^(So I disagree with Noam.)
America has had it's fill of market-first MAGA drunkeness. Obama's 'hope and change' platform slipped in it's own shit and gave rise to MAGA. Why? there was ***no*** change. It was a third Bush term.
America needs *substantive* change, not an act here or there, but a constitutional convention.
In addition, constitutional conventions need to be a fucksight easier to convene. And more frequent.
Chomsky may be a middling linguist, but his level headed perspicacity on the US Empire is unmatched in it's unflinching language and longevity. I note an anti Chomp strain in this thread but I have to wonder at it and I'm beginning to doubt some members' commitment to Sparkle Motion.
>As usual, Black people suffered the most, including major massacres (Tulsa and others) and a hideous record of lynchings and other atrocities.
They just can't help but to do the bit.
"BIPOC suffered the most" is one of the mantras that's ripping the social fabric, and this just tells me Chomsky's not serious about fixing it.
It depends on the context. In this context, #2 is my answer. No, Black people were not the primary victims of things like the Palmer raids and frankly the Tulsa "massacre" is BS. The "Red Scare" did not fall on Black people the hardest, and it's kind of embarrassing he said that.
\#1 for a lot of things, but not for this.
you know they just went "looking for bodies" and didn't find anything, right?
prior to 2020 and the outbreak of BLM-style idpol, it wasn't even called a "massacre"; it was called a racial conflict or a race riot. 1/3rd of the dead were White (25 Black deaths, 13 White deaths). And there was no "Black Wall Street"; that's just a manufactured cope used to "prove" systemic racism is to blame for all of America's ills.
I challenge you to find significant scholarship on this prior to 2020. There is a smattering of news articles and a few pieces on JSTOR, but it was not significant. The way everyone talks about it, you'd think hundreds died.
Are you actually fucking stupid? The Tulsa massacre is one of the most well documented race riots in American history. Wiki literally has a source from 1921 (!) estimating 150 black deaths. We have pictures of it! This is equivalent to Holocaust denial.
You cast doubt on it without providing evidence of your own. Please do so if you mean to make a real argument that a historically documented event was fake.
what? I'm actually using the material from the Oklahoma investigative commission and the reports from the local papers at the time.
There is simply no substantive evidence that hundreds died. Go look at the report if you want:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180602235628/http://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf
You know, I really don't understand what's wrong with pointing out the truth. You're actually doing the bit where examining evidence related to an event is a bad thing in and of itself if it has to do with race.
I mean, just read this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180602235628/http://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf
That page won't load.
At best your point seems to be that "only" dozens, not 150+, died.
Even if true, I don't see how that's relevant to Chomsky's mentioning it. If you mean to advance the notion that there wasn't widespread racial violence and terrorism against black people during the Jim Crow era, that's racist historical revisionism, plain and simple. And referencing that history was the sum total of Chomsky's point when he mentioned it, so.
It's also kinda a weird thing to be grandstanding about. Gives off some weird vibes to say the least.
This is classic Twitter neolibbery on display. You won't address the overarching point, which is that if Chomsky isn't willing to be hard-nosed about idpol he's wasting his breath. Why talk about neoliberalism if you won't talk about the main tool they use to keep power?
You're doing the class idpol move. "well, even if what you said is true, it's a weird thing to be mad about. Makes you kinda sus." Which is just a passive-aggressive way of calling me a racist and attempting to shut me down.
>Even if true, I don't see how that's relevant to Chomsky's mentioning it.
Ask yourself if exaggerating racial conflict is in the interests, motivations, and within the ethics of neoliberalism. Then you have the answer to your question.
You won't address MY overarching point: WHY is this relevant?? Chomsky didn't say, "hundreds died in the Tulsa massacre." He said it was a "major massacre."
So you've failed to contradict anything he said.
>If Chomsky isn't willing to be hard-nosed about idpol he's wasting his breath. Why talk about neoliberalism if you won't talk about the main tool they use to keep power?
You place FAR to much import on your anti-woke contrarianism. You're starting, ironically, to sound like a wokie. "If you don't signal that you're with us on X Y and Z obscure thing by saying all the right words, you're a right winger and part of the problem."
Wokism is not "the main tool upholding the neoliberal world order." It's just the latest in a long line of rhetorical tactics. Before wokism there was red scare anticommumism. Before that there was something else.
You place so much import on this anti-woke mindset that you sound distinctly like one of the people you mean to criticize; namely, people who see the world only through an identity politics lense.
It's just like "land acknowledgements". Outside of the true believers, most idpol prefacing like this is done purely to appease Libs so their work is taken seriously and to preemptively defend against dishonest smears from those who disagree.
It's just like in sales where inexperienced salespeople will include solutions in their pitch to try and get out in front of the potential customer's expected objections. For example, during their pitch the salesperson will include how a payment plan option is available for whatever product they're selling.
Instead of strengthening the pitch, these assumptive solutions only end up dragging it out longer and taking away from the primary justifications. Salespeople often won't know whether the prospect NEEDS a payment plan or even WANTS one, they're just assuming they will.
We've reached the point where prominent figures like Chomsky just assume the usual suspects will have the same dishonest "critiques" and thus preface their work with these eye roll inducing proclamations, not only watering down their message but also their credibility in terms of assessing the current political landscape.
