I thought that I'd post these two links, explain why I think they're interesting as well as problematic for me. Perhaps the act of doing this will later inspire me to expand on my unimportant thoughts in later posts at some indeterminate time in the future.
First of all, there's this post: "Why is the West so weak (and Russia so strong)? The role of human capital and Western education)" hosted on a self-described conservative's site. [I've been going to such sites lately for more realistic discussions about the NATO/Ukraine vs. Russia proxy war. It's sometimes a hard slog, because some of the commentators at these sites deny global warming; denounce the NATO countries for not suppressing homosexuality; deny the reality of global warming; and, some of these idiots simultaneously cheer on Putin's de-nazification goals in Ukraine whilst ranting about the Jewish plot to genocide both Ukrainians and ethnic-Russians in Ukraine so as to provide another homeland for Zionism. I believe that Putin is genuine in his goal to eliminate the nazi element in Ukraine's institutions because the Ukrainian brand of naziism advocates the physical elimination of Russians. That Putin actually supports fascists in other parts of Europe is irrelevant to this. IN FACT: pro-NATO shit-heads who are cheering on this mass-slaughter are the ones who can be accused of "Whataboutism" when they raise the point of Putin's hypocrisy. THEY are the ones deflecting from THEIR support of fascists in the war that THEY support. Putin, as a Russian, and as the political leader of Russia, has some self-interest in combatting Ukrainian nazis. Some US-American ignoramus who fantasizes about the taste of Joe Biden's anus has no justification for supporting the Azov Battalion.]
Holy Fuck! But I DO tend to start babbling when I get typing. It's just that one thing always leads to another thing. It's all connected. ANYWAY ...
I'm posting the link because I'd like to engage with some of the ideas expressed in it and I'm putting it before you (my almost 10 readers) if you're interested in the worldview created by a fairly articulate, conservative thinker. Like it or not, there's a whole population out there, reading their own writers and building their own narratives, and sometimes they're actually engaging with the real world. (In the same way that "progressives" are capable of not hating refugees because they understand the pressures that cause them to flee their homelands, and because they recognize our shared humanity with them, and therefore understand that they [progressives] themselves would do the same thing if they were in the shoes of the refugees; but who are also quite capable of believing that Joe Biden cares about Ukrainians and that his simultaneous policies of professed concern for Ukrainians while demanding the continued slaughter of Yemenis [which can ONLY be explained by hypocrisy, racism or the fact that he doesn't really give a shit about Ukrainians] isn't anything to worry about.
Basically, what this guy: "Gaius Baltar" - is saying is that the USA and its Western European allies (along with, I suppose, Canada and Australia) are declining because they have been taken over by a corrupt oligarchy. Competitive industrial capitalism has been completely taken over by monopoly financial capitalism. The practical results of this are corruption and incompetence and profit-taking, asset-stripping. This oligarchy has bought the political system that would have regulated them and turned them into sycophants who turn a blind eye to these depredations.
As a result of the lack of competition and regulation, the oligarchic elites become increasingly soft, lazy and incompetent. What threatens them are independent thinkers with the technical know-how to challenge them economically (by building better products either independently, or within existing institutions) that will upset the status quo, as well as intellectually/morally (by exposing their corruption and pointing to a better way forward).
Much of this stuff that Baltar is saying is in agreement with the leftist writers I talked about here. So, in many ways, I can see myself in agreement with Baltar.
But (And there's always a big "but." Everyone I know has a big "but." So allow me tell you about MY big "but.") Baltar goes off the rails when he starts to talk about the sort of "High-IQ/High general intelligence/High specific-technological intelligence" who are a threat to the status quo. His first example is Elon Musk. And, supposedly, one aspect of the genius Musk's challenge to the status-quo is his championing of "free speech" on "Twitter" (which Musk has brilliantly exchanged the name/brand recognition value arbitrarily to "X").
I'll take a little step-back first. Baltar says that the incompetent elites meet the challenge of competency by creating a private and public sector that is staffed with compliant, like-minded incompetents who have swallowed the Kool-Aid of financialization/extraction entirely. They find these people by transforming the education system from a system that teaches practical subjects [mainly STEM] and rewards individual merit and achievement, to a system that teaches nonsense such as women's studies, comparative literature, public relations, human resource management, ... most of the humanities essentially, social sciences, and Wall Street economics.
Students work in groups so that the mediocre can swamp the talented and the talented themselves either extract themselves and resign themselves to lives of independent dignified poverty or they are assimilated and take their place as frustrated, but useful cogs in the machine.
But Elon Musk's isn't much of a thinker or an innovator. His handling of Twitter has been a mess. His own "tweets" are often stupid yammering. He designed the plugs for the Tesla cars that only make it hard for others to power his cars (thus contributing to the monopolizing/rent-seeking/inefficiency Baltar decries) Go watch this guy for a take-down of Musk and his not-quite genius abilities.
