Laissez-faire Politics Thread - Praxis? I didn't play Deus Ex, sorry.

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/collinrees/status/1198329446878580737

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/walid970721/status/1198651517651304451

[Kara]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic campaign is shaking loose all sorts of stuff.

[close]

The most racist person I know in real life currently has "#Together Against Antisemitism" (yes there's a hashtag even though the words are separate) on his FB profile pic.

Been meaning to reply to this.

I've been mutuals on social media with maybe a dozen or so nü Labour devotees for a long time. Some of them have become quietist ever since Corbyn was elected head of the party, but some of them have just lost the plot and can never stop posting about him, which means that I've been inundated with the "Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic" stuff for months. It's made me think a lot.

1. I'm glad that we have an independent identity here in the U.S. One that runs parallel to, and often crosses over with, the State of Israel to be sure, but it's still one that can stand on its own (and has or a long time). As best I can tell British Jewry hasn't been as fortunate, though I should probably account for how small it is to begin with when making this comparison.

2. It's really bizarre seeing people who think that they're good allies spout questionable content all the time. I'm not even talking about the hasbara that they parrot like a child dressing up in their parent's clothes, but just stuff like "I'm qualified to define the exact parameters of what antisemitism *is*." Our gentile allies here tend to be evangelicals who have a very cynical eschatological reason for supporting Israeli actions so I harbor no fantasies about how righteous among the nations they really are, but these are people who legitimately think they're doing good.

3. The only time they talk about antisemitism in the U.S. is when Ilhan Omar says something ill-advised, which really makes their professed status as allies ring hollow after the pogrom at Tree of Life or a president who keeps interesting company, praises certain very fine people, and demands certain actions from the agencies that answer to him. The other day one of them retweeted Hen Mazzig equating the "blood and soil" chant with "from the river to the sea" and I just closed the Twitter app like the Banderas laptop gif.

I don't want them to be filler, and if I'm being perfectly honest I'm agnostic on the whole Corbyn issue but this stuff really sucks, man.

[Kara]

To draw a flawed analogy, if you told me an American politician was racist I'd be agnostic too unless I had knowledge of some anti-racist actions they'd taken in the past. Obviously Corbyn has a C.V. in that regard, but Dutch squatters in Africa aren't entirely analogous to the diaspora / Israeli dynamic and from my travels I know that the struggle for civil rights for Palestinians attracts all sorts.

Also the British press is utter trash so trying to piece anything together from reporting is mostly a lost cause.

[benjipwns]

I admit I am obviously nowhere as intertwined into the specifics of the anti-semetic claims and so on, although when there were some articles a bit back about all the people calling him an anti-semetic monster I was somewhat shocked at how many of the quotes came from "lifelong" Labourites with the other parties comparatively mum on the subject.

Somewhat on topic, I was actually most surprised coming across how seriously and INTENSELY Americans on the "Left" (aka Twitter mostly) are starting to take all this Corbyn stuff. The coming of an election, in another country (that matters unlike Canada) that speaks English, has really ramped it up the last month.

The dude has seemingly like no chance of being anything but opposition and the polls have looked like this for years now. The Tories are apparently running an internal contest to see how low on their totem pole they can go and still lead him by 30 points. The Liberal Dems are the Liberal Dems.

And like you guys said, it's not like Corbyn really says anything all that nutty for someone in his Labour tendency. At least I don't find all that much of it to be. It's more like regular politician flubs than anything I would take as some kind of deep ideological statement.

Yet, this is apparently the major debate of the Global International. Corbyn: For or Against?

[benjipwns]

He says without disclaiming that he's been mostly avoiding libertarian or similar websites despite their being good sources for Wank Dad content because the cycle debate has already started and ramped up to include whether or not "true libertarians" should support Trump on impeachment.

