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This is an interesting and much needed break from the incessant megathreads that dominate D&D these days and I am looking forward to how things progress. Don't get too discouraged if discussion moves slowly, especially at first, these kinds of more in depth discussions can take a while to get off the ground but are often much more interesting than the news driven threads. I'm curious to see how you develop your discussion of the book. My first comment regarding what you've written so far would be that a few definitions would be handy for evaluating your claims. Since you argue that many modern political movements are pseudo-religions, I think it would be useful for you to provide some sense of how you make that determination. You say that there are analogous parallel structures - having an equivalent to a priesthood and dogma - but that comparison seems underdeveloped. You also write that "all of these myths of Origin are religious" but I'm not clear by what you mean. Are you saying that all the specific myths of origin that you name checked are religious or are you arguing that any "Myth of Origin" is inherently religious in nature? While I do not dismiss this argument out of hand I do see some serious potential weaknesses to adopting this view of things. It would seem to water down the meaning of 'religion' to a substantial degree, essentially making any strongly shared belief system de facto a religion. If that is indeed your claim then I think it deserves to be clarified and stated in a more clear and transparent way. What defines a religion, what makes something a dogma, what makes a group analogous to a priesthood, etc. Defining terms and explaining exactly what correspondence you see between religion and politics would probably make the overall argument easier to follow. A second comment I would make is that we should keep in mind that while this book discusses a much larger phenomena with a particular resonance in modern times, it is nevertheless a book from a specific time and place. The emphasis in the text on blood and soil nationalism is particularly fitted to the German case. Arguably there is a split within the American far right at the moment between, among other groups, the alt-right and the alt-light, with the later group claiming to adhere to a sort of 'civil nationalism' that is open to different races, while the former are explicitly racialist and white supremacist. Temporary American white nationalism and its idea of race is also not necessarily the same as the Nazi conception of the Aryan race. While the Nazi Nuremburg laws were taking direct inspiration from America's legal segregation the Nazi conception of both race and soil was arguably very different from the contemporary White Nationalist conception of these things. Perhaps this isn't where you want the focus of the thread to lie (i.e. perhaps the distinctions between Nazi and White nationalist conceptions of race are academically interesting but not politically relevant to this thread) but I thought it was worth raising the issue. We need to be ever cautious regarding how we use language - it's very easy to make it two different things seem the same by giving them a common label. So let's be as vigilant and transparent as we can be about how we apply these labels and what exactly we mean when we use them.
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Oct 18, 2019 17:25
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DreadLlama posted:Kurzgesagt on youtube argues that that ideas are good and humans generate ideas and therefore humans are good. It elaborates that when humans are stuck in survival situations most of their ideas tend to be about basic needs - which isn't useful to us because those problems are largely solved in modern society. So if you want to gain the most benefit from the most people it's to your advantage to pull them out of poverty. This video is remarkable. It takes some basic and intuitive propositions and a laudable sounding premise and then uses them to make some of the most twisted, misleading and propagandistic arguments imaginable. Almost every specific comment it makes on history and development is incorrect and its model of how innovation works is dangerously simplistic. The overall message is so incredibly idealistic that there's literally no action plan whatsoever, which is unsurprising because the actual purpose of this video isn't to make you change your behaviour, it's to reassure you that the current system is basically benign and functional and that all that is needed is to remove some unfortunate distortions that are preventing some people on the bottom from achieving their true potential. I ask people to stop and think for a second whether everyone would really be materially better off in any concrete sense if the electronic devices we're all using to post on these forums were priced fairly and produced by workers who were compensated equivalently to the privileged workers of advanced industrial countries. Kurzgesagt talks in this video about how much more advanced medical research could be if there were more scientists. That may be the case but they overlook the massive role of care workers in the medial industry. Somebody has to empty the colostomy bags and wipe up the blood. In a lot of economies that person is a racialized migrant (or the child of one) who is compensated with a comparatively tiny wage, which means there is more wealth available to invest in the healthcare system. It might sound progressive to say that we would all be better off if the world were more equal but what that really does is disguise the huge extent to which our current