Ugh, what a fucking end of a nightmare:

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-leaving-office-3m-less-jobs-when-he-entered-worst-record-since-depression-1562737

"President Donald Trump will leave office with 3 million less jobs than when he was inaugurated in 2017, marking the worst presidential job record since the Great Depression. Despite previous claims that he presided over the "greatest economy in the history of our country," Trump's economic legacy was crippled in the last year of his term because of the coronavirus. The jobs report released by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on January 8 shows his employment record will be the worst in modern American history."

Anyway, to the next impending nightmare.

:up:

That tells us he changes his political opinions as he changes his clothes, according to the fashion. — Benkei

But he hasn't changed his political opinions. He has been remarkably consistent for 4 decades. And now he's proposing to extend his Patriot act, as among his first acts in office. Biden simply isn't a centrist, and never has been. It's fashionable to say that he's a Republican in all but name; frankly I think it's worse than that - I think he taught Republicans with the examples he set.

Biden has always taken his aggression and hawkishness on policy as a sign of pride. His sense of accomplishment has always been built on taking the most militant option when presented with them - whether it be expanding the security state (Patriot Act), throwing poor and black people into prison (crime act), locking students out of bankruptcy and chaining them to their debts for life, taking pleasure in attacking victims of sexual abuse (Anita Hill), and in this case, making Colombia the hellish, militarized place it is. He takes pleasure in always opting for the most violent and hard-edged line, and you can see it in the way he continually boasts of these "accomplishments" everytime he's given the chance to. Gosh you can see it in how he interacts with voters who ask him critical questions - always with aggression.

Even if there's a large element of exaggeration in his actual role in pushing most of the above, it's a case of 'when a person tells you who they are, believe them'. Biden's whole life has been spent making life more miserable for people; his policy language is punishment and pain. There's no reason to think the next 4 years of his upcoming presidency will be any different. Ironically he is positively rosy when trying to work with Republicans, when, all of a sudden, he will sing paeans to 'bipartisanship' and 'working together'.

I thought I had a pretty solid grasp of all the inhumane and outright life destroying policy positions that Biden had taken throughout his career of ruining lives. I was wrong:

"Plan Colombia was originally conceived as a peace and development proposal by then-Colombia President Andres Pastrana in 1999. However, in the Clinton administration’s hands, it was radically altered into a massive militarization of Colombian society, Biden successfully lobbying for 80 percent of the $7.5 billion total to go to the Colombian military (with much of the weaponry finding its way into the hands of far-right death squads linked to the government). In the era of 9/11, narco-traffickers were rebranded “narco-terrorists” as a flimsy justification for U.S. interference. Biden was among its key architects, telling the Des Moines Register in January that “I’m the guy who put together Plan Colombia,” adding that it “straightened that government out for a long while.”

What was billed as a huge anti-drug push turned into a war against the population, with the government carrying out a massive chemical defoliation regime, forcing huge numbers of people off the land and clearing it for multinational corporations. The plan also ended up giving the government and associated far-right paramilitaries carte blanche to massacre whom it liked under the premise that anyone opposing them were drug smugglers. Over 10,000 innocent civilians were murdered, the government dressing them up as narco-terrorists, their numbers being used to trigger more funding from the U.S. on the grounds that dead bodies equaled progress in the fight against drugs. Under Plan Colombia, the country became the most dangerous place to be a trade unionist, according to Amnesty International, with more unionist murders happening inside Colombia than in all other countries combined. The United Nations estimates that 7.4 million Colombians are internally displaced to this day because of the ongoing civil war and Plan Colombia, with millions more leaving the country altogether.

The plan’s stated goal of drug reduction did not even work, as cocaine producers simply moved across the border to other Andean countries not affected by the war, returning when the violence subsided. By 2017, domestic coca production reached an all-time high, according to the U.N."

https://www.mintpressnews.com/mass-incarceration-plan-colombia-biden-role-war-on-drugs/271375/

but the violence of America is simply a reflection of the violence of the world. — tim wood

The violence of America is a reflection of the violence of America, utterly unique in the history of the planet. Dissimulate and what-about and excuse all you want. My point, like MLKs, is simply that the US is the most violent nation the earth has ever seen - and continues, to this day, to remain. You can play twenty questions with someone who is as equally as interested as you in your imperialist murder apologetics.