For the record and for your amusement, it usually breaks down like this:
Cosmotarians - Support the LP if possible, impeachment is a regular good
"Constitutional" Libertarians - Support Trump because the LP won't enforce the borders if they somehow win, impeachment will let illegals take over
"Lifelong" Libertarians - Support Trump and the GOP because the LP won't enforce the borders, protect us from terrorism or regulate Facebook if they somehow win, impeachment will let the Democrats let illegals take over
Objectivists - Support Trump if only to oppose the Cosmotarians, but are currently too exhausted from trying to get everyone to pay attention to the recent Canadian elections because Objectivists are like 75% Canadian, this is a truth fact; impeachment will let Islamists take advantage of our weak foreign policy
Rothbardians - ongoing existential crisis
Ancaps - voting is immoral, but vote LP purely to spite all of the above; impeach him for violating the Constitution instead, then shrink down to a night watchmen state!
Paulites - Ron Paul 2020 (Dad used to hit homers and never got beat up by his neighbor.) WWRPD?

[benjipwns]

I guess I'm seeing more of a sudden very intense interest that I do not think will even exist after December 13, and there's lots of little not-so-subtle proxy warring related to Bernie, the "DSA" vs. "Tankies" Twitter War, etc.

[benjipwns]

https://archive.md/nESXY

“How to stop a civil war” says the cover of the latest Atlantic magazine. I can suggest a fix: the international community should intervene in the US. Of course Americans have a right to self-determination but the priority now is saving democracy.

It’s hard to assess the risk of political violence, given the US tradition of everyday gunslinging: the rival candidates for state elections in Montana, who each made ads showing themselves firing rifles at television screens, looked like actors playing Afghan warlords. Still, the recent ethnopolitical terror attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh and elsewhere were shocking even by US standards.

The much tamer UK needs watching too. Like Americans, Britons have been upgrading their political views into their identities and dismissing opponents as traitors. Both countries now intend to resolve their conflict with winner-take-all elections.

Such scenarios rarely end well, warns former Yemeni government minister Rafat Al-Akhali, a fellow at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He says: “A lot of people in the regions that we work with thought we had to transfer their experiences of national dialogue to the UK and other countries.” So what should interventions in the US and potentially Britain look like?

Washington used to advocate a set schedule for countries in conflict. A binary election only worsens polarisation. Instead, says Al-Akhali, the first step is power sharing: a transitional government that includes all conflicting sides.

Next comes an Afghan-style loya jirga, or grand assembly, to kick off a national dialogue. Yemen’s brought together political parties, but also youth, women, civil society, southern secessionists and northern Houthi rebels. A US dialogue could look remarkably similar.

Given the death of truth, a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission wouldn’t work in the US. Americans may also need to abandon the polarising impeachment of Donald Trump and let him seek exile in a friendly country: the model could be Ukraine’s kleptocratic pro-Kremlin former president Viktor Yanukovich, now based out of Russia.

The loya jirga writes a new constitution. This would be Britain’s first, and for the US, a much-needed update of its antiquated 1787 document. Japanese jurists could help draft it as a thank you to Americans for writing Japan’s excellent 1947 constitution.

The new text would dispense with vagaries such as “high crimes and misdemeanours”, define presidential corruption and end political control of the judiciary. If it’s undemocratic for the Polish or Hungarian governments to appoint judges, why can the US president do it?

The new constitution must cantonise the US, going way beyond “states’ rights” to neighbourhood rights. The smaller the units of power, the less important becomes the national political conflict. The US’s second republic will also need a new electoral system that favours coalitions instead of winner-takes-all rule.

The new constitution must also tackle foreign election-meddling. Ideally, a non-partisan institution would be put in charge of handling this, but the only one now somewhat trusted across the American divide is the military, and you generally don’t want soldiers in post-conflict transitions.

After Russia’s successes in the US and UK in 2016, half the world will be interfering in the next elections. Indeed, a British support group for India’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party boasts of campaigning for the Tories in 48 marginal seats. British Conservatives and US Republicans may welcome the help, but they should realise there’s at least a theoretical possibility that foreign powers might one day shift to their opponents.

