Category: Uncategorized

David Walsh – Actor Matt Damon Comes Under Attack for His Criticisms of the Sexual Misconduct Campaign

Link to an article by David Walsh:

“Actor Matt Damon Comes Under Attack for His Criticisms of the Sexual Misconduct Campaign”

There are some useful reader comments under this article, especially from Jason Kennedy (criticizing the typical class-reductionist argument style of WSWS, which is prone to making a few sweeping, unsupported conclusions propped up by vague soak-the-rich populism).  Trying to smear, shame and scapegoat the rich (including rich workers) undermines the effectiveness of the article by resorting to incoherent populist tactics — a problematic approach, lest Friedrich Engels‘ writings be dismissed on the same basis.

 

Underlying most of the #MeToo debate is a political/ideological divide.  On the one hand the most outspoken #MeToo advocates adopt extreme forms of liberal fear of making offense and a kind of “eggshell plaintiff” approach combined with a reactionary Ayn Randian acceptance of unilateral subjective belief as objective fact and a logic of victimization that anchors sociopolitical legitimacy in a victimhood identity.  On the other hand, there is the belief that every human activity should be judged according to its meaning in the total context, and not according to what an individual agent believes the significance to be. In this latter sense, many of the #MeToo advocates are self-serving opportunists stoking a “moral panic” for personal career advancement to the detriment of the public and the fair treatment of those accused of misconduct, often by conflating unrelated personal grudges or generalized (and non-sexual) ressentiment with sexual misconduct.

 

Bonus links: “Opposition Mounts to Sexual Harassment Witch-hunt” (“Under the blanket category of ‘sexual harassment,’ an extremely broad range of activity, including that which falls under the framework of normal interpersonal relations, is effectively being criminalized and associated with the horrific crime of rape. The effect is to create a situation where virtually anyone can be singled out and smeared with the charge of being a ‘sexual predator.'”) and “The Destruction of Matt Taibbi: How the Alt Right and Sloppy Reporting Smeared the ‘Rolling Stone’ Journalist” and « Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner, indispensable à la liberté sexuelle » and “Geoffrey Rush Lawsuit Strikes Blow Against Anti-democratic #MeToo Campaign” and “#MeToo Witch-Hunt Targets Veteran Actor Morgan Freeman” and “The Downfall of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman” and “Sex and the New York Times: When ‘Her Too’ Isn’t ‘Me Too'” and “Dominican-American Author Junot Díaz: The Latest Artist Victimized by the #MeToo Campaign” (“Well-paid academics and aspiring academics and others, full of jealousy and spite in many cases, are dishonestly taking advantage of, twisting, amplifying an individual’s difficulties and peccadilloes, and even perhaps missteps or misdeeds, to advance themselves and their careers. *** The politics are unwaveringly those of personal identity and the concerns are trivial and selfish.”) and “The Newest #MeToo Atrocity: Opera Singer Plácido Domingo Comes Under Attack” and Slavoj Žižek Quote About Victimhood Status

Maia Szalavitz – The Surprising Factors Driving Murder Rates

Link to an article by Maia Szalavitz:

“The Surprising Factors Driving Murder Rates: Income Inequality and Respect”

 

Of course, this data seems to exclude murders by the military and the police, relying on legalistic definitions that don’t apply the term “murder” to killings by the military and police.

Bonus link: “How Inequality Kills”

Jeff Kao – More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

Link to an article by Jeff Kao:

“More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked”

See also: “Public Comments to the Federal Communications Commission About Net Neutrality Contain Many Inaccuracies and Duplicates” and “FCC Emails Show Agency Spread Lies to Bolster Dubious DDoS Attack Claims”

 

Bonus links: Rich People’s Movements and “It’s Time to Nationalize the Internet” and “How to Save the Internet”

Bill Henderson – The Decline of the PeopleLaw Sector (037)

Link to an article by Bill Henderson:

“The Decline of the PeopleLaw Sector (037)”

 