For relative beginners, I'm always a fan of comparative introductions, so you get a feel for the contexts between different philosophers, the wider debates in which which they participated (and more importantly, the difference between those debates and contexts, which is not something always available if you're reading single authors). To that end, there are two book I might recommend to help 'situate' the philosophers you're interested in -

First, Sarah Blakwell's At The Existentialist Cafe, which covers most of the major existentialists in a very accessible and entertaining way. Second, Raymond Geuss's Changing the Subject, which covers a bunch of Western philosophy beginning with Socrates and ending with Adorno (Heidegger and Nietzsche are in there too). The only problem with these suggestions is that neither Kant nor Schopenhauer are covered. Schopenhauer is readable on his own though. Kant I really don't know. Most of the secondary works on him I know are big and dry.

It depends. Kant is by no means easy for someone who has not read alot of philosophy before, and neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche are a walk in the park. Heidegger just happens to be on another level entirely. The only way to know is to dive in and just read and see how your fare.

Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kirkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus. — deusidex

This is a good list. However, you ought to be prepared by a rather large jump in the order of difficulty once you reach Heidegger. I'd suggest looking around for some secondary reading to help you as well. Richard Polt's intro is particularly good.

I think that would be a uniquely bad idea. The reason this thread is here is to stop the proliferation of Trump threads that would otherwise spread across the forum like a cancer. The cute, self-satisfied symbolism of it is not worth having the headache of that crap.

For whom or what are you an apologist or advocate - what are you for? — tim wood

The same thing MLK was for.

Well, perhaps not of all time. The Assyrians were an extremely violent people/country/empire, if the inscriptions attributed to Ashurbanipal are any indication, and gloried in the violence they inflicted. — Ciceronianus the White

I don't believe I stuttered. The Assyrians did not ring the earth with military bases and conduct violent military campaigns on every continent bar Antartica. And technology is not the problem either. It's simple violent American imperialism carried out by violent American imperialists. And Americans regularly glory in the violence they commit. There's even an globally spanning industry worth billions of dollars a year to celebrate it - Hollywood. And lets not talk about the nuclear disintergration of Japanese civilians hey? Or the domestic genocide of American Indians? Or when not conducting genocide, enabling and supporting it elsewhere? America is a uniquely murderous nation, unmatched by anyone, ever. It has deserved every second of Trump.

But I do not think the myth is Pro-Trump. Facts, even incorrect facts, do not have ideology all by themselves. — Garth

That certain incorrect facts are propagated and not others is most certainly an 'ideological' effect.

It is also not quite what has been argued by Democratic Socialists like myself, who see the general lack of social safety nets and dearth of Economic opportunities in America as a factor in the rise of Trump. — Garth

As for this - I'd be more forceful. It's not just a lack - as though something just so happens to be missing. There is very much an active campaign, pursued at the level of policy and public consciousness, to maintain those lack of safety nets and economic opportunity. It's not a passive lack. There are forces that actively work against such things. The problem is political before it is economic.

Honestly, I feel squeezed on three sides -- the same old crap from the Right, postmodern identity politics from supposed "allies" who don't realize they are corporate stooges, and utopian dreams from the Revolutionary Socialists. — Garth

Yeah, it's a spiky field to negotiate. But everyone's doing it. You get better and more comfortable with the dance after a while.

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/371876/bifo-on-the-us-capitol-riots/

"[Who] thinks that Trumpists “believe” in the words of Trump in a literal sense? In the book Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? (Did the Greeks believe in their myths?), Paul Veyne questions the meaning of “belief.” His conclusion is that the force of mythology does not consist in believing a metaphor literally, in forgetting about the brackets before and after the metaphoric enunciation. Mythological belief (like memetic contagion) today similarly enables a sort of pragmatic coherence in the life of “believers.” It gives sense to the world of those who heed such mythology, amidst a world that has lost any sense.

For example, believing Trump’s assertion “I won the election” is not a semiological mistake. Rather, it is a strategy for identitarian self-assertion. When liberals speak of “fake news,” they totally miss the point, because those who share a mythology (or a meme) are not searching for the factual truth, like a social scientist might. Instead, they are consciously or unconsciously using the force of the fake enunciation as an exorcism, as an insult, as a weapon.

The more important question to ask is not why Trump lies, but instead why so many people vote for him in the first place. What are the conditions—economic, political, semiological, and so on—that produce this voting and acting? The solution to the problem is not to impeach the orange man (again), or ban him from Twitter (too late, Mr. Dorsey, too late). Rather, it is to allow people to think and to choose in a way that is not clouded by humiliation and resentment.