In fact, if Russia feels any need to hasten Britain’s break-up and international isolation, it can already choose between Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit party, the Scottish Nationalists, Sinn Féin and Plaid Cymru, while encouraging infighting between Remain parties.

Once the new constitution is signed, it’s time for closely scrutinised elections. Even before the US elections of 2000, the journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote: “The United States loves nothing better than to certify other countries’ ballots as ‘free and fair’, so there can hardly be any principled objection to a delegation of monitors from democratic nations taking up position, pens in hand, as America makes its ‘choice.’”

If only he’d been listened to. The problem is worse today: given gerrymandering and voter suppression, states such as North Carolina and Georgia are no longer full democracies. Tories are learning from Republicans: they’re now planning to make voters show identification, precisely because many poorer Britons don’t have any.

Whoever becomes leader must reach out. Andrew Yang, a no-hope Democratic candidate, has it right: “After I win the . . . election, my plan is to go to the district that voted for me the least in the entire country and say, ‘I know you didn’t support me, but I will be your president too.’”

But let’s not get over-optimistic. At best, intervention will freeze the US’s overlapping ethnic, economic and regional conflicts. The question for the international community then becomes: how much blood and treasure is it willing to expend on a country that may not be ready for democracy?

Simon Kuper is a British author. He writes about sports "from an anthropologic perspective."

[OnlyRegret]

Now, now, let's have some basic respect here.

(Image removed from quote.)

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic campaign is shaking loose all sorts of stuff.

[close]

reluctant 

[OnlyRegret]

He says without disclaiming that he's been mostly avoiding libertarian or similar websites despite their being good sources for Wank Dad content because the cycle debate has already started and ramped up to include whether or not "true libertarians" should support Trump on impeachment.

For the record and for your amusement, it usually breaks down like this:
Cosmotarians - Support the LP if possible, impeachment is a regular good
"Constitutional" Libertarians - Support Trump because the LP won't enforce the borders if they somehow win, impeachment will let illegals take over
"Lifelong" Libertarians - Support Trump and the GOP because the LP won't enforce the borders, protect us from terrorism or regulate Facebook if they somehow win, impeachment will let the Democrats let illegals take over
Objectivists - Support Trump if only to oppose the Cosmotarians, but are currently too exhausted from trying to get everyone to pay attention to the recent Canadian elections because Objectivists are like 75% Canadian, this is a truth fact; impeachment will let Islamists take advantage of our weak foreign policy
Rothbardians - ongoing existential crisis
Ancaps - voting is immoral, but vote LP purely to spite all of the above; impeach him for violating the Constitution instead, then shrink down to a night watchmen state!
Paulites - Ron Paul 2020 (Dad used to hit homers and never got beat up by his neighbor.) WWRPD?

So what flavour are you?

[Kara]

That FT article is just the JDPON copy pasta.

[OnlyRegret]

good work kara

https://twitter.com/SMuhrine/status/1199553440021667840

[OnlyRegret]

hit the road, Benjamin P. Wns

https://twitter.com/liz_franczak/status/1179107579038814208

[BisMarckie]

good work kara

https://twitter.com/SMuhrine/status/1199553440021667840

I don‘t really know who MovieBob is, but rallying against outsourcing of labor has been a classic Marxist staple for decades.

[BisMarckie]

When I think of Benji, I think of unbridled capitalism.

[benjipwns]

Personally, I especially like killing Libyans.

[curly]

When I think of Benji, I think of unbridled capitalism.

[benjipwns]

this went well:

https://twitter.com/the_moviebob/status/1199850018250866688

https://twitter.com/the_moviebob/status/1199852277265321985

https://twitter.com/the_moviebob/status/1199854468042543106

[benjipwns]

https://twitter.com/the_moviebob/status/1199868399645581313

[Kara]

Aside from some U.S. tax commentary I don't tweet political stuff, that's just asking for trouble. Always be dissembling.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Plus it lets me float in comically disparate circles because everyone turns off viewing other people's favorites on their timeline.

