenin can't be taken to support individuals voting for Biden. They weren't concerned with individuals voting. They addressed themselves to parties, organizations, leaders, and a class for the purpose of building power.
As I said before, make an argument for harm reduction. Some of them make sense. But don't base it on fraudulent evidence
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Corporations also go out of their way to hide information from the public. I believe the infamous communist, Adam Smith, warns against the opposing interests of the businessman and the public.
For Rubin's scheme to work, you'd be relying on the public somehow, sometime catching the corporation's misdeeds, likely long after the damage has been done, as in Flint, the Grenfell Tower, and so on. Companies manage to hide information from regulators (was it Volkswagen that published faulty mpg statistics?) but at least the regulators have authority, knowledge, and access.
Even then, regulation can fail. The case of thalidomide is probably the most notorious, but regulation gives the public a better chance of catching bad products and services. It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than nothing.
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@ericlefevre7741 High fat negates protein poisoning. Chicken, beef, pork, and other common meats in the Western diet do not contain anywhere near enough fat to counter the excessively high amount of protein. Research shows that diets high in red meat, like the one the Peterson's are advocating, have adverse affects on the body. So you're looking at a narrow, unique case, the Inuits, and choosing to ignore the wealth of data showing that people benefit from eating a wide range of foods, mostly vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and some fruit.
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@xhawkeye8717 Lol no.
"I don't have an ideology; I'm neither left nor right; I only want the best things for society" has got to be one of the most self-deluded statements one can make. You may not want to think you don't have any ideological commitments, but you obviously do, and dressing them up as "what is best" or rational doesn't change that. Usually when people say they're being rational, they're really hiding their values.
And like I said before, stating that what you want is only what's best is potentially just an administrative move that possibly evades deeper, paradigmatic questions. For instance, if everyone could have healthcare or education, but still within a capitalist context, is that really what's best for society? It turns out that merely wanting what's best doesn't really tell us anything valuable about what society actually should be. We end up not asking questions like, why do we submit vital services to capitalist logic in the first place...and if capitalism can't adequately provide for those services, why do we tolerate it in other areas?
Or regarding higher education, universal access of any kind is certainly better than what we have now. But is our current higher education system really what's best for society? Could we not imagine alternative forms of higher education that prioritize other needs and are not as concerned with, for instance, recapitulating the false meritocratic logic of grades and degrees, which is really just the fraud of capitalist meritocracy in miniature? But as soon as you do that you have to have some kind of political commitment beyond "what is best."
Maybe I could do a better job of explaining this, but it's always seemed to me that the posture of only wanting what's best just exists to evade questions of value or commitment by claiming to be above all else practical, expedient, cost-effective, etc....maybe even occasionally humane—in other words, by turning significant social questions into merely administrative ones because its solutions refuse to address fundamental questions.
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@MrOttopants That's a lot of hypotheticals and ifs. The fact is that in this political and economic environment—not Japan's, not Switzerland's—it is going to be basically impossible, and, more importantly, unsustainable, to get to a universal healthcare plan with a duct taped-together hodgepodge of private insurance, medicaid, the ACA, and ever-eroding employer coverage. It may seem like the smarter, more practical solution right now, and maybe you can get asymptotically close to something decent, but you will never get heliocentric ellipses from epicycles. You won't fix arguably the least efficient, most expensive health system in the modern world by putting private insurance on life support. Moreover, M4A has huge bipartisan support—not among politicians, but among the population.
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If Puerto Rico can pay for the system, you may be right, but considering that they just went through a natural disaster and have a lot of debt, I'm skeptical.
I think what Tesla is doing by promoting electric and solar power is great, and Musk has shown in some cases a commitment to the public good (for instance, by supporting open source), but I don't think it is wise to entrust something as valuable as a utility to one person or to one company (that is not acting under a public mandate, as most utilities do). The whole thing reeks of what Naomi Klein called "disaster capitalism," privatization smuggled in at a moment of tragedy when the populace is broken and disoriented and desperate.
I don't doubt that Tesla and Musk have good intentions, but we need to be mindful of the longterm social repercussions. Perhaps instead of ceding property to disaster capitalists we can find a way to use a disastrous situation to expand public control of human necessities.
From the article:
"SolarCity’s Bass says that, while the company knew Suniva was using prison workers, it didn’t know the wage was so low. He says that using panels made with cheap prison labor isn’t in line with the company’s commitment to sustainability. But SolarCity refused to confirm whether or not it will use panels made by cheap prison labor in the future."
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Einheriar
There's a reason why the character of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost was venerated by the Romantics as a revolutionary and a hero. He seemed to embody the spirit of the Enlightenment reacting against the bondage of centuries of religious and royal rule. And though Milton undoubtedly casts Satan as the villain of the poem, it's not for nothing that he grants him all the trappings of a classical epic hero. He's almost a perfect copy of Odysseus—the transgression against the gods, the leadership, the wandering, the charisma, the keen intelligence, the perilous journey through a negative space, the attempt to return home—as if in rejecting Satan as hero Milton was also rejecting the whole genre of epic poetry; or rather, replacing it with his own version of the Protestant epic, whose heroes are passive, repentant, subdued by visions, attempting to understand and accept the world rather than struggle against it.
He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of Hell resounded: Princes, Potentates,
Warriors—the flower of heaven, once yours, now lost,
If such astonishment as this can seize
Eternal spirits; or have ye chosen this place
After the toil of battle, for the ease you find
To slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven?
Or have ye chosen to adore the Conqueror?
...
They heard and were abashed, and up they sprung
Upon the wing.
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After reading the article, the email exchange, his post, and the editors' post, my sense is that he's making way too big of a deal about this and crying about how much the "New York" editors love Biden makes him look like a petulant child. The editors had a fair assessment of the draft.
But he's technically correct; they violated his contract.
The article itself struck me as that combination of analysis, cutthroat critique, grandstanding, amateur generalization, tunnel vision, and speculative allegation which has always been a feature of Glenn's writing. Go back and look at his PRISM reporting.
He was absolutely right about the media's rush to label the leaks "Russian disinformation." It's a shame he didn't want that to be the thesis.
What was most surprising to me is his allegation in the emails (which I'm sure he wrote knowing he'd make them public) that the editors Peter and Betsy threw him under the bus on the Reality Winner fiasco. If true, that alone would've been grounds for quitting in huff.
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Okay, but socialism is not the welfare state; it is not"more government," an equation Kyle has made explicit on at least one occasion. Socialism—though it's better to speak of socialisms—in its broadest application is the abolition of private property in favor of social ownership, which in most all cases means worker control of the means of production, i.e. workplace democracy. Capitalism opposes this through structure, ideology and, if necessary, through violence. Kyle—who is not loathe to remind us of his degree in political science—glosses over that fact in order to position himself in the rational middle, even if that middle does not exist. He's even gone so far as to spout absurdities like, "the military is socialist."
Again, I've seen Kyle use this tactic so often, but I just can't remember them specifically. That's a crap thing to say, but I'm not writing a dissertation here. The socialism-capitalism point one only stuck because he's done it on several occasions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzLc-pFoC1E
3:45 Watch for the straw man. It's even more ridiculous because it's about "human nature." You know, that thing we've got all figured out. Kyle comes to the astounding conclusion that people are assholes sometimes but nice other times.
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@geozap4518 Curiously the UN doesn't define apartheid by the number of members in parliament.
Here's its actual criteria.
(a) Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person: (i) By murder of members of a racial group or groups; (ii) By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; (iii) By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups; (b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part; (c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognized trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association; d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof; (e) Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour; (f) Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/05/19/how-un-can-help-end-israeli-apartheid-and-persecution#
None of which even addresses Israel's foundation as a settler-colonial state.
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@jaw-knee771 Moreover, if you look at the sources your article provides, they don't mention a ban on GOF. They say,
"Today, the National Institutes of Health announced that it is lifting a funding pause dating back to October 2014 on gain-of-function (GOF) experiments involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses. GOF research is important in helping us identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health."
"By October 2014, the Obama administration halted federal funding for such research. A statement from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy suggested an oversight framework that would allow them to resume, but the turnover from the Obama administration to the Trump administration meant the status of this type of research was in flux."
And if you read past the headline of the article you linked, you'll find that the ban wasn't on GOF research, as you surmised, but on federal funding.
"The decision follows a three-year ban on such funding."
As the WH press release from 2014 shows, it was never intended as a ban but rather as a pause on federal funding pending review, and half-way competent journalism reflected that.
And again, genomic studies have shown the virus evolved naturally, not as a product of GOF research.
So your pet theory collapses on all points.
1) Obama didn't ban GOF.
2) Trump didn't renew GOF to spark a pandemic; federal funding resumed per new guidelines after a scientific review.
3) SARS-CoV-2 wasn't created through GOF research but evolved naturally.
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A "war tax" is about the most neoliberal thing I've ever heard. Every time someone says Vietnam was a quagmire, Afghanistan was a blunder, Iraq was a mistake, they're doing what Beto is doing. They're thinking about a moral problem as an economic calculation, as a policy that could be a failed effort, but never evil, never wrong, never criminal.
If Beto were really concerned about "the cost of going to war," he'd propose setting aside a fund for the hundreds of thousands—millions—of people killed in the last two decades alone as a result of American imperialism and intervention, thousands of families destroyed, entire regions destabilized. That's the most substantial chunk of the "real cost" of war. That goes for the wars—sorry, "conflicts"—in the Middle East, that goes for the egregious War on Drugs that's caused so much damage in Latin America.
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Kyle's wrong about rioting and looting. He may feel that they're immoral, and he's entitled to his opinion, but he's wrong about those tactics/side effects being "ineffective." Rioting and looting accomplish a few things.
First, they intensify the contradictions inherent in our form of democratic government, which has an imperative to establish its authority and social order via laws and the police and an imperative to at least appear to represent the people. When protests combine with rioting and looting, the government has to often choose between losing legitimacy by doing nothing (failing to uphold imperative 1) or by reacting against the people it claims to speak for (failing imperative 2).
More practically, rioting and looting divert police forces away from protesters. Or they may goad police, who are looking for a skirmish anyway, to attack peaceful protestors and thereby heighten the aforementioned contradiction inherent in law enforcement.
They also attack property, which liberal democracies and the police are charged with protecting even above human life. Witness how long it took to do so little about covid, and compare that to how quickly even Democratic cities and states responded to broken windows and pilfered goods. Almost immediately. By attacking property, rioters force officials to take the matter seriously, and perhaps force them to go too far in their attempts to restore order.
Okay, but are rioting and looting effective at achieving longterm goals? Yes. It turns out that Kyle is being selective in his citations. It turns out that rioting and looting, in combination with protest, can force officials to make policy concessions. We've seen this in the 68 civil rights amendment, which came after 4 days of extensive rioting. We also saw it after the protests in LA. And just the other day, after a week of protests, rioting, looting (and, it must be added, police rioting), Chauvin's charges were upgraded to 2nd degree murder and his accomplices were charged.
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Adam Smith—this is more speculation than anything—I suspect wrote about the inherent national benefit of businessmen acting in their own self-interest because he wasn't too keen on the alternative. Smith was very skeptical, if not contemptuous, of the petty bourgeoisie, but he inveighed even more forcefully against the bureaucrats (of his autocratic, monarchical government). The businessmen at least could theoretically contribute to the wealth of the country, even if they had no intention to, so Smith hoped. If he had witnessed our technological revolution—in manufacturing, logistics, and communication—it would be impossible for him to take the same stance. If we want to talk facts, the fact is that Britain relied on protectionism to create and maintain its wealth long before it was powerful enough to jettison those policies in favor of, for instance, low or non-existent tariffs, and pretend that it had always favored free trade.
Korea.
"The popular impression of Korea as a free-trade economy was created by its export success. But export success does not require free trade, as Japan and China have also shown. Korean exports in the earlier period—things like simple garments and cheap electronics—were all means to earn the hard currencies needed to pay for the advanced technologies and expensive machines that were necessary for the new, more difficult industries, which were protected through tariffs and subsidies. [...] At the same time, tariff protection and subsidies were not there to shield industries from international competition forever, but to give them the time to absorb new technologies and establish new organizational capabilities until they could compete in the world market. The Korean economic miracle was the result of a clever and pragmatic mixture of market incentives and state direction" (Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans 14-15). Chang is also Korean, because that is apparently important to you.
More specifically, I could point to things like SOEs in Korea (against IMF interdictions) like POSCO and KNOC; extensive LCRs leading up to the 90s; restrictions on FDIs, at least in some sectors; tariffs until the 80s; and, though not a policy per se, a practice, until maybe the 90s, of pirating first world technologies and IPs.
You're right, simultaneity does not imply causation. But when that simultaneity happens over and over (England, America, France, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, Japan, etc. etc.) we can begin to be more confident that there is some sort of causation. If, for instance, there is a consistent pattern where developing countries that adhere to IMF and WTO neoliberal trade policies have sluggish growth rates of 1% or less, and ones that apply protectionist policies in strategic areas see much higher growth and acquisition of high(er) tech industries.
According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, growth has diminished under free trade policies while it was actually higher during the more "protectionist" years of the 60s and 70s.
"A sharp fall-off in the growth of GDP per capita was found for all groups of countries except the bottom quintile. (See Figure 1) In the fourth quintile, marked by per capita incomes between $1238 and $2364, growth falls from 2.4 percent annually in the first period to 0.7 percent in the second period. To get an idea how much difference this makes over time, at 2.4 percent growth the country’s income per person will double in about 29 years. At 0.7 percent growth, it would take 99 years.
1 Or most recent available year.
The middle quintile, with GDP per capita between $2364 and $4031, drops from a 2.6 percent growth rate in the first period to 1 percent in the second. The second quintile ($4086-8977) falls even further: from 3.1 percent in the first period to 1.3 percent in the second period.
Even the top quintile, which at $9012 to $43,713 contains a mixture of middle-income and high- income countries shows a sizeable falloff in growth, from 2.6 percent in the first period to only 1.3 percent in the second period.
The only group which does not show a slowdown in growth is the bottom quintile, with per capita income between $355 and $1225 annually, where growth increases slightly, from 1.7 to 1.8 percent. However this is still not a good average performance for the poorest developing countries, and the slight improvement disappears without India and China."
http://cepr.net/documents/publications/development_2005_09.pdf
Causation? Maybe, maybe not. But definitely a strong correlation.
Why is this important re: $7 t-shirts and protectionism? For two reasons. First, it may not be in the US's economic interest to implement broad protectionist measures, though it is possible that some may be needed to temporarily assist the economy back into a healthy state after decades of offshoring.
Second, and more importantly, the first world needs to acknowledge that protectionist measures are needed not for us but for the third world that we exploit for cheap goods. Without things like tariffs, subsidies, exemptions from patents, control of FDIs, LCRs, and other governmental controls of the economy, the third world will never make enough money fast enough nor retain enough to climb the industrial ladder. They will forever be the servants, seamstresses, and farmers of the rich countries. Protectionism won't hurt consumers because it will also be helping the workers in those countries who are themselves also consumers (this duality of a person as both worker and consumer is one of the reasons Rand Paul's argument is so bogus—so what if an American can buy a shirt for $7 if they can only earn minimum wage or just above minimum wage? the good, middle class factory job they might otherwise have had having been offshored decades ago to someone who will earn pennies?).
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@Sonnera I think the biggest conflict between our views is that you think abortion is solely (or maybe just primarily) a medical issue, but I think it's a medical issue, a legal issue, a political issue, a moral issue, a financial issue. It's a lot of different things. As you might say, they are conflated into one act. I don't know if I agree with this, but perhaps one could say that in some cases abortion is a legal act carried out through medical means, though it could just as easily be the opposite.
Women and men are not the same when it comes to conception, so we would expect to use different tools or methods to arrive at a similar outcome for something like abortion. Because men cannot biologically abort, we need the next best thing. I think it's less important how the "opt out" is accomplished and more important when it is.
On the other hand, it strikes me as bizarre that you think vasectomy and abortion are somehow equivalent just because they both have to do with people's bodies. That's like saying a submarine and a squid are equivalent because they both travel through water. Sure, it's a shared trait, but why is that THE trait that determines congruity? Between the two are many closer analogies. If anything, vasectomy and tubal ligation are equivalent because they are both 1) temporally equivalent, occurring before sex and before conception and 2) as forms of permanent contraception, they affect not only the current status of the person as parent, but their future status as well. Abortion is concerned with that pregnancy at that time.
I think your argument is a straw man because you keep bringing up and defeating the issue of responsibility after birth and then claiming victory over over the totally separate debate about what happens in the 1st trimester or so of pregnancy. Man. of. straw.
@Steven Boyd You somehow managed to make that sound like the most awkward and graphic and yet mechanical birds-and-bees talk. I've already said it, but the problem I have with your position is that it pretends that the woman has zero part in conceiving. Both partners decide to have sex, both make decisions that may or may not lead to conception. I find it hard to believe that there are many women who think avoiding unwanted pregnancy is none of their business; just whether or not to allow the fetus to mature. Do you really think that it's only after being inseminated that women should think, but do I really want a child? I know you don't; that's crazy. But that's what you're saying. Pregnancy should be a mutual, consensual act as much as possible, from contraception to birth to raising a child. It's not a seesaw or hot potato of responsibility. The woman has agency in conception, too.
Lastly, I don't know why more people aren't completely blown away by this artificial womb technology. It seems to me that with the exception of faster engines for space travel, the artificial womb is the most important piece of technology for successfully and rapidly colonizing another planet. If you wanted to build a population more or less from scratch, that means most or all of the women colonists being pregnant most of the time, meaning that they lose chances to work in their vocation or enjoy a normal life, and it could potentially result in women taking a huge step backward in terms of their rights and social standing. It also takes a long long time. With a hatchery of artificial wombs, you could free up the female population to work while still growing more people, and you could do it faster, since each woman can only gestate one baby every ~9 months. It's a revolutionary piece of technology if it can work.
But even getting past the hi-tech example, there are real world examples of similar cases involving surrogates, and they are a massive grey area from what I can tell.
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whyamimrpink78 The government is always in debt. That's how governments operate. We do, however, have massively misplaced priorities when it comes to spending.
Over half of our discretionary spending goes to defense the military. We spend more than the next 11 countries combined. We could have paid for a single payer healthcare system for years with the 1.5 trillion we invested in an underperforming fighter jet.
Further compounding the problem is our dysfunctional tax system, which, thanks to Bush2 and now likely Trump, gives breaks to the wealthy and corporations. As a result, income and wealth inequality have spiraled out of control, and tax revenues for social programs have dwindled.
We have a society and elite structure that values profit over people, lavish wealth over sustainability, growth over the environment, and the military-industrial complex over peace.
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whyamimrpink78 Did I say "federal spending"? No, I said "discretionary budget." Social safety net programs are not a part of the discretionary budget.
If you were serious about reducing the debt, you'd want to reduce our discretionary spending on the military, which is greater than the annual debt.
People pay for social programs through taxes. The revenue problems these programs will run into in the future can be remedied by returning to a strong progressive marginal tax system like we had during the so-called Golden Age of capitalism, during which there was a 90% marginal tax rate. We won't even have to go that high, but that's an example of how high it can go and still sustain a vibrant economy.
Marginal tax rates are taxes on income within that bracket, e.g. 10% on 0-9,999, 20% 10,000-19,999, etc. A marginal tax rate of a 100% would function as a maximum income. High marginal rates have historically applied only to a handful of incredibly wealthy people.
Tax cuts reduce the government's ability to spend. At the extreme end of the spectrum, severe tax cuts have led to a rise in corruption in some countries. The government cannot pay its employees a decent wage, so those employees seek other sources of revenue by accepting bribes from business and other interests. At the more moderate end, tax cuts diminish the ability of the government to administer programs that serve as a check against various kinds of inequality and misfortune.
Social programs like Medi-Care and Social Security actually improve people's lives. Our current spending on the military is a drain on the system and a form of socialism for the rich.
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She knows why the Left is alarmed by people like Mattis and Flynn. I'd bet that she also realizes that, while merely having military personnel in the cabinet is not itself a major cause for concern, the stacking of the cabinet with the military is, especially when the incoming president displays authoritarian tendencies. The military has civilian oversight (POTUS, Congress) so that we don't risk our government devolving into a junta.
But that's just one issue. Overall, she's far from progressive. For example, Progressive Punch ranks Gabbard as the 130th most progressive member of Congress. Not 3rd or 10th or 20th—130th. Punch labels her a "Strong Dem," but one who fails to be as progressive as her district would allow her to be.
Govtrack ranks her as the 19th most conservative Democrat. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/tulsi_gabbard/412532/report-card/2015
Gabbard has plenty of good, even progressive positions, but in a lot of other ways she's more like the kind of center-left Democrat that we've all come to dislike. John Bickel, who works with Progressive PAC in Hawaii, has said, “I am a little skeptical about how deep her progressive roots run. Tulsi Gabbard shows up in places and gets in front of the camera, spinning herself as a progressive-- but I’m not sure her record backs up what she’s created as a public persona.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/25/the-bernie-endorsing-congresswoman-who-trump-fans-can-love.html
While you may not like the tone of Hit Stoner's comment (or the obnoxious copy-paste) there is some substance to it, namely her ties to right wing Hindu organizations and leaders, like Modi. https://socialistworker.org/2016/12/08/an-islamophobic-progressive
She tends to the right on military issues, though she does oppose military expansion and intervention in general. However, she has voted in favor of the NDAA several times, including in 2013 when the bill contained the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which essentially allows the US government (specifically the State Dept. and BBG) to deploy the same psyops, disinformation, and propaganda on the American public as it uses against foreign countries. I fail to see how that "protects democracy."
She also used to be vociferously opposed to marriage equality, a stance she's since flipped on completely. This could be a case of a child overcoming the prejudices of her parents (her father was notorious for his homophobia) or it could be opportunism. I'd like to think the former, but we just got done having the same conversation about Clinton and her flip-flops on marriage equality, and Clinton was never as passionate as Gabbard.
If Gabbard hews progressive from here on out, that's great. I can support that. But that's not quite the picture I'm seeing, which is more complicated. The fact that she's being seen as THE progressive in the country is 1) a tremendous PR success and 2) a bit troubling for the progressive movement. We've already seen how much disappointment can come when enough people rally around a young, charismatic "progressive" who can't or won't live up to that expectation.
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William Slaughter It may be a timeless concern among Christians, but we have to ask whether it's legitimate for their concern to dictate public policy. That, as it turns out, is not timeless. There was a time, the early 19th century, when abortion was legal in some circumstances.
Christianity, broadly speaking, changes its mind every once in a while about what is important moral law and what is not. A thousand years ago, a Christian may have told you that the dominion of a man over his wife is a timeless issue, and yet we've gone a long way toward discarding it, at least legally.
The immorality of divorce was an important Christian issue--that suddenly vanished when Reagan ran for office. Now conservatives can have gone through a handful of marriages and still be considered good Christians.
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It would have been helpful to provide numbers for other presidential candidate books of the past, to provide context. According to this article in forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferbaker/2016/04/09/u-s-presidential-candidate-book-sales-match-electoral-popularity/#30763ac52417
Ben Carson of all people led in 2015 book sales. Ben Carson. I tried to find numbers for Obama's and Bush's books but couldn't find them. Maybe someone has information on that.
The other thing--well, two things--to keep in mind is that there's a difference between the kinds of books published early in a presidential bid and those in published a few months before the election an that there's been a change in how people consume media. The first books candidates publish are memoirs, stuff of general interest, a kind of get-to-know-me book. Clinton's Hard Choices (yes, providing an exception for weapons sales to Sudan for their child soldiers was a hard choice) sold 300,000 copies (it's also true that candidates and PACs buy their own books, so that number isn't 100% reflective of reality).
Pre-election books, however, are policy outlines. This is important, because we also have to ask to what degree people will be motivated to buy a book when they can get the same, or approximately the same, amount of information from other--free--sources: debates, interviews, articles, the internet, campaign websites. This is where it would be helpful to see the sales of something like Obama's Change We Can Believe In, although the Web was arguably less influential 8 years ago.
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Erik F I couldn't get that page to load before so I apologize for the mistake.
One interesting thing, if I'm reading the page correctly, is that the profits are not the result of companies simply repaying the loan.
For instance: "Altogether, accounting for both the TARP and the Fannie and Freddie bailout, $621B has gone out the door—invested, loaned, or paid out—while $390B has been returned."
Instead, the gov't has made a profit from the bailout through dividends, warrants, interest, etc.
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Socialism is control of the means of production by the workers. As the Knights of Labor phrased it, the people who work in the factories ought to own the factories. "Socialism" as you two are using it is just the welfare state bandage for capitalism. Sometimes that welfare is for ordinary people (Medicare, EBT, etc.) and sometimes it's for corporations (R&D, subsidies, deregulation, etc.). As Richard Wolff puts it, it doesn't matter whether a king owns the land or a noble owns the land: it's still feudalism. Likewise, whether the state or a company or an individual is the private owner, they're all capitalism.
The idea that the technology that capitalism generates simply makes our lives "easier" is something we should be highly suspicious of. It's more complicated than that. On the one hand it has opened access to information for lots of people (so did feudalism's printing press), but on the other, in the hands of corporations and the government, it's led to a loss of privacy, mass surveillance and so forth. It's not just the technical aspect that matters, but who owns, controls, and disseminates that technology.
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"Russia undermined our democracy."
I wish the same politicians and citizens clamoring to denounce Russia and Trump had attacked with the same fervor Citizens United, campaign finance law, super PACs, corruption, bribery, and the oligarchy. Where were these same people, with their rallies and marches and twitter hashtags, when Clinton laundered money through a joint committee to get around campaign finance limits, a tactic that is unscrupulous, to be sure, but, thanks to the fact that the laws in this country are made by the people who own the country, technically legal? Where were they when the news media effectively undermined democracy through subtle and not-so-subtle propaganda campaigns, e.g. WMD in Iraq? Where were they when the NSA undermined democracy by spying on every single US citizen? Where were they when the Bush administration passed the Patriot Act, which was then renewed under Obama? Where were they when Obama undermined democracy by executing US citizens without due process?