living standards are predicated on exploitation. In numerous crucial fields like agriculture, textiles, garments, transportation, electronics or social reproduction the role of cheap labour is absolutely crucial to propping up living standards in places like Australia, Japan, Western Europe or North America. If you take a T-shirt that was produced in Bangladesh and that retails at $14 CAD as an example, then the worker in this case earns $0.12 - less than two per cent of the total cost. The factory itself collects $0.58. Factoring in another costs like insurance and transport you end up with a shirt costing $5.67 to fabricate, transport and sell. The Store's markup is 60%. So the vast majority of the value in this process is captured by people in the first world despite the fact that the factory workers in this example are literally risking their lives every time they go to work. Even more crucially though, the government of the country where the shirt is sold collects tax revenue off its sale. Assuming the shirt in this example was sold in Ontario, Canada in 2013 then there would have been a combined provcincial/federal sales tax of 13%, or $1.82. That means more value from each T Shirt sold by Joe Fresh in Canada is going toward supporting Canadian healthcare than is going toward compensating the actual workers or administrative staff or anyone else actually living in Bangladesh. I apologize if this is a tedious length to go into but I think this point is important. People are sometimes quick to obfuscate or dismiss the extent to which first world economies in 2019 are directly reliant on the exploitation of the rest of the world. That Kurzgesagt video - brought to you by Bill and Melinda Gates - takes our empathetic desire to help people and then weaves it into a misleading Just-so story that conveniently obscures more than it reveals. I think there is a strong case to be made that we would all be better off living in a less exploitative world but this video isn't actually making this argument, nor do I think the video's primary aim was actually to convince anyone to be more altruistic. Instead I think the real intention here is to naturalize artifical constructed ideas like 'supply and demand' and naturalize them in such a way that a kind of progressive neoliberalism is seen as common sense solution to problems that actually call for much more radical fixes than anything a video sponsored by a billionaire's charity is likely to advocate. tl;dr - Maybe earnestly citing a video paid for by someone who flew on the Lolita Express isn't actually the best starting point for a discussion of altruism or addressing problems with capitalism
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Oct 18, 2019 21:53
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Bar Ran Dun posted:This single question could justify its own thread. I’ve had many discussions on it in D&D over the years. Yes it’s that broad and there are a couple directions to approach why from. From an anthropology perspective, there is an enormous diversity in the category of behaviors and beliefs agreed to be religions, to not exclude religions from the category the definition must be adequately broad. Generally if one opens up an introductory level religious studies text this pops up right at the beginning. I have a tendency to cause digressions that I will do my best to reign in for the moment (ed: I definitely failed in that, apologies), but I do feel as though we at least need to carve out some basic distinctions here. I feel as though not all religions are equivalent in this way. Prior to the axial age most religion in Eurasia that we know of seems to be somewhat closer to what we'd now think of as magic or superstition. The emphasis on an afterlife, or the sense that actions taken while alive will have some cosmic moral significance and might influence your fate in this afterlife, or even the sense that cosmic principles somewhat resembling our sense of 'good' and 'evil' might be at play in the universe and that humans might have a role in the struggle between them, are all ideas that only seem to gain purchase in the last six thousand years. We see another significant seeming jump as the world of Antiquity begins to crumble and the 'pagan' religions of the Greeks, Romans, Persians etc. are challenged by the rise of monotheistic and in particular Abrahamic faiths. Many scholars have argued that the millenarian strain within religions like Christianity or Islam live on in the form of political doctrines that call for the total reconstruction or society or humanity. It's a common argument against communism and also more recently has been deployed as a critic of hegemonic liberalism. I can understand that argument though I'm not sure I find it totally convincing. On the other hand, I'm not sure if all mystical, supernatural or faith based belief systems should necessarily be treated as belonging to the same category. Is the Roman Pantheon directly comparable to the God of Israel? Is there no real significance in the stark differences in attitudes between different faiths regarding non-believers or heretics? Perhaps the simplest way of saying this would be to put it as follows: a common theme of Christianity is that it is important because it is true. Christ really was the son of God, he really did die for our sins, and believing that really will set you free. Contrast that with the surviving transcripts we have of trials in ancient Rome where Christians refused to make sacrifices to the Emperor. Roman prosecutors found the whole thing baffling because they didn't understand why anyone would suicidally refuse to make the necessary sacrafices. They really didn't care