[close]

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1200278415590535168

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1200278788480946178

[Joe Molotov]

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1200278788480946178

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/thetrillbillies/status/1200483235261820928

[OnlyRegret]

[curly]

https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1200618578703073281

real marxism: demsuccs:: Godard: the guy who did Stepbrothers

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/MissOMara/status/1200859299049656320

https://twitter.com/MissOMara/status/1200860521882255360

https://twitter.com/MissOMara/status/1200889469705936897

https://twitter.com/MissOMara/status/1200938854263377920

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/DarkSoulsSauron/status/1200795866518433792

 

[Nintex]

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/REALpunknews/status/1200957688181592065

[OnlyRegret]

https://twitter.com/malscrung/status/1199690877154811904

[benjipwns]

https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1200618578703073281

real marxism: demsuccs:: Godard: the guy who did Stepbrothers

He recently even joined the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, proudly proclaiming on Twitter that “I consider myself a democratic socialist. Always have.” When I ask him why a successful Hollywood filmmaker would do something like that, he looks at me completely shocked, even disappointed: “Why not?”

“I went back after I got to know him, and I rewatched the Anchorman movies, and Step Brothers and Talladega Nights,” says Adam Davidson, cocreator of NPR’s “Planet Money” and a frequent collaborator of McKay’s. “I went back and really saw that passionate voice shouting through these funny movies and realized ‘Oh, those were, like, angry, pointed, and brilliant dissections of our culture.’”

Davidson served as an adviser on The Big Short where, despite very different temperaments and politics, he and McKay hit it off. “Our entire first year of collaborating was arguing about trade,” McKay says with a smile. “To his credit, he conceded some points.” Where McKay had the populist fervor, Davidson was trained in economics at the University of Chicago. “[McKay’s] texting me every single day on a huge range of topics about how does the world actually work and how should the world actually work,” says Davidson. “I don’t think I have anyone else in my life who is as voraciously curious about every aspect of it and whose brain is on fire trying to understand it.”

McKay tells the story of the radical anti-capitalist roots of Chumbawamba’s 1997 megahit “Tubthumping,” which he introduces as “the ultimate populist, activist story”: “[the song] was part of their deliberate thirty-year strategy to empower the working class and overthrow the status quo of England.” Davidson goes quiet. “I honestly don’t know if you’re doing a bit right now,” he says.

McKay backs up and sets the scene — Thatcher’s rise in the UK, the 1984 miners’ strike, and a little anti-capitalist collective, Chumbawamba, trying to figure out what the hell they could do about it. With McKay playing clips of their ever-evolving sound, we hear how the band eventually traded in the fuzzed-out guitars and guttural punk howling for drum machines and slick vocals, ditching the subculture to go pop. But their goal wasn’t money — it was to wage class war. And after fifteen years, it paid off with a hit that was no doubt heard by legions of workers around the globe — maybe more. The defiant chorus, still stuck in the heads of millions to this day, was about working-class resilience even after all the defeats: I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down.

McKay even shot an epilogue in which Derek Jeter, playing himself, acts as a kind of left-wing Deep Throat (with a touch of Matt Taibbi), handing our heroes their next assignment, this one on Gold-man Sachs: “The whole damn system is clogged up with dirty money. And the news doesn’t say a word about it,” says Jeter. “’Cause who owns them? The same corporations who own the government.” It was cut from the theatrical edition.

“The audiences hated it,” McKays says. “We would screen it, and it would just thud.” So he decided to drive home his point, instead, in the end credits, with a slickly crafted animated presentation on the startling rise in economic inequality. It charts everything from the explosion of the CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio to a comparison between the NYPD retirement benefit and the average chief executive package. Everything he’d been wanting to scream at his audience came pouring out in that sequence. It was a risky move — going full Bernie Bro just one year into the Obama presidency, when Bernie Bros didn’t even exist yet.

