I likely sidetracked the thread from the real point(s) . . . the uprisings/Chomsky, etc. Will post more, later, on that and try to keep on point. Apologies.

Hope all are healthy, safe and the proverbial hanging in there.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Billy_T.

My own view is that there isn’t a necessary conflict between “desire for change” and voting for Biden. I don’t see the tragic results of the Dem primaries as necessarily conflicting with support for radical change on the BLM front . . .

It goes without saying that I also think it was a massive mistake to choose Biden over Sanders — for a host of reasons we’ve all talked about. For the nation and the planet. While I personally don’t think Sanders goes far enough — likely cuz he doesn’t think the country is remotely ready for that — he is head and shoulders above the rest. But, my gut tells me, most Dems voting for Biden think Biden has the best chance to defeat Trump, and that’s the kind of “change” they want most. A good portion, in fact, is likely outright afraid that Sanders would lose, and they sincerely view defeating Trump as major change, and I agree with them.

Trump (and GOP control overall), IMO, is a once in a century kind of menace, and needs to end. Bolton’s recent revelations just underscore that all the more, as does Trump’s attempt to silence the book (and the one by his niece) . . . Trump telling Xi he approved of his plans to build concentration camps for Chinese minorities; Trump’s saying journalists (that criticize him) should be executed; Trump’s telling Erdogan he would crush investigations into personal friends/businesses, etc. etc. We have never had a president so willing (so often) to act corruptly, recklessly, dangerously, in his own best interest or that of his cronies. It’s just not close.

So, anyway, these uprisings are different . . . In 1968, Nixon successfully turned them into a referendum on “the left,” on “chaos,” on the “liberal consensus” that had basically been in place for roughly 35 years to that point. For “Law and Order,” which all too many heard as white supremacy at the point of a gun, and approved. We’ve now had the reactionary consensus in place since the 1970s — more than 40 years. I just don’t see Trump and the GOP being able, as the incumbents, to paint this as a “time for change” when they’re really asking for more of the obscenely failed same old same old. Their agenda, in a nutshell, is turbo-corporatism/hard neoliberalism + fake-libertarianism + Ron Paul/Lost Cause nationalism + outright fascism in suits.

Americans really do want a change from that. I just wish their dreams and hopes for change were far wider/deeper in scope. Dime store assessment? That scope has been beaten out of them for generations, and “the left” needs to find better ways of beautiful landscape painting.

WV,

I know you don’t want to open up that can . . . so I will lift the lid just a tad:

;>)

Taibbi mentioned the Steele Dossier. That, IMO, is a major major straw man. Why? Cuz the Dems never talk or talked about it, and it’s incredibly rare that the WaPo or the NYT or even MSNBC do, either.

Mueller didn’t use it, or bring it up when he testified. Nor did Comey before him, when he started investigating the Trump campaign in July of 2016 (and hid this investigation from America). I can’t recall a single mention of it in the impeachment hearings by any Dem. But Republicans, including Trump, brought/bring up its supposed centrality constantly. They’re still riding that horse in their current investigation of the investigation (Lindsay Graham’s committee).

Taibbi is pretty much echoing a GOP talking point, which no one but the GOP uses.

Buzzfeed published it, so “the left” has lost its mind? This is kind of like saying “the left” is X, Y and Z because Jimmy Kimmel says something something on Late Night.

Sheesh.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Billy_T.

Robinson isn’t saying there aren’t examples of overzealous “activism” here and there that we should look at, including in the classroom. He’s saying that Taibbi is wrong to categorize this as some kind of “movement,” or a sign that “the left has lost its mind.”

That would be my issue with Taibbi’s broad brush as well. It’s also where the “Fox News” comparison comes in, cuz it’s exactly what they try to do, all the time:

Make isolated examples into some kind of “movement” or . . . in the case of the protests, a supposedly dangerous development.

After quoting Taibbi at length, Robinson responds with this:

These are serious accusations. There is a whole new movement, an intellectual revolution, which is conning organizations, threatening people, destroying our belief in free inquiry, and persecuting thoughtcrime. This movement is apparently called “the American left.”

This is a thesis you may have heard before. It is the Fox News view of leftism, which says that leftists are a bunch of intolerant, social justice-obsessed intellectual Stalinists. Like Fox News, Taibbi collapses any distinction between “leftists” and “liberals,” sometimes using one term, sometimes the other, to describe the same group. The headline actually says “The American press,” then he says he’s talking about “the American left,” then says that “among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution.”