I don't want to take too long on this. I'll just mention two more things. The first of which will be Baltar's assertion that the debt crisis in the West is caused by an inefficient economy BLOATED with all sorts of bullshit jobs for feminists, eco-tards, gay-rights activists and various "nanny-state" functionaries. This is not a reality-based position to have. Our debts were caused by pro-capitalist/anti-worker anti-inflation policies that raise interest rates to cause recessions to throw workers into unemployment and thereby contain a wage-price spiral. They are also caused by tax-cuts for the wealthy which I'm sure Baltar, in his simplistic analysis, would actually support, since right-wingers tend to see high taxation as causing the stifling of initiative and entrepreneurialism.
The second thing I'll mention is Baltar's response to Russia's surprising (to the NATO leadership) competence in modern military tactics and industrial production. He attributes this to the no-nonsese, right-wing, social-conservative meritocracy culture that Putin has created out of the ashes of Yeltsen's ruined Russia. There is no question that Russia's performance has been impressive, especially when considered against its image as a basket-case by the arrogant neo-cons in Washington, London and Brussells. But Russia is not an efficient country. Aside from the military-industrial complex there is a lot of Russia that doesn't work and that impoverishes its people. As well, in using Russia's military achievements as a way to evaluate the society as a whole, Baltar is doing the exact same thing as arrogant Western imperialists during the two-and-a-bit centuries of European military-technological-industrial supremacy. To equate this superiority with overall cultural superiority that led them to denigrate and under-estimate the cultures they temporarily mastered.
Anyhow, that's enough for today. I'll post this Az-izz and finish the rest later ...
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Right. Another Day, Another Dollar. The other Essay I want to talk about comes from the wonder Caitlin Johnstone. It's called "Disrupt the Culture Wars". Now, I really like Johnstone. She's one of my favourite bloggers. But I've always had a problem with her contention that all we have to do is effectively puncture the narrative of the oligarchy and the delusions of the non-oligarchs will evaporate and we will then go on to build a better world. I agree with everything she says about the importance of narratives, but I believe that an effective revolution and the building of a better world actually require SERIOUS prior planning.
But the essay under discussion now is a different problem for me. This essay is about how the "Culture Wars" are unimportant. It's something I hear a lot of from economic leftists (a term that obviously includes Marxists), which is that the elites have us shlubs fighting amongst ourselves over "unimportant" issues like feminism, racism, gay rights, etc., ... because it distracts us from the TRULY important Class War. Sentiments expressed annoyingly in this Jimmy Dore video. Apparently racism isn't a problem in the USA. The US-American people all love each other. It's those darned elites.
Here's a couple of quotes from Johnstone's article:
One of the great challenges faced by westerners who oppose the political status quo today is the way the narrative managers of both mainstream factions continuously divert all political energy away from issues which threaten the interests of the powerful like economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide and toward issues which don’t threaten the powerful at all like abortion, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
This method of social control serves the powerful in some very obvious ways, and is being used very effectively. As long as it remains effective, it will continue to be used.
...
Draw people’s attention to this dynamic wherever you see it. When right wing “populists” babble about LGBTQ conspiracies and shriek about wokeness, mock them for the ridiculous sheep they are for playing into a dynamic that directly serves the elite power structures they claim to oppose. When liberals are ignoring economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide to focus on culture war battles whose outcomes will never even slightly inconvenience the powerful, highlight the disgusting way they themselves are feeding into a dynamic that imperils the marginalized communities they claim to defend.
Now, the thing was, this focus on economics was alienating to women and minorities in the 1950's. White male heterosexual working-class leftists focused on bettering their political-economic position vis-a-vis capitalists because they didn't really have a problem with anything else. They weren't oppressed by patriarchy or racism. And they found addressing those subjects boring and irrelevant.
Now Johnstone isn't saying that. But she's saying something close. And the end result of such error is the Jimmy Dore video where he says that these other issues (like racism) are even fabricated crises.
When I mentioned an ignorant, racist, anti-First Nations conversation by two working class guys I heard on the bus once, some old lefty trade-unionist activist started making excuses for them. As if they were children who had no idea what they were saying or why they were saying it because those evil thoughts had apparently been put in their brains by the evil capitalists. As if white men can't come up with bigoted thinking all by themselves. As if capitalist oligarchs don't themselves come out of a racist, patriarchal society, but, instead, create it entirely themselves as a means of subjugating everyone else.
This sort of nonsense was attacked by women and minorities in the 1960's and we developed the idea of "intersectionality" to deal with it. Something I alluded to way back here.
