Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Nathan Robinson is my hero!
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Billy_T.
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July 9, 2020 at 8:56 am #117753
Billy_TParticipantI think he’s easily one of the most astute young leftists in the mediaverse. Guessing he was quite the debater back in school, too. And I couldn’t agree with him more on this and so many other issues. Well worth reading the entire article:
Excerpt:
Donald Trump’s Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore was a call to arms to take on the evil mob destroying our beloved country’s values. It was a thunderous condemnation of the political left, and a promise to seize the country from the “totalitarian” proponents of “social justice” who are destroying our culture of “free and open debate,” replacing it with “cancel culture and speech codes”:
In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished… One of their political weapons is “Cancel Culture” — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America. This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life.
Trump’s picture of what is going on in the country is totally detached from reality. Totalitarianism involves guns and concentration camps. The “radical left” in the United States has two members of Congress, Bernie Sanders and AOC. (Perhaps Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.) This is the same conservative persecution complex we have heard for decades; some of the richest and most powerful people in the world complaining that the “far left” are totalitarians. The left is permanently tarred as Stalinist thought police trying to put dissenters in the gulag—even as the contemporary left is trying to dismantle both police and prisons and reduce the power of the carceral state.
It should be clear what’s going on here. Trump’s much-vaunted economy has tanked. Well over 100,000 people have died of coronavirus and cases are on the rise. 8 out of 10 people report that they are dissatisfied with the direction the country is going, and Joe Biden is outpolling Trump consistently. Americans have only gotten more sympathetic to immigrants over time, so he can’t run on scapegoating Mexicans like he did in 2016. Trump has one approach left: try to reignite the culture wars and convince people that a censorious PC left is trying to destroy our freedom.
But Trump is not the only one who sees the left as a threat to freedom. Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi has said that the “American left has lost its mind,” and that “leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation.” Yesterday, Harper’s magazine—which previously fired an editor for criticizing an anti-MeToo essay, and gave the world a 7,000 word self-pitying rant from an NPR host dismissed for sexual harassment and incompetence—published a short open letter on “Justice and Open Debate” co-signed by a motley assortment of luminaries, arguing that free speech is under attack:
July 9, 2020 at 9:09 am #117754Billy_TParticipantIMO, too many lefty pundits let the right frame the issues for us. They aid and abet the right (and Trump) in the process and they need to stop it. The right is the real enemy. Always has been. Always will be. And when they start lining people up against the wall, metaphorically or literally, they’re not going to separate the Taibbis, Greenwalds, Mates, et al, from the Robinsons. They’re not going to give them bonus points for echoing right-wing talking points. They’re gonna shoot us all, metaphorically or literally.
In my view, certain public figures on the left let the right, especially in the person of Trump, frame “Russiagate,” and then “Ukrainegate” — the mere existence of which should have made them do a mea culpa for their Russiagate views, but, hmm. Didn’t happen. They let the right frame the “Deep State” issue, which propped up (and still props up) the above. And now there seems to be a move afoot by some on the left to let the right frame the “Social Justice Warriors/PC run amok” debate too.
Again, they need to stop it.
As a general rule of thumb, if the right takes a certain stance, it’s safe to assume it’s the wrong stance, the cruel and heartless stance. Act accordingly. Dig deep, and act accordingly.
First rule of Ideological Fight Club:
1. Never, ever help the right — directly or indirectly.
July 9, 2020 at 9:18 am #117757Billy_TParticipantI should have formatted the excerpt. Should have put Trump’s quote in a, well, a quote box.
Best read on the website anyway. Robinson’s really good about sourcing and linking to this or that claim/clounter-claim, etc.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Billy_T.
July 9, 2020 at 10:25 am #117778
wvParticipantWell, you do know, Zooey beat you to him. Zooey spotted him a long while back.