People did protest those things, but I cannot remember the Democratic establishment coming out so vehemently and relentlessly against them, nor the corporate media giving them so much airtime.
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The appeals to rising productivity are valid—that is, if the goal of the economy is to provide a decent standard of living. If the goal is to create indefinite increases in growth as the result of market competition, then, no, productivity doesn't mean much.
The point in raising the issue of productivity, to me, is to show how the priorities of capitalism misalign with the needs of society, as pointed out by people like Bertrand Russell.
The federal minimum wage may be at an all-time high (in nominal dollars), but that's meaningless unless you take into account inflation and the CPI. In terms of real dollars and purchasing power, the FMW has fallen since 1968 (not a cherry-picked date...no pun intended). The 1968 FMW of $1.60 is the same as $10.69 in 2013. That $1.60 had a lot of buying power. In 1994, the FMW still had twice its buying power. The current FMW of $7.25 is equal to around $7.93. The problem is that the FMW has not kept pace with, yes, productivity, but more important to the immediate situation, with inflation.
We know that increasing the minimum wage sensibly and incrementally can have positive impacts on workers and the economy. There's no excuse not to do it. $15 an hour would give America the highest minimum wage in the world, which is where it belongs.
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Did Jesus reform Judaism to be universal? I think that's more due to the theology/revisionism of Paul and the promulgation of Christianity under the Roman Empire. What the historical Jesus thought of his role is, to me, ambiguous. At times he claims to have come only for the lost sheep of Israel (Jews), but at others he comes to the aid of the Gentiles and is said to have been the God of Jew and Gentile alike. Like many things in the Bible, I'd chalk this up to the not always harmonious political and religious goals of the different authors, interpolaters, and scribes, some of whom wanted to grow Christianity and fulfill certain aspects of prophecy, others of whom wanted to bolster Jewish identity against the oppressive Roman empire.
I can't agree that universal ministry is "ultimately" a good thing, because while some Christians interpret that universalism to necessitate unanimous compassion and respect, it also led to the increased opportunity for mass delusion and the coupling of imperial/state power with the potency of supernatural motivation.
I will agree with you that Maher is arrogant. Smug and arrogant. Maybe most secular people and atheists you've come across are like Maher (I can see that being true on the Internet at least), but I can assure you we are not. Many of us have a lot of respect for religious people who do good, brave humanitarian work, as the liberation theologists in Latin America.
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Have to disagree with Thom on this one. The "left" billionaires may have an interest in preserving the country/world from things like climate change, but mainly they want to concede enough on things like taxes to alleviate the social pressures that have, historically, led to revolt and the restructuring of wealth and power.
They could also be Third Way democrats, or democrats who are to the left on social issues but conservative on economics. I think a more coherent leftism recognizes that it's almost impossible to believe in strict forms of things like intellectual property rights, trade agreements, privatization of public institutions (e.g. Zuckerberg's push for charter schools), and campaign finance, while at the same time opposing racism, debt peonage, child labor, anti-gay legislation, etc.
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Look at the other countries that have the death penalty: China, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chad, Egypt, UAE, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Japan, Iraq.
Notably absent: Scandinavia, France, Germany, the UK, Norway, Finland, Canada, even Russia.
The US is the only Western country with the death penalty.
That, if nothing else, is the tipoff that our bloodlust is misguided. The most oppressive places in the world use the death penalty, while the least oppressive have abolished it. Among the first world, we, the US, have the most gun deaths, the most people incarcerated, the most wars, the most arms sales, some of the worst education outcomes, an astronomical gap between the rich and the poor—and we think that allowing the state to retributively kill people is a good thing. I can't draw a perfect line from one to the others, but it's hard not to see a connection.
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It'd be interesting to know what Chomsky had in mind specifically, but these passages might shed some light.
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. [...] Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation." The Critique of Political Economy, 1859
"A whole superstructure of different and specifically formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life arises on the basis of the different forms of property, of the social conditions of existence." The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Duncan Foley explained that this historical materialist approach "contrasts with the view that phenomena will tend to reassert themselves regardless of historical context."
We also have to keep in mind the intellectual atmosphere in which he was working—one, I suppose, that still exists today. Without a God to ground moral, political, and economic statements, Enlightenment thinkers had to find some other means—human nature.
Surveying the politico-economic literature of the Enlightenment, it's astonishing how much of it—Hobbes, Macaulay, Kant, Smith, Priestley, Hume, Rousseau—proceed from assumptions about human nature—particularly primitive or isolated man—at least some of which (the myth of barter) we know to be completely inaccurate. Marx was at pains to point out that that very human nature was rooted in the conditions of society and that very often theorists took their specific historical situation for granted as a universal (reification). Their claims about universal nature became justifications for their society.
Marx's historical materialism was an important intellectual counterbalance and I think it still has a lot of appeal even though it has some problems and holes: for instance, the tendency to retain assumptions about human nature without elevating them to the level of analysis.
In the more conservative interpretation, Marx believed in a definite human nature, but that we only experience it through the transformation of production, relations, and culture. What is human nature given X? Different conditions (de)emphasize different aspects of that nature. Marx just wasn't concerned about the invariable aspects of human nature since there's nothing you can do about it. He was interested in the variable expressions of human nature in society.
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You don't have to go back to the Indus valley. You can look at the things that were going on in Spain leading up to and especially during the Civil War of 1936, an important event often overshadowed by WWII. You can even find examples today of people practicing elements of anarchism, like the worker owned and managed businesses described by Gar Alperovitz.
+Jeb Galicia As I mentioned above, anarchism has at least in a few cases arisen in response to the strongmen so frequently generated by capitalism, militarism, nationalism, and republican forms. We've seen strongmen take over democratic states, like Germany. Would it then be correct to say that representative democracy "isn't a really sustainable form"? If Anarchism has had a shorter lifespan than republicanism, it's because it has had to bear the double burden of not only resisting the right but also the capitalist left.
Strongmen often receive the support of other strongmen because they exist together in a system that permits or in some cases encourages their anti-social behavior. So for instance we saw oil tycoons and IBM continuing to supply Hitler. I find it hard to see how such strongmen could arise as easily as they seem to today without a system of concentrated wealth and centralized power.
In regard to strongmen, I think there's an interesting but by no means definite analogy between possible future societies and what Robert Sapolsky observed in baboon troops that had lost their alpha male members—when other alphas tried to take over, the group resisted and either expelled them or incorporated them into the new, less hierarchical structure. If baboons can do it, surely we can.
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Ariel Epouhe Are you implying that wars aren't designed? They're naturally occurring phenomena without goals or objectives? America just woke up one morning and was like, oh look, I have a war, how did that get there? with the same casual exasperation with which one observes an inaugural outbreak of herpes.
There are long and dry books you can read to find out about who planned our wars. In the case of Iraq, that (long) list would include people like Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks, and G.W. Bush.
That isn't to say that they rubbed their hands together maniacally and planned a perpetual war.
When we talk about design, we sometimes interject an element of intentionality, "X was designed for Y by Z." But we can also use "design" without intention in mind, as when we talk about the design of the human ankle, for instance. In that case, design is synonymous with the function of the object. It's just a question of notation. Other people seemed to understand that without trouble, but then maybe they took the whole two seconds required to figure it out.
So when I said the war was designed to be endless, I meant that its goals and methods of achieving those goals created an endless war, regardless of whether the people who sat down and planned it actually intended it to be so. This is sometimes euphemistically labelled, "unintended consequences." In fact, the war in Iraq, to keep that example alive, was envisioned by Rumsfeld to be a revolutionary approach to war --brief, efficient, involving as few soldiers as possible; a businessman's war. But in hindsight we can see that the way the Pentagon and CENTCOM went about it actually created a protracted conflict, destabilizing the region and augmenting already existing radicalization.
I have no doubt that politicians who advocate for war really do think they it provides a solution to our problems (while also providing revenue for their military industrial complex donors).
I don't know how to explain this any better.
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The difference, one could argue, is that those republican candidates had a negligible share of the delegates, hadn't won any states, etc.
Moreover, they didn't really stand for anything except, as tyt pointed out, themselves and their representation of the right wing establishment agenda. Bernie's an old school leftie and he knows that movements don't live and die by elections. What he and his supporters do in the next year, the next decade, is more important than the outcome of any single election.
As long as he's in the race, he has the microphone and he controls the agenda (as evidenced by Clinton co-opting many of his policies, if half-heartedly). Why would he give that up prematurely?
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So, in another video Jimmy Dore (rightly) condemned Democrats who are falling over themselves to support or bring to power "smiley-faced fascists" like Mike Pence (who's probably never smiled in his life), meaning the authoritarians who will put a respectable image to wage cuts, social program cuts, tax giveaways to the rich, deregulation of environmental protections, increased military spending, etc.
But then he supports "community policing." The police are and always have been the enforcers against the workers, the tools of the property owners and the wealthy, the ones who kick the shit out of and murder union activists and protestors. That structural fact shouldn't be forgotten in light of the smiley-faced fascism of community policing.
I don't disagree that having law enforcement be more accountable to their communities is a good idea, but when push comes to shove, when people want real social change, the police will be on the side of the masters of mankind against the people. We saw that at DAPL when the governor bused-in cops and troopers and paramilitary to quash dissent. They set their dogs on protestors, blew a girl's arm to shreds, sprayed them in freezing temperatures, maced them, held them at gunpoint, targeted them with snipers, brought along armored vehicles.That was the true face of the police.
It's all well and good to push for community policing in the short term, but we should also, I think, not forget about relieving the roots of crime, whether it's poverty, deprivation, a stagnant economy, lack of opportunities, cultural biases, and when you try to address those problems you automatically lock horns with the elites and with those interested in maintaining a capitalist society of inequality. Who actually thinks that if a community decides to have the police go after Wall Street fraudsters, corporate polluters, and corrupt politicians, that the police will comply? Kick their heads in? Of course not: because they don't serve you.
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I can give another reason. The Democrats did dick to amend the election process by refusing to get rid of Citizens United and by not replacing the electoral college with some kind of popular vote back when it wasn't a politicized issue (in 2007, 70% of Republicans favored election by popular vote compared to around 20% today). Instead, Democrats looked at the circus lineup of extremist candidates the Republicans kept dishing up and they got comfortable with maintaining executive power, little expecting that the Republicans would win by becoming more extreme and more clownish.
Also, if we're going to play the "move the timeline" game, if the election were held the day after Trump's "grab em by the pussy" tape was released, Hillary'd've won...um, handily.
If the election were held the day after Clinton had a fainting spell, Trump would've won.
If Wikileaks had released Podesta's emails during the primary, Bernie'd've won.
Anyone can play that game and come out with the candidate of their choice. What lesson is to be gained from it? That the Democrats should push for elections to be a couple of weeks earlier?
It's a way of avoiding real solutions like instituting a popular or even ranked choice vote, choosing candidates that aren't severely compromised (it wasn't as if the things in the emails were untrue), abolishing superdelegates, having open primaries, creating effective propaganda and not self-congratulating pabulum, campaigning for votes instead of expecting them...
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I don't want to pick on the young lady speaking around 2:15, but this notion--so common and anodyne that it is the slogan for Fox News--that there are two sides to issues and that our political process exists to parse, compromise, and legislate them, is a fiction. When someone says to listen to both sides, ask them, both sides for whom?
The critical realization of the Sanders campaign is that finally there is a politician saying what average people have known for a long time: that the political system exists to serve our corporate and wealthy masters. When we speak of both sides, we're often talking about how decisions will affect the richest in the country. We are seldom presented with real, imaginative political options.
Far from being designed to adjudicate "both sides" of the argument (in reality, most arguments are not that simple), the system of American politics was designed, explicitly-read Madison, Hamilton, Washington, et al.- to curtail the "harmful" effects of democracy, that is, of ordinary people having a say over the direction of their lives, and to protect the property and wealth of the upper classes.
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Fred Hampton's Ghost While I think Fred is being a little fast and loose with facts (for one, wikipedia is not a credible source), he's essentially right.
The problem with people is that we tend to naturalize our current circumstances and by so doing come to interpret all other ways of living through the terms of our existence. So it is that we in a capitalist system see hunter-gatherers as lithic proto-capitalists, and we in the Judeo-Christian world see religion as god-worship, but when you read the scientific or anthropological literature, religion and economics are much richer, more diverse and complex things. Interpreting the world from our own viewpoint can be a powerful tool, leading to novel insights, but it can also be an intellectual crutch that prevents us from seeing the novelty and contingency of our own circumstances.
Division of land into parcels of private property is a relatively new idea. When Rousseau said "the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. [...] the idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen in successive stages, was not formed all at once in the human mind," he wasn't speaking about some bygone era; land inclosure was still a reality in his day, and one that many people felt was "unnatural."
Moreover, capitalism did not only fail to reduce wealth inequality; in some sense it has accelerated it. Like the OP, I don't think it was ever the point of capitalism to reduce wealth inequality.
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Fred Hampton's Ghost "The problem is capitalism is inefficient. It is incapable of humanely distributing the goods and services produced by labor and planning's high productive capacity."
Capitalism is good at making a lot of shit, but not so great at distributing it or even knowing what shit is the best to make.
The pro-market argument (and it's worth remarking that capitalism isn't the only economic system with markets; even anarcho-syndicalists want free markets) is that the market will dictate the needs and desires of the consumer. People vote with their wallets.
The problem with capitalist markets is that they are slow to respond. Take climate change. Any serious person knows that we needed a radical overhaul of our economy and energy five, ten, twenty years ago. But here we are, in 2016, still haggling over a degree here, a degree there. And what has the market done? Very little of its own volition. We're still fracking, still gas-guzzling, still exploiting tar sands.
One reason they're slow to react is that it is in the interest of corporations to conceal their anti-social, unsavory behavior while it is in the consumer/public's interest to know as much as they can about that company, in theory. Those two interests are at constant odds.
But I'm curious about why you think the inefficiency of the market contributes to mass poverty.
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In one of Chomsky's books, I think it's called Mind and Language, he talks about the different meanings of "can" with regard to human nature. The example he gives is something like, when we say that a person tied to a chair can't swim, we mean that they have the capacity to swim but can't at the moment. When we say that a mannequin can't swim, we mean that it does not and never will have the capacity to swim.
A feral child is like an acorn in a metal box. The acorn could become a tree, but only in the right conditions. The feral child can't do human things like learn language and physics but could have given the proper starting conditions. A gibbon, however, cannot learn physics and Shakespeare in the same sense as the mannequin cannot swim.
So the exploration of an intrinsic nature, human or otherwise, is an explication of capacity under "normal" conditions.
I'm not sure I understand your last sentence.
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f18181 Clinton ran against Sanders on two basic premises: that she could put forward practical, attainable policies and that she could be(at) the Republican nominee. She's now borrowed several of Sanders' policies--free(-r) college tuition, the estate tax, opposition to the XL pipeline and the TPP--so maybe they weren't so idealistic after all, and she's tied or just barely ahead of Trump, depending on which poll you look at on a given day.
Which makes me wonder why we just didn't get the real, unadulterated thing and have a candidate who wouldn't water down his policies and who's poll numbers have long shown that he is the better matchup against the Republicans.
That said, Bernie demonstrated, I think, that he isn't the best debater, at least against Clinton. He forfeited a lot of opportunities to criticize her and at times did a poor job of explaining his policies and vision (he's done a better job elsewhere).
I also think you're overreacting. Except for a few remarks in the beginning of the debate, she did much better than Trump, who spent most of the time flailing and rambling.
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No, it's kind of true. Maybe the Greens like Stein do not give outright support, but neither to they give outright denial either. People like 9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers, homeopaths, and others receive at the least a nod of "more needs to be known," meaning, we don't want to say you're wrong, but we don't want to say you're right.
Another example. The Green party, its leadership and some of its constituents, have this bizarre opposition to GMOs as scary frankenfood. Don't get me wrong, there's a legitimate critique of GMOs as exploited by corporations (terminator genes, suing farmers whose crop gets infested with GMO crops; the control and patenting of something as universally precious as food staples; the effects of pesticides, notably glyphosate on the environment, bee populations, etc.), but just blanketly declaring all genetic modifications abominations against nature is wildly illiterate and potentially dangerous.
About Wifi's effects on kids, Stein has said: "We should not be subjecting kids’ brains especially to that. And, you know, we don’t follow that issue in this country, but in Europe where they do, they have good precautions around wireless, maybe not good enough, because it’s very hard to study this stuff. We make guinea pigs out of whole populations and then we discover how many die. And this is like the paradigm for how public health works in this country and it’s outrageous, you know."
It's the old trick of sowing doubt ("it's very hard to study this stuff") and fear ("and then we discover how many die") to pander to what really must be a minuscule portion of the country. It's such an effective trick because stuff like that HAS happened before, thalidomide, asbestos, etc.
Full disclosure, I'm technically a member of the Green party and I voted for Stein twice. I like most of their agenda (much more than that of the infuriating corporate sellouts and war-mongers) but some aspects of their positions and culture are frankly embarrassing.
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BrownBear 59 You say strong, I say circumstantial at best. You're assuming that "up the chain of command" means Clinton but it doesn't have to. It could mean a regional official, an insider, a staffer, an aid, Palmieri, Podesta, Mook, even Clinton herself. But nothing in that statement tells us who exactly he's referring to, so it's all conjecture.
BTW the conversation you're quoting didn't happen that way. It was between PVA and Foval who was relaying what Creamer had said (so Creamer couldn't have nodded). You're mixing up two conversations.
Don't get me wrong, there's shady stuff in that video and people need to answer for it...
but given O'Keefe's history of doctoring footage, I'm hesitant to believe it outright. Much of the context in his video is presented by him, not by the interlocutor, meaning that O'Keefe can frame conversations however he wants. In addition, there are some suspicious cuts. For instance, there's a two or three second cut in his conversation with Creamer. Why did two seconds of a 16-minute video need to be cut? Did Creamer say something that didn't fit the O'Keefe narrative? Was it airtime?
Lastly, the footage demonstrates intent to commit voter fraud, but not voter fraud itself. It's important that we make that distinction. If people take this footage as a cue to track down actual evidence linking operatives or insiders to voter fraud, that's another thing.
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If wage labor is renting your time for money, then how can companies claim you for time that they aren't renting? That'd be like me paying rent for 10 days and claiming that I can stay in my apartment all month. Not going to fly. Even salaries don't assume that the employer has unlimited access to your time.
The word fascist gets thrown around a lot these days, so I hesitate to use it here, but I do think there is a clear parallel between the kind of obviously bullshit corporatism that companies are pushing not just on salaried but on wage workers as well--you're not an employee, you're an associate; you're part of the brand; you're part of the [insert] family!--and fascistic thinking that aligns the interests of the ruled with the rulers in the spirit of rigid hierarchy, tradition, military hegemony, and nationalism. Fascism grew out of the corporatist philosophy.
While it's true that capitalism has led increasingly to a separation of life and work, it also seems that the opposite is true, that capital is trying exert more and more influence on the lives of its consumers and employees, bringing work and life together from the other end.
The notion of personal responsibility is valuable, but there's also a way of using it to cover for less noble ends. Again, I don't agree at all with Schilling; I think he's a child; but I'm trying to imagine how I'd like to be treated in the kind of situation where I say something on my own time that my employers--historically, white, conservative, and religious--don't like.
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+Ti esrever I wasn't trying to answer the question of whether a communist implementation was successful. When assessing the criterion of "success," we should try to answer whether failure to meet that success was because of problems with the system or because of external forces. In both the Commune and the Civil War, there was not enough time to determine whether these societies would remain stable and self-sufficient, but by accounts they were managing. We don't know how long they could have lasted not because they crumbled from within, but because they came up against, in the first, the weight of the National Guard, and in the second, the combined weight of the Western capitalist-democracies, the Fascists, and the Bolsheviks.
Why did the dominant powers react so violently to movements that were doomed to peter out anyway? They feared their success and their appeal to their own populations. Do we blame the trampled flower for failing to grow, or do we blame the trampler? Do we prefer the tenacious but ugly weed, or the rose? Do we blame the people fighting against suffering and injustice for the suffering and injustice foisted upon them by the ruling class? The most intense suffering that has accompanied these and other implementations of communism were the result of state violence. That's not to say the revolutionaries were not guilty of their own excesses—they were—but those pale in comparison to what was directed at them. It may be that non-authoritarian attempts to institute communism or anarchist societies are inherently bad at war-making and aggressive expansion—a virtue, I think, but one that puts them at a disadvantage.
With regard to communism and anarchy we are in a worse position than a person in the 17th or 18th century yearning for representative democracy: at least they could look to ancient Greece. While there has been no occasion when a true communist state has arisen, there are moments and glimpses of what it would be like, the two examples I gave perhaps being the fullest. Others would be aspects of the obshchina or peasant communes in tsarist Russia, the commons in England, worker owned and managed enterprises in the US and abroad (Gar Alperovitz wrote a good book on this), cooperatives like Mondragon, and even the open and egalitarian aspects of the Internet, open source, and digital commons.
The mercantilist powers may have initiated imperialism, but capitalism was more than eager to assume its mantle. But I suppose that when Mark Twain and others were railing against imperialism ("I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land") it was because they were living in a mercantilist economy—in 1900. In a certain sense it should be obvious that capitalism had imperial ambitions: it required far more natural resources than feudalism or mercantilism so the rate of plunder had to be exponentiated.
As a final note, I think tribal que is wrong to insist that a communism requires a strong government to "run smoothly" since communism (not the transitional stage to it) dispenses with a government in favor of other modes of de-centralized organization. When people did try to implement communism through a strong government, it resulted in disaster.
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Oddly enough, yours is the reason usually given for why private ownership needs a government—a constant threat of force to "protect the minority of the opulent" from the redistributive tendencies of the masses. If you look historically at how capitalism was implement, that's the story.The middle-class's victory over the aristocrats necessarily involved taking whilom feudal property and transferring it to the state or other private individuals. It's almost exactly as you describe it. It required coercing people off their land, away from self-sufficient lives, and into dependency on wages. The direct producer, the worker, everyday "gives up the fruits of their labor" so that the owner can profit. If you oppose systems that have to be implemented and sustained by force, then you oppose capitalism.
Now, in the examples I gave, some property was wrested from the bourgeoisie, especially from the pro-Fascists in the case of Spain, but their claim to that property was seen to be as illegitimate as the aristocrat's right to his property. Even so, in the Commune, it was recognized that owners should be compensated for their property. In Barcelona and other cities, owners joined collectives of their volition. Take a more modern case like New Era Glass (I think it's called). They're not "communists" or "anarchists," but it is a company of workers who bought out the factory. That's one way to overturn the paradigm.
Communism—or more broadly, socialism—is about democratizing work—the thing most people spend most of their time doing. It seeks to expand upon the partial victory of democratizing politics to the economic and social realms. Rather than being a wage earner, the worker in a socialist system is an owner as much as everyone else. There are lots of ways compensation could be handled; there's no communist bylaw saying that everyone gets the same compensation; only that everyone deserves a good standard of living for their work.
The incentive of money I think clouds people's thinking. It's pretty obvious that people are incentivized by a lot of different things, and that money is kind of far down the list. We aspire to be exceptional to be in high esteem among our peers, to help others, to feel good about ourselves, to improve the lives of our children and communities, because we find the work intrinsically valuable.
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You may have noticed that I used the terms socialism, communism, and anarchism somewhat interchangeably. Socialism is the broader tradition advocating worker control. In some formulations, the state controls production on behalf of the workers. This would include Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism. Today we refer to these strands as "communism," but these were, at least in rhetoric, supposed to be transitional stages into the libertarian socialist societies.
In the more libertarian traditions, the workers directly control the means of production without a central governing body. Communism, mutualism, anarchism, some other -isms, have their differences and overlapping areas, but they're all branches of socialism, and each have their own subdivisions of thought. What we usually refer to as socialism today is capitalism with a welfare state.
Change the word "communism" in your description to "capitalism" and "state/gov't" to "company," and I think the paragraph still reads accurately. We're taught to accept a period of servitude whereafter we can ourselves become exploiters, but why would anyone want that arrangement, even if it were a reality, which it never has been for the vast majority of workers.
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gavin stephens That was pretty baroque, but I agree, with one exception: I don't think it's only professional historians who can or should attempt to uncover, establish, refine, and subtilize the truth. I'm not a historian, but I've doubted plenty of them. Maybe their sources seem flimsy, maybe their argument is incoherent, maybe their quotations appear mined/misused--any number of things can tip you off. Sometimes your hunch is right, other times not.
In a country like the US, where there is so much information available, almost anyone with enough free time can track down primary sources and learn to analyze them. Yes, we have to rely on secondary analysis, but we should try to confirm for ourselves those things that are of interest to us or that seem suspect.
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It doesn't mean I support his statement. It means that the phrase "tyranny of the majority" is a propagandistic term that has been used throughout history to discourage truly democratic forms of social organization and to disguise what is, in essence, a "tyranny of the minority," an oligarchy, a neo-aristocracy.
The point isn't that the rich shouldn't be protected by laws. The rich often exist above the law or can use their political influence to shape laws in such a way that protects them from punishment for immoral behavior. The Enlightenment ideal of the law was to remove the privileges of the aristocracy by creating a legal code that was not subject to the whims of a king but that applied to all equally. Unfortunately, that system never fully materialized. To take a recent case, look at Mnuchin and the fact that the California DA found his bank to have committed over a thousand violations—for which it was never prosecuted. Look at the Wall Street executives responsible for the crash, none of whom were charged. Look at Cheney and other members of the Bush administration or any president from the past 100 years—all of whom, if they were held to standard that we impose on the rest of the world, that we impose on the poor and middle class, would be guilty of war crimes. But because they are members of the elite in the most powerful country, they are praised and protected.