We on the Left tend to critique the Fox News view of us for a number of reasons. First, it is clear that much of the Left does not do any of this. The most prominent leftist in the country is Bernie Sanders. The most popular leftist magazine in the country is Jacobin. Do the tendencies Taibbi describes emanate from the pages of Jacobin? They do not. Instead, he is speaking about a “mob of upper-class social media addicts.” Well, who are we talking about exactly? Are we talking about left magazines? The Sunrise Movement? The DSA? I suspect that to the extent that Taibbi is referring to a group of people that can be clearly defined, they are probably liberal members of that “professional managerial class” that leftists distance themselves from. (Taibbi cites things MSNBC does, for example. I assure you the Left does not respect MSNBC.)

But I am already assuming that there is something solid about Taibbi’s argument, and that we can skip to identifying the party responsible. However, I actually think that the thing he’s describing, in many ways simply doesn’t exist. Because when we look at the examples he cites as proof of this all-consuming trend in leftism and the media, we find that they range from “things that Taibbi is just completely misrepresenting” to “things that seem like bad decisions but not really worth invoking the specter of Robespierre to describe.”

Often, I’ve found that when you actually click the links on stories about how the “social justice warriors” or “wokescolds” or “cancel culture” doers are getting wildly out of control, you find that the facts are far more nuanced than critics want you to believe. For example, Taibbi cites an instance of “a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ out loud.” This sounds so extreme that I doubted whether it was true, and indeed it isn’t. The students actually complained because when the (white) professor read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” aloud, he chose to say the n-word rather than censoring it. And when Black students told him they would have preferred if he’d omitted the word, he apparently doubled down and said being white didn’t mean he couldn’t say the n-word. (Students were apparently also upset that he had shown them a video containing the n-word and graphic pictures of lynchings, apparently without having had a conversation about it.)

I could have bolded a lot more of the above, but limited it to just a bit . . . .

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

WV,

Have you read Robinson’s piece? Didn’t know he had responded to Taibbi until I saw your video. Thanks for posting.

The Current Affairs piece is excellent. He calmly, effectively, surgically destroys Taibbi’s (IMO) ludicrously broad-brushed complaints, and Taibbi should have quit while he was behind. MT’s rebuttal to the rebuttal was a big ol’ bust. He wasn’t able to adequately address a single point made by Robinson — well, at least not without twisting it like a pretzel.

Will quote a bit from the article tomorrow or later this week. Sad to see Taibbi choosing this hill — and The Hill — to plant his flag.

Has The American Left Lost Its Mind? No. Once again critics of the left are misstating the facts and distracting us from consequential issues.

==================

Well, my gut tells me, Matt is just kinda defending a friend of his. Which is fine with me, but I dont know that there is really much of an issue there.

I dunno.

w
v

That makes a lot of sense, WV. I think your hunch is a good one.

. . .

On the Tom Cotten issue. Taibbi’s stance on that surprises me as well. We really don’t need the NYT to give us the “other side” to the issue of “Should we use our military to violently crush dissent in our cities and towns?” etc. etc. That’s a bit like feeling the need to pair an Op-Ed by the victim of domestic abuse with one promoting domestic abuse.

And Robinson says something in his piece I’ve always felt too. It’s not a “free speech” issue when X or Y or Z is denied this or that platform for their views. It’s a choice by said platform to allocate its extremely limited space/time as they see fit. No one has a “right” to a particular platform/time/venue. If we did have that right, then everyone who was ever turned down for a speaking engagement at Harvard, Yale, the UN . . . or a book deal, or a movie deal, or a music contract, or a spot on the Rams, could claim their rights were violated and they were “silenced.” When the NYT gave Cotten that slot, it had to say No to countless others. Using Taibbi’s logic, those countless others were “silenced.”

etc. etc.

It’s probably a bit of a dead horse at this point, but will add a few thoughts later on the above issues.

Fox News is also largely responsible for getting a large portion of the country wound up about “antifa,” even though there’s no evidence to support the claims. Trump seizes upon all of that. They get him all wound up too.

We’ve never had a president who spends so much time watching the Teebee. To make it a thousand times worse, it’s mostly Fox.

Some good, some not so good stuff in Taibbi’s column.

I know it’s by no means the main point, but I think he’s lost his mind regarding Trump, Russiagate, etc. etc. As did Greenwald, Mate and company before him. They’ve spent more time defending Trump — yes, that’s what it boils down to — than investigations of their own into his administration, and it’s not close. They’ve trapped themselves in this stance, cuz they think any investigation just helps those horrible corporate Dems.

Pizzes me off to no end.