if you believed in the cult of the Emperor, they just wanted you to make the necessary gestures for social stability. They would even say as much during the trials. They'd implore to the Christian defendant's self interest and point out all the nice things in life they'd be missing out on after they died. The significance of this anecdote, to me, is that it implies that for at least its most serious adherents Christianity was a substantial break from the religions of the past - a truly radical doctrine that overturned many assumptions about religion and introduced a very different kind of belief system than the ones that had preceded it (though in this respect it likely borrowed a great deal not only from the Jews but also from various mystery religions that were then widely spread throughout the Mediterranean Roman world). As for how this relates to the thread: I think it's alright to use broad and inclusive categories, especially for a big picture discussion like this one, but let's not lose sight of the extent to which these categories are theoretical constructions. If we want to assume for the moment that all religions are more or less the same because they all attempt to draw connections between "the symbolic and the Real" then that's alright, but let's keep in mind that this isn't a fact given to us by nature, this is a constructed argument that can and should be scrutinized carefully. Especially since - and I think you're better equipped to recognize this than most goons - the 'Symbolic' and the 'Real' are not necessarily stable or timeless categories themselves. quote:Yes, Nazi categories drew a great deal from the American categories. They are related, but you are correct they aren’t identical. It’s like different animals filling the same evolutionary niche in different habitats. We can’t learn everything about one by looking at the other, but we can still make useful predictions. One can infer things about a gazelle from looking an antelope, or about a triceratops from looking at a rhino. But it is important to remember they are different things. So when these categories are being discussed that’s a good thing to keep in mind. Agreed, and to be clear I don't think this is a fundamental issue, just something that should be noted. quote:The question of what ideas are and if they are real is very much directly related to the thread topic. Personally, I think ideas are tools.They are "technology" in the sense foundations of cybernetic understands technology. They are tools that are also signifiers. They don’t have an intrinsic moral value, tools are used for the end of the user. The user’s ends are moral or not. Yeah this is a much more succinct way of expressing what I was trying to say above. The Kurzgesagt video is very reminiscent of traditional economic development models that see economic growth as a more or less pure and direct result of capital accumulation. You pile enough capital into a country and that country will grow richer, countries that are less developed are capital poor and countries that are well developed are capital rich, the key to helping backwards countries develop is to increase the amount of capital they have. The problem with that perspective - as development economists have themselves recognized - is that this ignores the organization and structure of the economy, which it turns out is very important to the question of development. This is part of the answer to how countries with huge endowments or natural resources can often end up with extremely unbalanced and under developed economies while other countries with comparatively poor resource endowments can become successful - because the internal structure of the economy, as well as the specific types of relationship that the local economy has with the global economy (and with specific countries in the global economy) also matter. A country that specializes in manufacturing is different than one which only produces raw resources. A colony has a different economy to an imperial metropole. A country with deep systemic corruption faces problems that a country with very low corruption doesn't. A socialist, liberal or communist economy all operates differently even if the basic problems they face are often quite similar. So to relate this back to what you said: the way a system is organized matters. You can't just count up the amount of capital in an economy, you have to look at the concrete relationships and institutions and how they interact. So likewise just arguing that piling up more and more educated people will automatically create more widely shared prosperity, regardless of what institutions or economic systems are in place - is profoundly misleading. If we let that guide policy and were careless we could easily end up with a situation where a poor country over produces educated people who then leave the country for more advanced economies, resulting in a brain drain situation. In order to recognize problems like that and find ways to address them we need a much more nuanced understanding of how the economy actually works as a system, and unfortunately that video offers a very misleading account.
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Oct 19, 2019 21:07
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It's too bad this thread hasn't generated more activity but I think it might benefit from more engagement with the politics of 2019. What kind of lesson or action plan are you thinking can be derived from this? I have to be honest. Seeing you making these references to critiques of political moderation is a bit hard to square with your enduring affection for Obama and your support for Pete Buttigieg in the Democratic primary.
