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With the rise of Xi Jinping, the future of the liberal West ironically depends on the continuing success of the world's most powerful authoritarian state. How this will affect multilateralism going forward will be interesting.
I just want to ask didn't the rise of china begin with W Bush?
Like I feel there's some misplaced rage with china rising
An unintended consequence of globalism
Like I feel there's some misplaced rage with china rising
An unintended consequence of globalism
This is a good old critic of Chomsky, watched now i recommend, and Its Very didadict:
Its a critic against Lenin specialy
Its a critic against Lenin specialy
Boy that lady got angry over him being mean about Lenin.
That said, Chomsky isn't 100% correct here, either. But you can tell that he at least has read Lenin.
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I mean the US is in slow scale but rapidly increasing collapse, so I suppose so, but at least something is still holding together for now.
He's just going to pull the same stunt he did last time and run again after his next lackey replaces him as president for a term. As for once he's dead? Too far out to predict. If the USSR could undergo De-Stalinization, Russia can undergo De-Putinization, as it's not like his own personality cult is anywhere as strong. Right now he's still popular but that's due to his nationalistic bluster over the last five years or so. Prior to that he had been losing steam due to the economy. We'll see if he can hold out in the long run.
You know, I still don't, but I did start listening to some clips of theirs on YouTube at work just to drown out other people. The Steven Seagal book reading was pretty funny.
The episode right before you posted that had a section about evangelicals with the same sort of conclusion lol, you should look up their reading of Ben Shapiro's book, it's truly incredible.
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Oh, I actually did hear that one too - I had been looking for longer videos since I'm stuck here all day - and it was indeed pretty cringeworthy. I don't know how Ben gets a reputation as being a "smart conservative" when he writes blatantly racist garbage like that (cue that Nathan Robinson article).
Also the Jordan Peterson impersonations. Good God.
Also the Jordan Peterson impersonations. Good God.
No no. I understand what you were saying. I was just making a funny.
West Point graduate who wore Che Guevara T-shirt discharged
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44538404
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44538404
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He's a comedian. I don't know if you get any Adult Swim programming down there but he and his comedian partner (Eric Wareheim) make some pretty bizarre stuff.
But of course we should have known he was a socialist. He's big into free real estate.
still lol that sam hyde blew all his adult swim money on pizzagate investigators due to the worst case of irony poisoning i've ever seen
I've been thinking that a lot of America's problems aren't actually about capitalism but just straight up racism. Not racism caused by capitalism, but just racism. Capital would love to be out their educating everyone decently well and accumulating human capital. America is unique among rich countries in how bad it allows schools to get, and it's certainly not because those other rich countries are free of capitalism.
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Certainly that's the case, as white supremacy continually causes the white proletariat to shoot itself in the nose to spite the face. That's the prime barrier to the spread of a social democratic system in the US - we know that pretty well due to how popular welfare services were when they were relegated to whites but how everything flipped after the CRA and the media focusing on minority welfare recipients in the later 20th century. But if that hurdle was removed, we would still have I think a rapacious form of capitalism in this country compared to the other first world nations simply sue to how ingrained capitalism is in the American psyche and system as part of its national identity. Even when politics were explicitly for and by whites in the 19th century, the labor movement was never as advanced here as it got elsewhere. Recall how quickly Americans desired to relapse into "normalcy" by voting in laissez faire Republicans following the Progressive decade and WWI.
Does this bear true in terms of trajectories of education spending? Large cuts in spending have been the norm across pretty much the whole developed world. Has education been spared from that in non-America?
I think this is broadly correct but leaves out a couple of key elements, particularly the racial progress made by the New Deal even in the 30s (the jump in support FDR received between '32 and '36 is pretty insane and I'm not really aware of any demographic shifting their partisan identity that much that quickly at any other point in American history). An underrated element of FDR's presidency is also the Good Neighbor Policy, which attempted to foster pan-American goodwill and was pretty successful until it was abandoned in the Cold War. I'm also not an expert on Gilded Age politics but I don't think the laissez faire nature of American politics prior was a particularly unique even if it might have been more extreme. Austerity was considered the appropriate response to the Great Depression by most countries barring the US after all.
Of course, though, racism often watered down the New Deal relative to other social democratic programs, hence our outrageous healthcare system and lack of paid parental leave.
I really try not to be a "human nature" guy, but I look at the heartless reactions and even glee that I see expressed towards the current child separation policy and I just despair a little. Like...fuck...if a significant chunk of the population can support that, how do we ever safeguard against the capacity for such cruelty being exploited to undermine and destroy us?
I don't believe that's human nature. I think it's just what has been nurtured by the system we're living in.
Yeah, it's not "human nature", it's individual people.
But as above the capitalism v racism part, as discussed in this thread, Capitalism always requires a scapegoat. If not people of "inferior races" then it will move on to someone/something else.
But as above the capitalism v racism part, as discussed in this thread, Capitalism always requires a scapegoat. If not people of "inferior races" then it will move on to someone/something else.
Its not that I think that all people are secretly deep down capable of endorsing absolute cruelty. Its that I think in any population a statistically significant chunk of them will be, and it feels like they're always going to be corrosively working at any society and I don't know what we do about it. Sooner or later it feels like they're always going to get a win.
I think a lot of us have, consciously or subconsciously, internalized some of the "democratic ideals" of "if you enjoy majority support than you have power and can set the agenda" but...if even 25% of the population actively wishes to put people in camps, that's a lot of people and they're going to have influence in the political sphere and I don't know how we tolerate that
I think a lot of us have, consciously or subconsciously, internalized some of the "democratic ideals" of "if you enjoy majority support than you have power and can set the agenda" but...if even 25% of the population actively wishes to put people in camps, that's a lot of people and they're going to have influence in the political sphere and I don't know how we tolerate that
Form over Content.
Many people are capable of intolerable cruelty and then seek justification for it after the fact. Tankies seem to have the same authoritarian police state fetishism that Fascism has. Except Fascism throws the Jewish in prison simply for being Jewish, Tankies throw the Jewish into prison for being "bourgeois".
The content is, ultimately, the same. But the "form" is different, and in a society that is ruled by advertising, what you front as is more important than what you actually do.
Re: the DC restaurant protest and blocking Portland ICE: While this isn't and shouldn't be anyone's main concern right now, I do wonder how the anti-leftist liberal crowd processes leftists doing more to directly resist Trump than they are. Probably by ignoring the leftist angle, if Charlottesville is any indication.
well, yeah.
I've seen a few dumb tweets along the lines of "I bet they voted for Jill Stein" or "why focus on DSA when there are other groups doing direct action against ICE" (the latter of which is obviously true, but I don't imagine most of them are that much more in line with the donut emoji crowd than DSA is), but it's pretty toothless stuff on the whole. mostly, they're either trying to coopt it or ignoring it entirely
DSAs actions probably led to the EO that just got signed, but liberals here won't try to acknowledge that. It's frustrating but as long as some good is being done, I can swallow it.
to give credit where it's due, I believe DSA was just one of a coalition of multiple groups participating in the Portland occupation
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Stoya had an interview with Jezebel. Had some interesting stuff but I've cut it down to the socialisty bits.
http://jezebel.com/stoya-is-over-talking-about-feminist-porn-1826771529/
http://jezebel.com/stoya-is-over-talking-about-feminist-porn-1826771529/
Reading through some of the interview... this guy went up to her at a convention and asked if it's creepy if he found pornstars' legal names, researched what high schools they went to, and got their yearbooks to sign... uh yeah, that's fucking creepy.
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But what does it mean?
Just PoliERA banter.