First off, yes, a ton of evidence was produced to prove Trump colluded with Russia. Hell, his son finally had to admit to it, once we saw the emails. Taibbi, like all too many in the media, is hiding behind the irrelevant distinction between “no proof of conspiracy with Russia
to hack the DNC,” versus “collusion with Russia to aid the Trump campaign in the election.” The latter was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The former was not, as Mueller said in his report.

Also, it was Trump, not the Dems, who kept Russiagate in the news. Day after day after day, he tweeted, gave TV interviews about it, whined and moaned about how badly he had supposedly been treated, and endlessly spewed bogus counter-narratives. Trump desperately tried to keep it in the media cycle, thinking he could use this and the “deep state” narrative to his advantage. The Dem leadership actually tried to rein in their discussion under that barrage, because they thought it was hurting them, not him.

Anyway . . . on the larger points, I’ve always been against thought-police garbage, and in the age of Twitter mobs, they can be highly destructive. We could use an Orwell right now. But it seems Taibbi may be painting with a too broad brush, which will please reactionaries the world over, if they bother reading him.

I don’t know how much of this nonsense Bannon actually believes himself . . . but the supposed conflict between “globalists” and “nationalists” has always really pissed me off.

If someone is a supporter of capitalism, they’re a globalist by default, cuz it’s the first naturally globalist economic system in world history . . . It must Grow or Die. It must expand or die. It must forever shift pain, debt, consequences and responsibility elsewhere, or it dies. Geographically, and into the future, it’s the first naturally imperialistic, expansionist, cancerous, globalizing, totalizing economic system . . . and hopefully the last. And it never could have become world hegemon without genocide, slavery, and endless theft of the entire world’s resources.

How could it not be “globalist”?

And if someone is an American, the supposed conflict is even more laughably absurd, cuz we built the international system in place today, during and after WWII, especially. We maintain it through violence, austerity strings, officially recognized blackmail and other forms of exploitation. The only difference between the Bannonite “nationalists” and your run of the mill Goldman Sachs “internationalist” is the Bannonites push white supremacy on top of their baked-in globalism.

In short, a “nationalist” does everything a “globalist” does, and adds fascism to the mix. Plus, as we’ve seen in every case where these right-wing sociopaths gain power, they’re at least as corrupt as the worst centrists. Usually, far more so, and they don’t even pretend to want to help the so-called “developing” nations.

We leftists need to offer ferocious opposition to both, plus and our own alternatives.

I know you said you have no words. But I would be interested in your take on Bannon and the interview.

Trump’s rage at another governor makes him look weak and pathetic
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/11/trumps-rage-another-governor-makes-him-look-weak-pathetic/

“Go back to your bunker”: Mayor rejects Trump threat to invade Seattle over peaceful “cop-free” zone
https://www.salon.com/2020/06/11/go-back-to-your-bunker-mayor-rejects-trump-threat-to-invade-seattle-over-peaceful-cop-free-zone/

ZN,

Definitely a great thing to see the sustained protests and the large majority of Americans who support them. That is amazing and wonderful. Heart-warming, to be sure.

I think some of the reactions to Trump’s continued calls for military invasions of American cities are hopeful as well, but the calls themselves are obviously ominous. They don’t bode well for November, IMO. The reactions do. Trump’s tweets and conspiracy theories don’t, nor does the continued escalation of rhetoric regarding “antifa” from right-wing media.

So, basically, it’s a mix. Great news, horrific news. We perhaps should focus more on the former . . .

(Using your suggestions from the linking post, will add try two articles of possible interest by themselves below)

wv wrote:

Seems to me, Adolph Reed is just pointing to the idea that there’s two layers of ‘reform’ we can ‘see’ (not see, if we have ideological blinders).

One layer has to do with all the changes in actual police polices, regulations, and discipline reforms that liberals want to see.

The deeper layer though, has to do with Class. Ie, this is more than an ‘police’ problem its a Capitalism Problem. The police are just the tool, Capitalism uses to protect wealthy-privilege, etc. I think Reed is just saying, if we just focus on race, we are always going to be dealing with layer1 and not layer2.
Layer1 is very important, though. Layer2 — the invisible layer — is unlikely to be dealt with.

w
v

Agreed, WV.

Capitalism reproduces, acerbates, increases, expands class conflict and division. It has to, or it can’t function. You can’t accumulate “capital” without creating massive inequality and class conflicts, unless it’s owned and shared by all, in which case it’s no longer “capitalism.”

Racial, sexual, gendered, religious minorities are hit with an even higher level of these malign effects, but they won’t escape them if we somehow magically end discrimination on “social” grounds. As long as it exists along economic grounds, we will always have an unjust society/world, etc. And as long as we bar democracy from the economic realm, we can’t have it in the political realm, which means we won’t ever end that discrimination.