But then he jilted him and became obsessed with Krystal Ball. These things happen.
w
v
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“One distinguishing difference between neoliberalism and plain old nineteenth-century free-market capitalism is this tendency to try to improve the ‘image’ without changing the substance. Wall Street votes Democratic now, holds diversity trainings, and deplores outright bigotry. But they still won’t hesitate to profit off the victims of a natural disaster or close a factory to make a buck.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist
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“Bakunin had a simple formula that captures the ethos of libertarian socialists: We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. Liberty without socialism means rule by CEOs, socialism without liberty means rule by bureaucrats.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist
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“But there is something even more insidious about liberal politics: it is the politics of wealthy people who want to appear virtuous without actually making personal sacrifices.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist
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“Equality doesn’t mean ensuring everybody is the same, it means making sure some people don’t get godlike power to determine the fates of others.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist————
“Being an honest leftist requires one to have a nose for jargon and a determination to figure out what is actually going on. It means examining phrases like national security and globalization and ascertaining what they mean for real human beings. When we do so, we often find that the reality beneath the words is disturbing. The ‘freest’ country in the world is also the one that imprisons the most people; the most ‘democratic’ country in the world is one in which ordinary people’s policy preferences matter little; and ‘security’ can be invoked to justify almost any kind of brutality. You can rationalize nearly anything if you speak at the right level of abstraction. But my kind of humanistic socialism, unlike the authoritarian Soviet variety, begins with a resolute determination to find the truth, to care about human beings, and to not turn away from unpleasant facts or find ways to make them less comforting.”
― Nathan J. Robinson
———-“Dorothy Day (1897–1980). She is a legendary figure among social justice Catholics, organizing the Catholic Worker Movement and advocating pacifism, economic equality, and civil rights from a Christian anarchist perspective.26 Arrested numerous times for her civil disobedience, Day often took Biblical teaching more seriously than the Church did. She was the kind of Christian who defers to the Sermon on the Mount rather than the prejudices of local priests and bishops, and as such has been long admired for her moral courage. Predictably, there have been attempts to sanitize her legacy and minimize her radicalism. The Catholic Crisis magazine has suggested she was a conservative, because she “lamented the encroachment of the state and the perils of the welfare system.”27 She did so, however, because she was an anarchist, not a conservative. It’s true that her economics were not purely socialistic, but her words made clear how she felt about capitalism: I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and our consent, not His. It is the way we have arranged it, and it is up to us to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change … We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists “of conspiring to teach [us] to do,” but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.28”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist
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“4 Conservatism is “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”
― Nathan J. Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist
———-more quotes at goodreads
July 9, 2020 at 12:47 pm #117790
ZooeyModeratorI haven’t followed the Taibbi bruhaha, and so I’m not confident I have a clear understanding of what it’s about.
I will say that I follow Taibbi on Twitter, and more than have the tweets that appear on my feed are Taibbi fighting with nobodies who criticize him. I think he’s fallen into the Twitter maelstrom of hostility, people he should ignore. I do wonder if that has colored his views on “the left.”
And I see Robinson doing the same thing. They are both responding to personal criticism and spending a lot of energy fighting idiots they would be better off not engaging.
July 9, 2020 at 1:29 pm #117792Billy_TParticipantWV,
Good quotes from Robinson. Have been hoping my local library would carry his book, but no luck so far.
Seems to be a big difference in choices between Libby and Hoopla apps.
Anyway . . . yeah, I gave Zooey a H/T when he posted Robinson here. Didn’t know about him until then. Youze guys have done that many a time. Pretty good for a bunch of Seahawk fans!
;>)
July 9, 2020 at 1:42 pm #117793Billy_TParticipantI haven’t followed the Taibbi bruhaha, and so I’m not confident I have a clear understanding of what it’s about.
I will say that I follow Taibbi on Twitter, and more than have the tweets that appear on my feed are Taibbi fighting with nobodies who criticize him. I think he’s fallen into the Twitter maelstrom of hostility, people he should ignore. I do wonder if that has colored his views on “the left.”
And I see Robinson doing the same thing. They are both responding to personal criticism and spending a lot of energy fighting idiots they would be better off not engaging.
Agree about showing restraint on Twitter and picking your battles, etc. etc.
If you’re interested in the back and forth between Robinson, Taibbi and The Rising, there are a few threads on it here. Robinson has several articles on his site about it — you may have seen — which reference the relevant material from Taibbi and The Rising, etc.
Just my take: I wish “the left” would learn that these attempts “to be fair” are never reciprocated, and, as Robinson shows, they tend to be full of jumping the gun in the first place. They just help “the right” scream louder, claim vindication, and goddess knows what else.
Trump’s been ramping up this war for some time now, and I think it’s already caused deaths, directly, at the protests and elsewhere. The numbers for indirect damage are incalculable.
We’re in the Twilight Zone times 10.
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