The American crisis is not generated by the perverted effects of mass communication. It is generated by the contradictions that emerge from the racist nature of the most violent country of all time".

Even assuming that one could begin to establish that molecules are 'aware' by some kind of god-of-the-gaps fallacy ("this seems very complex and hard to explain... so probs awareness"), the question is what kind of "explanation" this would be at all. Ascribing 'awareness' to molecules doesn't explain anything so much as opens up even more to be explained - it complicates, not simplifies. How are they aware? What enables this awareness? What function would awareness 'add' that would enable it to somehow (how?) 'oversee'(?) the complexity of what happens with DNA repair? Exactly how does "awareness" work as a mechanism to explain the 'downriver' mechanics of it? We know a great deal about how awareness functions in higher-order animals - we can study the way tactile or visual illusions come about, the emergence of spatial and depth perception, the ways in which color properties interact in various ambient settings and so on, much of which can be explained by both physiology and developmental and ontogenic history. Can we do the same or similar for this proposed 'awareness'? 'Awareness' is a black hole of ramifying confusion, not a simplifying explanans.

:up:

However, I still feel that the prevailing narrative as ‘life as the outcome of a biochemical accident’ will never make for a coherent social philosophy. Humans need to feel as though they’re part of a story, not the result of an accident. Maybe we can spin an entirely new story, one that makes no reference to the cultural traditional of the past, but somehow I doubt it - the attempt will always result in the sense of being ‘stranded in the present’. It also implicitly dishonours all of the ancestors whose ways we now see as being antiquated and superstitious. — Wayfarer

We have the past we deserve and make for ourselves. The archive of history is filled with forgotten debris which never had the chance to become valorised as 'our' past. The worry that we'll ever not feel as part of a 'story' is largely a boogie-man; we'll make stories up staring at a blank wall if we have to. The question is not whether we'll have a relation to the past and to 'culture'; it's what kind of relation we'll have to it. Most efforts to say 'we're losing our relationship to the past' are reactionary covers for 'we're losing the relationship to the past I like'.

From further down:

"The difference between leftist and traditionalist appeals to the working class is that the Left’s is grounded in a rationalist examination of the ways that the world could be fairer for more people — a questioning of how our societal habits might be contributing to injustice, and how we could implement a more justifiable social order.

Traditionalists advance the opposite appeal: let’s not question the impact that our habits and traditions might have (to marginalize or persecute), because these habits and traditions are rooted in some deeper and more spiritual essence. As Teitelbaum observes, if anyone attempts to derive a logically coherent version of traditionalism, “all of the vagaries come to play a larger role. What exactly is this essence, and who gets to decide? If a people is defined by its history, what happens to citizens whose personal background diverges from the norm?”

Submitting traditionalism to any kind of rational scrutiny reveals it for what it is: an appeal to fantasy, the wrapping of oneself in the blanket of vaguely defined yet comforting categories. It presents a fundamentally hierarchical vision of the world, compensating followers for a lack of material improvement with a sense that they are superior to degenerate liberals and dangerous foreigners."

A profile:

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/benjamin-teitelbaum-war-for-eternity-steve-bannon

"They hold widely divergent views on a variety of issues — Bannon is staunchly pro-America and anti-China, while Dugin favors a new anti-Western Russo-Chinese alliance. The hypernationalists of Hungary’s Jobbik party are often rabidly Islamophobic and see themselves as waging a war in defense of Christendom, while many right-wing mystics find much to admire in the ultraconservative Islam of René Guénon, who rejects liberalism and embraces a totalizing vision of faith. Others on the far right, like Richard Spencer, have tried to rejuvenate concepts of race by emphasizing narratives of white deprivation and “ethnic replacement.” Still others see emphasizing race as too scientistic and insufficiently spiritual, a vulgar concession to modernity that — not coincidentally — helped bring down the Nazis.