After The Other Guys, McKay tried to get a comic book adaptation off the ground — The Boys, by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, set in a world where superheroes are very much real, but are also deeply corrupt and dangerously unaccountable corporate-sponsored celebrities. The title refers to a secret black-ops team tasked with keeping those superheroes under control — by any means necessary.

It’s the total antithesis of The Avengers and its celebration of libertarian billionaires thumbing their nose at democracy. “The famous line where [Tony] Stark lands and he’s like . . . what did he say? ‘The US military is privatized,’” McKay says, wincing. The dangers of an arrogant, unaccountable elite with blood on their hands flying around the world? For McKay, they might as well be hedge fund managers on coke. He cut a proof-of-concept trailer for The Boys and shopped it around town, but nobody would bite.

why is this happening

[curly]

[Joe Molotov]

Uh oh, Upsetera thread incoming! "Who is this old fuck that says Disney movies aren't cinema and doesn't even love Baby Yoda??"

[curly]

Foucault would have known about Baby Yoda

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/cafedujord/status/1192972896991211520

[toku]

https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1202365668013809668

[OnlyRegret]

[Crash Dummy]

any good articles etc on hypermodernity?

[OnlyRegret]

https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan/status/1202707578024845314

[benjipwns]

Study up, folks

(Image removed from quote.)

I was going to say what my score was, but I was reading the chart counterclockwise from No Treason so I got to "Precursors of Ancap" and saw "Ayn Rand" and now I refuse to participate.

[Joe Molotov]

ayncap

[benjipwns]

"interchangeable books, choose one"

what's the difference between "novice" and "beginner"?

The Helicopter Pilot's Handbook, zero reviews on Amazon

One problem with helicoptering is that there are virtually no flying clubs, at least of the sort that exist for fixed wing, so pilots get very little chance to swap stories, unless they meet in a muddy field somewhere, waiting for their passengers. As a result, the same mistakes are being made and the same lessons learnt separately instead of being shared - it's comforting sometimes to know that you're not the only one to inflate the floats by accident! Even when you do get into a school, there are still a couple of things they don't teach you, namely that aviation runs on paperwork, and how to get a job, including interview techniques, etc - flying the aircraft is actually less than a third of the job. Another is that nobody really tells you anything, either about the job you have to do (from the customer) or how to do it (the company) - you will always be up against the other guy who managed to do it last week! Sure, there will be training, but, even in the best companies, this will be relatively minimal. This book is an attempt to correct the above situations by gathering together as much information as possible for helicopter pilots, old and new, professional and otherwise, in an attempt to explain the why, so the how will become easier (you will be so much more useful if you know what the customer is trying to achieve). In short, this is all the stuff nobody taught me - every tip and trick I have learnt has been included.

I saw a similar thing to this that was like "top 50 libertarian books" or something along those lines and it was what you expected until about #20 where nearly the last thirty were all prepper books or "above normal" Federal Reserve related rants or both, I assume the state had such a dangerous person murdered

[benjipwns]

I initially thought that the $ indicated obscure self-published works that they sell and nobody has ever seen, as those often dominate a lot of these kinds of things, but at least two of them including Viking Age Iceland are at least semi-legit academic works, the others are just collected essays. Viking Age Iceland is literally what it says on the cover. I assume it drew attention because the Vikings did not exactly setup a "state" as there weren't really any at the time so things like "they had no foreign policy or standing military" is misapplying a current concept backwards. I think it's more a problem of our current IR scholars not considering "raid and rape everything in sight" as not being a valid "foreign policy" due to their bigoted cultural norms.

