Cultural Detritus, Reviews, and Commentary
Link to an article by Slavoj Žižek:
“Lessons From the ‘Airpocalypse’”
Notes: The phrase “spaceship Earth” was coined by R. Buckminster Fuller. Žižek seems to clarify Fuller’s suggestion, “If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do, how would I be? What would I do?” Žižek repeats his general position that people should not cynically obtain surplus enjoyment for doing what is good, but should instead be duty-bound to do good.
Link to an article by Sam Mitrani & Chad Pearson:
“A Short History of Liberal Myths and Anti-Labor Politics”
This article does an excellent job summarizing why Upton Sinclair called Republicans and Democrats “two wings of the same bird of prey” and why Malcolm X said, “The difference between the Republican and the Democrats is that the Republicans stick the knife in your back six inches, and the Democrats pull it out one.” However, there are a few points to quibble about. For instance, there is evidence to suggest Mayor Harrison in Chicago supported the Haymarket Martyrs — though this is tangential if not irrelevant to the overall article. More importantly, there is room to criticize some economic assumptions underlying the article. Take the claim “2. Let the banks collapse, which would have led to an even worse economic crisis than the one we experienced,” which seems dubious. Lehman Bros. collapsed. The government could have wound down the other big banks too — with the “even worse economic crisis” confined largely to the financial parasites and leaving ordinary commercial banks and credit unions intact, an overall positive result. That claim is followed-up by the (false) implication that there is a fixed money supply: “less and less money went into public services, schools, infrastructure, etc. because it had all been given to the already obscenely wealthy.” Modern Monetary Theory demonstrates how fiat money can be created by the government if there is a will to do so — the issue is lack of political will, not, as implied, a lack of actual dollars. After all, the TARP bailout money was created out of thin air! This economic history actually indicates that the government could also create money for socially beneficial programs, but chooses not to. These economic correctives actually reinforce the authors’ points, just in a slightly different way.
Bonus link: “We Need an Alternative to Trump’s Nationalism. It Isn’t the Status Quo”
Link to an article by Ted Rall:
Link to an article by Abi Wilkinson:
(The discussion of the cartoon in question seems a bit reminiscent of Snowpiercer)
Link to an article by Stephen Cooper:
“Benny King and the Criminalization of Addiction in America”
Bonus link: “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think”
Link to an article by Will Meyer:
Quote from Chapter XII “Conclusion – Repent Ye, For the Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand” from The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), by Leo Tolstoy:
“the organization of our society rests, not as people interested in maintaining the present order of things like to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple brute force, on the murder and torture of men.
“People who own great estates or fortunes, or who receive great revenues drawn from the class who are in want even of necessities, the working class, as well as all those who like merchants, doctors, artists, clerks, learned professors, coachmen, cooks, writers, valets, and barristers, make their living about these rich people, like to believe that the privileges they enjoy are not the result of force, but of absolutely free and just interchange of services, and that their advantages, far from being gained by such punishments and murders as took place in Orel and several parts of Russia this year, and are always taking place all over Europe and America, have no kind of connection with these acts of violence. They like to believe that their privileges exist apart and are the result of free contract among people; and that the violent cruelties perpetrated on the people also exist apart and are the result of some general judicial, political, or economical laws. They try not to see that they all enjoy their privileges as a result of the same fact which forces the peasants who have tended the forest, and who are in the direct need of it for fuel, to give it up to a rich landowner who has taken no part in caring for its growth and has no need of it whatever—the fact, that is, that if they don’t give it up they will be flogged or killed.
***
“Simply because torture and murder are not employed in every instance of oppression by force, those who enjoy the exclusive privileges of the ruling classes persuade themselves and others that their privileges are not based on torture and murder, but on some mysterious general causes, abstract laws, and so on. Yet one would think it was perfectly clear that if men, who consider it unjust (and all the working classes do consider it so nowadays), still pay the principal part of the produce of their labor away to the capitalist and the landowner, and pay taxes, though they know to what a bad use these taxes are put, they do so not from recognition of abstract laws of which they have never heard, but only because they know they will be beaten and killed if they don’t do so.
“And if there is no need to imprison, beat, and kill men every time the landlord collects his rents, every time those who are in want of bread have to pay a swindling merchant three times its value, every time the factory hand has to be content with a wage less than half of the profit made by the employer, and every time a poor man pays his last ruble in taxes, it is because so many men have been beaten and killed for trying to resist these demands, that the lesson has now been learnt very thoroughly.
“Just as a trained tiger, who does not eat meat put under his nose, and jumps over a stick at the word of command, does not act thus because he likes it, but because he remembers the red-hot irons or the fast with which he was punished every time he did not obey; so men submitting to what is disadvantageous or even ruinous to them, and considered by them as unjust, act thus because they remember what they suffered for resisting it.
“As for those who profit by the privileges gained by previous acts of violence, they often forget and like to forget how these privileges were obtained. But one need only recall the facts of history, not the history of the exploits of different dynasties of rulers, but real history, the history of the oppression of the majority by a small number of men, to see that all the advantages the rich have over the poor are based on nothing but flogging, imprisonment, and murder.
“One need but reflect on the unceasing, persistent struggle of all to better their material position, which is the guiding motive of men of the present day, to be convinced that the advantages of the rich over the poor could never and can never be maintained by anything but force.
“There may be cases of oppression, of violence, and of punishments, though they are rare, the aim of which is not to secure the privileges of the propertied classes. But one may confidently assert that in any society where, for every man living in ease, there are ten exhausted by labor, envious, covetous, and often suffering with their families from direct privation, all the privileges of the rich, all their luxuries and superfluities, are obtained and maintained only by tortures, imprisonment, and murder.”