There is definitely a different penal standard for the rich. Moreover, the law exists largely to protect their property from what has always been seen as the redistributive tendency (the democratic tendency) of the so-called masses. "Tyranny of the majority" is just code for abolishing the steep inequalities between the haves and have-nots.
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+monte68x They believe the critique is of socialism, but it's really a critique of authoritarianism, something that is evidenced in the many attempts to critique, reform, or abolish the authoritarian aspects of capitalism. Perhaps authoritarianism v. libertarianism is a more natural opposition, or one that is easier to grasp, than the more complex opposition between economic systems like capitalism v. socialism, and that is why capitalism is largely unopposed while authoritarianism is almost universally decried: people just haven't learned to equate capitalism with authoritarianism. Meanwhile, socialism and authoritarianism have become virtually synonymous.
The thing I disagree with you on is the equal ability of those economic systems to be either authoritarian or libertarian. It seems to me that some economic systems are inherently more disposed to one or the other. Capitalism tends to be authoritarian (even in its more liberal expressions, that liberty is highly restricted to a class of the few), while socialism tends to be libertarian. When capitalism tends toward genuine libertarianism, it either highlights existing contradictions in the system or generates purely theoretical absurdities like anarcho-capitalism. When socialism tends toward authoritarianism, as it did during the dogmatic reigns of Stalin and Mao, it regresses, even by their own admission, to statism and capitalism or quasi-capitalism.
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@djfringe1 The remark about the conservative tendency to raise the issue of Hitler's vegetarianism, entirely as a cynical attack against vegetarianism, was not directed at you but was instead a general observation about how easy it is to vilify an individual's unorthodox lifestyle while ignoring the much larger social reform happening around it. Non-vegetarian conservatives (Steven Crowder for instance) have no problem refuting vegetarianism on the grounds of its tenuous association with Hitler, but are silent on Nazi animal rights reform - because by now virtually no one disagrees with at least the basic notion of animal rights, meaning that the "guilt by association" argument isn't taken seriously even by the people making it.
Lastly, history is not an objective activity; it is not merely a collection of facts. It is rather a social activity engaged in by humans with limited perspective. There is no division between history and interpretation. History is always precisely interpretation. Even the bare cataloguing of facts is interpretative since one must always decide which facts to include, how they were generated, how to order them, how to inscribe them, and so on - all of which, while appearing on the surface to be neutral, objective, disinterested, actually belie a historical moment with its own theories of history, information, interpretation.
All that aside, we can (and do) easily speak of sides in politics and ideology, even if their exact terms and contents can't be specified and are subject to drift.
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Grant Morrison, your point about focus on individuals is well-taken. It's pretty rare that the media turns its attention to systems of power and injustice, at least not the sort that can't be righted by a few reforms or the demotion of certain individuals. Problems are easy to swallow if it's just the work of individuals. They're also impossible to fix.
Perhaps the media's myopia is due in part to 1) the focus on news rather than context and 2) the emphasis on "objective" news without trying to analyze through some theory of how the world works (a theory about social and governmental systems work or ought to work), though of course even the absence of a theory is a theory, that of those in power.
I tend to think of JD and Young Turks as news commentary. Young Turks is doing some more reporting, but the bulk of their output is merely commentary and they don't apologize for it. But when people say they get their "news" from YT et al. it sounds to me like when people in the Bush era would get their "news" from Jon Stewart. I mean, it's not really news. It's commentary, it's criticism, it's satire. Which is okay. But the problem with getting news from those sources is that, while media criticism is important, and while it's important to get a different take on the "big" stories, you're kind of dealing with a poisoned well. You're starting from the position that the MSM has already laid out. They've decided the bounds of discourse, which is important to be aware of; but it's a very narrow framework. -
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Go look at Obama's campaign funding. It's a lot of Wall Street interests. Your OP was about bankers/Wall St. Then you said "they" called Obama a communist. I'm telling you, Wall Street paid for Obama's gargantuan campaigns. That's a well known fact. In 2008, his number 2 contributor was Goldman Sachs. Number four, JP Morgan. Number six, Citibank.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638
In 2011, donations from Wall Street and big banks made up 1/3 of his campaign contributions. "That percentage is up from the 20% of donations that came from Wall Street donors in 2008, and contradicts reports that a growing Wall Street animosity towards the Obama administration may jeopardize his re-election bid."
https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-responsible-for-one-third-of-obamas-campaign-funds-2011-7
If by "they" you mean the right, then fine, but you changed the subject. My point was that if Warren runs. financial interests are going to start pushing the commie narrative, something they didn't do with Obama because they knew they could buy him off and appeal to his bipartisan, technocratic sensibilities.
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@YeeLeeHaw For starters he supports maintaining military aid to Israel. He is anti-BDS. He supports a two state solution...but doesn't want to move the US embassy from Jerusalem. Not sure how that squares. He also doesn't support right of return to illegally settled lands. Like a lot of things about Yang, if you boil his policy down to a sound bite (supports a two state solution!), it sounds good, or at least tolerable. But dig a little deeper and you find some pretty abhorrent and/or uninformed or incoherent views.
And yes, the US has a role in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is a major supporter of Israel, sending billions in weapons and aid, which Yang wouldn't've curtailed. It has also been a negotiator between the two countries.
During 2020, Yang assumed this gracious, enlightened posture that the conflict had to be settled by Israelis and Palestinians themselves without American interference. But, oh, giving weapons to an Apartheid state, why wouldn't we do that?
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For instance, you can look in any medical dictionary and find something like the following for "immunity": "Protection from diseases, esp. from infectious diseases" (Taber's medical dictionary). So when the CDC changed the wording for vaccine from "immunity" to "protection," 😱 they chose between synonyms. One can imagine a decision like this being made because of all you whackos who insist immunity means a 100% magical shield against disease.
But do something you've never done: stop to think about it for a second. You have an immune system. That immune system does not protect you from every infection, nor from every reinfection. But you can still have an immune response to an infection, possibly preventing worse symptoms. Your immune system, in other words, is not perfect, but it offers you protection. In medicine, immunity is not and never has been absolute, full protection.
Vaccines are the same. They offer protection.
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@onenationunderground2360 Ivermectin has not been shown to have an effect (see the Cochrane review). HCQ has actually proven to do either nothing or, in some cases, make covid worse. Please do your research through credible sources, like medical journals, not biased right wing propaganda sites.
Moreover, we do give boosters for things like polio. The polio vaccine is four doses, three between 2-18 months, and a booster between 4 to 6 years. You've also likely gotten a few tetanus boosters, among others. Tdap is a booster for whooping cough.
To date, only those 65 and older or with weakened immune systems are authorized for a covid vaccine booster.
"Several studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including three on Friday, suggest that while efficacy against infection with the Delta variant seems to wane slightly over time, the vaccines hold steady against severe illness in all age groups. Only in older adults over 75 do the vaccines show some weakening in protection against hospitalization" (NYT).
While vaccine antibodies may wane, the body's response to the spike protein remains, conferring immunity.
It'll be interesting to see which talking point you hop to now after not addressing that you didn't understand what immunity means, didn't know the research on ivermectin (several major studies of which turned out to be fraudulent) and HCQ, and didn't know that we do give boosters for things like polio, MMR, tetanus, etc.
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One thing I noticed he did in his Maddow interview is that he slips in these validating/framework type statements in transit from one vague idea to another. These statements often took the form as casual theories of history that grounded and supported his more germane answers. So he said something about the Green New Deal, referenced FDR's New Deal, and then concluded that—amazingly—sometimes legislation and policy changes over time. Another time he used the social strife in the 70s to support the idea that governments sometimes need reform.
In other words, he takes a certain theory of history and uses that to make a totally banal conclusion sound more impressive and intellectual than it really is. But more than that, it seems clear that his notion of politics, history, and social progress is fairly conservative and top-down; and that's when he's not making outright errors or gross exaggerations (for instance, making it sound as though FDR had no idea what was going on until he got into office, which seems to be Buttigieg's plan).
I don't think the listener is supposed to actually pay attention to these kinds of statements; rather, they exist to establish his knowledge, credibility, and thoughtfulness. The problem is, if the listener does pay attention to what he's saying, it's plain that he doesn't really know what he's talking about.
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@Blueblackngold Lol a 10k socialist cheeseburger! I thought I'd heard ever stupid riposte to criticizing capitalist dogma.
Remember when drug prices for basic, old medicines skyrocketed overnight by thousands of percent for no reason under socialism (I thought we were talking about communism, but maybe they're the same to you)?
Oh wait, what? That happened under c-capitalism! It can't be! Prices aren't arbitrary! Sellers will only sell for what people are willing to pay! The boot I lick daily said so!
In fact, if one compares the price of things like healthcare in, eg Cuba (which is not perfect), to prices in the US, there's a night and day difference. In Cuba it costs $10-20 for treatments that in the US costs $10k plus. Those are real differences, not made up bullshit about 10k cheeseburgers, you fucking joke.
And guess what? People in the US routinely cannot pay those costs; they sink into debt, lose their houses, maybe even their lives. They have an absolute and imperative demand that capitalism preys upon.
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@tjw1861 "Some poor policy decisions." That little phrase is doing a hellavu lot of work.
Virtually everything on the Trump/GOP agenda comes from these ghouls, from blanket and virulent racism to literally stealing elections. They're the people who came up with the strategy of undermining mail in ballots. They're the ones who helped Bush steal the election. They're the ones who supported the Iraq War and the War on Terror.
These weren't "poor policy desicions." They were finely calculated, disastrous policies designed to undermine democracy, entrench American hegemony, and enrich the top 1%.
If you're watching them so carefully, you don't need me to tell you that they took in $39m from largely liberal donors - money that could've been spent on downballot races, covid relief, literally anything actually useful. Instead - as you already know - much of that money got funneled into their own private firms, which previously had had little income; had a staggering 35% overhead expenditure for an outfit that edits together cheap ads and trawls Twitter for memes; and has been significantly overpaying for things like "research services," a common money-laundering tactic. You're also aware that their overhead has been as high as 89%.
It is baffling to me how Americans can time and again sincerely believe that the best people to fix a mess are the very people responsible for it - whether it was Geithner and other Wall Street bankers during the crash, Biden fixing criminal justice reform and race relations, or LP somehow correcting everything they helped build in the modern conservative movement.
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It's also pretty rare for someone to falsely report, though it does happen. Would we react the same way when we find out that a small percentage of reports of theft, assault, hit and run, etc. are false? You already know the answer: no.
Right now, the exceptions are being treated as the rule. Sexual assault has different standards of proof because it's a different sort of crime, just as financial crimes and murder have their standards. Because there is often little physical evidence involved in sexual assault, and because the reality is that victims do not report immediately, we have to rely on things like patterns of abuse, corroboration, interviews, psychological evaluation, etc. That so many similar stories emerge from people who have had contact with the alleged abuser is in fact a kind of proof in these types of cases.
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@abelincoln7346 As happy as I am to see you embrace the anarcho-communist critique of compelled labor under threat of deprivation as a form of modern slavery, you aren't getting there through a rational, evidence-based approach. There've been lots of studies on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines—I've probably cited a few already—on top of the clinical trials they all had to pass. You may not LIKE what those studies have to say, but uh, like, facts don't care about your feelings or something.
On the other hand, there isn't quality evidence supporting ivermectin. The two most optimistic studies were both fraudulent. The remainder, when controlled for quality and risk of bias, as in the Cochrane review (which you should read), don't support prophylactic use of ivermectin. The largest and best study to date, the Together study, also could not find a significant benefit associated with ivermectin. You may not LIKE that the abundance of data fails to support ivermectin, because you've already decided it's a miracle cure that's being suppressed by big pharma and their puppet Fauci, but that's too bad. Pending other studies, like PRINCIPLE, that's the conclusion the best evidence leads us to.
I'll also state again that for all the problems with big pharma, and the elevation of profit over need generally, you can't conclude from those problems that therefore the vaccine is neither safe nor effective. One simply does not follow from the other.
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@krinka1458 You're actually making it into a better analogy. Yes, there are cynical actors, like insurance companies, who take advantage of beneficial practices for their own gain, but that doesn't negate the benefit of those practices. Seat belts do save lives. The vaccine does save lives even though we have a messed up economic and healthcare system which allows pharmaceutical and insurance companies to profit from the vaccine at the expense of many, particularly in the global south. The correct response is not to jettison life-saving practices, like seat belts or vaccines, but to push to reorganize these practices along decommodified, egalitarian, and cooperative lines.
Engaging in antisocial behavior, like refusing vaccination, should be understood to exclude one from social activities. Actions have consequences, and one can't violate a compact with social health while expecting the benefits of social life.
The fact that you think this is tyranny only demonstrates what a coddled life you've lived.
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@FCB09daBEST 1) Her "M4A" plan is much closer to Buttigieg's. She's using the neoliberal, laissez-faire watchword of "choice" in order to undercut a much needed program. Sure, we could have free at the point of service healthcare for everyone...but what about muh CHOICE!!
Come on. If anyone else had made that rhetorical maneuver—from healthcare as a right to healthcare as a market "choice"—I hope you'd see it for what it is: an effort to cripple, undermine, defund, and smother single payer under some sophomoric notion of patriotism.
2) As far as her Islamophobia, she's not Rush Limbaugh or something, but she's on the spectrum. She appropriated the right-wing talking point that Obama wasn't "saying Islamic extremism"—an islamophobic, bigoted whinge rooted in birtherism. Maybe she doesn't see it that way, but that's what she participated in. She voted against allowing Syrian refugees into the country. She was one of the few Democrats to welcome Netanyahu to his visit to Congress in 2015, a move widely seen as an effort to bolster his electability and undermine Obama. Tulsi has made no significant commitment to holding Israel accountable for its illegal encroachment on Palestine; just the same tired promises to ensure fair negotiations. Either Tulsi's not anywhere near as sophisticated when it comes to foreign policy as her fans think, or she has an agenda that aligns with Israel and against a nonviolent movement to end the occupation.
I know this next point is going to fall on deaf ears, because every Tulsi stan I've engaged with can only think in terms of slogans like "real progressive" and "end regime change," but Tulsi's foreign policy is not progressive. Period. She's said: "When it comes to regime change, I'm a dove; when it comes to terrorism, I'm a hawk." Tulsi's supporters think she's willing to end our forever wars, but all she seems willing to do is rearticulate those conflicts under counter-terrorism; hence her initial waffling on torture (which she's backed off of) and support for drone strikes, even after they've been proven to cause an unforgivable number of casualties.
The War on Terror, started under Reagan and ignited to a global scale by Bush, is precisely the kind of war that we need to end. Under President Tulsi, we could still be waging decades of destabilizing conflict against "extremist Islam" (which can mean whatever we want it to mean) without ever having the goal of "regime change." There's a reason why Tulsi focuses on that small aspect of American imperialism and not the bigger picture. Tulsi's framing of the conflict in Kashmir, between the aggressive far right Hindu nationalists and Muslim Pakistan as a "counter-terrorism" effort is a preview of how hollow her putatively "anti-interventionist" rhetoric can be.
https://www.thenation.com/article/tulsi-gabbard-president-foreign-islam/
3) I don't understand why you'd bring Obama and Harris up, because I could easily admit that they have or may have questionable ties to Modi. And? How does that exculpate Tulsi? For someone who's spent her career demanding that moderate Muslims condemn extremism, it's a little weird that she's done nothing to condemn what the Indian government has been doing.
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@FCB09daBEST 1) Tulsi's allows for not just supplemental but for duplicative care. If you don't understand the difference ce a.d why it's significant, look it up.
2) You said: "She currently doesn't support any drone strikes" and now you're saying, "I never got the idea that she doesn't." Which is it? I would like Bernie to be more left on a lot of things, but let's not pretend that Gabbard even approximates Sanders when it comes to progressive foreign policy. (Also, if you understood what "neoliberal" means you'd know it's beyond dumb to Michael—and even Sam—that). I know you're caught up in the rhetoric about regime change—but that's not progressive rhetoric. That doesn't represent any commitment to ending the War on Terror, which Tulsi is all for. What is she going to do when ISIS is gone? If ISIS is gone? With whatever takes its place? She has no plan beyond endless "surgical," "precision," "counter" this and that buzzword war.
3) Part of this is true, but it also reeks of Jimmy Dore nonsense. Tulsi doesn't get smeared half as much as you think she does, and even if she did, that would be no inherent indication of the virtue of her policies or positions. Trump gets smeared plenty, and I doubt you're scrambling to praise him. She and her supporters can't keep resting on the laurel that she quit for Bernie. There needs to be more substance there—instead, she's getting funding from a billionaire, reneged on M4A, supports the war on terror, etc. etc.
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@FCB09daBEST If her plan would leave no one behind, why do we need to have private, duplicative coverage, which is precisely what she and her campaign have said she favors: letting people keep their current health insurance. At best, that's a universal healthcare policy, not a single payer policy.
Why keep duplicative, private coverage around? It would just siphon off younger healthier people from the pool, crowd sicker, older people into the public option, straining the system, and causing people to call for market reforms. Which is precisely the neoliberal strategy of the past several decades, divide, defund, sell off. No thanks. We need a real M4A, single payer system.
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@FCB09daBEST No, I'm sorry, I can't let this go. They are not the same. If they were the same, Tulsi could just back Bernie's plan.
Bernie's genuine M4A plan prohibits duplicative care. It is a true single payer system. Private insurance can offer supplemental care—which amounts to plastic, aesthetic surgery, but nothing that is on par with the comprehensive, government plan. Do we understand the difference between supplemental and duplicative now?
Tulsi proposes (I haven't seen her post any details, but in broad strokes) to require every one to pay into and have access to a government plan while still being able to purchase private care that is EITHER duplicative or supplemental. The only way such a plan can work is if the cost—and therefore the quality—of the government plan is LESS than what Bernie is proposing (otherwise people would have no opportunity to purchase the duplicative care offered under the policy) thereby creating a two tier system not unlike what we have now, maybe a little better. But it is not Bernie's plan, it is not a Medicare for All plan, it is not single payer.
It is a half measure, means-testing by another name, and an almost textbook neoliberal strategy for how to create a failed program—as I said before: divide, defund, sell off.
What do you think is going to happen in a two tiered system when the people who can afford to buy duplicative and supplemental ("supplemental" in Tulsi's plan will almost certainly have greater scope than in Bernie's) insurance—what will happen when they decide they don't want to pay taxes for other people's care because they aren't really benefiting from the system? Really. What happens in that scenario?
Is Tulsi's plan really going to be as robust as Bernie's? On less money? With the private insurance companies around to pull money out of the system?
Why keep the private insurance companies around? Why? If nothing else, answer that. Why do they need to exist? They drain resources. Have high overhead. Restrict care. Drive pharmaceutical and hospital costs up. Why does Tulsi want to keep them around? Cuz America? Cuz freedom?
Here are some other problems with her approach. 1) It accepts the neoliberal (Biden, Delaney) and conservative notion that what people care about is their precious insurance when what people actually care about is their doctor and their hospital and being cared for. 2) It accepts that market choice is a valid method for rationing care.
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@vxxiii4160 The mistake with this kind of reasoning is that it assumes that some political entity, some economic arrangement called communism can exist alongside capitalism, for a long time now a hegemonic, global system.
The Marxist view has always been that societies are organic wholes, and they cannot be totally changed in a short period nor exist abstracted from their environment. Economic transformation is a process.
Capitalism didn't emerge fully formed from the calf of feudalism; and for centuries after it made its first tremulous steps in the world, it bore the traces of its ancestor.
The accusation of "abused to the point of mass murder" shouldn't be brushed aside, but it is a strange defense for the status quo given the incalculable lives blithely squandered, trampled, and suffocated in the name of capitalism's juggernaut, "progress."
That said, if you want a picture of what a society evolving toward communism can look like, there are examples, though not widely known to the public—Spain in the 30s, Chiapas under the Zapatistas, the AANES in Rojava.
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@tuberroot1112 There's a number of problems here.
1) The history of thalidomide. Thalidomide was not approved for use in the US when it was released. It was discovered to cause birth defects during trials.
2) Thalidomide isn't a vaccine, and its development can't be compared to the covid vaccines or any vaccine. Unlike thalidomide and other drugs, vaccines are administered infrequently and cleared by the body within a few weeks. They can't build up in the body over a long period of daily use, triggering side effects down the road. Allergic reactions and side effects manifest between 15 minutes and a few months, not years.
3) The vaccines all underwent successful phase 3 trials, with tens of thousands of participants. Since then, they've been closely monitored for emerging side effects, which have been rare, including myocarditis and blood clots in about 1 in 50k to 1 in 100k. Thalidomide is the reason drugs like the covid vaccine have to undergo trials to prove they're safe and effective.
4) A drug is technically experimental until it completes its trials. The fact that the FDA's usual vaccine approval process takes longer (about 1 year) than it does to issue an EUA is more a bureaucratic than a scientific way of determining whether a drug is or is not experimental. If a drug proves to be safe and effective, it's not experimental. It's proven.
5) The Pfizer vaccine is fully approved, so I'm guessing you accept that at least it is safe and effective.
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@tuberroot1112 "Getting full FDA approval for a vaccine is a time consuming process that can take up to 10 months under normal circumstances." Forbes
I'm not confounding anything. The vaccines went through Phase I, II, and III trials, which established their safety and efficacy. That's the entire point of having trials. The vaccine had to demonstrate that it was BOTH safe and effective.
You're not understanding that the side effects of a vaccine are quite different from a drug like thalidomide. According to Paul Goepfert, director of the Vaccine Research Clinic at University of Alabama at Birmingham,
"Vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body,” Goepfert said. “This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn’t expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine. [...] “The side effects that we see occur early on, and that’s it,” Goepfert said. “In virtually all cases, vaccine side effects are seen within the first two months after rollout.” ("Three things to know about the longterm side effects of covid vaccines," uab.edu).
Indeed, that's exactly what's happened. Rare but serious side effects and allergic reaction have all happened within minutes to weeks of taking the vaccine, not a year later.
The mRNA platform isn't "totally novel." It'd been in development for 30 years and had been through Phase II trials as a cancer vaccine. Moreover, the J&J vaccine uses a viral vector; it's not an mRNA vaccine.
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There's also the fact that any means-testing program is going to have to establish and maintain a bureaucratic structure to means-test applicants which is 1) going to cost money, perhaps more than it costs to send a few rich kids to school, and 2) will inevitably restrict the service further by creating another obstacle for the poor. We already have a lot of grants and scholarships for college that children of poor and working class families don't access because they don't have the institutional knowledge, often of how to know that the grants exist, let alone how to apply, fill out the forms, etc. You can try to individualize the problem and say, So what, that's their problem, or cite your own experience working the system. But we have data on this, and the data shows it's not an anecdotal problem. It's a systemic problem. If the purpose of those grants or similar programs is to enroll more people in school, and they're not able to fulfill that purpose because they themselves constitute an obstacle to enrollment, then they should be replaced by a system that increases access, and that's exactly what a universal free college tuition program does.
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EDIT: For some reason several sections of my post were deleted when I posted this reply, the bulk of my comment on PC culture and the quote in the cancel culture section.
Let's work through your post to reveal the poverty of thought behind it.
"the last three absolutely exist lol. Maybe not in the ways dishonest actors use them, but its literally impossible to argue otherwise"
Starting out your claim is that these phenomena exist, but not in the way they're generally understood because "dishonest actors" are distorting them. The problem with this is that I referred to those terms as they're generally understood, because that's usually how words work—we have a mutual agreement on roughly what words should mean and go from there—that is, unless there's a substantial reason why we should use them otherwise. But you chose, arbitrarily, to assert idiosyncratic definitions, and claimed I was wrong because I relied on the general definitions.
It gets worse.
"Identity politics - look at the Dems"
It gets worse because you immediately contradict yourself. At first, you said dishonest actors were distorting the real meaning of the terms, implying that is what I needed to pay attention to. In the case of identity politics, this would mean the Dems are dishonest actors distorting the real meaning. But hold on. You never talk about what that real meaning is. You take their dishonest representation to be the thing itself. Which is unfortunate because you almost had a real point. Identity politics was not fashioned by the Democratic party as a cudgel or program. It was created as both an academic and activist discourse in order to understand the circumstances and struggles of different groups. It's certainly fair to critique it, but that was its purpose and origin, not the Democrats who cynically trot out its specter in attenuated form. So this is the one case where you could maybe say that idpol is real and not merely the formulation of butthurt reactionaries, but in order to do that, you'd have to implode your little rant about the Democrats.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/#HistScop
"PC Culture - both parties are trying to make it illegal to criticize israel. It is objectively correct that israel is an authoritarian apartheid state"
What is perhaps harder to grasp, because it requires some facility with nuance, is that we do have issues with, for instance, how words are policed, whether it's overzealous HR departments trying to protect their corporate bosses, owners and managers preventing workers from discussing unionization, or your example, the conflation of any criticism of Israel with anti-semitism...but these aren't political correctness. Only the last has some claim to that (Finkelstein has written about his experience with "politically correct" Germans, I assume with the scare quotes) but I don't see why it should be framed through the lens of a reactionary, unhelpful, and analytically limp term.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/30/political-correctness-how-the-right-invented-phantom-enemy-donald-trump
http://www.ram-wan.net/restrepo/hall/some%20politically%20incorrect%20pathways.pdf
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-88-the-mythical-bygone-glory-days-of-free-speech
[Transcript: https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-88-the-mythical-bygone-glory-days-of-free-speech-8b2508d5e5de ]
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=political+correctness%2Ccancel+culture%2Cidentity+politics&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3
"Cancel culture - basically everything in politics that ISN'T identity politics these days."
