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

[Kara]

A debate where Mussolini tells Gramsci to read Bordiga.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1925/05/speech.htm

[Kara]

Considered posting this in the rona thread but there are intersections in the story that our liberal friends don't like to think about (there is a god damn Cheeto in the White House after all) so I'm sticking it here instead.

https://www.propublica.org/article/similar-to-times-of-war-the-staggering-toll-of-covid-19-on-filipino-health-care-workers/amp

(Sorry if this is a repost. I'm using my brief sabbatical to catch up on 2020's reading queue.)

[team filler]

stost has fallen 

[Mandark]

In DC and Maryland it's black and African American women, especially in home health care where they're 80-90% of the workers.

[Kara]

Weird how it's falling along racial lines. Must be a coincidence. Time to fire up some Jacobin and / or Chapo to hear about how identity politics (the kind oriented around racial inequality, not the kind screeching about Star Wars) is bad.

This is a companion piece to my last link I guess. More superficial, but covers a wider spread of stories.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-02/one-day-in-the-life-of-covid-19-in-los-angeles

[Kara]

https://twitter.com/lib_crusher/status/1288574789150547968

They talked about this some more on the recent free Corner Späti. Apparently some of the party platforms used stretch as far back as 2011, which is 2+ political lifetimes ago.

It's a bit damning that this data analysis fumbles so much with Portugal because it's a country that should exonerate their system. All the major parties there have names that straight up lie about their politics: Christian Democrats? Conservative nationalists. Social Democratic Party? Right wing. Socialist Party? Social-democratic. Communist Party? Brezhnevite revisionists. Left Bloc? Props up a minority Socialist Party government--they aren't blocking anything!

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The U.S. Democratic Party is a member of the Progressive Alliance along with Bolovia's MAS and Poland's SDL which you could describe as a special interest group for former state officials in Polska Ludowa that masquerades as a political party.

Maybe all those Republican accusations about being riddled with Marxists are true.

[close]

e: My messed up brain.

[Kara]

Can't imagine why #3 is here.

[Rufus]

Or civics.

---

"[x,y,z] are also important"
- "oh, so you're against [a,b,c]!?"

Is there a good word for this willfully obtuse nonsense?

[Great Rumbler]

(Image removed from quote.)

Can't imagine why #3 is here.

All that sounds pretty dope tho?

[Kara]

Ike also helped decolonize the Middle East.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Then he intervened in Lebanon.

[close]

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/ev4ngeIion/status/1290801671182983169

[VomKriege]

https://twitter.com/ev4ngeIion/status/1290801671182983169

 

[BIONIC]

https://twitter.com/ev4ngeIion/status/1290801671182983169

[Joe Molotov]

https://twitter.com/ev4ngeIion/status/1290801671182983169

1/3rd of 100% is 33.333% (repeating, of course), so they should have gotten an F. I hope this wasn't a math class.

[team filler]

 

[EchoRin]

I liked Boy Meets World (ya I know that was the Girl Meets World edition), but it always had some little things like this. Remember the cult episode? And when Shaun is confronted by Corey's dad, the dad says something like "You don't believe in anything? Not even God?".

Then the cool teacher wipes out on his motorcycle and Shawn is alone in the hospital room while he lays in a coma. Of course Shawn then goes and asks God for the teacher's good health. Now I like that episode anyways, but even as a youngster who wasn't religious and didn't know jack about media communication I was still very  about that.

Whatever, I don't have much love for communism with my background ("your country of origin was not real communism!!!  ", I know jack off), but ehhhh, I could have done without an episode tackling the subject matter in such a blatantly stupid American cold war hot take way. 

[BIONIC]

https://twitter.com/mechanicalastra/status/1291111580747194368

He lives 

[remy]

(Image removed from quote.)

Can't imagine why #3 is here.

All that sounds pretty dope tho?

for real, whenever i see this right wing hitpiece type shid i'm always like damn that sounds sick as hell

[Kara]

(Image removed from quote.)