If you're a woman, or if you're gay, or if you're a racial minority, the men who won't hire you, the men who will ruin your life by criminalizing abortion, the men who will rape you, the heteros who bill bash you, the racists who won't hire you, the racists who will kill you for jogging, the racist criminal justice system that will persecute you, these are all very real, ongoing, constant threats. And the people who think and espouse and act on such bigotry are dangerous to you. Even if they're not economically powerful.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the left-right divide in the population. That even if the right-wing doesn't have a monopoly on stupidity (and they don't) that I can't help but think that much of what they advocate is nonsense. That you're more likely to find a right-winger expressing hateful opinions and acting hatefully (while whining about imaginary assaults such as peaceniks spitting on veterans) than you are to find a left-winger behaving that way.
It is the right-wing that denies global warming the most; that hypocritically polices sexuality; that believes in cruel, vindictive sky-gods who tell them to plunder the earth and subject everyone to their imaginary truths. It is the right-wing who will shriek when First Nations protesters aren't machine-gunned down and swept away while whining about how they themselves would be persecuted should they every protest anything. [And then when they DO protest and are met with support from the police they don't even notice the discrepancy.]
At the end of the day, recognizing the limits of the environment's ability to absorb our garbage has been a leftist thing. Recognizing that racial minorities are human beings with the same right to dignity as any other human, has been a leftist thing. Recognizing that women are just as valuable as men has tended to be a leftist thing. (Though right-wing women happily enjoy the benefits won by those ugly, bra-burning, shrill harpies from the past without acknowleding their provenance.)
It is the right-wing that calls for intensifying the surveillance, carceral state. For targetting minorities. For imposing their terrified anti-gay morality. For putting profit over the environment. For tons and tons of reasons, I tend to reject right-wing ideology and find the most aggressive right-wingers as obnoxious and disgusting. But at the same time, I recognize that many conservative people are NOT hateful. Their opinions, when they're objectionable, are not strongly held. They just don't like change and they have rationalized the system that they've become comfortable with. If changes are introduced gradually, and their economic conditions aren't made desperate, then they often actually come around.
Meanwhile, I know plenty of intolerant, humorless, close-minded, hypocritical leftists. And don't get me started about these Liberal Party and Democratic Party "progressives." From the actual partisan hacks n' activists who have no principles higher than tribalism to the supporters who call for state suppression of problematic free speech and shit-headed support for US intervention in Ukraine despite the obvious hypocrisy and the inevitable continuation of human suffering and just the overall brain-deadedness of it all.
If you're a young woman, abortion rights are a vital part of your daily lived experience. If you're a racialized minority, anti-racism is a vital part of your daily lived experience.
We have to acknowledge this truth and incorporate it into the struggle. We can do more than one thing at a time.
5 comments:
That's about where I tend to notice heterodox right wingers going weird. I mean, I myself work at a university, and have been basically hanging at a university watching its transformation since 1983. And it's in Canada, which makes it probably more thoroughly progressive than the American ones.
And there's a big important fact about the designated right wing culprits: They have little funding and few students. There are no armies of gender studies students taking over the world. Period, full stop, the end. Same goes for the previous version, the "cultural Marxists". Sure, there are a few people in a few disciplines that are interested in race and gender and cultural equality and things, some with a sort of marxist lens and stuff. But they are absolutely swamped by the rise of the elephant in the room: The Business department.
As far as I can tell, if you look at the balance of faculties at universities in North America since I started being a university person, STEM has actually stayed fairly constant. There's always panics about STEM going down the tubes, and there are problems in STEM because of the relentless instrumentalizing and corporatizing, so that less solid research not dedicated to getting someone a patent takes place. But still, complaints about not enough STEM are constant, come from all sides of the political spectrum, and generally lead to action, so whenever STEM starts to erode it gets beefed up again. STEM is not subject to any kind of ongoing neglect. Could there be more with good results? Sure, maybe. Could the amount we have be better run? Oh hell yes. But there is no crisis of STEM neglect.
Then, the liberal arts and social sciences. Since the 80s, these have systematically shrunk. A lot. When I started out, the English department was still riding high, semi-prestigious. Now it hobbles along. OK, and the women's studies, comparative literature (there is actually almost zero of this at my university), in the Canadian case First Nations studies, anything related to race . . . all that stuff is a small part of this shrinking basket. There is certainly less study of literature + of "comparative" literature + world literature + whatever literature, all added together, now than there was just of basic canon English literature back in the day. If the study of literature wasn't a threat to our competitiveness in the 60s and 70s, it sure as hell isn't now. Same goes for the social sciences, most of which have never been oriented towards practical anything.