The absence of democracy from the economy guarantees its absence, in real terms, from the political. To me, this movement has to include “class,” or it won’t have longterm success.

InvaderRam wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

“Small government” is ideal, if this includes the police, the military, the border patrol, capitalism, the way brown, black, indigenous and leftist bodies are disciplined and punished — ending that garbage. It’s horrifying if it just means corporations and the super rich can do what they want, while everyone else has a boot on their necks.

well. the only thing i would say is there’d be no “small government”. it’s just that funds would be redistributed.

but you make a lot of good points.

Ny own view: I see an incredible irony and disconnect in the right’s love of capitalism and its supposed hatred of “Big Gubmint.” To me, there’s no way around the fact that the capitalist system itself requires Big Gubmint. That its very existence demands a massive intervention of “the state,” and because it’s the first global economic system in world history, “states.” It simply can’t survive without that massive Big Gubmint support, policing, military, bailouts, propping up, defense of, wars for, supplements for, offsets for, etc. etc.

Take away the capitalist system, replace it with community-based, fully democratic, localized, egalitarian, cooperative economies, and a massive Big Gubmint is no longer needed . . . not only on the propping up side, or the offset side, but the bailout and warfare side.

In short, I see a direct conflict between the love of “small government” and the love of capitalism. I don’t think the two things are at all compatible. Capitalism requires imperialist governments, working in tandem. It requires endless bailouts because capitalism inevitably eats its own and has to be revived. And because it generates ginormous inequalities, it needs endless offsets. And it will always need policing to protect the rich. It will always require smashing skulls in the process. No way around that, IMO.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by Billy_T.

Interesting video.

Several thoughts come to mind:

1. The pernicious effects of the “Great Man Theory” of history, which permeate the West . . . Made me think of how all too many Americans are kewl with billionaires making their billions, cuz they supposedly did everything themselves, no help, and there wouldn’t supposedly be this or that innovation if not for these individuals.

2. Of course, just as with Churchill, they’re nothing without millions upon millions of other human beings, their work and sacrifices, in the present and generations into the past, plus public infrastructure, etc. etc.

3. If it hadn’t been (extremely conservative) Churchill, it would have been any numbers of other leaders. And without the countless men, women children, etc. etc. . . . and on and on.

4. The brave soul going up against those yahoos didn’t really have a chance to mention the Late Victorian Holocausts, which may have shut them up, after they laughed at the mention of Marxism. Just in India, Nepal and China alone, the Brits — and a few other “Great Powers” — were responsible for killing roughly 90 million people there in the late 1800s and early 1900s, in the name of profits/colonialism. Throw in genocide in Ireland, the Americas, Africa, Southeast Asia, etc. etc. . . and it dwarfs anything they could claim happened because of “Marxism,” which has to be about the most misunderstood word to this day.

5. If a present-day Marxist can be automatically condemned, out of hand, because of past perversions and distortions of its radically diverse philosophy/sources, then anyone who claims to be a Christian in the present should be “damned” for the Inquisition, the Crusades, the mass destruction of pagan literature, art, architecture, and the countless lives killed under its banner.

. . . for starters.

Whenever I post links, it always seems to trigger the spam filter, so I’ll leave them out for now.

But in recent days, I’ve read several articles about how Trump and his administration have pretty much gone full-on fascist. I’m guessing you guys already know all of this . . . but they put unidentified, heavily militarized, basically secret police in the streets, who won’t say where they come from. His personal soldiers, basically, under the direction of Barr. And, while this has been going on, protesters have been arrested (ten to twenty thousand and counting) and interrogated by the FBI and “police intelligence,” demanding to know political affiliations, which is illegal. Boiled down, this war on black and brown people is also a war on leftists, and “antifa” is being used as a catch-all umbrella, with obviously incredibly dangerous potential. McCarthyist and beyond.

Which leads me to think yet again about the focus of all too many leftists with audiences and bullhorns. Is this really the time to spend 99% of their shows telling us what we leftists already know? That the Dem power-structure is corporatist? That corporatism is bad? That far too many Dems are sellouts?

As the young kids used to say, “Duh.” Tell us something we didn’t already know.

Better yet, why not focus their time on an existential threat of making leftist thought in America punishable by jail time and worse? Which is where this is heading. If Trump, Barr, white supremacist militias, the alt-right, Talk Radio, et al have their way . . . that’s what we’ll have: the American left being illegal, full stop.