Can't imagine why #3 is here.

All that sounds pretty dope tho?

for real, whenever i see this right wing hitpiece type shid i'm always like damn that sounds sick as hell

I got it from the accidentally left-wing account on Twitter.

[Joe Molotov]

None of y'all praising Communism ever heard of Voldemort and it shows.

[OnlyRegret]

Whatever, I don't have much love for communism with my background ("your country of origin was not real communism!!!  ", I know jack off), but ehhhh, I could have done without an episode tackling the subject matter in such a blatantly stupid American cold war hot take way. 

be careful, when bismarkie tried to pull that on shosta, kara materialized out of the warp to shank him. what I'm tryna say is watch out for slav-on-slav violence

[Kara]

This is LF Bore, where we keep things chill. Anything goes, you might say.

This event seems to have been an indelible one for you, however.

[Great Rumbler]

None of y'all praising Communism ever heard of Voldemort and it shows.

Voldemort was a true progressive, Harry was a status-quo neoliberal.

[Kara]

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/02/trumpism-after-trump/

spoiler (click to show/hide)

“Are you a communist or something?” he asked, in a friendly, sparring way. “I mean, it’s okay if you are; I’m so far right that I’m in Maoist territory.”

The PRC is wild, man. They have right wing Maoists, but not because socialism has achieved victory and the struggle is between better and ultra-leftism.

[close]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The pair worked as assistants to Niall Ferguson, the conservative historian who had gotten himself into trouble at Stanford’s Hoover Institution for encouraging “oppo research” on a liberal student. “Oh man, it was bullshit. They only got Ferguson because Susan Rice’s son accidentally forwarded a whole email chain to some unreliable student.”

“Wait, you mean Susan Rice—”

“Totally conservative, her son, yeah,” said Undergrad One.

 

[close]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Tucker riled his audience a bit when he exposed his knowledge of the American left. He found bits to admire in Warren’s “economic patriotism,” and as long as the left kept quiet about the minorities and the migrants, some of them were promising candidates for a left-right nationalist pact. For this was Tucker’s great insight: the social-democratic left was essentially right about economics. It would be good to nationalize social media; it would be good to boost American wages.

[close]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I took my seat early at the dinner for Hawley. A recent convert to Mormonism was bad-mouthing the Supreme Court justices: Trump had to do better. “You really don’t like Kavanaugh?” I asked her. “No, I mean Gorsuch. Have you read his decisions on Indians? He wants to give it all back to the Indians. Insidious rulings.”

 

[close]

[Kara]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/venezuela-hugo-chavez-afl-cio-united-states

 

[Kara]

I suppose the operative question is will it amount to anything? Our liberal friends love a good feel-bad story when they don't have to do anything to rectify it, and the opposition to regime change proffered by national conservatives and / or paleoconservatives (do we even have to pretend these guys exist anymore?) stretches the human capacity for credulity beyond its recorded limits.

There's also the whole thing where Indonesia served as a blueprint for "less bad" Cold Warrior events ("Jakarta is coming" was both a threat and a promise), don't think anyone is willing to discard fruit from the poison tree there.

The author himself said that he didn't think he would have been able to write the book during the Obama presidency (ironically given his childhood). Hard not to chalk this up to Bhaskar's observation that, "what's good for The Nation isn't what's good for the nation."

Speaking of, this should be interesting.

https://twitter.com/jacobinmag/status/1291750949971730434

[Crash Dummy]

The Jakarta Method, so hot right now. Can't believe how much play this book is getting from liberals

yeah, been seeing this book referred to a lot and the claim that pretty much everything is a cia psyop on twitter

[VomKriege]

The author of the Jakarta Method was on TrueAnon (The paywalled feed, but it's not exactly hard to find it for free...) for a three-parts episode about a Nazi-pedophile-Junta black site settlement in Chile and the last episode was a larger discussion around his book. He was also a guest on their episode about Brazil and Bolsonaro.