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Oct 31, 2019 21:12
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Thats because you are looking at it backwards. Invert the question. Why I would like Obama and Buttigieg is plainly obvious. What have I told you about who I am and the various places and instituions I've been through? I read either of thier autobiographies and I indentify with massive chunks of each, in specfic, absurdly specfic ways. We could talk about that. But thats not interesting and it's not the important question. The better question is why have I taken a more radical turn? Why have I decided for socialism? and for things like that critque of moderation? It's been there under the surface, for over a decade inserted by the later theological works of the author.. Perhaps it's easier to be blunt here and get this issue out in the open so it can be addressed clearly. If you look at Obama and think he was a great President rather than a failure and if you look at Buttigieg and think that he would make a good President then in what meaningful sense have you taken a radical turn? If your readings are allowing you to feel that you've made a radical shift in your politics despite the fact you're still supporting the same politicians and policies then that would be, if anything, an indication that this is a serious political dead end where all you've done is invent new legitimizing fictions for centrist politicians so that you can pretend to have adjusted your politics to the Trump era without ever leaving your political comfort zone. If that is indeed what is happening then I see no reason to celebrate that.
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Nov 3, 2019 17:36
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Bar Ran Dun posted:At this point I’ll be voting for Bernie in the primary with Warren as a second choice, my state is fairly late. I still identify with Buttigieg more, even though he’s currently my third choice. Helsing is just upset that I don’t think Buttigieg a sociopath. This isn't about Buttigieg's inner mental state this is about trying to make sense of your political beliefs and how they fit together. In particular I want to understand why all your criticisms of American politics are exclusively focused on Fox News and the Republic Party when Obama and Buttigieg seem to be clear examples of exactly the kind of political romanticism that you're describing here. If we were to compare the crude mercenary rhetoric of Trump to the grandiloquent rhetoric of a typical Obama speech then Trump's semi-coherent ramblings would arguably be a much more honest and accurate presentation of American foreign policy than Obama's absurd attempts to argue that the US military empire is really somehow on the side of justice and human rights. Let's take the essay on ur-fascism that you cite repeatedly and look at what is almost the very first passage: Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco posted:In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric. You seem to be using articles like Eco's ur-fascism piece to narrowly criticism conservative politicians and media outlets in America while quite conspicuously ignoring liberal outlets and politicians. Referencing Martin Luther King's condemnation of the white moderate and again, remaining silent on the role of the liberal establishment in America, further emphasizes this discrepancy in your thinking. The idea that conservatives in America are more inclined toward political romanticism just doesn't follow. The opposite would be an easier case to make, at least in the last few years. Republicans tend to be more open in acknowledging the brutal self interest at the heart of American politics while liberals are eager to mystify American politics by invoking legitimizing myths. This is all kind of indicative of how your real target seems to be conservatism rather than capitalism. If that's the case then calling yourself a socialist or a radical seems like a misnomer. You advertised this thread as a way to understand how to get liberals or centrists to think more like socialists but maybe the first step is to then demonstrate that this has actually happened. Where's the actual break here? What's the rupture between a liberal or centrist and a socialist, in your mind?
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Nov 5, 2019 19:27
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Broken myth, the liberal and the centrist are participating in a myth they do not consider broken. I don't really feel like this has meaningfully answered my question. The difference between a liberal and a socialist is that they follow different myths? Well practically speaking what does that mean? What are the concrete real world implications of believing the one myth or the other? Or at the very least, in what specific ways do these different myths substantially diverge from each other?
