Tim is basically a Trump supporter, but for Obama. He will excuse the fact that he is a war criminal who literally killed children by bombing hospitals, or that he entrenched a culture of corporate greed and immunity that continues to ruin millions of American lives when he had every chance to rein in it - making him the biggest coward recent memory - because he still thinks he is a 'good man'. Obama fucking sucked, and he continues to suck.

Yall need to storm some Bastilles.

I got books spilling out from under my bed atm haha. If it helps, I bought Robin Blackburn's two books on Atlantic slavery as part of the sale. Saved me a good AU$60. If you liked Wood, I can't recommend enough Anievas and Nisancioglu's How the West Came to Rule - it's a wonderful corrective to Wood, and covers a heap of non-European history that's well worth reading (not Verso tho). Probably contains some of the best theorization of what capitalism is that I know. Speaking of Wood, currently reading:

Ellen Meiksins Wood - Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy
Quentin Skinner - Liberty Before Liberalism
Raymond Geuss - The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School

Sorry is this a debate proposal or am I locking this thread?

Ah, Peter Navarro, the only economist whom Trump could find who thought that a trade war with China was a good idea, and who was promptly installed into a position that meant anything at all.

Interesting! I'm doing alot of reading around states and state trans/formation recently, but the intersection between cities and law sounds awesome too. Will put it on the list at least.

:up: Plan to read this soon too!

Incidentally, am currently reading Joseph Strayer's On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State.

I don't think it's a loophole though but a serious logical error to pull in consent in this discussion. It's gaming the issue by demanding that there should be married bachelors and then pointing out there are no married bachelors as a moral reason there shouldn't be any married people.

I do agree with you that it's not the issue necessarily but will point out the problem when it occurs. I also say this earlier :

It's not well-stated at all because consent cannot play a role here because this is once again personifying non-existence as if it has thought processes and a will. And consent isn't even necessarily important for moral questions. Actions can be moral or immoral without another person being involved. Unnecessarily cutting down trees because I like destroying stuff isn't right either. Gluttony isn't right either. Lusting after your girlfriend even when nobody in the world is aware of it, isn't right either. — Benkei

:up: Anti-Natalism is basically a series of grammar mistakes themselves mistaken for substantive philosophy. A position lacking even the dignity of being 'wrong'.

Imagine being so illiterate that you can't even properly read statements that you think you agree with. To be expected from those who belive in fairytales I guess.

Ah yes the good 'ol 'look around you' standard of proof. Trash.

Yes: no evidence, historical or otherwise. — Xtrix

:up: Yep. One of those mythic stories, not unlike jaguar spirits in the jungle or haunted chairs in grandma's house. Unempirical trash.

They choose people for the reproduction of their power, and (the same thing) the satisfaction of their donor base. Nothing strange about it.

BTW, does anyone know exactly what Greek word is getting translated as "habit"? — Xtrix

Either hexis or ethos, depending on context.

Well gee Biden being a cynical shit of a politician with zero principles wow what a surprise. Butt's reward for dropping out early I guess. Also an early grooming maneuver - teach the inexperienced little suckup the ways of neoliberal capitalist dominance then play him for pres again a few years down the line, future-proof corporate dominance of the democratic party for decades to come. For all those political incompetants who fantasized about 'pulling Biden to the left': this is it, this is the 'left' you get, some pliable whitebread shit ready to be molded in their image.

Proud owner of the means of pontification.

Dictatorship of the prattleariat.

A little off topic, but a nice quasi-review of Obama's new memoir, predictably chock full of self-aggrandizing rubbish and fawned over by every other milqetoast liberal limpet:

https://bypass.theweek.com/articles-amp/950908/obama-pretender

"We are still paying for Obama's faceplant on his most important task. An increasingly lunatic Republican Party took advantage of that failure to seize control of Congress, and eventually elected Donald Trump, who is currently attempting to overturn the election he lost. It sure seems unlikely that Obama's vice president Joe Biden will countenance the extreme action now necessary to preserve American democracy.

Obama had a golden opportunity to knit the country back together after a disastrous Republican presidency and a brief moment of Wall Street helplessness. He didn't do so because he couldn't stomach the radical action necessary to heal the nation's wounds and repair the social contract, and instead invented a lot of excuses why he had to sit on his hands and do nothing. The name for such a person is a coward".