The Jakarta Method, so hot right now. Can't believe how much play this book is getting from liberals

yeah, been seeing this book referred to a lot and the claim that pretty much everything is a cia psyop on twitter

Honestly he came across as rather level headed and open about what was speculative in his talk.

[paprikastaude]

None of y'all praising Communism ever heard of Voldemort and it shows.

Voldemort was a true progressive, Harry was a status-quo neoliberal.

Voldemort actually came from Gryffindore 

[Kara]

Another old article that could be posted in another thread but is going here because it deals with icky intersecting topics that I apologize in advance for if it was already already posted.

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/09/puerto-rico-energy-electricity-solar-natural-gas/

[Kara]

 

[Kara]

 

https://twitter.com/leetxt/status/1292231732628983809

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Reminds me of a cursed tweet I saw the other day that said something to the effect of, "The Republican Party has been doing MMT for 30 years."

[close]

[Kara]

The millionaires and the billionaires are not the only ones who should have access to subsidized, unrefined Russian oil. Thank you.

[Rufus]

Part of being a socialst? Even the buddha would be more heated.

[Rufus]

Let's just hope it doesn't get them killed some other time.

Glad to see their pets are OK too.

[Kara]

It takes a lot of guts and love to be shot at multiple times and insist that the carceral archipelago is not a solution. That's unrivaled character.

"[W]hile there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

[Kara]

Another old article.

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2020/02/09/nevada-lithium-mine-environmental-investigation-bureau-land-management-100595

As always, the rule of law is very important!

[benjipwns]

I genuinely don't understand why it's possible or legal for him to just sign an executive order and give away so much land.

Because that's how most of the land was protected in the first place.

[benjipwns]

Well, yeah, back in 1906: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiquities_Act

[team filler]

I thought congress declared federal lands individually, my bad

this is why you're marxist and I'm the student

[Kara]

Xavier: Renegade Angel is back.

almost pissed myself laughing at this

Workshopping a way of making the squatters' rights episode about Euro Amerikans.

[Kara]

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/betsy-devos-title-ix-mens-rights/tnamp/

[Kara]

I'm glad that story is getting covered, but the voices amplifying it in unison come off as having some other intention. Don't know what it is and tbh I don't really care.

See also: the near daily amplification of a nobody on Twitter who has a different take on sexual mores.

[Kara]

Moved this here so that we'd spare the wank dad thread this misery.

I like your creative way of interpreting expropriation, we need that kind of ingenuity in the socialist movement.

I'm being cheeky but only to point out why "germany didn't raise taxes" can't explain chartalism's failure in the german empire. It did tax the public, just not legally.

I would say that you're making a taxation is theft argument instead of being cheeky.

It is disingenuous to pretend like the economic consequences are primarily the result of the financing decisions of the government. To the extent that Germany expected to plunder its borders, there was a shortfall. But inflation was stabilized to 2% by the end of the war and it didn't become a problem again until the French decided to fuck Germany to death.

Love the bold, very econ textbook.

Anyway, that link you posted states that the German Empire was different from its competitors in that it had poor money markets and you yourself took the position that its poverty in foreign money markets was to blame in particular. I believe money markets arise with the commoditization of money, a characteristic of money that chartalism rejects. (If either of those base premises are wrong please feel free to correct me.)

If I'm right with both of those premises this feels like the time my 7th grade English teacher gave us a Christmas brain teaser that consisted of the alphabet without the letter L and my friend at the time kept shouting, "There's no L!" There's no L!" without realizing he was saying Noël.

That is of course unless the absence of mature money markets in the German Empire can be explained by something other than an institutional skepticism of money as a commodity. The Empire and the Third Republic roughly correspond in existence, but the Third Republic was far more bourgeois driven whereas the Empire had its lovely nobility to mediate.

[curly]

https://mobile.twitter.com/EBBerger/status/1294652835930439680

[Tripon]

Adolph Reed is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities.

Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working class and poor people of all races fought shoulder to shoulder for their rights.

In late May, Professor Reed, now 73 and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to speak to the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. The match seemed a natural. Possessed of a barbed wit, the man who campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders and skewered President Barack Obama as a man of “vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics” would address the D.S.A.’s largest chapter, the crucible that gave rise to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a new generation of leftist activism.

His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice.

Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”

“We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”

Amid murmurs that opponents might crash his Zoom talk, Professor Reed and D.S.A. leaders agreed to cancel it, a striking moment as perhaps the nation’s most powerful Socialist organization rejected a Black Marxist professor’s talk because of his views on race.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html

[Tripon]

https://twitter.com/KareemRifai/status/1274000317034659841

 

[Madrun Badrun]

[Great Rumbler]

(Image removed from quote.)

[team filler]

https://www.filmsforaction.org/news/revolution-and-american-indians-marxism-is-as-alien-to-my-culture-as-capitalism/

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

 

reading white theory 

[jakefromstatefarm]

holy shit david graeber died last week

[team filler]

love her

"any time you engage with people who are on the front lines of any type of being targeted or suffering. the extent that you align yourself and then you're open to learn from them, it means that you expose yourself even if you're not legally vulnerable to endure the conditions that they're enduring. like between emotional connectors in terms of learning from each other, in terms of shared intelligence. that there is a bonding that goes on and you carry that with you."

[benjipwns]

holy shit david graeber died last week

He lives on in previously unreleased interview footage!

[team filler]

love her

"any time you engage with people who are on the front lines of any type of being targeted or suffering. the extent that you align yourself and then you're open to learn from them, it means that you expose yourself even if you're not legally vulnerable to endure the conditions that they're enduring. like between emotional connectors in terms of learning from each other, in terms of shared intelligence. that there is a bonding that goes on and you carry that with you."

1:43:10

“We keep our communities functioning because we love them. We will not abandon them even when they turn on us, because we love them, and the state uses that labor to stabilize itself”

“We keep our communities from going crazy, like they kept us from going crazy. and that labor is expropriated by the state.”

“Do you see the beauty in that? It’s an impossible task, but it’s one completely worthy of you.”

[OnlyRegret]

hehehe

https://twitter.com/MattLech/status/1320743074297974784

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/SingSolidarity/status/1320751773418688513

 

[jakefromstatefarm]

https://toynbeeprize.org/posts/katrina-forrester/

Rawls didn’t emerge out of nowhere, and despite the story that’s often taught by political philosophers, he didn’t revive political philosophy from its postwar slumbers. His political thought was part of a liberal response to changes in the twentieth-century administrative state—as Anne Kornhauser suggests, he’s one part of a longer legal tradition of critical liberalism—and also as a particular American response to the changes in global politics after World War Two. 

To take a couple of examples: on the one hand, Rawls developed a vision of society that flattens certain types of conflict and prioritizes certain forms of consensus quite common among postwar “liberal consensus” theorists. On the other, Rawls also borrowed ideas from liberal critics of the administrative state—for instance, Frank Knight, one of the early neo-liberal economists at Chicago. These connections to mid-century liberalism were often submerged in Rawls’s published philosophical writings, so his unpublished materials collected by archivists at Harvard University are crucial to making sense of them. But it’s clear when reading those materials that Rawls’s account of society and the state emerged from a particular ideological constellation in the postwar US, when many liberals were skeptical about the extension of the state and were looking for novel ways to both legitimize and critique it. 

[jakefromstatefarm]

https://jhiblog.org/2020/11/25/marx-and-the-birth-of-modern-society/

[jakefromstatefarm]

...and presumably, it [the political regime] turns into a democracy when the poor are victorious, when they kill some of their opponents and send others into exile, give an equal share in the constitution and public office to those who remain, and when public office in the city is allocated for the most part by lot.

[team filler]

https://twitter.com/Progrockfarmer/status/1344411277343551489