Category: Uncategorized

C.J. Polychroniou – Fraud

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?

RYM Shitheads

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.

Michael Hudson – Socialism, Land and Banking: 2017 Compared to 1917

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.

Richard Wolff – The Political Economy of Obama/Trump

Link to an article by Richard Wolff:

“The Political Economy of Obama/Trump”

 

(One small caveat about this article.  This statement is misleading: “Strictly trickle-down economics was how his administration ‘handled’ the 2008-09 crisis. Nothing remotely like the New Deal’s taxing the rich to fund programs for the poor and middle was proposed or debated, let alone adopted as policy.” At the federal level, there is no need to tax the rich to pay for programs for the poor, because the USA is no longer on the gold standard as it was during the New Deal.  Today, money can simply be printed to fund these programs, within reasonable limits.  This is explained in detail by Modern Monetary Theory publications.).

Douglas Allen & Paul Anderson – Consumption and Social Stratification

Link to an article by Douglas E. Allen and Paul F. Anderson:

Douglas E. Allen and Paul F. Anderson, “Consumption and Social Stratification: Bourdieu’s Distinction”, Advances in Consumer Research Volume 21, 70-74 (C. Allen and D. Roedder John, eds.,  Association for Consumer Research, 1994).

Selected quote:

“[Pierre] Bourdieu sees the consumption field as a site of struggle over the definitions of legitimate, middlebrow, and popular culture. In his view, the socially and economically dominant in any society seek to maintain a strict hierarchy of cultural forms so that all judgments in the consumption sphere are subject to the hegemony of ‘legitimate’ (i.e., dominant) cultural tastes. This is accomplished without conscious direction or coercion because a person’s class habitus presents each individual with a preexisting set of ‘natural’ classifications that constitute his or her unreflective definition of reality. Thus, in western industrialized societies, classical music, opera, legitimate theater, books on philosophy, knowledge of foreign languages, modern art collections, and subscriptions to academic journals are just a few of the cultural forms that are unquestionably (and unquestioned) elements of the legitimate or dominant culture. While members of the middle and working classes may eschew such cultural forms (indeed, they may well view them with suspicion or disdain), their position at the pinnacle of the cultural hierarchy goes unchallenged. As a result, those who can appropriate elements of legitimate culture as their own have the power to define the status of all other cultural forms.

***

“For Bourdieu, the singular mistake made by dominated class fractions, particularly the petite bourgeoisie, is to associate culture with knowledge. Lacking the lived experiences that produce the elite habitus, the petite bourgeoisie misrecognize what are essentially arbitrary aesthetic selections for special knowledge of what counts as ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ in the cultural sphere.”