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Nov 13, 2019 21:03
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Bar Ran Dun posted:It's jumping all the way to the end of the book, but the since word has already come up. I'm trying to hold off on making too many commentaries so that I can get a better sense of the direction you want the thread to go in but I want to note that you still haven't answered my original question. "Expectations" are not a concrete way to differentiate between political tendencies. I'm not even really clear on what 'expectations' means here: I can see a few different ways to interpret what it means to have shared expectations in politics. Same thing with "romanticism". I'm not really clear on what that means in this specific context, to the point that I would not confidently say that my own politics are devoid of Romanticism. Depending on what you mean by that term I'd actually say that probably all political projects might necessarily have an element of romanticism within them. For instance, with this post: Bar Ran Dun posted:The Cultural (translators note Geistige also rendered as spiritual or intellectual) Expression of Political Romanticism If I read you correctly you're saying that George W. Bush was practicing political romanticism but Barrack Obama wasn't. Really? The idea that contemporary Democratic politics in the United States has some deep linkage to reason and disdains political mythology or sentimental appeals to a 'myth or origin' is a genuinely bizarre argument. Obama is easily one of the most blatantly traffickers of political romanticism in contemporary American history and yet you set him up as Claiming that there's literally a spectrum going from 'mythic' to 'rational/scientific' and that trying to classify ideologies by locating them along this spectrum is such a ludicrous and blatantly self serving intellectual maneuver, especially when you're literally citing Nietzsche's thought as you do it. One of Nietzsche's core scholarly insights was arguably to collapse any attempt to create such a distinction and to demonstrate that seemingly 'rational' things are always built upon irrational origins and that even our ideal of 'truth 'is itself merely a refined series of errors that developed in a blind evolutionary fashion. Then we get to this: Bar Ran Dun posted:The Bourgeois Principle and Its Tension Bourgeois liberal society is to a large and consequential degree founded on white supremacy, and even though some major thinkers in that tradition have condemned racism the presence of racist and racialist theories and the use of legal apartheid to protect private property are recurrent and common features of liberal societies. Nor are these 'irrational' primitive beliefs emerging from pre-liberal prejudices. We can directly trace the implementation of racial segregation and the development of 'scientific' theories of race in the various colonies over a period of many centuries. Racism, colonialism and liberalism have an inseparable and deep history that you are not only erasing but literally reversing with what you write here. John Locke, the preeminent liberal philosopher, is not coincidentally also the last major philosopher of the Western cannon to explicitly champion racial slavery. America, the liberal exemplar, developed the Jim Crow laws that were the literal blueprint for Hitler's Nuremberg laws. The liberal distribution of private property and the system of property rights and contracts that made the expansive growth of liberal societies possible at the dawn of capitalism was secured through a military system of white supremacy. This isn't some incidental detail that can be brushed away to reveal the 'true' character of liberalism: this is it's true character, or at least one aspect of it. Yet everything you write here feels designed to whitewash that reality and preserve this invented idea of liberalism as a scientific wager undertaken by fundamentally decent people that if only we stop being so prejudiced then we could all live together in harmony. I should note that I say all this while still believing that many of the pluralist values of contemporary liberalism are valuable innovations worth defending. But I demand that we understand the development of this political tradition without sentimentalism or bizarre attempts to transform the theory into something completely separate from what it actually is. Also, I would add that even ignoring all this history and focusing on say, the last thirty years, that the proposition that liberalism is scientific and rational simply does not hold. Holding up Obama as the opposite of a political romantic is, I just cannot emphasize enough, a seemingly ludicrous position. How do you possibly justify that argument?
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Nov 30, 2019 17:59
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Obama probably fits best as a radical bourgeois and the centrist democrats would mostly fall there too. W is a conservative political romantic pre Trump the GOP would have been run by conservative political romantics with a mixed revolutionary/conservative romantic base. Trump is a revolutionary political romantic and it's pretty safe to now characterize the GOP as that too. The chapter on radical bourgeois is soon ( it might be next). This is not a justification this is a description. I'm asking for you to support this premise with evidence and arguments because so far I do not find it convincing. What actually makes George w. Bush more romantic than Obama here? How do we actually sort politicians into these different categories? What are the actual criteria? quote:The structure is rational and systematized; the content and origin isn't. And the bourgeois principle ends up having to fall back to origins because of its contradictions. Here's a way to say it. Linear programing is rational. It is math, just complicated algebra. But what we set as the objective function for a system of equations, that is subjective, it is arbitrary, it is our chosen goal. Can you find a way to actually show how these categories have merit and are useful and reveal interesting facts about the world that we could not reveal if we relied on other schemes of categorization or other forms of analysis? It is not enough for you to demonstrate that your ideas are internally coherent, you need to show how they actually map onto the real world. That's why I keep bringing this back to specific politicians like Bush and Obama. Both seem to rally their followers around equally inspid and ridiculously false national mythologies about America's unique national mission and character. So why is Obama's liberal version of that myth any less romantic than Bush's conservative version? quote:That would be the radical bourgeois position. I’m not there anymore. I still have sympathy for it, some of its goals are still worth accomplishing. Its systematizing is probably necessary. I wrote two paragraphs detailing why I do not agree with that and you just cut that part of my response and then reasserted your initial position without any further attempts to explain or justify it. I still do not have any idea whatsoever how your political position has actually changed. I guess you mentioned that you're now planning to vote Sanders over Buttagieg in the primary but that seems to be the sum total of the concrete political differences between your worldview now and your worldview in 2015. I don't mean this as a purity test. I'm not demanding you stand up and denounce things or demonstrate your fidelity to some specific political programme. I just want to actually understand how your thinking has changed on the key debates between liberals and socialists, i.e. topics like class struggle, foreign policy, private ownership, electoralism, bourgeois democracy, reformism vs revolution, etc.
