Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an interview with Larry Krasner, conducted by Nyle Fort:
“Meet Larry Krasner, Philly’s New Progressive DA Who Has Sued the City’s Police Dept. 75 Times”
Bonus links: “The Problem with Sullivan & Cromwell Partner Nicolas Bourtin and His Five Myths About White Collar Crime” and The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison
Link to a series of articles from teleSUR about the October Revolution:
Link to an article by Kevin Murphy:
Link to a report by The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists:
“Paradise Papers: Secrets of the Global Elite”
Bonus links: “Joe Ricketts Is a Walking Case for a $1 Million Maximum Income” (“A maximum income—and progressive taxation more generally—is less about redistributing income than about redistributing power, though the two aims go hand-in-hand.”; this article does make numerous contradictory statements, though, first stating by way of a quote the principles of Modern Monetary Theory, then immediately contradicting them with reference to “starving public coffers of funds”; an important distinction here is between state and local jurisdictions that cannot issue currency, and a sovereign federal government that can) and “How the Rich Stay Rich” (this interview makes a misleading reference to a book that actually also admits that revolutions can cause equalization of wealth, but the interviewee seems to follow a similar defeatist line of thinking rebutted in War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, for example)
Link to an article by Erwin Chemerinsky:
What Chemerinsky does here is apply principles of “legal realism” to critique the “textualism” school of thought as merely concealing the expression of class interests.
Bonus link: Language and Symbolic Power
I have read a number of interviews and essays by C.J. Polychroniou. Why do people keep publishing his drivel? His ideas are naive, conclusory, and counter-factual. He is one of those quaint anarchist-leaning fools whose ideas Lenin conclusively debunked over a century ago. Why doesn’t Polychroniou just shut up, or crawl back under whatever bridge he lives under?
Ever notice how the web site RateYourMusic is run by a bunch of shit-for-brains, bigoted assholes? If not, well now you know. They are a bunch of bigoted Liberals who engage in the most simple-minded discrimination against non-Liberal politics under the guise of multicultural, “politically correct” identity politics. They also are fully invested in the “Web 2.0” neoliberal exploitation regime, privatizing the collective and unpaid contributions of users — and the site doesn’t even make the user-contributed database “open source”, which would at least have been something (bearing in mind how inadequate that regime is), and likewise hasn’t sought non-profit status (again, bearing in mind the inadequacies of that corporate form). There are as immoral as any surveillance capital “social media” company. Someday hopefully they all go to cultural reeducation where they belong. There was a time, when the site first started, when it had potential and was mostly a DIY user community, but it went off the rails, over time, and off a cliff once the site became corporatized. A key turning point was when the site implemented regulations of the types of reviews it would permit, and began banning, deleting/unpublishing and — most egregiously, in terms of copyright infringement — making unauthorized edits to — reviews posted to the site. There regulations implemented simply didn’t pass muster and were really just attacks on certain disfavored viewpoints, combined with attempts to make the site appear to have more content reflective of commercial media (and hence, less DIY and more monetizable). Then they eliminated one of the message boards, with only disingenuous explanations and circular logic. All through this time they made a number of policy changes around things like “genre” tags designed to present the appearance of neutrality while pushing certain agendas. What’s more, most of the early site administrators left to be replaced by a pack of sub-idiotic fools. A cursory glance back at the site archives, to the extent they are still visible, shows citation standards for verifying information that would make scholars cringe, with precisely the same sort of crony culture that infects sites like Wikipedia. Frankly, criminal prosecutors might use RYM as a test case for going after these Web 2.0 corporations that violate labor laws, because the site probably isn’t funded well enough to survive a legal challenge, thus allowing favorable precedent to develop that could later be used to go after the “big fish” of Silicon Valley and put those monsters behind bars where they belong. In RYM’s case, they are probably also liable for copyright violations due to moderators editing reviews and posts (hence creating unauthorized derivative works), which is not even to mention that their moderation policies probably mean that DMCA safe harbor provisions are unavailable to them.
Link to an article by Michael Hudson:
“Socialism, Land and Banking: 2017 Compared to 1917”
For a more nuanced and detailed account of Soviet bureaucracy, and the construction and dismantling of Stalinism, see The Soviet Century. Combined with The Half Has Never Been Told, it is worth wondering whether industrialization is possible without slavery. Also, it is worth questioning Hudson’s characterization of China as pursuing “socialist” policy, rather than being state capitalist — he basically just assumes such points. Though this was intended as a speech to be delivered in China, so maybe he felt the need to pander on that point a bit.