Believe it or not, but citing "everything" isn't an example of anything. If I ask a theist for proof that God created the universe, and they simply point out that everything exists, I'm unlikely to swayed in my beliefs. And in this particular case, citing everything as an example only makes you look woefully uninformed. Are treaties cancel culture? Permits? Those are all part of "politics" today, and most days. And this is precisely why I insisted that these phenomena—the caricature of identity politics, pc culture, cancel culture (which is really just pc culture with a new coat of old paint)—are the creation of reactionary hysteria: because a number of liberals and progressives like you, even some on the left, have bought into the the right wing rhetoric and framing whether you acknowledge it or not. Cancel culture is everywhere. It's the scourge of freedom of speech. College campuses are safe spaces for weak degenerates. Why can't we just say the things we've always said without consequences? You think it's everywhere and a huge problem because the right constantly, incessantly complains about it. They're the real victims, after all. And maybe because of incredulity, maybe because of a sense of needing to be "fair and balanced," non-conservatives agree—not completely, but just enough.
Look at one of founding fathers of the anti-cancel culture hysteria, Jordan Peterson. He insisted vehemently that Canadian law was forcing him to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns under penalty of imprisonment. Ben Burgis and Matt McManus write,
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/jordan-peterson-capitalism-postmodernism-ideology/
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@allnighter2011 The problem that those procedural reforms don't actually do anything to improve police accountability or lessen police violence in poor and minority communities—body cams, sensitivity training, etc. At best, those reforms simply give police departments (which are highly decentralized, so reforms in one city would not apply to those in another) more rules and regulations to ignore as they apply laws which are themselves inherently unjust and target the less powerful in society.
What's better is that we focus on taking responsibilities from police and hand them off to others that are better capable of solving those social and individual problems. Maybe some random person with a gun isn't the best way to solve problems with drug addiction or domestic violence or children acting out or homelessness—yet that's exactly how our society, including people like Kyle, has been trained to think: problems must be solved by the threat of force or by force itself.
Defunding police means investing in pro-social methods for resolving social problems. Instead of cops carrying out the war on drugs, we have doctors and other health professionals providing safe places for injection, opportunities for rehab, and care for people who OD or suffer other ill effects of drug use. This is essentially the Portuguese model, which Kyle has mentioned before. That is defunding the police.
Instead of putting officers in schools, we fund schools adequately, provide good training and pay for teachers, lower class sizes, etc. We provide school lunches, daycare for working parents, tutors, and social workers and counsellors who can help improve the situation at home.
Instead of sending cops out to harass the homeless (something I see every single fucking day in my city), we provide housing for all, jobs programs, mental health services.
In other words, we try, as best we can, to solve the underlying problems, at least as much as we can within the capitalist system, which is itself THE underlying problem. Letting an armed gang roam our streets has not been an effective solution to any of these social problems. By design: the police merely manage and mediate the inequalities produced by the economic and political system.
Now that may mean that eventually we can defund the police to such an extent that the police no longer exists as we know it. Fine. It will have been replaced with organizations which are not, as Kyle thinks, simply the police by different names, but organizations whose purpose and methods are entirely different from the police. The goal of defunding the police is not to produce better policing but to diminish the need (real or not) for policing in the first place.
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@diffened Gravel and even Sanders. Neither have spotless antiwar records, but they're both markedly better and more consistent than Tulsi's. That's not to mention the droves of third party candidates with better anti-war positions.
But that's all beside the point. The claim Tulsi supporters make is that she is an "anti-war" or even, raising their pitch, an anti-imperialist candidate - full stop. This is a claim that should be able to stand up on its own, without appeals to relativism.
What her supporters should have recognized very early on is the way in which she branded her foreign policy position - anti regime change wars. That qualifier isn't an accident. Anti-war candidates or activists have no issue saying they're anti-war. They don't qualify it - anti regime change wars.
What the qualification obscures is the fact that Tulsi has a history of waffling over torture (her default acceptance of torture was not unlike her uncritical acceptance of that Project Veritas hit job - both belie a proclivity toward believing conservative framing), her support for Hindu nationalism and fascism (Modi), and her support for prosecuting the War on Terror (a permanent state of siege upon the Middle East, but just not bothering with the whole regime change thing). That's your "anti-war" candidate, who herself has said that on the WoT she's a "hawk." Her foreign policy is more than compatible with the rise of nationalism, fascist revanchism, and a modern approach to conflict, endless, diffuse, targeting ideology rather than state actors, fueling a new kind of Western hegemony.
"Congresswoman, are you an anti-imperialist"
"I'm a patriot."
A perfect encapsulation of who Tulsi is.
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@TonyFisherPuzzles So if a conservative, strongly pro-Israel rabbi says Corbyn is anti-Semitic, it must be true? Keep in mind that for conservatives, any criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism, which includes Corbyn's promise to withhold military aid because of Israel's illegal settlements.
At the same time, we've heard the conservative John Bercow say that he's never seen anything to suggest that Corbyn is anti-Semitic. He's known Corbyn for ages, and, now retired, he doesn't have an obvious political agenda. So whom are we to believe? The guy with a political, economic, and ideological axe to grind, or the one without?
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@thomasmcmenamin5436 Next time, maybe take the time it took to type that comment to just search the answer. You'll avoid looking like a complete tosser.
Glenn Beck: "It starts with carrots and french fries, over apples, and then it moves into butter, and soon it becomes a shove. Because if you won't do the right thing when you're being gently prodded, they, of course, will -- well, they'll have to become a little forceful. It's for your own good. There's more. We're not to the “friots” yet."
Rush Limbaugh: "it won't be long, after that call -- she talked about what food she's going to fix and how she's going to prepare it and where she's going to get it -- that woman will be reported to Michelle Obama. In the not-too-distant future, monitors assigned by the White House to listen to this show will have to report that woman because she is going to be considered a part of the obesity problem in the United States.”
____
"Republican lawmakers reportedly plan to demand the suspension of first lady Michelle Obama's school lunch program in order to avoid a government shutdown, an ultimatum that follows follows a sustained conservative media campaign against her anti-obesity efforts. According to The New York Times, congressional Republicans plan “to scale back Michelle Obama's school-lunch nutrition mandates and curtail some clean water regulations in a $1 trillion spending bill that would avert” a government shutdown on December 11. Republicans have staked their ground against a program the Times describes as an attempt to “improve school nutrition by reducing the sodium content and increasing the percentage of whole grains in school lunches.”
How Conservative Media's Attacks On Michelle Obama's Anti-Obesity Efforts May Lead To A Government Shutdown
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@bustamoveorelse Did you miss the "everything" part?
Let's take the 10k children stat, which inept right wingers (I know, I know, you're a rational centrist) love to parrot.
That number has nothing to do with the US. It relates to children in 3rd world countries like Yemen, Burkina Faso, and Venezuela, which were already food insecure. Their situation has a remedy - the lifting of sanctions and an international effort to increase aid and food aid to those areas. The Republicans have not made an issue of that. In fact, just before the pandemic, Trump proposed slashing US foreign aid by 21%.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-budget-foreign-exclusive/exclusive-trump-proposes-21-cut-in-u-s-foreign-aid-in-budget-proposal-officials-idUSKBN2030Q5
So we have a claim that 1) does not apply to the US and cannot therefore be adduced as evidence for or against a US lockdown, 2) was precipitated by decades of minimal if not rapacious economic policy and aid to vulnerable regions, and 3) has a clear solution that opponents of the lockdown refuse to apply even as they use real human misery as their phony ideological cudgel.
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meeg_2005 It's true. I think Chomsky once made a point about how Watergate and COINTELPRO were concurrent events, and the latter was by far the more egregious scandal, and yet "-gate" is the suffix we always default to when we want to dress up a controversy, Pizzagate, Nipplegate, Climategate, Russiagate, etc.
Try comparing the search results for "watergate" versus "cointelpro." You can do this for any major news outlet and come up with similar results. Here are the results for CNN, MSNBC, NYT, and Democracy Now!.
Watergate results: 638
https://www.cnn.com/search/?q=watergate
COINTELPRO results: 4
https://www.cnn.com/search/?size=10&q=cointelpro
Watergate results: 475
http://www.msnbc.com/search/watergate
COINTELPRO results: 3
http://www.msnbc.com/search/cointelpro
Watergate results: 26,923
https://www.nytimes.com/search/watergate?action=click&contentCollection®ion=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=Homepage
COINTEPRO results: 212
https://www.nytimes.com/search/cointelpro
Watergate results: 218
https://www.democracynow.org/search?utf8=✓&query=watergate
COINTELPRO results: 123
https://www.democracynow.org/search?utf8=✓&query=cointelpro
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@subversionz4919 It's so flawed that the hospitals themselves agree that they shouldn't refuse care.
It's so flawed that it's essentially what medical ethicist Daniel Wilker argued in a recent WaPo oped. He writes, "priority depends on how serious their condition is, how urgently they need help and how well they are likely to do if treated. What does not matter is culpability, blame, sin, cluelessness, ignorance or other personal feelings."
Like Wilker and you, I share the sense of frustration directed toward people who wilfully, ignorantly, and bumptiously defy sensible public health measures like vaccination. But that frustration can't be the foundation of policy.
If hospitals were to be flooded with patients suffering from complications related to obesity, smoking, or any other "personal choice," it would be okay to create a policy refusing care to them? Again, it's an absolutely psychotic proposal that contradicts the principles and ethics of the health profession.
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Like most establishment figures' positions on war and foreign policy, Biden's stance on the war in Yemen is not the "correct" position. It's better than Trump's, no doubt, but it falls short. Biden criticizes the Saudi's "conduct of the war in Yemen," not the notion of a waging a brutal, unnecessary war in the first place which, let's not forget, the Obama administration abetted while imposing certain restrictions and which was, even before Trump, causing one of the worst modern humanitarian crises and on the verge of causing the worst famine in decades. How does Biden's statement signal anything more than a return to the Obama era status quo in which the Saudi's are allowed their war so long as they "conduct" it in the proper manner?
This is the refrain heard over and over: this or that war was a mistake, it was costly, it wasn't executed correctly, etc. What you won't hear is that war is a moral failure and, except in situations of legitimate self-defense, always wrong. Biden ("Make America Moral Again") is not going to say that, but that is the truly correct position.
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3:50 To quote the late David Graeber,
'In today’s political discourse, “deregulation” is—like “reform”—almost invariably treated as a good thing. Deregulation means less bureaucratic meddling, and fewer rules and regulations stifling innovation and commerce. This usage puts those on the left-hand side of the political spectrum in an awkward position, since opposing deregulation—even, pointing out that it was an orgy of this very “deregulation” that led to the banking crisis of 2008—seems to imply a desire for more rules and
regulations, and therefore, more gray men in suits standing in the way of freedom and innovation and generally telling people what to do.
"But this debate is based on false premises. Let’s go back to banks. There’s no such thing as an “unregulated” bank. Nor could there be.
"So what are people actually referring to when they talk about “deregulation”? In
ordinary usage, the word seems to mean “changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.” In practice this can refer to almost anything. In the case of airlines or
telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition between midsize firms. In the case of banking, “deregulation” has usually meant exactly the opposite."
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"the best creative people are and have always been leftists"
I mean, yeah, there's a trend, but it's not absolute. Just off the top of my head, John Milton, Vladimir Nabokov, V.S. Naipaul, J.S Bach, T.S. Eliot, Carl Ruggles, Edward Elgar—all were various shades of conservative or reactionary and yet each made significant contributions to their art form.
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@IronJohn755 I'm not sure why you seemed to think that because I made a contrary point I must be a right-winger myself (I'm not). I'm just stating what I think is pretty obvious given a wide enough survey of evidence: great art is not the exclusive domain of leftists (which I tend to think of as anti-capitalist).
These terms, right and left, get really messy fast, especially when we're trying to treat them ahistorically. The right-left dichotomy emerges during the French Revolution, so perhaps it's not fair or accurate to apply those labels to people who lived before then. I think the notion of "progress" is just as fraught and subject to revision. Would Shakespeare have anything today with Trump? It's a pointless question. I mean, would Proudhon and Bakunin make it very far among the modern intersectional left? Probably not, at least not as they were.
There's also a lot of artists—like Wagner, Wilde, Berlioz, etc.—who are generally left (the first two being avowed socialists) but who envision politics primarily through its usefulness to art. They're sort of aesthetically political; and I bring that up because there were also quite a few artists who were willing to support reactionary and outright fascist governments (Stravinsky, Strauss, Mompou, Rodrigo) because it was expedient for their artistic vision.
I've never seen anything to suggest that Bach was an anti-monarchist or sought socio-political progress in his time. He was religiously devout. On the other hand, Elliot Gardner, quite strangely in my opinion, chides Bach for a certain contempt for authority. Like I said, it's not always easy to determine exactly where a historical figure should fall in today's political categories precisely because they had no experience with them. But in relation to his own time, I'm not aware of anything particularly progressive about Bach's political views or activities. If you are, I'd be interested to know.
Rachmaninov is another who was conservative not only politically but artistically, eschewing the avant-garde, jazz, and atonalism of his day. That's not a value judgement: it's a fact.
Tolstoy's kind of interesting because as a Christian Anarchist he was both incredibly conservative, as required by his personal (and idiosyncratic) religious beliefs, and he was repulsed by the rise of modern industrial society and could only find escape in the simplified past; and yet he was also probably one of the most progressive people of his time and place, an early supporter of the Ferrer School, a vegetarian, an opponent of private property and government rule.
We also have to acknowledge that to a certain degree we (posterity) may have a tendency to seek out art, or those things within art, of the past that reflect our own situation as it has progressed through history, so that it's not so much a question of social progressives being more inclined to produce better art as it is a function of the dominant culture flattering itself with artifacts that legitimize its ascendency. I'm not saying that's the whole truth, but I think that does play a role. Obviously the kind of art a society culls will reflect both its progressive history (its ascendency above barbarism) as well as those things it hardcodes as natural, conservative, and permanent.
Maybe I've clarified myself a little. Or made it worse.
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@everythingloveurlife4904 My point is that it's not black and white like you're making it out to be. If you're vaccinated you CAN spread it to others—it's possible—but first you have to get infected, and if you're vaccinated, you're much less likely to get sick in the first place. In other words, you have to look at the rates of transmission, and, unsurprisingly, an unvaccinated person is much more likely to get sick and spread the virus than a vaccinated person. Imagine if someone said, you can die in a car crash even if you wear a seat belt. It's true. You CAN. But you're much less likely to than if you didn't wear one. We're interested in the likelihood of an event, not its mere possibility.
We also know, according to studies out of Singapore, that vaccinated people stop shedding the virus faster than unvaccinated people.
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@mballer Oh wow, nice quote mine. Here you forgot the next part:
The news is encouraging, says Chaccour, who has been critical of ivermectin’s use in Latin America. But it’s not enough to give ivermectin wonder-drug status, he adds, particularly because Krolewiecki’s results have not yet been published, peer-reviewed or replicated.
Krolewiecki agrees. “It is a bit reckless for someone to say, from the studies we have completed, that we should prescribe this drug,” he says."
Again:
"Krolewiecki’s results have not yet been published, peer-reviewed or replicated."
"It is a bit reckless for someone to say, from the studies we have completed, that we should prescribe this drug."
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@thewayofthefist5666 First, if you're not aware of and able to recognize the context in which the the letter was published - ie pushback against Rowling for her transphobia - you just weren't paying attention. If the letter were written in the wake of David Wright's suspension and demotion following another dubious Project Veritas sting, informed readers would recognize the context, however vague the letter itself was. (Of course, no such high profile lament on "cancel culture" was written on Wright's behalf.)
I never said Rowling wrote it. Wikipedia's mentions Thomas Chatterton Williams "spearheading" it. If you don't know who TCW is, he's what we might call a liberal conservative in that he functions as a liberal who can comfortably espouse conservative opinion so that other liberals don't have to feel dirty about agreeing, as for instance when he decries rap music and "black culture," or in this case bemoans the left's attack against freeze peach.
One thing you mention is sort of correct, but not for the reason you think. The letter is incredibly vague. It mentions no specific circumstances. It could almost have been written 50 years ago or 50 years in the future and the reader could graft onto it whatever meaning they choose. It does a poor job - if it even could be said to attempt to - to discuss what "cancel culture" is, why it exists, and what to do about it.
What the letter does do is recite liberal (I use the word pejoratively) platitudes and point the finger at the left. Because the letter is so vague it both never has to publicly own up to its own impetus (which is, proximally, the hullabaloo over Rowling) nor the fact that "cancelling" has long been a feature of modern society, more often deployed by the right, as in the cases of Norman Finkelstein, David Wright, Linda Sarsour, and countless others. By failing to be specific, the letter creates an air of unfalsifiability: cancel culture could be anything, but never what it's shown not to be. It also avoids dealing with union-busting, anti-labor laws, nor the many attacks against leftists. In other words, it doesn't address it sociologically but as a political axe to grind against a marginal group. Its vagueness allows it to skirt the fact, amid its reactionary campus panic - that "silencing" on campuses is rare and that more left and liberal professors are silenced for their opinions, according to a Georgetown study. The omission of this data, while emphasizing the left as the newfound perpetrator of cancelling, reinforces the letter's status as a reactionary, classist document.
There are some legitimate concerns about strangers being able to trall through someone's history and do unnecessary damage to their life. There's also a problem with corporations and HR departments being able to weaponize "cancelling" or "wokeness" as a mere pretext to fire an employee. Because the letter is so vague and written from a PMC perspective, it cannot and does not seriously address those concerns. Ironically, while the right and center are silent on solutions, the left does have some possible answers, like implementing restorative justice techniques where possible instead of termination.
Signing off on the reactionary context and content of the letter is precisely a "gift to the right," even if Chomsky isn't capable of seeing that. It legitimizes them as victims and targets marginal voices within the public as enemies of society.
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@thewayofthefist5666 I'll say it for the umpteenth time, if you want to live in the real world, you can't just abstract moral values from material contexts. Context matters.
Let's say that a notable paper published in the early 2000s an open letter decrying the rise of Islamic extremism. It was written by a warhawk and extolled the virtues of democracy and criticized leftists for providing cover to terrorist ideologies. Conservatives co-signed, but so did liberal dupes like Thomas Friedman, Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Keller.
Someone of Noam's stature is asked to co-sign. He doesn't believe in the dogma and authoritarianism of Wahhabism. He likely thinks that, for its failings, capitalist democracy is preferable to theocratic monarchy. He may be aware that terrorism isn't unique to Islam, nor is it a particularly concerning phenomenon for most people in the world. And he probably disagrees with the ultimate goals of the authors and signatories.
It shouldn't be surprising that such a man declines to sign. And in fact, Chomsky spent the 00s criticizing people like Hitchens for a glaring double standard and harmful policies because when it comes to foreign policy Noam is able to discern that context matters when it comes to messaging. Elliot Abrahms criticizing Venezuela has very different real world implications and meanings than if a socialist does. All I'm asserting is that Chomsky should apply to the public discourse on speech the same standard he gives to foreign policy and to not legitimize hysterical, reactionary martyr myths.
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@thewayofthefist5666 I'm sorry you don't comprehend anything that we're discussing.
You say that Chomsky (and your) take on the issue isn't abstract; it's "direct" (which isn't the opposite of abstract, but we'll let that go). Then you say that freedom of speech should be protected period, which is an abstraction, you fucking idiot. It's a claim about a universal, transhistorical value regardless of material reality, historical context, or political consequences - that's an abstraction. As you even conceded, the letter was vague; it dealt with no specific (direct) events.
You're also committing the same sort of butthurt whinge many of the signers are guilty of - namely, mistaking "palpable" criticism for a sign of aggrieved dogmatists and cEnSoRsHiP.
Your assessment of the "argument" either reveals how disingenuous you are, or how stupid. The disagreement is not about David Frum or someone else co-signing: it's in the context and content of such a letter that would invite the likes of a David Frum, JK Rowling, or Bari Weiss to sign on. They are barometers, not the issues of contention. Unless you're silly enough to think that they would sign on to a letter that cites the data I described previously or that discusses the systems of capitalist suppression that preserve "speech" for the few.
This is not about "shaming" Chomsky. The fact that you can't discern criticism from shaming is highly revealing.
I also take it as revealing that you haven't been able to respond to a single point I've made but continue to dance around the meta of the topic.
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@donHooligan https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-13-17#toc5
However, the origin of the “circled-A” as an anarchist symbol is less clear. Many think that it started in the 1970s punk movement, but it goes back to a much earlier period. According to Peter Marshall, “[i]n 1964 a French group, Jeunesse Libertaire, gave new impetus to Proudhon’s slogan ‘Anarchy is Order’ by creating the circled-A a symbol which quickly proliferated throughout the world.” [Op. Cit., p. 445] This is not the earliest sighting of this symbol. On November 25 1956, at its foundation in Brussels, the Alliance Ouvriere Anarchiste (AOA) adopted this symbol. Going even further, a BBC documentary on the Spanish Civil War shows an anarchist militia member with a “circled-A” clearly on the back of his helmet. Other than this, there is little know about the “circled-A“s origin.
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"Because local standards of measurement were tied to practical needs, because they reflected particular cropping patterns and agricultural technology, because they varied with climate and ecology, because they were "an attribute of power and an instrument of asserting class privilege,” and because they were “at the center of bitter class struggle," they represented a mind-boggling problem for statecraft.
"...Even when it did not jeopardize state security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a pattern of either undershooting or overshooting fiscal targets.50 No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.
"...For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older, particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural progress. The academicians of the revolutionary republic, like the royal academicians before them, saw the meter as one of the intellectual instruments that would make France "revenue-rich, militarily potent, and easily administered."53 Common measures, it was supposed, would spur the grain trade, make land more productive (by permitting easier comparisons of price and productivity), and, not incidentally, lay the groundwork for a national tax code.54 But the reformers also had in mind a genuine cultural revolution."
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2:40 "If you're going to mandate that I have something, well then, provide it bitch. I pay you enough in taxes."
What does Kyle make of other types of insurance, like car and liability? You could argue that you don't have to engage in activities that require those things, but you could use the same argument for building or owning a home.
It's not just insurance either. Government regulation requires businesses to include features in their products all the time. For instance, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration mandates that automobile manufacturers include a host of systems and features like seatbelts and defoggers. As a consumer, you can't buy a car without these safety features, and the government does not provide them with your tax dollars. Are they therefore illegitimate? Do we want manufacturers cutting costs by jeopardizing public safety? Because that was the paradigm before the 60s.
It might be worth considering something like mandatory solar panels as less of a luxury item, a feature like cupholders or seat warmers, and more of a safety feature, not for the individual consumer, but for the planet.
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@underballbutter I think that besides a quantitative difference in change each is proposing (eg how much the wealth tax ought to be) there's a more subterranean, and for that reason more potent, qualitative difference. Bernie in 2016 sounded a lot like Warren in 2019, but 2020 Bernie has developed and expanded the progressive agenda. To you it may not seem like a big difference, but as MLK pointed out, the (white) moderate is keenly sensitive to the pace of change, and though they may recognize the need for change, it must be so gradual, delayed, negotiated, and defanged of any expedited justice as to preserve their essential comfort. Warren also represents an appeal to competence as the chief virtue of governance. And I think in running Warren us merely representing aspects of those forces - reluctant progress (just enough to stanch the possibility of insurrection) and manageralism. The fact that Warren and Sanders share policies obscures the fact that they are ideologically distinct. Perhaps that's where the confusion comes from. You're thinking she's essentially Bernie Sanders, so why run? But she knows, and her constituents know, and Bernie Sanders better fucking know, that she is no Bernie Sanders, so why wouldn't she run? She's in a different if parallel lane.
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@underballbutter First off, you need to knock off the misogynistic, hateful bullshit. Not only is that reflective of an entitled attitude, but it isn't going to do Sanders's side any favors.
Second of all, you can't think of Warren as Sanders-lite. They share certain priorities, but their ideological commitments are distinct, and without reading her mind, I'd guess that Warren believes Bernie's a fine messenger, but she's a better steward. That may just be it. But who knows, and what does it really matter? She doesn't owe you or me anything. Those Bernie supporters she "stole" may've just been more progressive anti-Clinton voters.
What really matters is that people organize, join unions, join protests, and, on the side, make a case why Bernie Sanders is better for an environment for and vision of working class movements than Warren. Her motives are immaterial.
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@tiioga8053 Yeah, I don't think anyone's arguing that the company should renege on its TOS or be unregulated. Again, I don't necessarily think these sites should become public utilities. If you want to argue the merits of that with someone, call into the show. But social media companies wouldn't be the first to start out as privately held and controlled companies and then be restructured as a public utility or nationalized. If anything, I think we're much more likely to see 1) the Internet become a public utility, since it's more akin to other sorts of PUs and is a telecommunications technology and 2) the classification of sites like Youtube (Google) and Facebook as monopolies and a strategy for breaking them up.
The only way I could see social media classified as a PU is if it is considered an essential public good. Ten years ago that would've been absurd, and maybe it still is in some ways, but almost everyone relies on and uses social media for information, sharing, news, networking—it's a service that is quasi-infrastructural, or like an infrastructure within an infrastructure (broadband, cable, etc.). In other words, social media is closer to a modern analogue for telephony rather than a print medium like newspapers. Social media is different from newspapers and magazines in terms of accessibility and sheer volume of content. Also, we weren't really in a position before where newspapers were dominated by a few corporations (that's since changed, though not to the same degree as social media) and where a monopoly needed to exist to control prices and access. But that's not really my position. If you want to debate someone, debate Michael.
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@christophermarang.3569 Have you read the decision?
Oh because I have! my sweet buttery muffin top.