In this, Obama shares the same qualities as Trump: a slick salesman and an incompetant statesman, beholden to masters dictating their every substantive policy move. His 'Hope' being the exact rhetorical equivalent of Trump's 'Build the Wall'. God, even Trump unkept bullshit slogans were policy proposals rather than vague feel-good nothingisms.

As an aside, can anyone even remember Biden's campaign slogan?

Repubs singing onto the lawsuits and contuining to show public support for Trump makes perfect sense and is exactly what anyone in their position would do. They get to show public support for a figure extremely popular among their constituencies, while it cashes out into exactly nothing at the level of substance. This should not be some kind of surprise - their support of lawsuits guaranteed to fail is a feature, not a bug.

You simply think everyone sucks - an equal opportunity misanthrope — tim wood

Some more than others certainly - especially those in power responsible for making the world a worse place, like Obama. And you did call me a racist and you're still a ****** for it.

*yawn* An inconsequential footnote to history, if it is remembered at all.

Remedy: try a little nuance. — tim wood

I'd like him to drop dead painfully. More adjectives?

Then why did you ask me to actually engage what you said initially? — BitconnectCarlos

To point out that you haven't, and watch on as you flail every which way with irrelavencies in meantime - including this.

Are you even interested in any sort of honest political/philosophical conversation with me? — BitconnectCarlos

No, I am absolutely not. I am interested calling out your shitty analogies for those who might otherwise be suckered in by lazy appearence mongering. I couldn't care less about your intellectual development if I tried.

As for "parasite", it perfectly describes a class of people who feed off the work of others while allowing their hosts to effectively bleed out in destitution.

What point do you even want me to address? — BitconnectCarlos

Really, don't worry your pretty head about it. If you really can't figure it out, I don't want your brain to fry from over-exertion.

https://thesuburbiareport.com/2020/12/12/we-cant-be-hand-wringing-about-fraudulent-elections-every-four-years/

"All of the hand-wringing after 2016 about a supposed conspiracy involving both the Trump campaign and the Kremlin resulted in a conglomerate of steadfast “resistance” liberals that felt compelled to endlessly tweet about how Trump and his base were poised to tear down every pillar of our democracy, and then pat themselves on the back when such obviously ludicrous and hyperbolic conjectures never panned out. Four years later, we now have a faction of Republicans more or less conducting themselves in a very similar manner, with the Texas GOP Chair even suggesting succession in the wake of the Supreme Court refusing to hear a case regarding overturning the victory of President-elect Biden.

Meanwhile, who suffers most of all at the end of all of this? The voters.

Two election cycles in a row now have seen grave concerns being raised and temper-tantrums being thrown at least from one side of the political spectrum over the results of the presidential election. The populace though managed to keep itself from descending into mayhem and pandemonium after 2016, and looks set to also unanimously accept the 2020 results without any widespread militant uprisings or civil wars (which were anticipated rather comically).

But the political elite and the mainstream press have a substantial responsibility in the coming years to make sure that this type of hyperbolic anguish does not nearly get the same degree of airtime and exposure once 2024 rolls around. Otherwise, is it really that far-fetched to say that Republican elites in 2024 will bemoan another loss, and claim the election was stolen by “socialists” that had hijacked the Democratic ticket? And how doubtful is it that, after a 2024 loss, the Democrats and all their friends in cable news will spout speech after speech, and run segment after segment about how a supposed “Putin-puppet” such as Mike Pence or Tom Cotton is an “existential” threat to the fabric of our democracy?"

Ah yes, take the reply 5 or 6 posts down from your initial shitty post after you changed the subject about as many times and wonder if that's the relevant one. Who dropped on your head and why haven't you sued them yet.

Address what you're saying? Is that an invitation to a genuine political/philosophical discussion about our differences? — BitconnectCarlos

No, it was an invitation to address what I said. Which you still haven't. I'm sure you still think you've made a Very Important Point regardless. Maybe you want to pivot to asking about how to economically taxonomize Bernie Sanders instead. Was that an Important Point you made too? Like I said, you don't give a shit.

I think it brings up an important point — BitconnectCarlos

No you don't. If you did you would actually address what I said, instead of playing trivia host. You're point scoring, don't pretend to yourself like you're doing anything else. You don't give a shit about your own point at all.

Wealth is an indicator, a symptom. What matters more are both the means of production and the social and political systems which constrain and enable the use of wealth. Quality, not quantity. In any case I'm not here to play twenty questions while you act as a apologist cuck for the super rich. You drew a lazy analogy regularly trotted out by those who base their politics on skin deep comparisons and I pointed it out for what it was - that's all.