But there are areas that have grown, hugely, from basically nothing. There's computing, obviously, and that's fine. But mostly, the 80s saw the massive rise from nothing of the business department (actually, in my university it gets to call itself a whole faculty, like there's faculty of Arts, faculty of Science, faculty of Business! Alongside, there was growth in the Economics department and some other related stuff.
So what I notice is that this right wing critique seems to treat gender studies courses and business department stuff as the same thing. They're obviously not the same thing. Their impulses for existing, institutionally, ideologically, monetarily are vastly different. Gender and racial studies stuff starts from two sources: Grassroots struggles for justice, and interested academics looking for some ideas to hang their hat on. Their funding comes from lots of little academic turf battles, and it is small. The business stuff comes from the ideological hegemony and wads of direct funding from big business, and from the movement into university administration of business types. And it is much, much, much bigger. And indeed, even some of the remaining arts have been put into the business service--people used to study art, now many instead study graphic design so they can make ads.
Their results are also very different. Comparative literature has largely led to . . . some people reading some cool stuff. The success of gender and race studies has been largely in hiring practices at some institutions. I work with some of the people that get hired because of that success, and they are on average more competent and effective than the white male old boys who used to get those jobs. And at least in our local institutional culture, they actually play fewer and less damaging games than got played in the old days; conservatives notice them more because they're new, different games and get played much more overtly and they don't have home turf advantage. Tough.
The thing is, none of that changes things very much; the genius, if one can call it that, of the "woke" institutional agenda is that they're clearly right about something that doesn't matter much structurallly. So, they push for it, and the people structurally in charge of the economy are like "Oh, look, a bone we can throw that doesn't change anything. Sweet!"
The results of the rise of the business department and related groups are very different. Now that is actually strongly connected to the problems the right wing analysis calls out. I mean, the business department is explicitly there to teach people how to run enterprises via the financialist plan. And the masses of graduates then go and run enterprises, which then get run according to the way these bozos got taught. Duh. And this whole structure got put in place because relevant technocrats working for people with huge festering gobs of money thought they would be a way for things to be run that would give those people even huger festering piles of money than before, and that is exactly what it has done.
The bottom line is, heterodox right wingers build the "Wokes are gonna get us all" thing into somehow being a cause of some kind of economic outcome because at a gut level they really want to. They don't like gays let alone trans, they don't like darkies, they are uncomfortable with genuine equality for women, and they don't want to be told that their group being socially on top has put those people socially on the bottom or that that is unjust. So, people going around saying that must be the cause of some really bad outcome. It is self-indulgent nonsense.
I should note that this is one self-indulgence the left, which is to say the economic, socialist left because anything else isn't actually "left" in any real sense, does not fall prey to. I mean, I hate cracker culture. I hate the modern alt-right and the older school hillbilly racists. I hate their cruelty and their stupidity and their aesthetics. I would love to believe the road to a better society leads through giving those revolting, worthless sons of bitches a massive shitckicking, or that they're the cause of all our ills, because they're horrible and repugnant and ethically vile and culturally ugly and tawdry. But, unfortunately, they are not the cause of our major structural problems, and any genuine fix for society would make them better off as well. I am willing to live with this, and left wing thought in general seems to accept this concept. If heterodox right wing thinkers were capable of consistent logic they would realize the difference between "I dislike X" and "X is the cause of my problems" . . . but then they might find themselves turning into left wingers.
PLG,
I'm pretty sure your comments are appearing in the opposite order that you submitted them. That's mainly my fault as I don't often see two posts back-to-back like that. And blogger only told me that they were both from "six minutes" ago.
I'll make a note at the bottom of the post about this if you confirm my 96% certainty that your comments are in reverse order.
With regards to the meat or your post: I have long argued that socialist policies that make things better for everyone reduces the anger of large amygdala conservatives. That is the reason why feminist and anti-racist gains were even possible in the 1950's-1970.
Furthermore, the short-term profit-taking from asset-extraction policies of Baltar's financialized elites [Jamie Dimon, Blackstone, Business "Faculties", MBA's] and the insecurities that result, CREATE larger amygdalas.
Which leads me to my final point: The Caitlin Johnstone webitorial [patent pending] DEALS WIth (sorry) the whole right-wing vs. "woke" and how that e/a ffects left campaigns.
This is my last party weekend for a while.
Had to do two--turns out there's a character limit and I rammed way through it. I think it's in the right order currently.
On the Russian economy--well, far as I can tell what's going really well in the Russian economy right now is war production. So like, the segment of the economy where the state's resources have been mustered in an all-out push to get results, ignoring the orthodoxies of markets. It's almost like that part of the economy has been . . . socialized.
PLG
thEN all is ell.
Also: I forget.
it had been whorld-shatteringly important but itz LAWST now.
CUZZEYE'M BAKED.
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