What makes the clowns all part of the same circus is less their shared commitments than their mutual bêtes noires — namely, modernity. All believe that with the advent of modern liberalism — and its permissiveness, pluralism, and materialism — something fundamental was lost. More secular variants of traditionalism tend to emphasize a sense of community, belonging, and national purpose. More New Agey and mystical brands insist on abandoning materialism and returning to a more spiritually disciplined existence. ... More mainstream conservatives like the “Intellectual Dark Web” also push many regressive views, but concede enough to the power of modernity that they often try to give overtly mystical language about “order and chaos” a scientistic gloss. But as one mainlines deeper and deeper into the far right, such concessions to reason and modernity become less viable. Consequently, the appeals to affect seem to become ever shriller to compensate for their dissociation with anything tangible."

It has to come from inside the party that’s responsible if it’s going to make any difference. — Wayfarer

I don't particularly want it to make a difference. Trump tore the Republican party into pieces. I think it would be to the benefit of all if it stayed that way.

This coming from someone who voted in line with Trump's policies nearly 85% of the time. These shitbags are all talk.

Can you stop doubling up on existing threads.

Yeah, when they chanted "hang Mike Pence" what they really meant was "engage in rigorous critical debate with Mike Pence".

That said, as if that larping 'organic food' soy fuck was ever gonna hurt anyone.

Apart from the cop that blue lives matter crowd beat to death with American flags.

Eliminating bots is not the mods' only problem. — Kenosha Kid

Does literally anything else need to be said about this? That it needed to be said at all is embarrasing.

:lol: I was enjoying the responses haha

Sorry, official Thought Police™ orders.

So this is one of the few things that has genuinely surprised me - perhaps naively - about the capitol incident. The myth that spontaneously formed right after it happened was that it was the actions of disaffected, poor, white, working class people. Turns out, this is not the case at all. The people there very much well-off and in positions of power. Should have known. Of course the people prepared to support Trump like that are those with monied interests:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/thoroughly-respectable-rioters/617644/

"They were business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, stay-at-home dads, and, I assume, some Proud Boys. The mob that breached the Capitol last week at President Donald Trump’s exhortation, hoping to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, was full of what you might call “respectable people.”

The notion that political violence simply emerges out of economic desperation, rather than ideology, is comforting. But it’s false. Throughout American history, political violence has often been guided, initiated, and perpetrated by respectable people from educated middle- and upper-class backgrounds. The belief that only impoverished people engage in political violence—particularly right-wing political violence—is a misconception often cultivated by the very elites who benefit from that violence.

The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen."

Or in video form for those with short attention spans:

[Mod note: @Eduardo is no longer with us, and anyone replying to him can save your effort. Reason? Anti-Semitism, holocaust... approval. Posting here rather than the bannings thread as he is basically a new, pretty much unknown poster].

Because I have dibs!

Bezos has his means to circumvent/endure taxes, not the average Joe in your street corner. — Rafaella Leon

And you think this is a fault of socialism? On account of what? It's well known advocacy of not taxing the rich? In any case you seem to want to have it both ways: you want to use the experience of the USSR to delegitimate socialism in the present - but you can't just pick a historical period and then pretend that that experience is applicable now. The facts of the matter as it stands in the present - i.e. without the anachronistic projection of the past overlaid like a fantasy upon the present - is that the state is totally at the behest of capitalist powers. And I'm sorry but you pushing discredited trickle down economics as though you were some champion for the people is a joke.

Amazon - who you want to boycott - has gotten to exactly where it is precisely on the back of it's paying its warehouse workers a pittance in terrible conditions while doing everything it can do terrorize it's workers so that they don't form unions. And if you paid any attention at all to the fracas over the building of it's new headquarters, you'd note that states were falling over themselves to offer it tax breaks and financial concessions - the kind of thing opposed by every socialist who had anything to say about it. You're peddling capitalist propaganda and pretending it has anything to do with socialism at all.

In fact it's worse than this: your own political proscription - "boycott Amazon" - is directly contradicted by your own analysis - if, as your rightly say, corporate power is becoming ever more disentangled from market forces, then situating politics in the market is nothing but a call for utter impotence. Your own analysis makes clear that such 'boycott' actions are increasingly less and less effective. It's completely incoherent.

Re: Biden's promised "domestic terrorism laws", i.e. Patriot act 2.0:

"The only way to sincerely believe more Patriot Act-like laws will benefit Americans is to believe that the US will only have wise and beneficent leaders going forward, and the only way to sincerely believe the US will only have wise and beneficent leaders going forward is to be completely shit-eating stupid."