And the notion that Castor granted Cosby immunity is very dubious. There was no written agreement beyond a press release which explicitly says that Castor reserves the right to revisit the case (he later gave multiple, contradictory readings of this sentence), which is why the trial court read the press release as a statement of prosecutorial discretion, not immunity.
The PSC decision also notes that,
"Mr. Castor testified that he could not recall any other case where he made this type of binding legal analysis in Montgomery County. He testified that in a half dozen cases during his tenure in the District Attorney’s office, someone would attempt to assert the Fifth Amendment in a preexisting civil case. The judge in that case would then call Mr. Castor to determine if he intended to prosecute the person asserting the privilege. He could confirm that he did not and the claim of privilege would be denied. Mr. Castor was unable to name a case in which this happened."
So without an unequivocal statement of immunity, and by not invoking the Fifth during discovery for a civil trial, Cosby and his lawyers left his immunity ambiguous enough to make this appeal. Had he invoked the Fifth, Castor would have had to resolve the issue one way or the other. But, contrary to what you're saying, there was no written "deal" for immunity even if that had been the intent.
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@NJ-wb1cz By your second comment I can tell you're quite unacquainted with the socialist tradition and labor history. That's okay. If you like, I can recommend some information.
For one, the notion that unions, affinity groups, and the like aren't repressed, receive no pushback, is historically illiterate in the extreme. It is far from the path of least resistance (apparently you think ticking a box in a voting booth is some form of resistance). Look at the Black Panther Party. That was a dual power organization engaged in meaningful direct action within their communities. Are you going to tell me the BPP received no pushback?
Even if constructing new social forms and institutions were somehow the path of least resistance, it would still be necessary if what we want is a world organized by producers because we need people to be able to self-organize democratically, not rely on electing rulers every few years.
Second, this prefigurative strategy of dual power is antithetical to utopian socialist projects which have always been criticized for pretending to remove participants from society while doing nothing to change society.
E: also, you put "radical" in quotes, which just tells me you didn't know what that term means in this context. A radical trade union differs from a trade union insofar as the latter exists merely to negotiate on workers' behalf within a capitalistic framework. These unions often get coopted and are rendered more or less inert, their leadership at times working against the interests of their members. Radical trade unions, like the CNT, were built on horizontal structures for the express purpose of militantly undermining capitalism while also bargaining for workers in the short term.
If there is a path of least resistance, it is precisely electoralism and reformism, which do not challenge the prevailing power structure.
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@NJ-wb1cz All you've demonstrated is that you either can't read or are acting in bad faith.
Using "little clubs" as a disphemism for worker controlled organizations is peak reactionary.
If there were a quote you could've used to pin down my position, this seems the most reasonable, which oddly enough you didn't include:
The policies you're laying out, like M4A, are not bad reforms. What I'm arguing against is an over reliance on reformism, incrementalism, and insurgent politicians to substitute for work that is better reserved for—indeed, can only be accomplished by—the organization of people to act on their own behalf. Even Sanders, who favors the incrementalist approach, has said that M4A will require the mass mobilization of the working class to push through Congress. What I'm saying is, why prematurely limit the horizon of action at a temporary political agenda? Why not instead build mass movements that can as a byproduct exert pressure on politicians but have as their main goal the development of autonomous, decentralized, democratic institutions which can provide the framework for a possible world post-state and post-government?
Answers to those questions would be nice.
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@InfoForYou8 The CNT was a trade union, not a political party. If you read accounts like Beevor's, Bookchin's, Mintz's or Danny Evans', it's clear that the moment the CNT leadership began to centralize and cooperate with the Popular Front—to be a participant in state repression—it began to undermine the legitimate and viable revolutionary aims of its members.
I'm not opposed to specific reforms, but what I've been at pains to express is that of course the interests of the state and capital are going to warp the good intentions of progressives, who will ultimately serve those interests against the interests of workers or be marginalized and expelled from the political class. This is a matter of history and present reality, and I've given a number of examples.
A fundamental principle of anarchism is that there must be a unity of means and ends. As a centralized, authoritarian structure, the state (and by proxy a liberal party) cannot be the means to effect socialist ends. That is what I meant by traditional politics being a dead end. If someone sees social democracy and the welfare state as ends in themselves, then I fundamentally disagree with their reactionary project.
Having a reformist party is not a bad thing if it is acknowledged as such and transcended. Moreover, it should not be the center of political action since even a reformist party will serve to coopt, moderate, disrupt, and defuse a workers' movement that it cannot control away from social revolution and toward more reformism.
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@jimwheeler6094 No, we shouldn't've "gone in," by which you mean "invade a non aggressive country in violation of international law." The Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden, an offer they'd also made after the embassy bombings in the 90s, but the US refused the terms—provide evidence of bin Laden's guilt and negotiate extradition to a third party.
One country cannot invade another because the latter refuses to extradite a suspect in a crime, let alone without proof and without established extradition agreements. We would never accept as legitimate, for instance, a Cuban attack on America because the US refused to extradite Luis Posada Carriles. Under international law, one country may attack another in self defense against an imminent threat, an ongoing armed attack by the state, or with UNSC authorization, none of which criteria were met by the US-UK bombing and subsequent invasion.
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@jimwheeler6094 The Taliban requested proof. The US refused. As late as 2003 or 2004 iirc the press was reporting that no definitive link had been made to bin Laden. In June of 2002, well after the invasion, Robert Mueller, then director of the FBI, confirmed that no positive link had been made. Instead, other members of al Qaeda, namely Khalid Sheik Mohammed, had been implicated.
The Taliban didn't defy the UNSC order insofar as they weren't legally bound to it. No extradition agreement existed between them and the US. The US didn't even recognize the sovereignty of Afghanistan under the Taliban. But even if they were legally bound, even if the US recognized Taliban rule and had made extradition agreements with them—even then there would have been no justification under international law for the US to invade Afghanistan. The US can't just invade (far weaker and browner) countries whenever they don't comply with its mandates. (Would the US be justified in invading Ecuador or the UK because neither had handed over Julian Assange? Of course not.)
The Taliban did, however, offer to try bin Laden in Afghanistan, which is customary when no extradition agreement exists between countries, or to set up a tribunal of third party countries, or to remand bin Laden to a third party. It was also a possibility that the Taliban would've handed bin Laden over to the ICJ in the 90s, but America was so insistent that only they should have custody of bin Laden that the offer was never officially made. Whether the Taliban would've followed through with its offers, and whether a conviction were possible with what little evidence the US possessed at the time is impossible to say because the US government twice passed on the opportunity, the second time favoring a flagrantly illegal bombing campaign and invasion.
To make it clear, the US has refused to extradite people it acknowledges are terrorists because they would face execution abroad. The US has not been invaded for that position nor for starting multiple wars in violation of article 51. Obviously a double standard exists.
Terrorists are sheltered and abetted by the first world with impunity.
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@jimwheeler6094 Apparently you have an issue with reading comprehension. Or maybe there's another reason you keep avoiding the main issue—America's invasion was in no way justified under international law.
I had said the the US had not acknowledged hard evidence of bin Laden's role in 9/11 as late as 2003. I was wrong. It was as late as 2006, per Rex Tomb of the FBI: "In the case of the 1998 United States Embassies' being bombed, bin Laden has been formally indicted and charged by a grand jury. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11." This even years after the December confession tape.
Obviously bin Laden was involved. The question is whether the US had enough evidence at the time to prove that, and the answer is no, not in September 2001, not in October 2002, and it was a fact that was openly and widely reported. We're talking about the same administration that invaded Iraq because they were absolutely certain Saddam had WMD. These people didn't have a lot of respect for evidence and due process. If they couldn't get their way, bomb, bomb, bomb.
Once we've seen that the US refused to provide evidence for a crime (which is what one normally does when making an allegation—provide evidence), the next question is whether the US was justified under international law in bombing and invading Afghanistan, and again the answer is a resounding no. No where in the UN charter is it stated that one country may, without UN authorization, invade another for failing to comply with its requests or even for itself breaching international law.
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@jimwheeler6094 Lmao when did you answer any of mine?
I repeat: under no circumstances can one nation attack another except in self-defense during an ongoing attack, to prevent an imminent threat (not merely a hypothesized one), or with UN approval. The US met none of these requirements.
It had legal procedures to follow. It could've submitted evidence to the Taliban or even to the UN. It did not, and all reporting indicates that at the time of the bombing and invasion none existed. It could have petitioned for UN authorization of coalition forces to extract bin Laden. It did not. Instead, the US followed the totally illegal and spurious Bush Doctrine. It could have appealed to the UN for sanctions or negotiated a handover to the ICJ, which, at least by December, the Taliban seemed open to. Again, we can't know whether those offers would've been executed because the US preferred to engage in the pre-eminent war crime, an attack on a non aggressive country.
But even if all legal avenues had been exhausted, the US still had no right to invade, causing regional instability, 20 years of occupation, the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Afghan people.
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@chomskyan4life If you were talking to someone who had never read Chomsky and considered him irrelevant, maybe this "president of the Chomsky fanclub" schtick you're doing would work.
But you're not. I've read a large chunk of what Chomsky's written, including his linguistic work. I've probably seen every interview he's done up to the late 00s. I have a lot of respect for Chomsky. Which is precisely why I don't revere and idolize him, treating his every utterance and opinion as though it were unalloyed truth.
It's almost as ridiculous and degrading to pretend that he's the most censored person in America. That's hysterical, and you've adduced no evidence to support it. Is he really more "censored" (you seem to have a very vague notion of what that means) than Mike Davis? Than Angela Davis? Than Michael Albert? Than Michael Parenti? Than Norman Finkelstein? Than Mumia Abu-Jamal? Than Chelsea Manning or Ed Snowden? None of these people, excepting the last two, to my knowledge have appeared on network TV, at least not as often as Chomsky. Most are not published by mainstream publishers. Some have and are being actively persecuted by the state.
What would be Chomsky's response if you wrote to him and said he was the most censored person in modern US history? What would he say if you argued that he was more persecuted, censored, and ignored than Mumia, Fred Hampton, Kwame Ture, Snowden, Finkelstein, or any number of dissidents and activists?
It's nice that you like Chomsky. But you need to expand your horizons, grow up, and stop idolizing another human being.
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@jayctacohut It's not my "belief." You're not looking at the data critically and trying to understand what the numbers mean or the context they exist in.
According to Christian Yates, Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Biology, University of Bath, to cite just one person,
"More vaccinated people are dying of COVID than unvaccinated people, according to a recent report from Public Health England (PHE)...At first glance, this may seem alarming, but it is exactly as would be expected.
"An unvaccinated 70-year-old might be 32 times more likely to die of COVID than an unvaccinated 35-year-old. This dramatic variation of the risk profile with age means that even excellent vaccines don’t reduce the risk of death for older people to below the risk for some younger demographics.
"PHE data suggests that being double vaccinated reduces the risk of being hospitalized with the now-dominant delta variant by around 96%. Even conservatively assuming the vaccines are no more effective at preventing death than hospitalization (actually they are likely to be more effective at preventing death) this means the risk of death for double vaccinated people has been cut to less than one-twentieth of the value for unvaccinated people with the same underlying risk profile."
He's responding to a carbon copy of the false claim you're making, but unfortunately, for the free thinkers who've completely liberated their brains from their skulls, this kind of misinformation refuses to die.
If you look at Table 5, you'll notice that the vaccinated number is skewed by the >50 category. I've already explained why this might be the case. But for the <50 category, the opposite is true. Way more unvaccinated people died. That throws a serious wrench in your theory.
When are you going to get out of your little bubble and do some actual thinking instead of just talking about it, posturing, and cherry picking data you don't understand?
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@jayctacohut That would only be true if the vaccine was the, or even a, cause of death, which of course it isn't. In reality, the vaccine is preventing more death. Your mistake is that you're looking at one number from one report, covering a few months, without trying to understand what that number represents and, as important, what it doesn't tell us.
For instance, since those 50 and older were the first to get the vaccine, and a higher percentage of them are vaccinated, it makes perfect sense for more deaths to be present in that group. If 100% of people are vaccinated, 100% of covid deaths will be vaccinated. That by itself tells us nothing about vaccine effectiveness. Generally, the more a population is vaccinated, the greater will be the percentage of vaccinated hospitalizations and deaths.
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So your complaint is that the people you agree with took over a term and then made it their own? While Marxism is not coextensive with big S Socialism, it is part of the socialist tradition and critique. That's a historical fact. Marx and Engels were socialists. They participated in socialist organizations. Those are also indisputable facts. Political labels can be fraught, especially in America, where no Republican is loathe to remind us that they are the party of Lincoln, despite bearing virtually no resemblance to the early Republican party. It is often expedient to use the common meanings of labels, but it can be important to resurrect their original meaning.
Socialism was never a unified ideology—it encompassed utopian socialists, historical materialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists. Eventually one branch of socialists thought that, rather than overthrowing capital, it would be a better idea to get elected into office, push some reforms, and assume that in the event that capitalism wouldn't destroy itself (or the world; increasingly likely) maybe a mix of the two would be okay. Those are the Social Democrats, whose legacy we see in the welfare states of Europe. They are the least socialist of the socialists. The radical tradition of Marx has a much better claim to the word "socialism" than that fraud, Social Democracy.
Despite the assertions of Lenin and Stalin etc. etc. it's not clear to me that the USSR was "Marxist" in any particular way. Marxism is a critique of capitalism; it isn't a prescription for the structure of socialist society. The closest Marx came to providing any kind of theory of socialism is a few scattered remarks about how to transform the existing (19th century) society into socialism, and his one significant contribution there is the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," an idea the Soviets abandoned almost instantly in all but rhetoric. The single most Marxist thing I find in the actual practices of the USSR, is the Stalin-era assertion that all societies must pass through stages of economic development, which is why the Stalinists deplored left communism, deplored peasant movements, and advocated in many instances—China, Vietnam, etc.—aiding pro-nationalist, pro-capital, anti-colonial insurgents.
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@theamazingautist2363 We should abolish prisons and move toward a restorative justice scheme of dealing with conflict and crime.
I think the issue with the death penalty is not that it makes society no better than the killer: it's that it makes society worse. A person may kill for a variety of reasons, crimes of passion, personal gain, derangement, but the state kills while, allegedly, operating from a rational position, with no external coercion. In the criminal code, premeditated murder carries the harshest penalty, and this is the kind of murder the state reserves for itself to perpetrate, as it is the wont of any authority to exempt itself from certain of its laws. We should not allow the state, a giant, fallible apparatus of immense power, to have the ability to kill citizens it deems unworthy.
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@janvanruth3485 I don't know what vitamin salesman you got your stats from, but they're not remotely accurate. They're not real numbers based on actual data.
People who are vaccinated but who are still at greater risk of infection include the elderly, the seriously ill, and people who're constantly exposed to high viral loads—not 83% of all vaccinated people, as you erroneously stated.
Studies have shown that the unvaccinated are 29 times as likely to end up in the hospital.
Ivermectin has not been shown to have an antiviral effect in humans. The dosage required to do so, if it could be done, well exceeds the safe limit. Anti-vaxxers buying up horse dewormer from the vet are using highly concentrated formulations, with toxic effects, like shitting out their intestinal lining.
A study in Nature found: "As noted, the activity of ivermectin in cell culture has not reproduced in mouse infection models against many of the viruses and has not been clinically proven either, in spite of ivermectin being available globally. This is likely related to the pharmacokinetics and therapeutic safety window for ivermectin. The blood levels of ivermectin at safe therapeutic doses are in the 20–80 ng/ml range [44], while the activity against SARS-CoV2 in cell culture is in the microgram range."
In particular, the study notes that ivermectin had an antiviral effect on SARS-COV-2 in vitro (ie in a petri dish) at 5 micrograms, far above the safe nanograms range for humans. You could get an antiviral effect from the right concentration of bleach in a petri dish; that doesn't mean it's a viable remedy against the virus. Don't ingest bleach. Don't ingest ivermectin to treat anything other than parasites. Concentrations that are safe for humans will likely have no effect on the virus.
Meanwhile, the vaccine has proven safe for the overwhelming majority of people.
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@markpostgate2551 "In vitro" refers to studies that take place in test tubes, petri dishes, or otherwise outside of human patients. Lee used an example to explain how what happens in vitro might not necessarily translate to the human body.
"I can increase the concentration of sodium chloride (table salt) by 50% to my tissue culture cells and show inhibition of most viruses," Lee said. "But I don't go asking people to eat as much salty food as possible to combat virus infections, much less SARS-CoV-2."
Lee added that hoping ivermectin works based on "in vitro efficacy studies" is "magical thinking."
"Do I know for sure whether it will NOT work in vivo? No," Lee said. "But if it is shown to work in rigorously controlled clinical trials (which is ethically indefensible these days), then its mechanism of action has nothing to do with the in vitro studies that the trial was based on in the first place."
In the literature, Lee said, "you will hear about [terms like] 'IC50' or 'EC50' – that is, what is the concentration of drug that will inhibit 50% of the virus replication." Lee explained that the level of drug concentration needed to stop replication in the body "simply cannot be achieved."
"The concentration of drug required to inhibit 90% of virus replication in the body – a minimal standard when it comes to antiviral drug action – simply cannot be achieved based on the known pharmacology of the drug," Lee added in a follow-up interview.
"I understand why low and middle income countries hold so many trials in the hopes that ivermectin works — it's cheap, it has been around for decades," and is reputed to have minimal side effects, Lee said, noting that ivermectin's side effects are often more prominent than promised. "But to extrapolate from how much drug is needed to work in the test tube to how much it is required to work in a human being against the virus makes these trials and all the meta-reviews published less than worthless – it's dangerous."
"Is there any evidence ivermectin can treat COVID-19? We analyzed the prominent scientific studies," Salon
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@reptomicus Here's Gore on Bush's foreign policy.
“President Bush deserves tremendous credit for the way he has led the nation in a highly successful opening counter-attack in the war against terror.”
“Since the State of the Union, there has been much discussion of whether Iraq, Iran and North Korea truly constitute an ‘Axis of Evil.’ As far as I’m concerned, there really is something to be said for occasionally putting diplomacy aside and laying one’s cards on the table. There is value in calling evil by its name. …”
“[T]here are still governments that could bring us great harm. And there is a clear case that one of these governments in particular represents a virulent threat in a class by itself: Iraq. As far as I am concerned, a final reckoning with that government should be on the table. To my way of thinking, the real question is not the principle of the thing, but of making sure that this time we will finish the matter on our terms.”
“In 1991, I crossed party lines and supported the use of force against Saddam Hussein, but he was allowed to survive his defeat as the result of a calculation we all had reason to deeply regret for the ensuing decade. And we still do.”
“The question remains—what next? Is Iran under the hard-liners less of a proliferation threat than Iraq? Or less involved with terrorism? If anything, Iran is at this moment a much more dangerous challenge in each area than Iraq."
In its evil, Iraq belonged in a class by itself, according to Gore. In Cobra II, Michael Gordon (himself an early cheerleader for the war, with Judith Miller), Iraq was actually chosen because it was the weakest and could be made an example of.
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It still astonishes me that some people think that people invent and create because of all the money they (will) get paid. Michael Albert has this test he does in some of his talks. He'll pick two people from the audience to roleplay.
One of the people is a high school graduate who goes straight to working in the coal mines and earns $60,000 a year.
The other person goes through all the necessary medical training to become a world-renowned surgeon—years and years of study and practice. Very difficult. But also very rewarding. The surgeon makes $300,000 a year.
The question is, if you're the surgeon, how low do I have to make your salary for you want to take the coal miner's job? $200,000? $100,000? I think everyone would still prefer being a surgeon. The skill, the prestige, the healthy lungs. What about $80,000? $70,000? Now we're at $60,000, the same pay as the coal miner. Maybe for a second you think, to hell will all the hard work, I'll just take the coal miner's job. But would you really? Obviously a job is about more than the pay; that's why we still have grade school teachers. So how low do I have to lower your pay to make you change jobs? And for most, it's around the point at which it becomes impossible to get by financially.
The lesson of this little test is that money is actually a rather poor incentive, and that other things—self-pride, curiosity, the respect of the community, personal fulfillment, doing good for others—are actually much stronger. There's even some sociological research to support this. Money is good at motivating people to do tedious work but poor or even detrimental when it comes to incentivizing creativity.
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@capttrips1523 People with education and expertise do benefit society. Again, for the deaf, that's why we have free public schools. Over time, as society has advanced, we've increased the number of years a person needs to be in school to get a basic education. Now, high school is no longer the standard; college is.
It's very odd that you think performing a public service deserves no remuneration. Of course people who provide for and benefit their communities should be compensated fairly and looked after. That goes for doctors and architects; that goes for teachers and cooks and grocery store clerks and everyone else.
Should we make high school for profit? We could rationalize it with the same logic you're using.
The public services you listed aren't all that different from the ways socially provided college benefit the community at large. Underlying your criticism is, I think, the market-based assumption that one should only pay for what benefits them.
I use roads, so it makes sense that my taxes should pay for roads. That's your argument. But of course I don't use all roads. I only use a few of the many thousands in my county and state. Why do I have to pay for all of them? Because the society as a whole needs those roads to operate—to deliver goods, to convey to work and home people whose services I may need, and if I don't need them, someone else will, in a complex web of mutual dependence.
I'm not the direct beneficiary of someone's math or art or education degree, but they contribute to the general raising and reproduction of society. The point is that, like the roads, someone depends on their having the requisite expertise and knowledge afforded by their education, and this constitutes a social good. In a more vulgar sense, college graduates also tend to make more money and pay higher taxes, meaning that the individual "investment" in a basic, monetary regard has a return to society, some of which ought to be the furtherance of education for others.
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"forced integration is just as bad as forced segregation."
It really isn't. Requiring schools to serve white and black children was definitely NOT worse than black children being denied a equitable education with their peers. Having black people eat at the same lunch counter as whites was NOT worse than denying blacks service. Anyone who gets their feelings hurt because they have to share air with people of other races can promptly go fuck themselves, and that goes for their apologists, too.
"That gay couple could have went elsewhere but didn't"
Why do people feel vindicated saying, "Maybe that gay couple was discriminated against, but they could have gone elsewhere," as if it's their responsibility, as consumers, to navigate their way through discriminatory practices, as if non-discriminatory behavior were itself a commodity to be sought out, like a half-off sale or buy one get one free? By the way, this logic seldom gets applied to the other side. No one says that if Jack Phillips wasn't able to provide his services to all people as required by Colorado law then HE should have done something else, something that did not make such extraordinary claims on his moral compass. But somehow, strangely, wonder why, the onus for moral behavior redounds upon the people who are discriminated against. The logic of "Don't like it; go somewhere else" can apply to either party, and so it's not really helpful at all.
Social problems aren't going to be solved—perhaps never have been solved—by some correct distribution of people. It's the solution that always seems like the best and easiest but is always the most utopian, far-fetched, and in the end unhelpful. Look at how people like Lincoln approached slavery before the Civil War. The best thing to do was to deport the slaves and have them live in their own colony in Africa; then America could wipe its hands of black people entirely. That would have been a monumental undertaking, and one that had no moral vision; it was by design an abdication of moral vision. The real solution, the one that seemed impossible but became imminent, was the integration of former slaves and their descendants into society, an ongoing project. Perhaps there are parallels also to the current discourse on immigration, with one side, the side of President Trump, calling for the mass deportation of millions of immigrants to their proper place, which undoubtedly would not only create huge problems for the US financially, but also for all the people being deported, local economies in the US that have suddenly had their workforce reduced, and for countries receiving all these deportees. You can't wish problems away, or pass them along to the next person; they have to be confronted, synthesized, transformed.
"the fascist route"
Yes, one remembers well the fascists' love for...the gays. You know, those pillars of "traditional modes of being." Can we all collectively agree not to take seriously anyone who uses "fascist" as a slur for "stuff the gubment does"? Please do everyone a favor and actually learn what that word means. If not for the "fascist route" of "forced integration" (which has the same fish-smell as "reverse racism"), what are we supposed to do? Wait around, laissez-faire this bitch, maybe eventually bigoted people will humanize themselves, or, hey! why not allow the market to crack its knuckles and work some magic? In a case like this, the failure to produce any solution is a vote for the status quo, and that's what you're offering. Several states are either contemplating or have already put in place laws permitting the refusal of service to homosexuals for religious reasons—that's really precious isn't it: religious reasons. We know the Troglodytes feel emboldened by Trump; they scamper out of their dens to find a world that wants to accommodate them.
"If every business is discriminating then sure, it is necessary to enforce anti-discrimination laws. But that is not happening"
That not how laws work. You can't decide to enforce laws only because more than x number of people are violating them. A company's polluting? Well heck, we can't do anything if there aren't 2,000 more companies polluting, too! Someone committed murder in your city? Sorry, we can't do anything unless every other person is a murderer, including me—BANG! Your granny was abused in her old folks home? Doesn't matter: we haven't received complaints from all the old people. The car dealer sold you a....I think you get the point.
"You would be hard pressed to find businesses turning away people for being gay or black or whatever."
You might be. Because you don't want to look. How about trying to find some information on housing discrimination, to start.
Or how about these cases: https://www.eater.com/2015/4/1/8325219/indiana-pizza-parlor-public-deny-service-lgbt-gay-law-discrimination
https://www.outsports.com/2015/3/27/8303925/christian-indiana-business-gay-refuse-service
That took me 1 search and 10 seconds. Hard pressed indeed.
And I wonder why you don't see more businesses overtly turning away black people. I mean, it's not like we've had laws against that for decades. Right?
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@thursdayaf22 "Business bolstered by government is not libertarian."
Sometimes ideology in theory is different from ideology in action. In theory, libertarianism wants small government (a highly dubious term). In theory, business needs the government to secure trade, land, print money, provide a stable economy, provide a military for defense, etc., so libertarianism in action ends up falling well short of its intention. Moreover, what I said was that "business bolstered by government" is the norm for capitalism and that a capitalism evacuated of a central governmental authority could either reconstitute something like that vanished government or create a situation in which the most powerful corporations divide up land, resources, and power for themselves.