However one of them is most definitely this, and you'll never guess which one:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The essays contained in this volume were the result of many years of intensive thinking and reading about liberty. They address a topic, anarchist strategy, that is underdeveloped. Many people have written about how a free society might operate. But relatively few have applied hard thinking to the key question of "What do we do to achieve that world?" In the few instances people have, their proposed solutions have always been vague (a generic call for "education") or unconvincing (defeating the state through black markets - "agorism"). This is a problem. As long as we lack a comprehensible plan to bring about a free society, we will be unable to convince people that our ideology has a future. This will make them unwilling to act on our behalf. A person acts, as Mises explained, only if he believes that by acting he will successfully remove a felt uneasiness. Until we develop a plan to beat the state, I do not think our movement will inspire the hope necessary for action. The essays in this book are an attempt to solve this problem. In them, I outline a comprehensible plan for ending the state.

[close]

[jakefromstatefarm]

https://arzamas.academy/materials/1269

[curly]

I've gone from Left SR to Bolshevik. You really do get more conservative as you age.

[benjipwns]

I think I may be in for some trouble comrades:

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"the more things stay the same" amirite

[close]

[OnlyRegret]

https://arzamas.academy/materials/1269

I got Menshevik Centrists, the dot is about a unit up and left from them. But all I remember about that era of Russia was one class many years ago so :shrug

[OnlyRegret]

On the subject of quizzing, I want you to take the Canadian one, Benji.

https://votecompass.cbc.ca/canada/

Edit: If you need coaxing, I'll share mine.
It's a bit of a shite thing though, BQ do not deserve to be that upper-left and neither are the Libs that far apart from the Cons.

[Crash Dummy]

https://arzamas.academy/materials/1269

i'm a filthy centrist

[Great Rumbler]

World's Most Laughable Centrist

[Mandark]

https://twitter.com/willmenaker/status/1205253288083345408


cc: Esch

[Mandark]

I get rooting for both guys to win, but the implication seems to be that they could each have been platforms for some shared global project and

"With Corbyn's defeat, the last hope for citizens of the UK, and indeed the world, is that Americans get free health care and college!"

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Or really "a president who in his heart really wants Americans to get free health care and college even though it doesn't happen" but I'm tryna find a charitable reading.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'm obviously not trying that hard. Sue me.

[close]

[close]

[benjipwns]

On the subject of quizzing, I want you to take the Canadian one, Benji.

https://votecompass.cbc.ca/canada/

I think the "French Canadians have no human rights" and "Quebec should be turned into an open-air slave farm" positions affected my vertical position.

[OnlyRegret]

On the subject of quizzing, I want you to take the Canadian one, Benji.

https://votecompass.cbc.ca/canada/

(Image removed from quote.)

I think the "French Canadians have no human rights" and "Quebec should be turned into an open-air slave farm" positions affected my vertical position.

Good policies, want to take over the PPC? I'm sure no one will fight you over it.

[benjipwns]

lol I did the thing to weight the answers and it barely changed except for boosting one party, apparently my desire for a Republic outweighed hating French Canadians:

[OnlyRegret]

I wouldn't put too much stock in the finer details, just at face value.

[team filler]

[benjipwns]

Probably the one getting to work indoors.

[curly]

I think the 'democratic socialist' innanet movement really does believe that it's the antidote to fascism and capitalism in decline in the first world (despite how many years of history to the contrary). Corbyn and Bernie stans have a lot to shake hands over, they both summon great man theory to lionize washed up demi-Trots as their saviors and collapse in agony whenever reality punches them down. They genuinely believe what they're doing and saying is new and will work and people will just tail their politics because hell, they have People First Politics right? The dissonance comes when they are forced to come to grips with the reactionary nature of the classes they want to recruit. Look at jezzas platform itself, the confusion is clear when the Brexit Question is put on the table.

WRONG

https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1205280974017310722

https://twitter.com/lara_eleanor/status/1205285778999382016

https://twitter.com/marcusbarnett_/status/1205287276785352705

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/gobloid3/status/1205177360506589184