This article conveys some useful factual information, but the commentary is troublingly limited.  The article states, “Our legal system as it pertains to ordinary people is unraveling.  *** No amount of tinkering at the edges is going to fix or reverse these trends. Instead, we need a series of fundamental redesigns.”  It then proceeds to suggest…tinkering at the edges.  The fundamental problem with the article is that it depoliticizes a fundamentally political issue, and then proceeds to suggest at most technocratic fixes at the edges that don’t touch the underlying political questions.  The questions?  Well, first off the anti-labor, pro-business and pro-finance policies are at the heart of the so-called neo-liberal political project, inaugurated by things like the Trilateral Commission’s report warning about an “excess of democracy” or the infamous Powell Memo.  The decline of what Henderson calls the “PeopleLaw Sector” is just a small corollary to the intended political policies of neo-liberalism, which tends to be just a financialized version of the exclusionary logic of liberalism — which has always promoted economic polarization.  Of course, the root problem is capitalism, but its symptoms are also the increasingly extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of corporations and a small plutocratic elite.  Lawyers (like so many others!) generally follow the money, and also seek prestige, and most lawyers won’t be swayed by exhortations and moral chiding to forego money and prestige.  And frankly, the economic base for them to do so is shaky and limited without changes to the economy that are only possible in the realm of politics.  Henderson links to an article by Deborah Merritt, which further emphasizes minor technocratic fixes, mostly surrounding law school education.  Neither article addresses the problem of decreasing public funding for higher education, including law schools, which has the (intended) effect of pushing lawyers to accept corporate jobs to pay off the staggering tuition costs (increasingly pushed away from the state and onto students). Pierre Bourdieu usefully developed the metaphor of the left hand and the right hand of the state to make a similar point.

Henderson is correct, to a point, that “we are either going to redesign our legal institutions or they will fail.”  (Assuming he means they fail for most people; the current institutions are quite effective for the so-called “1%” [or really the “0.001%”] at present).  But redesigns to legal institutions without large redesigns of political institutions that shape the overall economy will produce no long-term changes.  But of course, Henderson doesn’t seem to want that.  He writes about finding “creative ways to restore the balance.”  What historical balance, precisely, is he referring to?  Is this yet another (implied) invocation of the “Keynesian” (or “Bretton Woods”) post-WWII “golden years” of prosperity and growth, which depended on things like the destruction of industrial capacity in much of the world, racial discrimination, sexism/patriarchy, military and financial imperialism, wanton environmental destruction, etc.?  I don’t think there was a time in the past that we can say had anything close to a reasonable “balance” in the American legal system.  As Alan Nasser put it: “A rational and historically informed response to the legend of the middle class is that this alleged stratum of the 1920s and the Golden Age existed for a mere 34 years of American history. Before the 1920s just about all working-class people were poor. Since 1974 then we have had 42 years of burgeoning inequality, un- and underemployment, growing poverty and steadily declining wages with no end in sight. The middle class was a departure from the historic norm of a materially insecure working class, the default position of industrial capitalism.”  Reference to “balance” (in a purely domestic sense) is just coded language in a way parallel to the slogan “Make America great again.”

I guess, in short, my major concern is that Henderson seems to suggest narrowly framing symptoms of class warfare in the legal sector as root problems that permit sufficient populist/technocratic fixes solely within the legal sector, bracketing out the larger society-wide political dimension of class warfare (and avoiding a class-based materialist analysis in general) that better explains the origins of the (very real) downstream symptoms he chronicles in the legal sector.  For the kind of analysis I would like to see Henderson engage in, see Jeffrey Reiman’s …And the Poor Get Prison (which deals just with criminal justice), Jodi Dean’s “This Changes Some Things” (critiquing Naomi Klein’s milquetoast environmental populism) or Alenka Zupančič’s outstanding article “The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing” (detailing typical liberal McCarthyite arguments rooted in bad faith and a kind of blackmail).  I guess you could paraphrase Zupančič here by saying the (legal) apocalypse is (still) disappointing.

Matt Bruenig & Ryan Cooper – How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth

Link to an article by Matt Bruenig & Ryan Cooper:

“How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth”

 

As is typical for writing in Jacobin, this article includes a section at the end that draws conclusions unsupported by the body of the article.  For example, the authors state, “No political obstacle stood between President Obama and a better housing policy.”  The article does not address political factors at all, so this is a bald assertion without support.  It also is questionable.  While certain other studies have established how the Democrats during Obama’s era have courted Wall Street and other banking/finance donors, if you follow (for example) Thomas Ferguson‘s “Golden Rule” theory about “investment” in elections, which holds (in greatly simplified form) that politicians are vetted by moneyed interests and masses are too poor to be able to influence the choices offered in an election, then the authors would need to establish that Obama could have raised the same or more money elsewhere (Bernie Sanders’ small donor approach seems like the closest and easiest comparison point).  This also requires an assumption that Obama and the Democrats care/cared about long-term consequences, rather than limiting themselves to short-term thinking (e.g., sacrificing the future for a near-term win) — which is normative.  That criticism aside, the linked article does do a good job illustrating how the problem discussed is fundamentally political in character.