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Dec 5, 2019 21:12
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Which bring us to the answer to your question Helsing what is the difference between Obama and Bush in regards to all this? When we look at Obama he is often making these turns. (If we need to get specific here, let me know) To do this isn’t a false consciousness, but a recognition of where the limits of bourgeois principles are and an attempt to support the bourgeois principle by turns to myths of origin and to the roots of our society and history. In Bush and the GOP prior to Trump that’s not the goal. The goal is to go back, to return to the older forms of life that the bourgeois principle dissolved and reordered. This is a false consciousness and that’s what makes it a romanticism. We can not reverse the direction society has developed in without destroying society. George W. Bush was not a paleoconservative who was trying to turn back the clock on big government or return America to some mythic past. Quite the opposite, he was a market evangelist who aggressively pursued a dramatic series of changes to both American domestic politics and the global order. He invaded and tried to dramatically alter the domestic constitution and economy of multiple foreign states, he enacted the most sweeping change to the national security state in decades and he oversaw a massive privatization of state functions. By European standards Bush was a liberal. Attempting to shoehorn him into the role of traditional conservative - as carved out in a book written about Germany in 1933 - doesn't work at all. As for Obama, if we're going to step back and a take a long view - i.e. comparing America in 2019 to Germany in 1933 - then his similarities to Bush are a lot more striking than any differences. They're both men with elite educations who rose through the ranks of their respective parties, gained the backing of key corporate sectors of the economy, and pursued remarkably similar policies on trade, foreign policy and bailing out Wall Street. Both of them made serious attempts to cut the social safety net and both of them made large expansions of healthcare spending that were largely to the benefit of insurance companies. Both of them oversaw the continuing militarization of the police. Both pursued similar trade deals and while they had some differences on fiscal policy both supported a largely privatized government and a regime of comparatively low taxes and high military spending. Both of them pursued an aggressive right wing policy in foreign affairs and showed no compunctions about enacting coups or other forms of pressure against countries that didn't follow the US foreign policy line. Both of them were actively committed to the idea of America as world policeman. Both of them refused to take meaningful action on climate change. Both of them supported the expansion of American domestic energy production. The really deep divisions between the parties aren't in the ideologies of their ruing cliques but in the demographics of the party's differing constituencies. The leaders, donors and consultants often have far more in common with each other than they do with the groups they nominally represent. A vast professional class largely controls both parties even as those parties compete for different slices of the electorate. Both mainstream Democrats and Republicans also tend to be much more in favour of the status quo than their most vocal supporters. This is rather different than the late Weimer Republic in which the leadership of the parties of the extreme left and right openly called for the destruction of the status quo and large parts of the judiciary and civil service wanted to transition to an authoritarian system. tl;dr - I am really not seeing this supposedly fundamental difference between Obama and Bush, both of whom seem like radical liberals who were actively reshaping both domestic and foreign politics to conform with a sweeping neoliberal vision of an American centered 21st century capitalist world order based around free trade, high finance, American militarism and endless consumerism propped up by constant technological innovation.