Mises: "It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization."
The two most visible figures within libertarianism are Rand Paul and Ron Paul, both ardent fans of Ayn Rand. In her influence and her ideas, Rand was thoroughly a libertarian, whatever she may have said otherwise. Lots of thinkers, artists, etc. reject labels that nonetheless fit them well enough.
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Trump's culpability should be a separate issue. Asking "what about..." can be an important step in recognizing what the media chooses to prioritize and be outraged about and how they craft their narrative. It can reveal hypocrisy and bias.
One can point to the many instances of the US meddling in elections, deposing leaders, etc. not as excuse for anything Russia is alleged to've done, but to show how the media and politicians select, omit, and bend facts to fit their corporate, pro-war agenda. One can also point to the many instances of so-called fake news that existed before Trumpism and that had far greater consequences, things like the Gulf of Tonkin (lie), Iraq WMD (lie), the NSA is not collecting Americans' data (lie) without condoning or forgetting anything Trump has done and said. But we can ask, was the outrage and coverage commensurate with the injustice? And no, not even close.
If you want to deflate Trump's "whataboutism"—you'll never disarm it completely because he and his close followers don't operate based on principles—there's a simple thing the media, journalists, and politicians can do: take crimes and injustices seriously, regardless of who commits them. When Bush commits war crimes, charge him with war crimes. When James Clapper lies in front of Congress about data collection, charge him with perjury. Don't treat someone like Henry Kissinger as a foreign policy guru and a mentor; treat him as a pariah. When Bush assassinates with drones, condemn it; when Obama assassinates with drones, condemn it; when Trump assassinates with drones, condemn it. These are just moral truisms.
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@Nobu Nee You might actually want to read the case report before citing a number you saw on boomer social media, because it doesn't support your point.
You're talking about a single county where presumably 10k+ attended several large events, and there were around 300 breakthrough cases. As the study points out, when more people are vaccinated, it's expected that a larger proportion of infections will occur among the vaccinated.
So the 74% looks much more alarming when you take it out of context. Massachusetts has a 63% vaccination rate.
To prevent breakthrough events like what happened in Barnstable, the CDC is recommending masking for everyone in areas where there are surges. This isn't surprising. They're not dismissing vaccine effectiveness based on this one period, in one state, in one county, because that'd be like dismissing seatbelts because occasionally people still die in really bad crashes even when they wear one.
Moreover, if you look at national data, or even just data for Massachusetts, new cases among the vaccinated make up less than 1%. The overwhelming number of new cases are among the unvaccinated. Please apply a little critical reason the next time your stupid friends send you a link.
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@Arnold Frackenmeyer
Reuters: "A similar narrative is replicated in a TikTok video here . “Receiving the COVID-19 vaccine reduces your risk at most 1.3%”, the women says to the camera around timestamp 00:33. “Why have we been hearing this vaccine has a 95% efficacy rate? Simple, they lied to you.”
The posts erroneously claim the article was a “peer reviewed study”, when it was actually a commentary by Piero Olliaro, Els Torreele and Michel Vaillant on April 20, featured in the Lancet Microbe here .
When asked about the claim, Olliaro, professor of poverty related infectious diseases at the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health of Oxford University ( here ) told Reuters via email it was “extremely disappointing to see how information can be twisted.” He also said, “Bottom line: these vaccines are good public health interventions,” and added that in the commentary, “We do not say vaccines do not work.”
“Let’s say a study enrolled 20,000 patients into the control group and 20,000 in the vaccine group. In that study, 200 people in the control group got sick and 0 people in the vaccine group got sick. Even though the vaccine efficacy would be a whopping 100%, the ARR would show that vaccines reduce the absolute risk by just 1% (200/20,000= 1%). For the ARR to increase to 20% in our example study with a vaccine with 100% efficacy, 4,000 of the 20,000 people in the control group would have to get sick (4,000/20,000= 20%).”
Natalie E. Dean, assistant professor of Biostatistics at the University of Florida, understood why the ARR numbers might have confused users on social media and explained why the RRR is the “usual scale” considered by the medical community when talking about vaccine efficacy.
“Because (the ARR) is a much lower number, it feels like it is saying that the other number (RRR) isn’t true,” but this is not accurate, “they are both capturing some aspect of reality, just measuring it in a different way,” she told Reuters via telephone.
Vaccine efficacy, expressed as the RRR means the vaccine will reduce the risk of infection by that reported percentage irrespective of the transmission setting. “It is more meaningful,” she said.
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@gabrielle-d1b Obviously the blanket immunity stems from the need to expedite the vaccine. In exchange for prioritizing the covid vaccine, drug makers wanted reassurance that if something did go wrong, they wouldn't be held liable. I can understand why it was done, but I don't personally agree with it. Granting immunity to drug makers is almost unheard of in normal circumstances.
That said, the vaccines have proven to be safe and effective. While trials were expedited and EUA invoked, there were 6 months of tests with thousands of people. Side effects to vaccines normally occur within the first 15 minutes to the first 4 weeks after injection. No longterm effects have been apparent, other than being immunized. These vaccines have been scrutinized and are constantly being monitored.
The side effects you mention range from injection site soreness, chills, or fatigue to very rare side effects like myocarditis or blood clots. The former are minor and pass within a few days at the most. They're typical of other vaccines.
Myocarditis appears at a rate of 0.0002% post-vaccination, which is much lower than the rate of myocarditis in people diagnosed with covid, and in most all cases, patients fully recover.
AstraZeneca found that 8.1 in 1 million people will experience a blood clot after the first dose and 2.3 in 1 million after the second. These are serious but treatable side effects and are very rare.
Every medication carries side effects and risks. In the case of the covid vaccine, the risks are very small for most people, and the risk of longterm complications from covid much higher.
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@goldwater1984 The fact is that there isn't anything special about me, and I don't know everything. The problem is that you're being willfully ignorant, spouting lies and misinformation that either take two seconds to debunk or which are contradicted by the very sources you cite.
You're the one who thinks they're a know-it-all even though you clearly are too lazy to do the bare minimum of reading and critical thinking, instead choosing to credulously regurgitate lies you saw on social media. I don't think I know it all, so I actually have to query, read, evaluate, and try to understand something first. When I cite something, I actually read past the headline to make sure the content says what I claim it says. You should do the same.
When dealing with a topic I'm not trained in, I do the sensible thing and defer, at least provisionally, to the consensus of expert opinion, research, and theory. This is really elementary stuff you should've picked up in high school or college.
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@doughesson You're making the assumption that because the outbreak occurred in Wuhan that it originated in Wuhan, and if it originated in Wuhan, it must've come from the lab.
But, as scientists have pointed out, it's not surprising that there was a viral outbreak in a city—that's where people are, allowing the virus to spread rapidly. It's also not surprising that there's a lab that studies coronavirus in a city surrounded by rural coronavirus hotspots—you'd want your lab to be near what it's studying.
You're mistaking these normal circumstantial facts for causation without any evidence, only wild speculation. If you look at the history of previous outbreaks, like Zika, HIV, SARS, MERS, lime disease, they all had their outbreaks in cities, sometimes with medical labs, many miles from where they originated. It took 15 years to track down the origin of the first SARS outbreak, some 50 miles, I think, from where it began to spread rapidly among humans after having been passed from animal to animal to people in rural areas.
Just because the outbreak happened in Wuhan doesn't mean that the virus came from Wuhan. It's a false connection.
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@doughesson I think you need to reread my comment. The outbreak occurred in Wuhan. That's different from saying the virus originated in Wuhan. I don't know what "the news media" said in every instance, but if they said the virus ORIGINATED in Wuhan, they were either lying or at the least speaking speculatively, not on the basis of any facts.
I know anti-vaxxers aren't too with critical thinking, but the distinction between the origin of the virus and the origin of its initial outbreak isn't too hard to understand.
"Virology labs tend to specialize in the viruses around them, says Vincent Munster, a virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a division of the National Institutes of Health, in Hamilton, Montana. The WIV specializes in coronaviruses because many have been found in and around China. Munster names other labs that focus on endemic viral diseases: influenza labs in Asia, haemorrhagic fever labs in Africa and dengue-fever labs in Latin America, for example. “Nine out of ten times, when there’s a new outbreak, you’ll find a lab that will be working on these kinds of viruses nearby,” says Munster.
Researchers note that a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan isn’t surprising, because it’s a city of 11 million people in a broader region where coronaviruses have been found. It contains an airport, train stations and markets selling goods and wildlife transported there from around the region5 — meaning a virus could enter the city and spread rapidly" (Nature).
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@BH-fi1sb I mean, you just watched a video on the Brooks Brothers Riot, in which members of Bush's recount committee and staff participated.
Bush may not have instituted a travel ban on Muslims, but he oversaw the mass despoliation of the Middle East, the creation of the racist DHS and ICE, the rise of a surveillance apparatus that profiled Muslims.
Trump's war crimes don't come close to Bush's. The assassination of Solemani was flagrant and illegal, but we can't compare that to a war of aggression, described as the principal war crime fton which all others derive, that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis. (Bush also had plausible intel that 9/11 would happen and did nothing.)
Covid and Trump's weakening of the judiciary and regulatory apparatus may prove to be egregious enough to earn him designation as the worst modern US president.
Ultimately, I don't think ranking them is terribly important. What is important is to remember their records and the impact they had. I guess I worry that by cordoning Trump off as "the worst," many will forget who Bush really was as president.
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@nagulf How am I supposed to quote Glenn when he's omitting information?
I pointed to three major flaws.
1) He claims, "nothing demonstrates that Shokhin [sic] was impeding investigations into Burisma," but that's false. And I gave multiple sources of evidence, not "received opinion," to support that.
2) Throughout the article he engages in a motte and bailey where he rages against journalists for not investigating Biden's alleged corruption (motte) but when forced to admit that in fact they have investigated it and found nothing, he retreats to a position where no one is alleging Biden's involvement in corruption (bailey), whereupon he scurries back out to the motte position. And his main tactic to support his argument is to omit key information. As I said already, I can't quote that because the point is Glenn neglected to write anything about it in the first place.
3) He credulously repeats the story of how Giuliani obtained the hard drive without mentioning any of the inconsistencies. He can say the origin of the source doesn't matter, but he doesn't have to take at face value a suspicious story to make that point. I also provided evidence to support that, not "received opinion."
I also have 5 quotes from his article, so you need to practice your reading comprehension. Or maybe get your eyes checked.
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@thecompetentman5384 Clearly you didn't read your own source. For one, this paper concerns a breakout in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, not Vermont, which was the original claim. Nice try.
Second, this outbreak is from the Delta variant, and more needs to be known about how effective existing vaccines are at preventing infection and mitigating the worst symptoms from Delta, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get the vaccine or that it's useless. Breakthroughs happen precisely because people aren't vaccinated, and they can spread the virus even to people who are immunized.
The paper also notes,
1) "vaccination is the most important strategy to prevent severe illness and death."
2) "data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak."
But that's precisely what you're doing—drawing sweeping conclusions from a single event based on data that are insufficient.
3) "As population-level vaccination coverage increases, vaccinated persons are likely to represent a larger proportion of COVID-19 cases."
This makes sense if you think about it. If 100% of the population were vaccinated, any infection—and there would always be some small percentage—would mean that 100% of infections were among the vaccinated, but that's not surprising. According to the CDC, 469 people were infected at "multiple summer events and large public gatherings." Data is not provided for the size of attendance, but we can imagine it could easily be as much as 10,000 for multiple large events.
If we assume that Barnstable has roughly the state average rate of vaccination, 63%, then an infection rate of 74% among the vaccinated might present some concern, depending on the reliability of the data, but isn't the fatal blow to vaccination you seem to think it is, which is why the CDC is recommending masking at public events in areas with rising infection rates, not dismissing vaccination altogether.
Moreover, this breakthrough in Massachusetts seems to be an extreme outlier emerging from a large, crowded event at which many people were unvaccinated and presumably unmasked. National data shows that breakthrough cases constitute <1% of new infections. The number in Massachusetts is a little higher at about 0.15%—which means that in the aggregate the overwhelming number of new cases, 95% in Massachusetts, are from the unvaccinated. Unless you have some miraculous theory to explain the discrepancy, it would seem that the vaccines do work, and about as well as previous studies have indicated, and that the breakthrough in Barnstable County is an exception, not the rule.
Please actually read the stuff you're citing so that you're not appealing to something that contradicts your points. It makes you look silly.
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@thecompetentman5384 1) Colloquially referring to a vaccine as a "shot" doesn't make it any less a vaccine. Flu "shots" are flu vaccines, and they don't have a 30% effectiveness, as you claimed. I don't even know why you bothered citing that number because I already provided a more accurate one of 60%, though the actual number changes a bit from year to year depending on how well doctors can predict which strains will be prevalent. Honestly, this was such an incredibly stupid point that I'm stunned you made it. I also cited figures for other vaccines, neither of which is 100% effective.
2) Who cares what Biden said? Getting vaccinated has been the advice of medical experts around the world ever since we had a vaccine.
3) The CDC actually rescinded its masking recommendation, as did many local governments. It's only because of concentrations of unvaccinated people and the spread of the much more contagious Delta variant that the CDC has advised masking in areas with rising rates of infection. Importantly, the immunized can carry and transmit the virus (at least the Delta variant) even if they are asymptomatic, meaning the vaccine worked for them, but they can still be a spreader.
4) As I already pointed out, the notion that covid vaccines "don't do anything" isn't supported by the data. Overwhelmingly, new infections are occurring among the UNvaccinated, at about 95-99%. Unless you have some miraculous explanation for why that is, it would seem that the vaccines are working, though of course herd immunity can be compromised if enough people continue to refuse to get vaccinated, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where anti-vaxxers generate the very failure they believed always existed. You'd also need to explain the decrease in new cases and deaths—where vaccination is at higher levels—since the vaccine became widely available. Tellingly, surges are occurring in places where more people are refusing the vaccine.
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@judkunokin268 Go watch or rewatch his video on electoralism. As Googily Moogily points out, it's incredibly dishonest, and I think a good example of the ways Vaush, Wikipedia warrior, engages in charlatanry.
He quotes Marx and Lenin to support voting for Biden and electoralism in general. He tells his audience he has read the texts these quotes come from, and he is not quote mining or taking them out of context.
Only, that's precisely what he does. Either he's a charlatan who hasn't bothered to read what he says he's read, or he has read them and is straight up lying about what their authors intended. In some cases, Vaush's interpretation of the quotes is undermined within the next few sentences, and it's totally exploded upon any confrontation with an awareness of the historical context and Marx or Lenin's other writings and activities. His interpretation sounds convincing at first glance only because he relies so heavily on rhetoric bluster and counterfeit confidence to replace an actual argument.
Marx and Lenin did not advocate for "lesser evilism" or participating in the legitimation of bourgeois political parties like the Democrats. They supported workers' parties running in elections as a way to grow their numbers, broadcast their ideas, and maybe win. The Democrats are not a workers party; Biden is not a working class candidate. The closest Marx and Lenin ever came to supporting non-workers' parties was, in the absence of a workers' party, provisional support for labor parties, which were far to the left of anything currently viable in American politics, against more purely bourgeois parties. In fact, Marx was explicitly against supporting the bourgeois parties of his time.
There are arguments for strategic voting, but using Marx and Lenin as justification for Ridin with Biden is a dishonest, ahistorical attempt to either radicalize centrism or neutralize radicalism, giving a patina of edginess and lefty glamour to a fundamentally liberal argument.
We can keep going through examples of his laziness, dishonesty, charlatanry, and vapid grand-standing.
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@patientfirbolg3299 The problem is that by "meeting people where they are" he may just be exaggerating destructive tendencies and behaviors (eg the belligerent debate bro aesthetic) but in the guise of something that looks like leftism but is pretty superficial.
Look at groups who work to deradicalize extremists like neo-Nazis and white supremacists. They don't succeed by appealing to the hostile aesthetics of those ideologies; they succeed through empathy, listening, compassion, engagement, exposure.
If anything, we should be measuring Vaush's success by how rapidly his audience abandons him for a more mature, compassionate, practical, and well-read form of leftism. But that's not what happens. Most people are attached to the hostility, bluster, and delusion of grandeur that animates Vaush's online personality, and they get stuck there, circling that vortex of impotent and self-affirming contempt for anyone that doesn't align with Vaush; and, worse, he cultivates that following.
As far as punching left, Rising certainly deserves it, if you can call them left (even only counting Krystal), and I can't think of any leftist who is a fan of them, but what about Thought Slime or BadEmpanada or Hakim or Shaun, all of whom are markedly better leftists than he is, even if you don't agree with them? At its most cynical, we might say that Vaush pursues these "beefs" and dramas to stir up attention for his brand. Don't like it? Come debate me, bro! That kind of thing.
Vaush is trying to secure a little corner of "the left" for himself and grandiosely posturing as the representative of the (online) left. It's silly. He has no engagement with theory or organizing. Who the fuck is he? A charlatan. A poseur. He was at the mic calling himself an anarchist before he even had a grasp of what that meant.
PS Is he still calling himself a sociologist because he has a B.S.?
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@judkunokin268 I believe that's a passage Vaush adduced, and I appreciate your bringing it up. It's a great example of how Vaush not only fails to educate his audience but miseducates it to such a degree that it is not capable of reading what is right in front of it.
TL;DR "Infantile Disorder" is about urging the European left (German, Dutch) to engage in parliaments through workers' parties with communist leaders - not to support bourgeois parties or candidates for the sake of mitigation.
If I asked Vaush, or you, or some other fan of his what that essay is about, they would likely say it proves the left has to participate in elections, and that means voting for the Democrats, the lesser of two evils, in order to nudge us toward socialism.
Lenin says nothing of the kind. If you actually read the essay, or even just the portion you quoted, it's clear that Lenin is castigating the German left communists for abandoning parliamentary activity. It says it in the subtitle, for fuck's sake: should we participate in bourgeois parliaments? Not "should we vote for bourgeois candidates?"
Lenin is urging the German left to run its own candidates in a workers' party AGAINST the bourgeois parties but within the bourgeois parliamentary framework and to push toward revolution through the workers' party.
"Criticism—the most keen, ruthless and uncompromising criticism—should be directed, not against parliamentarianism or parliamentary activities, but against those leaders who are unable—and still more against those who are unwilling—to utilise parliamentary elections and the parliamentary rostrum in a revolutionary and communist manner."
In these concluding remarks, Lenin is clear that he is exhorting the left to run leaders in elections and govern "in a revolutionary and communist manner." Biden applies not at all to that wish. He is not a member of a workers' party and he will not govern in a communist manner, regardlessof what Republicans say. He is not Karl Liebknecht.
Let's look at the passage you quoted. With careful ellipses, mental or legible, one could manipulate this passage to read as if it supported lesser evilism voting. One would only have to bowdlerize passages like the following:
"...participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses."
"Obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat." Doesn't sound like the Democrats. Lenin even lays out the goal of such a party: to educate the backwards element of its lower class, to elevate class consciousness, and to engage in revolutionary activity. Again, neither Biden nor the Democrats - as representatives of the bourgeois state - fulfill those tasks. If anything, they would be responsible for de-educating the masses, inculcating double consciousness; at best, stoking a wayward impatience and frustration with their incompetence, irrationality, and corruption.
But doesn't Lenin say to work within the system? "Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them." Doesn't that mean leftists have to vote for Biden? Only if we ignore the paragraph in which that sentence is found, the entire polemic and its thesis. This is where Vaush and his audience fail to distinguish between a system - like electoral politics - and a party - namely, a bourgeois party. Lenin only advocates for the former.
No where does Lenin urge leftists to vote for one bourgeois party against another. No where does he name a bourgeois candidate to vote for in any election. No where does he indicate the terms under which leftists should vote for a bourgeois candidate. (In fact, he concedes there are rare times when a boycott can work and gives Russia 1905 as an example; Russia 1906 as a failure.) One would expect him to be specific if he were urging voting for a bourgeois party - maybe the Center party - and how to entice workers or peasants to revolutionary politics or how to "transform" the party from within.
On the contrary, his insistence upon the German communists participating in parliamentary elections demonstrates he fervently did not want a situation where workers were voting for bourgeois stabilization. The one time he mentions a non-left party, the Catholic Center Party (who would later abet Hitler's rise), he does not encourage anyone to vote for them; only that their numbers among the proletariat signify the relevance of electoralism and the opportunity for a revolutionary party to capture new supporters through running a workers' party in elections.
As a final rebuke, Lenin cites the success of the Bolshevik Party, which he attributes in part to their presence within electoral politics. "We Bolsheviks participated in the most counterrevolutionary parliaments, and experience has shown that this participation was not only useful but indispensable to the party of the revolutionary proletariat..." If the Bolsheviks could grow and harden under a reactionary, undemocratic government, so could European communists while engaging in traditional politics. This passage also clarifies that for Lenin, "the party of the revolutionary proletariat" is a communist party, not the furthest left mainstream bourgeois party.
Whether or not you agree with Lenin (I happen to think this is one of his more damaging screeds, and one that shows his capacity for being a petulant, polemical, and sloppy fool), you have to respect what he actually wrote. Lenin was every bit a revolutionary, and as a turn of the century revolutionary, he saw Germany, industrially-developed, with a fully fledged proletariat, where the contradictions of capital were greatest, as the site of social revolution. If not for the perfidy of the SPD, Germany may very well have joined Russia as an aspiring socialist state.
There was no reason to think, at the time, that German leftists needed to take two steps back and merely co-sign bourgeois parties in a bourgeois parliament, which is exactly why Lenin advocated for the left to engage in legal politics in the aftermath of the Spartacist uprising. Nor can Lenin be said to support, based on the text, the adoption of bourgeois parties under reactionary conditions, because it is those conditions that he credits for Bolshevism's strength.
Nothing he writes here can be used to support voting for Biden. If the primary lesson of "Infantile Disorder" were taken seriously, one would advocate for PSL, DSA candidates, or some other socialist alternative. Vaush isn't doing that.
I strongly urge you to actually read the text and anything else Vaush offers up as evidence for his claims, whether you agree with them or not. He has you thinking you're hearing truth from the horse's mouth, when in reality he's blowing wind from its ass.
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@roigrose5045 I was going to give you a longer reply, but now it's evident you don't know what you're talking about. In fact, China has long maintained that they are communist in aspiration - like the USSR was - and for theoretical and developmental reasons have seen fit to implement private AND state capitalist enterprises to develop their productive capacity before integrating socialist reforms.
This is obvious when one looks at the actual structures, institutions, and material conditions - not just at labels.
As the economist Richard Wolff has written, "Employer/employee structures of enterprises are today’s Chinese norm. China is not post-capitalist. China is, as the USSR was, socialist in the sense of a state capitalism whose further transition to post-capitalism has been blocked."
https://braveneweurope.com/richard-d-wolff-socialist-or-capitalist-what-is-chinas-model-exactly
The "socialism" he refers to there and elsewhere in the article is an aspirational socialism, not a material socialism, judged by the change in the mode of production. That is why he can describe China or the USSR as both "socialist" and capitalist - socialist in intent, capitalist in reality. Social democracies in Europe don't even pretend to aspire to post-capitalism anymore. Everything they do is in service of managing capitalism.
He's also written of social democracy, "The most visible example of this is in the social democracies of the Scandinavian countries, which practice a gentler, kinder form of capitalism."
https://www.rdwolff.com/socialists_need_to_fight_for_economic_change
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Ann Linley I can't imagine a progressive would create an account to fund the border wall. If you meant why don't progressives try to fix those problems, the answer is simple. They do. Charity as the solution to society's ills is the conservative position. You may see progressive-minded people who give to charities or create ad-hoc campaigns like this GoFundMe page, but in general progressives want long-term solutions because they see the problems themselves as long-term and structural. The progressive answer to GoFundMe, ad hoc activism isn't yet another version of charity, it's things like tax reform so that the top 10%, 5% and especially 1% and 0.1% are paying their fair share of taxes. It's making sure that the public welfare is not auctioned off to private enterprise. It's ensuring that everyone has access to healthcare, education, food, clean water, shelter, and work, not just the cover page victims of the latest tragedy. This border wall helps literally no one.
Conservatives constantly preach about how moral, compassionate, and responsible they are, and this is what they have to show for it—a stupid, ineffectual, waste of time and money border wall. That's the problem that grabs their attention and empties their wallets. When progressives start a GoFundMe to bankroll something as pointless and contrary to basic human decency, then you'll have a point, but not till then.
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I don't see how any of those reasons are plausible motives that relate in a logical way to the crime. "To cause distraction" is so vague it's meaningless—literally every scandal or disaster could be blamed on the government wanting to cause a distraction; and you toss it off so casually without providing any shred of evidence: just speculation and assertion.
Note that there is also a huge difference between taking advantage of a distraction, which world leaders are wont to do, and actively causing one. I'm sure May could love to get some of that Brexit heat off her; doesn't mean her government ordered the assassination of a—to them—random person, their ally, no less.
That Russia wants to punish defectors not only makes for a more logical motive; it fits with a decades-long history of covert assassination, Litvinenko, Nemtsov, Yeshenkov, and many others, political rivals, journalists, spies, lawyers—anyone who didn't fall in line.
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I'm neither a tory nor a republican. I guess you'd call me a left libertarian or anarchist. Whatever I am, I hardly need a sermon on the evils of the capitalist state.
I do, however, believe in having something even approaching evidence for claims. You not only don't have evidence; you don't even have a logical, causal connection between the crime and the alleged motive. Blair works for an oil company, so Theresa May had murdered some ex-Russian spy no one's heard of so that she can rally NATO (presumably) to attack Russia. In what cockamamy world does that jumble make sense? The explanation you provide—that the West wants a war with Russia and to deflect attention from its own problems—not only doesn't make sense; it also doesn't match what's actually happening. To date, no member of UK politics has called for war with Russia in response to the poisoning. What they have done is eject Russian diplomats and call for increased UN sanctions.
