zn wrote:

wv wrote:

My own view is that it matters more to shine light on the war-crimes of the country you are IN.

My view is that doing a distorted or mythed-up version of anything is never progressive. And to me, ANY bumper-sticker, street slogan, reductive approach to ANYTHING is always in danger of being mythed-up if it has not already crossed that line already. In terms of highlighting and examining the war horrors of one’s own national history, absolutely we should do that and DO do that. This is the only conquering nation I can think of that is ambivalent about its own foundational conquest. So there actually is a lot of that. Apparently not enough to stop it from continuing, but struggling among other forces, that awareness is there.

To me this whole thing is really really tricky.

I see myths on the left about american war crimes that will not convince anyone of anything precisely because they ARE myths, and it is easy to expose them as such.

And meanwhile super-patriots deny all that stuff, or worse, glory in it.

You will find I will usually just simply resist the bumper-sticker version of anything. No matter where it comes from. Fascists, the right, moderates, liberals, and fellow lefties.

To me it is always better to be dialectical.

So for example in the Pacific theater, the USA fought in many cases to restore european colonists to local power. Their anti-japanese rhetoric was insanely racist. They made fire-bombing the population regular military policy. There were race riots in the pacific at places where black cargo workers were considered unwelcome by some white troops. This just goes on.

And. The Kempeitai are among the biggest monsters to ever exist. Right up there with Stalin and Hitler’s Germany, and in many respects–if this is even possible–far more horrifying. I have no second-thoughts about the defeat of the Kempeitai. And at the same time mixed in with all of this, local peoples such as in New Guinea and the Solomons welcomed americans for driving out the japanese, and these were people and places where the USA had no imperial/territorial ambitions.

To me if you’re not dialectical about things like that, then, the way I see it, it’s falling into the bottomless pit of sloganizing.

The left needs honest internal dissent too.

————–
Well this is a lot like the identity-politics thing weve battled about.

We really arent that far apart, for me, its more a matter of emphasis and a matter of ‘what audience are you aiming’ at.

I totally agree we should never mythologize or distort. But i dont agree that in every case, with every audience we should always be dialectical. I think sometimes for some audiences its better to emphasize things they likely DONT know. Things that have been suppressed. etc. Not to ‘distort’ but to UN-distortt what has already been distorted by the dominant culture.

I mean i think of howard zinn for example. He chose to emphasize things that had NOT been emphasized in the mainstream history books. He was ‘un-distorting’ things by maybe…distorting things 🙂

w
v

My own view is that it matters more to shine light on the war-crimes of the country you are IN. If i were in Germany I’d be complaining more about German war-crimes. Etc.

I say that just because i think every nation does the ‘denial’ thing about its ‘own’ history.

So, i rip into america because I’m here. Etc.

But sure, every warring-nation is guilty of all the usual war-crime stuff.
To me its not about ‘who is worse’ its just about which nation are you in.

w
v

I wonder sometimes if a corporotacracy has more lies per square inch than any other form of government? Here’s an article on think tanks. Nothing new. Just more from the culture of lies.

w
v
———–
Extract:

A closer look at the highly opaque institutions on our list confirmed our hypothesis that think tanks that hide their donors usually have something to hide. For example, according to research compiled by TobaccoTactics, the Adam Smith Institute, the Centre for Policy Studies, and the Institute for Economic Affairs have all previously received undisclosed funding from tobacco companies, and all have produced research that was then used to lobby against stronger anti-smoking regulations. We found that the Adam Smith Institute has created a structure so opaque that it concealed not only who gave money, but also who took it, leaving us unable to determine where close to one million pounds given by American donors had ended up. Meanwhile, Policy Exchange has previously used evidence that appears to have been fabricated; the resulting report led to fake news headlines in several media outlets that had naively trusted “research” conducted by an opaque think tank.

Opaque ‘think tanks’ working the Westminster lobbying circuit seem to have considerable financial backing. Collectively, they spend more than £22 million of dark money every year to shape public debates and influence politics and policies in Britain. Ironically, some are registered as charities and so are indirectly subsidised by tax payers.

Full article:

Think tanks, evidence and policy: democratic players or clandestine lobbyists?

John Oliver

Well, i blame LaFleur for teaching Ryan
how to take a sack to lose a Super Bowl.

w
v

Some voices of women who marched:
link:http://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/01/31/four-young-feminists-reflect-experiences-critiques-future-hopes-stemming-womens-march/

zn wrote:

Well, the Roman empire (with slavery and gladitorial games) was worse than this and so was the catholic middle ages, with its endless dynastic conflicts ruining the lives of everyday people. And, we got rid of those.

So you never know.

If Einstein weren’t optimistic, he could never have climbed Everest. Let alone swim the English channel.

————

Well, to all those warped and twisted forms of reflection I can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.

foucault ram

Some Foo-ko

The last quote is by far my favorite.

w
v
===================
“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
― Michel Foucault

“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.”
― Michel Foucault

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky – Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based… To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.”
― Michel Foucault

“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”
― Michel Foucault

“The first task of the doctor is … political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.” Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated…”
― Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

“The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.”
― Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”
― Michel Foucault

“power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”
― Michel Foucault

“Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”
― Michel Foucault

“We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is
good-and that is the real theater-to
transcend them in the manner of play, by
means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,
to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put “in
play,” show up, transform and reverse
the systems which quietly order us about.”
― Michel Foucault

“Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.”
― Michel Foucault

“Parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy”
― Michel Foucault

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Skip to the twenty minute mark and listen for a few minutes
to him talk about Obama

w
v