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Dec 17, 2019 17:50
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Despera posted:Your opinion is so out of the political mainstream that you might as well not have it. You'll never convince any substantial group of people that this is true, which is what you kind of need to enact change in a democracy. Try to understand the conversation we are having because what I said was not a particularly controversial statement. We are comparing the contemporary politics of the United States with the politics of the Weimar Republic. The Reichstag contained parties of the far left and right who were openly working toward either a revolution of a coup to overthrow the existing system. Significant parts of the civil service, judiciary and military were fundamentally opposed to the existence of the Republic and wanted a return to authoritarian government and many of the large capitalists feared a revolution. America by contrast has one of the oldest constitutions and governments in the world and a very tightly managed two party system. The range of ideological positions in the American congress or expressed within the primaries of the two big parties are far far narrower than the range of ideological positions in Weimar Germany, which literally had fascist and communist political parties fighting in the streets.
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Dec 20, 2019 16:17
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Bar Ran Dun posted:I do agree with this. So I have been trying to think of how we can avoid continuously talking past each other and I think maybe the first step to doing that is for me to ask you a very straight forward question. Can you explain Obama's failure to bail out underwater homeowners during the financial crisis? Can you reconcile that with the much more vigorous efforts made to rescue the financial system? Decisions like that one, or his later efforts to cut social security and medicare, or his strong advocacy for the exact same kind of trade deals that he opposed as a candidate, are coherent and actually quite predictable using the theoretical frame of "Obama the Neoliberal Democrat" (I'm somewhat simplifying for the sake of argument, we can refine this definition later if you want). I can root my explanation of his behaviour in the bloc of large economic investors who finance the Democratic party and the web of relationships these large political investors have with power centers in the government and media. Can you give me some compelling examples of how the interpretive frame of 'Obama the Christian Democrat' somehow enhances our understanding of him or allows us to better predict his behaviour? Can you demonstrate how your perspective on him gives you some special insight or otherwise enhances your understanding of his administration's actions on this key issue?
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Jan 24, 2020 16:55
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How do you feel about the values you've spent your life honouring being used by Buttigieg to attack the only candidate who is actually trying to build a movement of working class people?
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Feb 24, 2020 00:12
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He's still wrong but asdf32's argument is at least comprehensible once you realize that his definition of 'working class' excludes non-whites.
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Feb 24, 2020 23:43
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Bar Ran Dun posted:
You hold your favorite candidate for President to the same standard that you have for me, a poster on the Something Awful forums? You don't think that's a rather low bar for someone who wants to be President of the United States?
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Feb 25, 2020 17:48
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Yeah he’s so close, yet so drat far. My wife and I spent an hour or so poking holes in his thesis tonight. Had to think of something other than the out of town fascists that decided to breath smoke (AQI ranged from 250 to 350) we could see from our living room that decided they needed to do half assed drills and pt in a public park. Yes Trump is a bad President and his rhetoric and actions are contributing to domestic instability in the USA as well as enabling some bad actors abroad. However, you won't find a President within living memory who didn't actively encourage the material conditions giving rise to paramilitary violence across the world, quite often with direct aid and comfort. American military aid tends to directly correlate with massive human rights abuses in recipient countries and has been carried out on a catastrophic scale over many decades. In many cases these activities are carried out in direct coordination with American corporations and are specifically aimed at securing proper conditions for investment, which in practice means suppressing locals and empowering death squads and imposing the favoured economic policies of Washington. Does none of this counts because it is happening outside America's boarders? Are previous Presidents any less awful than Trump just because their victims were more concentrated in foreign countries that the US was grinding under its heel? Is Biden's role in Plan Colombia somehow less awful because he remembered to mouth the correct platitudes about pretending to "help" the country being looted? As for how any of that fits into this thread; the current social, political and economic breakdown afflicting the United States is an outcome of how it managed both its domestic economy and its global 'grand strategy' since 1945 and it speaks more to the underlying tensions in America's political economy. You allude to these factors when you refer to the American "myth", though you're unclear on precisely what you mean by this (in a previous post you cited the related but very distinct concepts of neoliberalism, capitalism and postwar foreign policy as examples of the myth). But your analysis is vague on the particulars and appears largely disinterested in the concrete material factors. Your emphasis on "myth" seems to end up obscuring those factors in a way that conveniently makes the United States seem far more benign as a global actor.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:06
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