You also don't seem to know what a false flag is since the instigation of the Iraq War, while built on fabrications and insinuations, did not result from efforts to fabricate the pretext for aggression by blaming the opposition for one's own crime—that is, unless you're a 9/11 truther who thinks Bush bombed the towers to blame Al-Qaeda so that he could then invade Al-Qaeda's longtime enemy, Iraq, instead of making the attack an Iraqi aggression to begin with, in which case, there's no hope for you. There is no dearth of examples of politicians taking advantage of events to obscure their own activities. To give one recent case, the conservatives, led by Trump, went on the warpath against NFL players who took a knee during the pledge of allegiance. Conveniently, this coincided with with the passage of their tax cuts to the rich and corporations. They took advantage of a controversy, if it can even be called that, magnified it, and benefited from it because it diverted attention from their nefarious acts. That does not mean that they called up Colin Kaepernick and told him to take a knee to get the thing whole thing started. To suggest that, I hope, would sound ridiculous.
Conspiracies do happen, but in order for the public to be aware of a conspiracy there has to be evidence—not just a ranting list of unconnected bad things governments have done in the past, or evidence of its present corruptions. Without evidence, conspiracies remain merely conspiracy theories, abstract and impotent frustration directed at power.
I also don't understand how in your mind (and Jimmy Dore's mind) it's a certainty that the West is inventing a bogeyman while (tacitly) assuming that there's no way Russia, a society even more oligarchic and corrupt than our own, which has a pretty well documented recent history of doing just this sort of thing to its own people—there's just no way they could've done it. I think both you and Jimmy Dore are making the lamentable mistake of, in many cases, correctly identifying the hypocrisy of Western imperialism only to fall hook-line-and-sinker for the propaganda and self-regarding hypocrisy of other state powers, and that stance comes off as a kind of naive, reflexive contrarianism, which may have once been founded on substantial critique, but over time has eroded into a mere formula of dissent. Why distrust one state actor only to trust another?
The Iraq War, along with so many other instances of the crimes of the US government, are invaluable lessons to learn from. Their specter should rightfully cast a shadow over every discussion of state action internationally, lest the public relapse into a complacency toward state atrocity. But those lessons are also not to justify, in a straight forward, all or nothing way, every single opposition to the state's narrative. Skepticism is a fine thing, but dogged cynicism is the cancer of critical thought. So by all means, if you don't trust the UK's explanation of the Skripal poisonings, don't trust it. Wait for more evidence. But don't be so daft as to, from your armchair, invent a vast conspiracy totally out of scope with the actual available facts. Don't build your case on what amounts to the most tenuous of circumstantial conjecture.
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Your posts are such a hodgepodge of accusations and random threads it's hard to follow any thought through to criticize.
For clarity's sake, you aren't just saying that the British government is dissimulating about who attacked Skripal and his daughter, which is at least a defensible position; you're saying that it was the British government itself that orchestrated the attack. That's radically different. That takes you from being a skeptic, past being a cynic, and into being a conspiracy theorist making unfounded claims because, essentially, it just feels right.
The atom bomb was a hundred times stronger than any conventional bomb, and people survived it. Therefore there was no bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That's what that argument of yours is saying. Obviously there are going to be other factors at play, beyond the potency of the toxin, that affect its lethality, such as the dose or the way it was administered. It's not as if Skripal and his daughter are walking around fine. She's out of critical condition, but we don't know what if any lasting damage she'll have. Skripal is still critical and very well may not recover.
I honestly don't understand what that last part about Bush and Cheney has to do with the present situation. I for one never bought their warmongering bullshit about WMD and thought it was obvious from the beginning that they were manufacturing a conflict to fulfill geopolitical and financial ends. The same can't be said regarding an alleged British attempt on Skripal's life, in my opinion. If you can lay out a concrete case for why it is, I'm open to it, but so far all you've done is say that US and UK governments are liars (as is the Russian government, it should be noted).
Right now, the most plausible scenario seems to be that Russia was behind the attack. That may or may not change as more experts have time to assess the evidence. Have the last word, because I really don't think there's anything else for me to say unless you can be more concrete.
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That's somewhat fair, although the modest alternative is that he at the very least believed what he saw. I don't know enough about Paul's biography to say what if any motive he might have to convert. I do know that the Christianity espoused by Paul was radically different from the other kinds of early Christianity practiced by the Ebionites, the Gnostics, etc., with whom Paul had major beef, even after his conversion. Paul converted to Paul's version of "revealed" rather than learned Christianity, which is less strange than adopting a pre-existing doctrine.
I would also push back on the notion that Paul had nothing to gain by converting. Not that he could have known, but obviously the reason we still talk about Paul is because he converted. Had he remained a Pharisee, he'd've been lost to history. But supposing that he had some non-supernatural motivation for converting, a supernatural explanation for conversion is definitely the best way to go. It's certainly more impressive to be inspired by an incredible flash of light and the arisen Son than by one day deciding to try something else. The latter isn't going to earn you a lot of followers. In that respect, it's comparable to Constantine's conversion. It makes for a great piece of propaganda, regardless of whether it's true.
Paul may not have tried to trick people with his story; he may have sincerely believed it; but that doesn't make it a true story.
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@igvc1876 The assumption that police would only be concentrated in areas of capital is unfortunately for you not borne out by history in the slightest. One of the functions of modern policing is to manage the externalities of capitalism, like the poverty and the crime it generates, crime being a socially, culturally, and historically mediated-phenomenon. Police occupation of poor and racial minority neighbors is absolutely in service of the interests of power, in more diffuse, systemic ways, but also in glaringly obvious ones, like the intersection between criminalization, incarceration, racism, and private companies profiting from prison labor, or how the police took over from private security the task of monitoring and quelling strikes or other forms of protest.
Maybe you should educate yourself on this topic before pretending to lecture others based merely on a few naive assumptions.
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zwergie256 Yeah, for sure, Glenn's written some things that are a little off (a piece he wrote about gun rights in Brazil hasn't aged well). But I don't think he's a neoliberal or that your link proves he is. If anything, he's doing the same thing he usually does: express a standard and follow it, in this case, does international opinion necessarily make Bush a "bad president," and he's right that, no, usually not. Being a bad president made Bush a bad president, the Iraq war made Bush a bad president, among a myriad other backwards policies. Glenn's just trying to uphold a standard of critique, which is valuable given how the MSM is hyperfocussed on optics, appearance, and opinion rather than facts and truth.*
I think Glenn is actually kind of a moderate, which is what so many people try to claim to be in order to throw up a smokescreen for their real values. He believes in constitutional law, civil rights, regulation. He seems like the sort of person who opposes socialism (the collective ownership of production) AND neoliberal capitalism. Personally, as a leftist, I find Glenn's older comments about fanatic socialist this and that to be petulant and grating. I can look past it to the better aspects of his actual reporting and not just commentary in a blog.
I can't tell someone what to do with their money, but I think it's a little rash to pull a donation over one story that one reporter wrote. The Intercept has variety—that's a good thing. Most of that variety is a counterpoint to the MSM—that's good too. I think it's better that journalists have leeway when it comes to their stories, rather than having the narrative set by an editorial team. That's how we got the MSM in the first place. It's easy to control, buy off, and undercut a team of a few editors; much harder to do that to each and every journalist.
Caitlin Johnstone, however, I can say with confidence, is a know-nothing hack with an Internet connection.
*I remember an NPR story about anxiety surrounding Obama's visit to Japan. People were worried he might apologize for the nuclear bombs (he didn't). So NPR got an "expert" on to talk about whether or not Americans believe the bombs were necessary to end the war. Of course, there was no discussion of whether the bombs actually were necessary—only the belief or opinion that they were; no mention of the July cables, the Bombing Survey, nothing. That's a very dangerous practice in journalism and you see it everywhere.
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@jordonstatton6344 I guess so.
The Martin (not Martian) Aspen story is separate from the laptop material, and the revelation of his false identity came out yesterday - after Glenn wrote the article, which doesn't mention Aspen that I can recall, after his exchange with his editors, after he quit, and I think even after he posted the story of his termination.
So unless Glenn has a time machine, I don't see how your non sequitur gotcha has any relevance. Even if Glenn had known about the false identity, it wouldn't have mattered; he was covering a different story.
You also didn't acknowledge the fact that the alarm was sounded about Russian disinformation despite no evidence supporting their involvement beyond CIA hearsay.
Here's Glenn's editor, Peter Maass: "I think it’s totally right to point out the haste with which some journalists and experts are talking about Russia’s hand."
Moreover Martin Aspen (Chris Balding) was not working with the Russian government but with an anti-Chinese government Hong Kong tabloid called Apple Daily.
So, like, what is even your point?
Our disagreement isn't over whether journalists should blindly accept the word of CIA operatives - they shouldn't - but that Glenn's recrimination of journalists for doing so was NOT a motivation for the edits. Peter agreed with that angle; in fact, his edits would've made it a bigger focus in the article.
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There's a difference, but I don't think that difference should be overstated. In reality, fascism and neoliberalism share many important, conspicuous features on their political, economic, and social structure, as writers like Raphaele Chappe and Ajay Singh Chaudhary have pointed out.
I think describing neoliberalism as "policies that halfway work" is without merit. As with questions of that sort, one must always ask, work for whom, how, at the expense of what else?
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"But then SolarCity maneuvered to bump SolarWorld out of the deal. (The two companies had a contentious relationship: They were on opposite sides of a trade dispute over alleged dumping of Chinese solar panels.) SolarCity says it was afraid that SolarWorld was on the verge of bankruptcy"
"SolarWorld did not, in fact, go bankrupt — though it had to lay off workers at its Oregon plant after SolarCity ousted it from from the university deal."
The "trade dispute" concerned companies like SolarWorld wanting to protect American solar panel manufacturing from cheap Chinese imports. On the other hand, solar installers, like SolarCity/Tesla, wanted to retain access to those cheap panels. SolarCity wants cheap panels whether that's from Chinese labor or prison labor. In the short term that can be good for customers, but in the long run it hurts manufacturing, jobs, and communities. Maybe I just don't understand Musk's idealism.
To say that Suniva was the last option is not quite correct. They were the last option because SolarCity didn't want to give up its cheap Chinese imports, just as they didn't want to commit to not using cheap prison labor in the future. SolarWorld was capable of handling the job, and they paid decent wages. They did not go bankrupt, as SolarCity feared. SolarCity simply chose to stop using them.
"If you have an issue with the low pay then the state should either make prison labor illegal or force Suniva to pay higher wages."
That's all beside the point. The topic we're discussing is does Musk/Tesla operate according to some kind of benevolent, altruistic geek ideology. The answer in the case of the Oregon job is clearly no. They operate according to standard business logic—whatever serves the bottom line.
Moreover, SolarCity clearly violated the "spirit" of the stipulation to use Oregon-based manufacturing. The point of that restriction is that a project for a public university would help stimulate jobs and manufacturing in the state. By using cheap prison labor (which doesn't increase the prisoners' competitiveness in the job market when they get out) SolarCity undermined that intent. Not only that—they indirectly led to the LOSS of jobs by pulling out of their contract. Again, perhaps I just don't understand Musk's benevolent ideology, but that just sounds like run-of-the-mill business practice to me. All for wealth and profit over people.
(The OP's contention—which I could be misinterpreting—that because SpaceX and Tesla haven't returned hefty profits means that Musk is somehow above the profit-motive is pretty easy to throw into doubt. It takes most companies a while to become profitable. Honda was operating with losses for something like a decade before it make a decent car and a profit. When SpaceX does become profitable they will have a virtual monopoly on spacetravel/freight outside of the public sector. It's a gamble that it will pay off, but if/when it does it will be huge.)
Musk has done some good things. I think making Tesla's patents open source was a very commendable thing. I'm saying: don't be naive about the business-side of things.
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@Doppe1ganger From the standpoint of preserving human life, it isn't. Trump's done enough damage. I know Biden isn't going to be friendly to progressives. I'm fairly certain he won't make real concessions; only superficial ones, maybe, that radical centrists like Alexay can take as "marginal victories" and an excuse to do as little as possible. I understand Biden could have a cooling effect on the left—not some bullshit co-opted "progressives," but a real, pro-worker, anti-capital left. It's also possible that Biden won't matter, that we've already stepped far enough into radical politics that there's no going back and—as plenty of thinkers, from Tocqueville to Bookchin, have described—Biden's attempts to fix Trump's failures may be his biggest weakness as a leader precisely because people realize that his solutions impose arbitrary, inhumane, and irrational privation. It's not about asking Biden for crumbs. It's about trying to take the bakery. I think that's a much more dangerous and dubious proposition under Trump.
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Young Bernie > 2019 Bernie
Lowering the voting age is probably a good idea. I don't know about to 14, but 17, 16, while kids are in school and developing the habit of being political, sure.
Legalizing, or at the very least decriminalizing, drugs is a no brainer. We need to stop thinking about recreational use and chronic abuse of drugs as a crime and start thinking of the latter as a public health issue, provide safe places for people to use, clinics for people do break their habit, etc.
There should be a maximum wage. Personally, I think there are better ways to do it than by a tax, but the concept makes sense.
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Reading the PSC decision, it's worse than I thought. D.A. Castor not only never provided a written agreement; this "agreement" consisted entirely in his sharing a professional opinion with Cosby's lawyer that, since Castor was not going to bring charges, Cosby wouldn't be able to take the Fifth during a civil trial. And, indeed, Cosby never invoked the Fifth during his deposition. If he had, Castor may have had to get involved and clarify the situation—that Cosby effectively had immunity. But because he didn't, the PSC has been able to conclude that because Cosby believed he had immunity, without any formal declaration, he in fact did.
Castor: "So I have heard banter in the courtroom and in the press the term “agreement,” but everybody has used the wrong word. I told [Cosby’s attorney at the time, Walter] Phillips that I had decided that, because of defects in the case, that the case could not be won and that I was going to make a public statement that we were not going to charge Mr. Cosby.
"I told him that I was making it as the sovereign Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and, in my legal opinion, that meant that Mr. Cosby would not be allowed to take the Fifth Amendment in the subsequent civil suit that Andrea Constand’s lawyers had told us they wanted to bring.
But those two things were not connected one to the other."
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@alienanxiety "Martyrdom, of course, was always admired, but martyrdom for the truth. If they were witnesses to falsehood there was nothing admirable about them: perhaps something to be pitied, certainly nothing to be admired. By the 1820s you find an outlook in which the state of mind, the motive, is more important than the consequence, the intention more important than the effect. Purity of heart, integrity, devotion, dedication - all these things which we ourselves admire without much difficulty, which have entered into the very texture of our normal moral attitudes, became more or less commonplace, first among minorities; then gradually they spread outwards."
The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin
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@intuitionz1198 The really nice thing is that you don't have to believe me, personally. You can look at the record, at studies, and so on. You can look at the evidence IN TOTALITY, not the one thing that trips your malfunctioning bs detector enough to prevent you from doing further (or, apparently, any) research.
All the jaqing off in the world isn't going to legitimate your opinion, except to cranks, like the conservative, misogynistic friend you made. "The timing is fishy" btw is exactly the phrase Republicans used during the Kavanaugh hearing—anything you people can do to deflect.
Again, your own ignorance isn't evidence.
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I think education reflects the larger socio-politico-economic system. And I think the content of that education, which you pointed out, also matches that. We live in a capitalist, hierarchical society, and our schools reflect that. Quality of education is measured by accountability, efficiency, so-called objective measures, and the amount of money spent. Teachers are seen as authorities who disseminate standardized knowledge to more or less passive receptacles.
I don't think you can have an educational system that respects children's intelligence without radically changing the structure and social meaning of education, turning children from a means to an end into ends in and of themselves. As Bakunin said, "Children do not belong to their parents [or teachers in this case], but to themselves and to their future liberty." Kindness and love are necessary, but they are inadequate within the current framework. It'd be like trying to solve climate change through individual choices. Again, they're nice, and can be awakening, but they won't solve the problem.
If you somehow managed to change the current framework, without altering anything else, into something more libertarian, like Finland's comprehensive education or the Modern School proposed and effected by Ferrer, no child would grow up to embrace our capitalist, hierarchical, competitive, atomized, consumerist society. The problem is that you can't abstract something like education from everything else. The economy, healthcare, education, law enforcement, government—they're all intricately connected. I don't think you can meaningfully change one without changing the others.
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@robertakurtz2830 Citation needed.
This is another piece of Zionist, pro-settler propaganda meant to justify apartheid. Initially the Zionist says, When we came here, there was nothing and no one; we built a real country. Then: oh, those 700,000 people? They left their land and homes to us of their own accord.
Such rationalizations appear in every instance of colonial history.
For instance, Robert Fisk, one of the most highly-regarded Middle East correspondents in Britain, writes,
"The Arab armies that invaded the new Israel were driven out, together with between 500,000 and 700,000 Arab Palestinians whose homes had been in that part of Palestine that was now Israel or in those areas of Arab Palestine that Israel captured. For decades after their War of Independence, the Israelis claimed that most of the Arab Palestinians had left of their own free will after being urged by Arab radio stations to leave their homes and take sanctuary in neighboring states until the Arab armies had conquered the upstart new Israeli nation. Israeli scholars now agree that these radio appeals were never broadcast and that the allegations were fraudulent. The Palestinian Arabs left their homes because they were frightened, often because they had heard stories—accounts which were perfectly true—of the massacre of Arab civilians by Jewish gangs" (Pity the Nation 17).
The notion that Palestinians left their homes voluntarily is dehumanizing and deeply anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. It requires us to believe that they are a treacherous and scheming group, abandoning their homes not out of fear or necessity—sympathetically human responses—but in order to more expeditiously exterminate Jews. And if we believe that, then whatever punishment Israel can mete out is justified for reasons of self-preservation. However, if "most" didn't flee voluntarily (it even feels absurd to write that: flee voluntarily), suddenly Israel's illegal annexations, its settler policies, its siege of Gaza, its refusal to grant the right of return—all of them become illegitimate.
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He's at the very least ambiguous about his support for gay rights. By most definitions of the word, that's homophobic. Most research on the topic has shown that children of gay parents are at no disadvantage when compared to children of heterosexual parents. I think there was a big meta-analysis done a few years ago, and out of 70-some studies over several decades, only a few were negative. There have been a few high profile studies concluding that children do not do as well with gay parents, but those have major methodological problems.
Instead of cocking his head and pretending to be thoughtful, Peterson could—you know, use Google. At the very least. He's a trained psychologist, so he probably has access to great resources, peer reviewed journals, colleagues, conferences. He could easily find this information. If he wanted to seek it out. If he were as serious as he acts.
But he's a poseur spouting conservative ideas dressed up in really the most flimsy intellectualism. It's embarrassing and at this point I feel embarrassed for anyone who defends him.
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There was a recentish Citations Needed episode on MIC lobbying, and one of the examples they adduce is of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank funded by the defense department and contractors, publishing a report setting off the alarm about an ice cutter gap between Russia and the US. Russia has 7 ice cutters; we have only 2. (But Russia also has 14x the Arctic coastline we do, so if anything, we have a relative surplus.)
Well, that study got picked up in the news. The NYT reported it, as did Politico. Congress swung into action and passed a bill to fund the construction of 6 new ice cutters (giving us 1 more than Russia). The contract for those vessels landed in the lap of Lockheed Martin, one of the top donors to CSIS.
So you have this circular dynamic whereby these arms manufacturers—who cannot, for political reasons, simply come out and say, We need to build more weapons!—launder their marketing through an ostensibly disinterested think tank, which cycles through the media, through public alarm and calls for action, through Congress, and ends up back at the arms manufacturer in the form of a lucrative contract.
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VeryEvilPettingZoo As a consequence of that, it's worth remembering—from within the very confused contemporary debate about free speech, which confusion in itself I think evinces an inadequacy of old conceptual categories and rhetorical modes in dealing with both freedom and speech—that liberalism's initial contention was against the encroachment of tyrannical monarchical overreach and censorship. Its critique was limited to the scope of state authority over dissent (and even that was not absolute). In contrast, it had nothing to say about the limits of other institutions (businesses, the church) to coerce or suppress. Freedom was a legal political category that emerged from the fiction that all are equal under the law. We know that in practice that is not true.
The reason I say that the liberal absolutist position on free speech is ill-formed and bordering on incoherent within the context of capitalism is precisely because of the hierarchies—social, political, economic—generated by capitalism, which accord varying levels of power of speech to some and not others.
But the absolutist position makes further errors—it extends without adjustment its demands for free speech to realms beyond the political. Not only are speakers now granted the negative liberty against state coercion (see Geuss); they also are supposed to have positive liberties, platforms, publications, princely speaking fees, and so on.
This view confuses several different freedoms and pretends they are all the same, the freedom to speak without state suppression, the freedom to have a public platform, the freedom to have an audience. These latter are well beyond the scope of the original liberal notion of free speech, but they exist only by naively applying its logic to incompatible aspects of speech and pretending they are identical.
Consequently, by pretending that not only are all persons equal in the eyes of the law but also that we must be agnostic about different kinds of speech, this new liberal conception of free speech almost always grants greater privileges of speech to those already with extensive powers of speech—politicians, executives, experts, public figures. In the "marketplace of ideas", the same tired debates—about whether women, trans people, racial minorities etc deserve rights; whether we should care for the poor; whether it's moral and legal to invade countries—must be rehearsed over and over as if they had any vitality and interest left and were not merely ways to blockade the progression political consciousness.
There is a long tradition of socialists and particularly anarchists fighting for free speech in the sense of protection against state suppression and censorship. But that fight was also coupled with a critique—a critique lacking in the absolutist argument—of how other hierarchical institutions and systems, namely capitalism, preclude the masses from having an authentic voice within their families, communities, schools, workplaces. Such a critique better represents the spirit of free speech. It endorses the empowerment of the average person rather than the enrichment or controversy of notable public figures. This conception of expanding powers of speech for the public are often derided, perhaps unconsciously, in the liberal absolutist framework as "cancel culture" (another impossibly vague and muddled concept).
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@scotaloo77g73 That's weird, youtube deleted your links to peer-reviewed studies too. Why is it only doing that for you and the other guy?
"Researchers from the WIV collected hundreds of samples from bats roosting in a mine between 2012 and 2015, after several miners working there had gotten sick with an unknown respiratory disease. (Last year, researchers reported that blood samples taken from the miners tested negative for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, meaning that the sickness was probably not COVID-199.) Back at the lab, WIV researchers detected nearly 300 coronaviruses in the bat samples, but they were able to get whole or partial genomic sequences from fewer than a dozen , and none of those that were reported were SARS-CoV-29,10. During the WHO-led origins probe earlier this year, WIV researchers told investigators that they cultured only three coronaviruses at the lab, and none were closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
"Although the investigators didn’t sift through freezers at the WIV to confirm this information, the low number of genomes and cultures doesn’t surprise virologists. Munster says it’s exceedingly difficult to extract intact coronaviruses from bat samples. Virus levels tend to be low in the animals, and viruses are often degraded in faeces, saliva and droplets of blood. Additionally, when researchers want to study or genetically alter viruses, they need to keep them (or synthetic mimics of them) alive, by finding the appropriate live animal cells for the viruses to inhabit in the lab, which can be a challenge.
"So, for SARS-CoV-2 to have come from this mine in China, WIV researchers would have had to overcome some serious technical challenges — and they would have kept the information secret for a number of years and misled investigators on the WHO-led mission, scientists point out. There's no evidence of this, but it can't be ruled out." (Nature)
So, cautiously, the mine theory can't be ruled out, but it also seems unlikely and relies on a shaky conspiracy, like all the other theories you've thrown out as "evidence."
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@scotaloo77g73 No, I cited an article from a major science journal explaining the relevance of the mine to the lab leak theory.
You repeatedly invoke generic "scientists," but what you're really referring to is a letter that 18 scientists signed and general calls for more investigation. But, awkwardly for you, virtually all reporting on this topic (aside from places like Sky News, granted) includes some version of 'Scientists agree natural transmission is the most likely scenario."
Moreover, even some of the signers of that letter don't buy the lab leak theory.
"The organizer of the letter, David Relman of Stanford, told Nature’s Amy Maxmen, “I am not saying I believe the virus came from a laboratory.” Another signatory, Ralph S. Baric of the University of North Carolina, told the New Yorker, “The genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 really points to a natural-origin event from wildlife.”" (LA Times)
In other words, the investigation is a way to put lab leak theories to rest.
So I have to wonder why you're so eager to invoke "scientists" when 1) there's no scientific evidence to support a lab leak, 2) genetic evidence points to natural transmission (cf Andersen), 3) scientists in general believe the most likely origin is natural transmission, 4) except in the land of conspiracy crankery, calls for investigation aren't proof of potential outcomes of that investigation, especially the least likely outcomes.
This article does a good job explaining why your suspicions (what you think are proof) have plausible explanations and don't prove a lab leak. For instance, why would China resist calls for transparency? For one, because that's what they usually do. (Plenty of authoritarian regimes have resisted inspections even when they had nothing to hide, eg Saddam and WMD.) Two, the calls for inspection and transparency are being made by hostile governments. The whole argument that China's opacity proves a lab leak is a version of "the innocent have nothing to hide," which of course isn't true. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-revisited/
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@scotaloo77g73 And Roizman is basing that on zero evidence, just like you. I'm glad you found one scientist who's convinced of a lab leak. For someone who disdains appeals to authority, citing him as evidence seems odd. You can't seem to disambiguate between an investigation and its (unreached) conclusions, and also don't understand that citing actual data and studies isn't "an appeal to authority"; it's an appeal to evidence. How cringey of me to uh cite evidence. I should be more like you and make baseless speculations and insist that trust me bro, bro trust me, all these coincidences are PROOF I'm right. That's the noncringe way to argue.