Again with the confusion of arbitrary social constructs with - this time - literal organs. It's such a strange pathological compulsion: this idea that wealth is somehow intrinsic to a person's being. Guess it's what happens when you're inundated with capitalist propaganda your whole life. First race, now this. On the edge of my seat wondering what you'll come up with next.

Why should anyone be allowed to have $10MM? Maybe 5 or even 1mm is excessive when you have homeless people living on the streets. — BitconnectCarlos

Welcome to the club, comrade.

Ah yeah, you're the kind of person to ask if age is 'just a number' and 'what's the cut off point?' for that. But as a heuristic let's say at the point at which upward distribution of wealth robs roughly $50 trillion from the rest of society.

And if you're counting the US only, Bernie's not 1% although definitely in the top 10%. Don't particularly have any stake in defending him on this so if he belongs to the parasite class then so be it.

Oh I was entertained, just not the way you think. Imagine comparing extreme wealth - an utterly extrinsic, completely contingent, socially bestowed institutional device that defines nothing whatsoever about you - to racial qualities. It takes a kind of oblivious imbecility that one can only laugh at in pity.

I suppose your 'target audience' is the kind who would appreciate trite pseudo-analogies that only work if you're a moron enough to not see through their cynical disingenuity. On that, I concede.

had kind of a funny thought today — BitconnectCarlos

You didn't have a funny thought. You had entirely unoriginal thought regularly regurgitated by those whose depth of political analysis starts and stops at the way people dress.

The world as it is, is structured through and through by 'regulations imposed from above', enforced by continually exercised violence along with the threat of it. There is arguably no point in human history in which that power has been exercised to the degree that it currently is, on the scale and reach that currently exists. To worry about that is to worry that the sky is blue. Global capitalism has been the biggest human engineering project ever undertaken, and it's not only still going but accelerating.

It is absolutely the case that anyone is susceptible to this. The goal is to design social mechanisms which blunt or neutralize the effects, rather than entrench or exacerbate them - as exists currently. Separate wealth from power, or better, invert the relationship between wealth and power - the more wealth you have, the less say you have exercising power. Political enfranchisement should run from the bottom-up, not the top-down: i.e. the democratic exercise of power. It's neither 'human nature', nor wealth alone which is 'determinant': it is the political structure of society, which can be made otherwise. And we know this because of the humongous exercise of pollical power among the 1% who continually mobilize to ensure their own reproduction.

https://theintercept.com/2020/12/11/democrat-tom-vilsack-usda-secretary-farms/

Oh would you look at that Biden re-hired the same shitty agri fuckstick that helped disillusion the farmers to begin with to vote for Trump.

Guess he's banking on a Trump reelection on 2024.

Which to be fair is a great election strategy. Keep the opposition as wannabe fascists, and hold the electorate hostage so that the choice is between batshit crazies or corporatist scum like Biden. Honestly hope this man drops dead during his term.

https://commongood.cc/reader/the-one-percents-50-trillion-dollar-tab/

"A staggering $50 trillion. That is how much the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over the past several decades.

This is not some back-of-the-napkin approximation. According to a groundbreaking new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to more than double median income—enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.

Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality had grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020. That’s $50 trillion that would have gone into the paychecks of working Americans had inequality held constant—$50 trillion that would have built a far larger and more prosperous economy—$50 trillion that would have enabled the vast majority of Americans to enter this pandemic far more healthy, resilient, and financially secure."

The 1% are parasites.

Age of the anthropocene indeed! There's no 'going back to nature' now - only coming to grips with the now natural artifice of this world.

Wtf is Brett whining about lol

Also fuck anyone who calls themselves a 'centrist' or 'moderate' which is just another name for 'conservative in disguise', including Joe Biden:

David Adler found that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions, and the most supportive of authoritarianism. Furthermore, Adler found that centrists are the least supportive of free and fair elections as well as civil rights — in the United States, only 25 percent of centrists agree that civil rights are an essential feature of democracy.... Our findings show that concerns about political moderates — and specifically politically moderate men — are not unfounded. As America battles a global pandemic and an economic collapse and reckons with systemic racism, IDEALS suggests that moderate men may be the least likely to make a positive difference.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/biden-moderate-democrats-republicans-conservative-study-john-kasich-aoc-a9699431.html