Tag: Politics

Ted Rall – The Difference Between Liberals and Leftists

Link to an article by Ted Rall:

“The Difference Between Liberals and Leftists”

 

Bonus links: “‘Far Left’? There’s No Such Thing in This Democratic Party” and Virtue and Terror and Review of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History and  Non-violence: A History Beyond the Myth and War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century and Violence and Slavoj Žižek On Political Struggle and Trouble in Paradise and Revolution at the Gates and The State and Revolution and “The Guardian’s Populism Panic” and “Left is the New Right, or Why Marx Matters” and “Oregon’s Republican ‘Walkout’ Was a Serious Defeat For the Left” and “Democracy Is the Enemy” and “Don’t Mourn, Repoliticize!”

Malloy Owen – Don’t Mourn, Repoliticize!

Link to an article by Malloy Owen:

“Don’t Mourn, Repoliticize!”

 

Bonus links:  Mladen Dolar on “university discourse” and Review of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History and Slavoj Žižek On Political Struggle and Read My Desire (Chapter 6) and “Was I Right to Back Donald Trump Over Hillary Clinton? Absolutely” (“Democratic elections are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics. When this agreement on basics falters, the only procedures at our disposal are negotiations or (civil) war.”)

Scapegoating Mountain Bikers

There is a small but determined group of people claiming to protect wilderness by scapegoating mountain biking and mountain bikers.  Their normal tactic is to highlight one or two absolutely true—but nonetheless isolated—facts about how mountain bikers are a threat to wildlife in particular areas to suggest that mountain biking should be banned to protect wilderness/wildlife.  On the surface, this seems appealing.  But the problem is that once you scratch the surface this is a highly chauvinistic approach that involves absolving hikers/backpackers/horseback riders/etc. from their own threats to wilderness/wildlife.  This can be detected even in the language that these self-styled protectors of wilderness use.  The best is “backcountry”.  This is a term that denotes at least limited openness to hiking/camping/homesteading!  When deployed in conjunction with words like “protecting”, what we see is not a plea to protect wildlife and wilderness, but to protect certain human uses in certain sparsely populated areas from certain other human uses thus reserving those areas for selected uses.  Here is an article that sums up this phenomenon:  “Griz Expert Says Mountain Bikes Are a Threat To Montana’s Bears.”  (actually, the headline was changed in response to some of the negative feedback).  It is worth reading the comments because people absolutely nail the author’s anti-bike bias (which the author explicitly denies!) and cite countervailing evidence that the author ignores or actively minimizes.  This article is not isolated, though.  People like George Wuerthner write similarly—for instance, he deplores the self-identities that mountain bikers and ATV operators cultivate but excludes from his scorn the self-identities that hikers, etc. cultivate (he does note in passing that hikers can also harm wilderness, but minimizes those admissions and quickly returns to biker-bashing scapegoating).  This is basically typical political liberalism: policing the line between the community of the free (the “good” hikers/backpackers/etc.) and those unworthy of liberal freedoms (the “bad” mountain bikers).  What is pernicious is that this is “discourse of the university”, that is, the advancement of normative political/ideological positions in support of a disguised mode of social domination.

Txema Guijarro – Selling Out Julian Assange

Link to an interview with Txema Guijarro, conducted by Eoghan Gilmartin and Tommy Greene:

“Selling Out Julian Assange”

 

Bonus links: “I Was Fired for Helping Julian Assange, and I Have No Regrets” and “The Guardian Forced to Clarify Misleading Article on Assange and Russia”

Michael Hudson – Food Blackmail, the Washington Consensus and Freedom

Link to an interview of Michael Hudson summarizing his essential books Super Imperialism and Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, conducted by Bonnie Faulkner:

“Food Blackmail, the Washington Consensus and Freedom” and

“De-Dollarizing the American Financial Empire”

 

This interview provides an excellent summary of many of the main points of Hudson’s books.  For a latter-day treatment of a portion of these topics, see also The Global Minotaur and “Imperialism in a Coffee Cup.”

Peter Greene – Winners Take All, Education Edition

Link to a review by Peter Greene of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) by Anand Giridharadas:

“Winners Take All, Education Edition”

 

Bonus links: “Social Service or Social Change?” and “Education, Jobs and Capitalism” and Summary of Dupuy on Social Hierarchy and Slavoj Žižek On Political Struggle and “Democracy Is the Enemy” and Oscar Wilde Quote and Review of The New Prophets of Capital and Critique of Cynical Reason and “Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas Review – Superb Hate-reading”

Marcie Smith – Gene Sharp, the Cold War Intellectual Whose Ideas Seduced the Left

Link to an interview of Marcie Smith, conducted by Branko Marcetic:

“Gene Sharp, the Cold War Intellectual Whose Ideas Seduced the Left”

 

Bonus links: “Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One)” and “Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part Two)” and Non-violence: A History Beyond the Myth and War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century and Violence and “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said” and Crowds and Party and The Idiot Pool and Walter Benn Michaels on Neoliberalism and The State and Revolution

 

Bonus quotes:

“rich and powerful men engage in what the writer Kevin Roose has called ‘anarchist cheerleading,’ in keeping with their carefully crafted image as rebels against the authorities. To call for a terrain without rules in the way they do, to dabble in the anarchist cheerleading, may be to sound like you wish for a new world of freedom on the behalf of humankind. But a long line of thinkers has told us that the powerful tend to be the big winners from the creation of a blank-slate, rules-free world.

“The self-styled entrepreneur-rebels were actually seeking to overturn a major project of the Enlightenment– the development of universal rules that applied evenly to all…”

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018)

“The assumption is that the fight against these excesses should take place in the familiar liberal-democratic frame. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control over the global economy, through the pressure of media exposure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, police investigations etc. What goes unquestioned is the institutional framework of the bourgeois democratic state. This remains sacrosanct even in the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ – the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement and so on. ***

“Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations.”

Slavoj Žižek, “Democracy Is the Enemy”