You've yet to produce any credible, verified, peer-reviewed evidence for your theory, and if you keep avoiding it, I'm going to have to assume it's because you don't know of any.
And unless I'm mistaken, that WSJ article is basically just repeating information from the State Department, hence why I keep referring to your theory about 3 sick WIV researchers as unverified State Department info. Because that's what it is. You are conveniently pretending that the unverified claim about 3 sick WIV researchers refers to something broader, but that specific claim comes from the State Department. Maybe you didn't know that.
At the risk of being accused of "appealing to authority" and "copy pasting," here's the fact sheet and relevant section: https://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/
"The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses."
I for one love uncritically taking the US intelligence community at its word when it says it has "reason to believe" something without producing evidence. I know you do, too, big ol' skeptic, you.
I'll reply if actual evidence is adduced, but I don't see the point in continuing to entertain the same wild speculations as if they were true.
I don't think you even bothered to read the study on early spread. More posturing on your side; no evidence.
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@scotaloo77g73 Yes, they are very recent statements. I know you have an allergy to reading sources, but I've provided them above.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/
"When those independent experts got a look at the State Department’s analysis, he wrote in an email at the time, they found it rested on a single statistical analysis prepared by one scientist “a pathologist, rather than a virologist, epidemiologist, or infectious disease modeler” without expertise in that type of modeling. The “statistical case seems notably weak,” Ford wrote."
'And what about RaTG13, the virus that Wade and Baker argue is so similar to COVID-19 that it would only need some tuneups? In a statement from April 2020, Edward Holmes—an evolutionary biologist and virologist at the University of Sydney—noted that “the level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change.”
“Hence, SARS-CoV-2 was not derived from RaTG13,” Holmes said. Backing up what numerous other researchers have found, Holmes added that “the abundance, diversity and evolution of coronaviruses in wildlife strongly suggests that this virus is of natural origin.”
"I asked him about the lab leak theory. “This ‘growing body of evidence’—we haven’t seen it,” Ben Embarek said."
"In a Feb. 9 press conference, after several weeks on the ground, Ben Embarek and his colleagues announced that they had seen enough to conclude that the lab leak theory was “extremely unlikely.”
“There had been no publication, no reports of this virus, of another virus extremely linked or closely linked to this, being worked with in any other laboratory in the world,” Ben Embarek noted then."
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@SeraphsWitness Except we had multiple trained and respected medical experts testify that positional asphyxiation was the cause of death and clearly explained how that can happen.
We also had police officers, including the chief of police, testify that leaning on someone's neck for 9 minutes was not in keeping with policy or training and represented a gross disregard for life and safety.
To be absolutely clear: Chauvin's use of force was so extreme and malicious that even the police could recognize that. Why can't you?
So even if Floyd had conditions which made him more vulnerable to respiratory distress, Chauvin went far beyond what he was trained to do, disregarded Floyd's health, and was therefore the direct cause of his death EVEN IF in some other reality some other combination of factors could have killed him later. As I've already had to point out before, much to my amazement, the police don't have justification to kill you just because there's a chance you could die from something else. If anything, we should expect the opposite to be the case: they should be expected to help you avoid that end, especially when your infraction was as petty as a counterfeit $20.
The conversation may have been different had Chauvin shown restraint, exercised only the force that was needed to arrest Floyd, made every attempt to preserve his life, and followed protocol to the letter; but that simply was not the case, and the overwhelming number of experts and witnesses testified to that, and the jury agreed. Like them, I'm going to trust a world-renowned pulmonologist before I trust some guy in the YouTube comments with a PhD in common sense, intuition, and feels.
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If you look at the history of those drug laws, they were clearly crafted with racist intent. Dan Ehrlichman, a Nixon advisor, candidly confessed that they knew they were lying about the drugs (and consequently, the people using them) when they used anti-drug laws as a tool of political reprisal but did it anyway.
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html
Anti-drug laws appear to apply universally, but in both their conception and enforcement they were targeted at specific oppositional groups. Combined with policing practices in the US, which tend to enforce certain laws in variance with the demographic, these laws can be called racist.
The reformist notion of merely correctly enforcing existing laws entirely misses the point in this case. Should marijuana be legal or illegal? It's long been understood that marijuana poses none of the risks attributed to it, like violence, addiction, madness, or that it's a gateway drug. So long understood, in fact, that when Nixon appointed the Shafer Commission to recommend anti-drug legislation, the Commission, despite its members being hand-picked for their anti-drug stances, confronted with the facts about marijuana, could only recommend that it be decriminalized, much to Nixon's chagrin. Nixon opposed the commission's recommendation, and to this day marijuana remains a Schedule I drug.
https://www.alternet.org/story/12666/once-secret_%22nixon_tapes%22_show_why_the_u.s._outlawed_pot
Looking back, your first point doesn't make much sense. You admit that there is a racial disparity in drug enforcement but conclude that there's no point in legalization since racial disparities in enforcement may appear in other areas. Well, yeah, but one thing at a time. Acting like this is a technical matter to be solved by some police reform (a return to the law as it was meant to be enforced, which we've already shown means enforcing it along racial lines) is the best way to ensure that nothing changes. Legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana would instantly solve that problem. No kicking of cans. Instant. Done.
If your only argument is, we should enforce the law and do what's "legal," without any consideration for what is and should be legal, you're just defending the status quo because it's the status quo, not because you have any good reason why that law should be enforced in the first place.
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@TheMattj88 Every medication comes with possible, even severe, side effects. Safety is established relatively, statistically.
Myocarditis after vaccination for 16 or older males occurs about 1 in 50,000 times (0.00002%). You're more likely to get myocarditis from covid than from the vaccine. Myocarditis is also treatable. So statistically, myocarditis is a rare side effect, and it's relatively less common in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people.
In case you want to retort with something about blood clots, clotting after vaccination with J&J happens about 8 in 1,000,000 times. It, too, is more common after infection.
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I saw an article the other day by Vox (published in September) that claimed that if Hillary were president we might have a nationally-guaranteed minimum income, because that was one of the major policies she was contemplating, but her campaign "couldn't make the numbers work" without cutting other programs (basic income was once a right-wing policy idea targeted at dismantling social assistance—Social Security, Medicare, foodstamps, etc.). Curiously, Clinton almost seems to recognize the benefit of that policy as a kind of liberal nationalist response to Trump, as it would make "every American feel more connected to our country and to one another—part of something bigger than ourselves."
I don't think I have to point out what the goal of this "revelation" is: to show that alternatives to the status quo are not possible, be they basic income, $15 an hour, medicare for all, and so on, and that the "responsible" thing to do is to stick with what we've got, perhaps with modest incrementalism. After all, "America is already great."
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See, I think you're not quite right about Clinton's basic income rhetoric not being nationalist. It isn't the "hardline" nationalism of a Hitler or Mussolini, nor even the temperamental nationalism of Trump, but it is the sort of conventional, "soft" nationalism shared by just about if not every American president (but of course "American" could be any nationality). It's the belief every empire and nation has in its own "exceptionalism," and Clinton is no exception herself to that shared delusion.
"Not a fan of Trump but he was right when he asked why we have so many nukes (6,800 total) and we don’t use them. He literally meant stop making nukes bc it’s a waste of money."
I'm sorry, but you're wrong here, in what seems like a rhetorical case of pareidolia. We know that he doesn't think they're a waste of money because 1) he's done nothing to deproliferate and 2) he's bragged about a $1 trillion investment in "modernizing" the nuclear arsenal (which was actually not his but Obama's plan), a move that one general said might make their use more likely. And 3) though it's kind of just rumor, it seems as though in closed-door meetings Trump has asked advisers repeatedly why we can't use nuclear weapons. He's not being ironic or socratic, or rhetorical. He's a moron.
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The point is that he has a pattern, kind of like you do, of apologizing for sexual harassers (usually by smearing others). For an ordinary person that's just a disappointing, ugly trait; but for someone in his position, someone who has a history of suggestive and inappropriate behavior with underaged girls (Soon-Yi, Mariel Hemingway), someone who's made a living off of movies about the appeal of older men to much younger (underage) women, someone who married his adopted daughter, perhaps it says a bit more.
The legal situation motivating Geimer's position toward Polanski is a bit more complicated than you're making it out to be. Polanski should have done time for what he did—drugging and raping a 13 year old girl—but the judge reneged on a plea deal and Polanski fled. Yes, one of the reasons people don't like to come forward in high-profile cases is precisely the extreme media scrutiny. All of the unwanted attention, having to relive the abuse, total strangers blaming everyone but the person responsible for what happened. But there has always been one person who could end the "media hysteria" and injustice for Geimer, and that has been Roman Polanski. He doesn't give a shit, except to use her—again—to vindicate himself. She's dealing with what's been happening the best way possible, by trying to move past it. Polanski is never going to trial, and so I imagine she thinks it's better to just let it go. Good for her, that's her prerogative, and it's not anyone else's place to dictate to her how she should feel about the situation or about him, but, especially in light of new accusations, I don't see how he deserves any slack.
So I quoted Allen's remark about Polanski because it demonstrates that he has a consistent view of sexual predators: poor them, they're the victims. "Enough is enough." He doesn't understand what the big deal is. After all, if you're an artist, if you're a bigshot like Polanski or Weinstein, the rules are different. He doesn't understand the difference between forcing someone to have sex and winking at someone in the refectory. Sure, he didn't know about the new allegations against Polanski, but how did Allen respond when one woman after another recounted stories of Weinstein approaching them, groping them, raping them? It's sad for Harvey. Gee, must be terrible. Those poor women, but also poor Harvey. It shows where his sympathy lies.
There are two people who know for sure whether Allen molested Dylan—Allen and Dylan, and given Dylan's age at the time, it's possible Allen is the only one who knows for sure. Mia Farrow isn't the most credible person, children are impressionable; but Allen has many times tried to push the boundaries with minors. My instinct is to trust Dylan. Children can be fed lies, they can make up stories, but they can't fake trauma. If nothing else, this case demonstrates why it's important to prosecute people at the time of the offense.
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@BWolf00 That sounds like a very tough-minded, practical thing to say, but it's actually tremendously cowardly and selfish. If covid is a feature of life from now on, it'll be due in large part to people like you valuing the banal freedom of filling your pie hole at Cheesecake Factory or getting a haircut over the freedom of...I don't know, being alive. As I've already pointed out, coivd had an answer: early lockdowns, paying people to stay home, washing hands, wearing masks, things countries like Vietnam, China, New Zealand and others did, and where people are back to a semblance of normalcy, concerts, restaurants, etc. Our outcome, the fact that we're still staggering through this, was not inevitable.
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@krisb3939 You may be shocked to learn that 22 cases worldwide in a year isn't a pandemic. Crazy, right? Even crazier—none of those were in the US. There hasn't been a case of polio in the US since 1993, and even that didn't originate here. So yes, to address the original point I was responding to, and not the gallop you're riding, virus can be effectively eradicated.
I'm not sure why the dum dums in the comments think that there being a vaccine is some kind of gotcha. Yes, we need (and now have) a vaccine for polio and covid. That's important. The point of doing an effective and humane shutdown is to prevent the staggering loss of life we've seen which affected not only covid patients themselves but anyone else who needed hospital care until a vaccine was produced.
A strong early lockdown would've likely made future lockdowns unnecessary or merely local. Places where lockdowns were both effective and accompanied by provisions for citizens have both tended to have greatly reduced, if not virtually zero, significant covid spread and did not witness upticks in depression or suicide. The fact that America couldn't figure this out doesn't mean that there was no solution. (Someone also raised population as the smoking gun explanation for those countries' low case numbers, but it's not. Vietnam, for example, has roughly the population of my state but a fraction the total cases of my county.)
I'll reiterate the point I'm making. The spread of covid could've been largely if not completely prevented by a quicker response by governments globally, eg by shutting down for a 4-6 weeks and paying people to stay home. Instead, they chose to delay and prioritize the smooth functioning of business over people's lives and longterm health, and selfish Americans in particular prioritized their banal sense of normalcy over everything else.
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James Risen has done some amazing and important reporting. No one can take that from him.
However, reading his book State of Power, it became clear fairly quickly that he does operate with that "Washington bubble," pro-elite mindset that you see everywhere in the corporate media.
Here is how he describes Bush in State of Power. He says that Bush's foreign policy was "a radical departure from the centrist traditions of US foreign policy," which presumably includes supporting dictators, supporting coups, Iran-Contra, Bay of Pigs, installing medium-range missiles in Turkey, funding Diem and calling off elections in Vietnam and then turning it into a parking lot. Risen further describes this tradition as embodying "cautious pragmatism."
He goes on to say that "President Bush deserves credit for making the spread of democracy a centerpiece of his agenda," which was his "ambitious dream." I'm sorry, but anyone who sincerely thinks that Bush cared about the spread of democracy is severely blinkered when it comes to assessing the agenda of power in America. One can imagine similar panegyrics being made to Trump's MAGA, with similar effect on the gag reflex. Who cares what Bush's intentions or dreams were if his method was to devastate a region with impunity?
He says of Condoleezza Rice, "Rice had a strong bullshit detector." This of the woman who sold America on the line, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Rice must have been on DEFCON1 for that.
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@alexculliton9926 I don't want to write an essay, but I do want to point out and maybe clear up a few misconceptions in your reply.
The first is that leftists aren't "afraid" of power structures. Some even love them. But most, like left Marxists, certain communists, and anarchists, have a critique of hierarchies. That's very different than being afraid.
Next, there's quite a wealth of information available about workplace democratization, including books by people like the aforementioned Richard Wolff or Gar Alperovitz; studies by people like Frank Mintz; books about Mondragon; the work of Nobel Prize winner Elenor Ostrom, who debunks the myth of "the tragedy of the commons" and shows how collective or common ownership of resources is better for sustainability that private ownership; or resources from places like U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and that's not even scratching the surface.
I can't speak to the example you provided, because it's one example, and I'm not familiar with it. It could've closed for any number of reasons. Anyone in the restaurant business will tell you that it's a fickle industry and even popular places can close. I also don't know how it was managed. If it was students running it, that probably meant at least some turnover, and that can be difficult to deal with. On top of that, workplace democracy is both neither one-size-fits-all nor a perfect structure in that it can't be demolished by external factors.
Following from that point, it's not as if you can take a business and overnight make everyone boss. That's not how it works. For instance, the USFWC recommends employees take at least several months if not years to train in management courses so that they know how to run the coop. You can't just take people who've been systemically forbidden, in a sense, from exerting power over their work life to suddenly just know how to do that. Also, being a worker in a worker coop doesn't mean that you exercise executive authority over every decision and act as a manager. Every place is different, and there are lots of theories about how to best organize labor. In some cases, workers may have voting power matters that most affect them, they may be responsible for voting to hire managers; votes may be by majority, consensus, or some other measure. The notion that there has to be an "executive," by which you mean tyrant, is purely ideological.
Another important thing is that you seem to be basing your belief in the inefficacy of worker coops on an example of failure. But notice that when a socialist business, or a business that is as socialist as possible within a capitalist system, fails, it is taken as a sign that the entire project of socialism is unfeasible. A cafe in Dublin goes under; so goes under socialism. But when a capitalist business fails, which happens all the time, well, that's just a sign of how great the market is! It's competition kicking in! When a capitalist business succeeds, that's proof capitalism is the greatest economic system in human history. When a capitalist business fails, that's proof capitalism is the greatest economic system in human history. In science, that would be called an unfalsifiable position. Of course, some worker coops aren't going to work out, especially when they're competing against a system that isn't designed to act in their favor. No leftist disputes that. It doesn't make sense to have arbitrarily strict criteria for a socialist business that capitalist businesses not only fail to meet but are lauded for failing regularly.
Anecdotally, I could point to many coops in my area that have thrived for years, including an excellent cheese and pizza shop. Would that sway you? Maybe not. What we can do instead is look at data and see what that tells us. There was an excellent article in the Nation that talks about the increased productivity and wellbeing of workers in coops, as well as the fact that many of these businesses are larger operations.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/worker-cooperatives-are-more-productive-than-normal-companies/
It would also be worthwhile looking at Mondragon, which is by no means a small operation. From available data, worker coops aren't limited to small "hairdressers" and the like. They also include large scale factories (see for instance New Era Windows in Chicago, which got a bit of press back in the day), bakeries, green energy firms, farms, etc. It's possible that worker coops and federations aren't going to produce giant multinational conglomerates like we have now. Good. We should be thinking of how to degrow and decentralize the economy where it makes sense, and avoid concentrating power into the hands of a few whether they're capitalists or self-avowed socialists.
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@lias.1280 I think you're right. It probably has to do with declines in education, the necessity to reach more people, and the expanded diversity of the constituency. Van Buren could deliver an FK grade 20 speech because his audience was mostly wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon, and educated. A modern president speaks to people of all cultural backgrounds, ESLs, high school dropouts and PhDs.
On top of that there's a more recent cultural suspicion of education, particularly the liberal arts, which are seen as useless and elitist (a far cry from the working-class culture described by Jonathan Rose).
But just because Obama COULD deliver a better speech, bud, pal, amigo, compadre, doesn't mean that the speeches he actually DOES deliver, my dude, mark him as a great orator, homie.
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@bonchidude That's not evidence. And like I said, the people "behind" the "attacks" are a Bernie supporter who retweets Tara Reade and progressive staffers trying to oust Pelosi. I'm asking for what evidence you have to think Pelosi is behind that, and your response is, "yeah, because Pelosi's behind it." That's just begging the question.
Again, this is the same deranged, conspiratorial thinking we saw Kavanaugh and Biden supporters marshall. Well, Bernie would benefit from Biden getting MeToo'd; therefore, Bernie is behind it! Etc. Based on nothing. I'm asking for you to give a little bit more than nothing.
I think I've asked very reasonably and repeatedly for evidence of what are pretty big claims. So far all I've gotten are reiterations and re-assertions of the claims.
Now it's possible that neither the sexual harassment nor the toxic workplace allegations are valid for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with Pelosi, but you're committed to this being all her doing, and I would just like to know what actual evidence you have of that.
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1) Who gives a fuck about intent. Consequences matter more. If Bush II had a good intent for starting the Iraq War that does absolutely nothing to make him less of a war criminal. Intent matters in some cases. Like, if you accidentally kill someone, that's manslaughter. If you kill someone, even with "good intentions," then, assuming you're of sound mind and it wasn't self-defense, that's murder.
2) You can support free speech—this is a crazy idea; hold on tight!—you can support free speech and also believe that that does not require every outlet, platform, and rodeo to broadcast every despicable idea. If someone wants to deny the Holocaust, they can mosey over to the Daily Stormer or something. Facebook doesn't have to tolerate that any more than another platform.
When someone like Chomsky stands up for a Holocaust denier's right to publish, they're not saying that Penguin or Anchor or the NYBR has to publish that denial; only that, if there's a willing publisher, we shouldn't go out of our way to censor that speech.
Not. a. complicated. issue.
3) Unsurprisingly, only a few minutes into the video, the story becomes about Kyle and his demonetization woes.
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@floopsiemcsoops6008 Marx was a leftist and a communist. Again, that you're only capable of thinking in a narrow liberal/conservative dichotomy is revealing. Should I be surprised that you still haven't responded to the issues I raised?
How about just answering why, if the left can claim a political victory merely by reframing its demands in the terms of the status quo rather than by association with "socialism"—why can't conservatives turn around a similarly reframe the thing you're promoting, ostensibly socialism by a different name (but not really), as socialism and thereby wars away would-be converts? Why can't they take already existing, pervasive ideological suspicion of democracy—that is, direct control, not indirect control through representation—and demean socialism as mob rule?
Your idea sounds nice. It's a particularly attractive idea online. But once you actually talk to people, or try to think outside capitalism and the state for yourself, you realize that, while having a vocabulary can be helpful, words won't do your thinking for you, or for anyone else. If you want a radical critique of all that exists, falling back on common sense assumptions and biases won't cut it.
Socialism is not coterminous with workplace democracy; and while socialists do, contrary to what you seem to think, spend a lot of time talking about democratizing work, it's been long recognized that that is not enough; it's not enough to have co-op capitalism.
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@floopsiemcsoops6008 More empty bluster from the lib lmfao
Do you think socialists don't already talk about democratizing work? Do you think you came up with that? Gee, we've never thought of talking to people about a core feature of our ideology. We just spew jargon at the initiated, but nothing seems to stick, and we're left scratching our heads. Thank god for you!
You can debate with conservatives about "sensible gun regulation" or whatever liberal policy you prefer—taxes on the rich, M4A, infrastructure bills. But we really don't need more people watering socialism down further as a flimsy ruse to encourage co-op capitalism.
Where's the science showing that conservatives agree with abolishing private property when you change a few words around? I've asked for it multiple times, and it hasn't materialized. Maybe YouTube is deleting your links?
Framing may be useful when some core assumptions or ideology are shared. But as I have already said many times, the task is TO CHANGE the underlying ideology. That is the task of socialism. And yes, it is difficult. It takes time. It requires talking with people over and over, addressing their particular circumstances in jargon-free terms. It can't be done with a linguistic legerdemain that attempts to bypass content by hijacking the status quo reactionary ideology.
"What is Marx, a liberal or a conservative????!?!?!"
""When did I ever operate from a liberal/conservative dichotomy???"
What an absolute clown.
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@TheBighatter First, teachers actually provide a structural social good.
Second, the notion of "bad teachers" protected by unions is right wing anti-union propaganda. Does it happen sometimes? Sure. But it's not a systemic problem.
Third, the problem with the police, and therefore with police associations, is not a few bad apples. It is with the police as an institution of class and racial oppression.
Police associations don't just protect "bad apples"; they also protect the so-called "good apples" who also uphold a racist, classist, ableist, and altogether unjust social order. That is their function: to manage inequalities produced by our political economy.
Whatever your opinion of the public education system or unions (and there are valid critiques) teachers' unions and police associations aren't comparable in the way they protect their members.
A teacher's union, for instance, wouldn't condone murder, planting evidence, rape, and all the other nefarious activities police unions support.
Teacher's unions also frequently advocate for beneficial reforms, like de-emphasizing testing, decreasing class sizes, and school funding. Police associations routinely fight against even the most modest reforms.
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Oh look, another layperson who's heard of aether. I can't wait to hear about your opinions on epicycles or Vulcan. Guess what, several centuries ago some people believed that all things were composed of incredibly small objects called atoms. But many scientists did not believe that could be possible. After all, no one had ever seen an atom before. The atomists were busying themselves with equations based on something that had no physical proof and to which, moreover, they attributed ever stranger paradoxical properties, like the ability to be a wave and a particle, or to only have qualities when measured. Boy, those atomists sure were wrong.
The problem with your comparison is that it's nothing like the case of aether. Science is quite different, our understanding much greater, and our instruments both more precise and accurate. And while there was little evidence for aether, there actually is solid evidence for dark matter, like bullet clusters. But science isn't made from comparisons. As I just showed, it's as easy to find a comparison that flatters dark matter as it so to find one that disparages it. You're not the first person to make a facile connection with dark matter or dark energy and other defunct concepts in physics. You may not like it, but so far dark matter is the much better candidate to explain flaws in the theory of gravity on a galactic scale. Other attempts, like MOND, have not fared so well, and if anything they evince the kind of ad hoc approach you think dark matter/energy represent.
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@soundpalette2438 “Conspiracy theories” are attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors (Aaronovitch, 2010; Byford, 2011; Coady, 2006; Dentith & Orr, 2017; Keeley, 1999). While often thought of as addressing governments, conspiracy theories could accuse any group perceived as powerful and malevolent. Conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terror attacks accuse the Bush administration, the Saudi Government, corporations, the financial industry, and the Jews; conspiracy theories about climate change accuse scientists, communists, the United Nations, Democrats, the government, and the oil industry among others. While a conspiracy refers to a true causal chain of events, a conspiracy theory refers to an allegation of conspiracy that may or may not be true. For a history of the term, see McKenzie-McHarg (2018), and for a critique of its usage, see Walker (2018)
"Finally, the term “conspiracy theorist” refers to a variety of concepts in both popular usage and in the literature. For some, the term refers to a person who believes in a particular conspiracy theory or has a strong tendency toward conspiracy thinking. It is sometimes used more specifically to denote a person who propagates conspiracy theories professionally (e.g., Alex Jones, David Icke) or to people who advocate strongly for a conspiracy theory, such as former Florida Atlantic University Professor James Tracy who claims that the 2012 killings at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in the United States were a hoax, or Piers Corbyn—brother of UK Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn—who claims that climate science is a fraud. We avoid this term in this review in exchange for more precise language."
Karen Douglas, "Understanding Conspiracy Theories"
Personally, I think if you believe in a cite with some frequency conspiracy theories, it's fine to call you a conspiracy theorist. You don't have to self identify for the label to apply.
Believing in russiagate and JFK assassination theories would certainly fit.
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Adam Smith talked about capitalism's need for home bias, meaning that businessmen prefer to operate within their own country and thereby any wealth they accrue will redound to their country, hence the "wealth of nations." What he couldn't have anticipated was the late 20th century development of technologies like freight shipping, airlines, telecommunications, and so forth, that mobilized capital, eradicating any economic benefit for the businessperson to nurture a home bias and creating the conditions for the massive offshoring of jobs, urban blight, and financialization.
Like many conservatives and liberals, Payne is holding up an 18th century notion of capitalism—idealized even for its time—and finding it doesn't match the capitalism that has emerged in response to hundreds of years of irreversible history.
That's if he's being honest. More likely it's opportunistic kvetching. Look at Stuart Varney, who constantly complains about government interfering with the private sector but now is saying that of course states need to pay out fat subsidies to mega-corporations like Amazon.
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