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/01/15/consent-manufacturing-for-patriot-act-ii-continues/

"They’re not actually worried about “domestic terror”, they’re worried about any movement which threatens to topple the status quo. They want to make sure they can adequately spy, infiltrate, agitate and incarcerate into impotence any movement which provides a threat to America’s rulers and the system which funnels them wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. The movements which most threaten this are not rightists, who are generally more or less aligned with the interests of the oligarchic empire, but the left."

I feel like it's a rorschach test.

So I guess the answer is to have free education up to the university level, where those academic graduates finally earn more than their working class counterparts when they reach their 40's. — ssu

That would be the bare minimum; and even then it would be useless if universities remain nothing more than for-profit vocational institutes - excuses for hedge funds, in some cases - while budgets get slashed for actual vocational institutes along with K-12 education, under the guise of 'austerity' and 'balancing the budgets'. It doesn't help that the US funds their schools by property taxes, meaning that poor areas - those with the lowest property values - literally get the worst education. The poor are kept undereducated. But yeah, sure, blame the uneducated for everything that's going on :roll: This is not about 'academic graduates', this is literally about anyone at all who wants to grow up to be an autonomous human being.

Idiocracy is a terrible movie, an excuse for well-off liberals to make fun of the uneducated while ignoring capitalism's systemic drive to keep people stupid. Self-satisfied crap that shits on the working class, masking systemic problems and transforming them into individual ones. Excremental films like that are not diagnostic, they are contributary to the problems they aim to pick out.

Those who are 'given power' are those who can satisfy the whims of corporate America, that's it.

It has been a talking point among conservative discussion communities, which of course have conveniently picked out a black woman to aim their ire at. Of course, I have no doubt she is shit and that letter is, in fact, fucking terrible, but no more terrible than literally anyone else in the Biden administration. Biden himself is a fucking racist whose actions (four words: school segregation; crime bill) have done more to worsen the condition of black Americans in a way that the KKK can only aspire to.

NOS of course, being the rapacious cunt that he is, will only chime in when the issues involved somehow involve xenophobia over China or in this case, looking to poke the fires of racial tension.

https://readsludge.com/2021/01/14/biden-picks-former-corporate-lobbyist-jaime-harrison-for-dnc-chair/

Friendly reminder that Joe Biden and his team remain an enemy of humanity everywhere.

Cool OP. The trajectory seems largely right - the decoupling of corporations from market forces is exactly right and is already at work. It is indeed the most dangerous trend that we're seeing take shape right now. And this is just the end result of the core logic of capitalism: that of self-valourizing capital, capital begetting more capital, decoupled from all material processes. Hence the explosion of speculative and financial markets.

But it's very jarring to see socialism as being named as complicit in this process. Socialism's economic principles have always lent themselves to the dilution of corporate power, not its concentration. The 'opression' you decry - which is real - is not a function of any 'socialist' capture of the state; quite the opposite, it follows from the corporate capture of state power.

You might be interested in Jodi Dean's diagnosis of a coming neo-Feudalism, which seems very much in line with what you write here: "Under neofeudalism, the directly political character of society reasserts itself. Global financial institutions and digital technology platforms use debt to redistribute wealth from the world’s poorest to the richest. Nation-states promote and protect specific private corporations. Political power is exercised with and as economic power, not only taxes but fines, liens, asset seizures, licenses, patents, jurisdictions, and borders. At the same time, economic power shields those who wield it from the reach of state law. Ten percent of global wealth is hoarded in off-shore accounts to avoid taxation

...Just as feudal relations persisted under capitalism so do capitalist relations of production and exploitation continue under neofeudalism. The difference is that non-capitalist dimensions of production — expropriation, domination, and force — have become stronger to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and equal actors meeting in the labor market even as a governing fiction. It means that rent and debt feature as or more heavily in accumulation than profit, and that work increasingly exceeds the wage relation. What happens when capitalism is global? It turns in on itself, generating, enclosing, and mining features of human life through digital networks and mass personalized media. This self-cannibalization produces new lords and serfs, vast fortunes and extreme inequality, and the parcellated sovereignties that secure this inequality while the many wander and languish in the hinterlands."

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/

Liberals are a centre, liberal economic party that is distorted by a small number of very conservative idiot politicians — Banno

This seems very generous.

My favourite thing is that everytime he does this, there's inevitably a wave of his supporters who end up being utterly incredulous that he disavowed them. Usually racist pigs, but to watch them cry, like NOS has been doing here, is so sweet.