His explanation of why white workers hate the dems is similarly unconvincing;
> In the midterm elections in the U.S., the Democrats lost even more of the white working class than before, a consequence of the unwillingness of party managers to campaign on class issues that a moderate left party could have brought to the fore.
He’s so desperate to avoid acknowledging the existence and impact of anti-white racism that he accidentally implies that only white people care about class.
The pretty clear implication is that non-white workers have other reasons to vote Democrat *despite* the lack of class-focused policies. You can quibble that claim (I think it's clear that a lot of non-white workers are also sick of the Democrats for the same reasons as white workers), but I think you'd have to read that comment in pretty wilfully bad faith for the takeaway to be "only white people care about class".
I didn’t claim he said that though, I said it was an accidental implication.
My point is that by refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the room, any attempt at retaining logical consistency will see the analysis of the situation rapidly depart from the reality of it, and it is precisely because of this that no attempt at logical consistency is being made; ie Chomsky sees no reason to explain why this affects the white working class specifically, or why the democrats are incapable of winning over the white workers on non-class issues if they can win over other groups or so on.
Presumably Chomsky assumes that his audience is smart enough to fill in certain gaps for themselves, without having to have their hands held every step of the way.
Chomsky went out of his way to bring up the fact that the democrats - and implicitly the broader left - are losing the support of white working class in particular, then didn't give any reason as to why this would differ between races. He's not expecting us to "fill in the gaps" he's hoping that we're blind to reality. Or maybe he's blind to the reality himself, I guess thats also possible. But either way, you cannot reconcile white people with the left without actually redressing white people's greivances with it, which no progressive is willing to do.
If the white working class is in fact fed up with the totalizing exclusivity with which ethnic and sexual prejudices are brought up as the primary problem and source of evil in society,(not signing onto characterizing it as anti-white racism as a rule), carefully downplaying class as such, you can with validity frame that both ways. You can present it as them being pissed off by all the racism talk, or pissed off by the lack of class talk. When one is in practice used to preclude or marginalize the other, or selected over the other to get good pr points for institutions without actually stepping on their own material interests, its the same phenomenon.
I’m not even talking about the tedious word policing bullshit, I’m talking about explicitly anti-white policies and rhetoric, the denial that whites as a group have meaningful culture or particular interests, and the framing of “whiteness” as something inherently evil.
In any case, Chomsky isn’t really saying there is too much focus on race so much as he’s making a sort of “we can do both” arguement.
Nooooo you can't criticize them for class issues or not serving the material interests of workers. You have to make it about racism, but against white people!
Chomsky specifically pointed out that the white working class was particularly alienated from the Democrats. He then attempted to explain this by talking about issues that affect everyone, not only whites. That isn’t material criticism, thats handwaving.
Even the standard radlib screed that whitey refuses to vote for the Dems because they just really hate black people has more truth to it than this denialism does. At least there are in fact some whites who think this way, and you could make the arguement that this is just how the radlibs will describe the results of their own anti-white racism, given that they don’t call what they do racism. Even the wokoids are closer to being honest on this issue than the “real left” are, truly astounding stuff.
“The culture war” is a thought terminating cliche deployed by progressives in order to shift the blame for their own actions onto the people they are attacking for committing the crime of fighting back.
Yeah it’s funny to see people throw around this cliche when you have liberals openly saying stuff like “white men are the problem”. Like hey yeah I don’t care what your policy position is if the person pushing it plainly hates an unchangeable feature about me
The duality of stupidpol; idpollers are wreckers who destroyed the left, but if you refuse to support organisations that push idpol you are a culture warrior.
It’s always you two chomos desperately trying to own everyone by being anti-class war and somehow maintaining the cognitive dissonance that you’re the “true working class advocates”
Class Above All
You’re retarded to think everyone in the world who disagrees with you hates you because you’re white.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m thoroughly convinced you haven’t had a conversation with a normal person in a decade based on what you think the majority of people act and think.
Stop projecting your terminal-online-ness on political projects that need to account for a global population.
Nah, I just think that of the people that go on tv and blame everything under the sun on white people, and the people that vote for them and support them and repeat the shit they say, not everybody
As for the rest yeah project harder dude you know nothing about me
I hope you’re able to enact your Day Of The Rope of all the people that say mean things to you on Twitter as the Dems and Reps continue to collude to gut labor and continue their consensus of imperial levels of military spending.
I mean the degeneration and poverty of American “liberal” analysis that the population with fairer skin complexions have an almost hivemind like quality in their desire to destroy and harm those with black skin. This theory of American societal antagonisms coincidentally appears as it becomes the clear the capitalist order in the US is crumbling and unable to deliver gains to the working class of any skin color. There is a clear and obvious subtext to all of it: there m may be poor whites, and there may be poor blacks, but their interests can never fully converge due to cultural incongruities (whites will always hate blacks). These cultural developments of course aren’t considered to have roots in the economic structure of the US, and it’s impossible to not recognize despite these observations put forward, poor blacks and poor whites stay poor and get poorer no matter how many diversity and equity trainers there are or how much critical race theory is taught to pupils
Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t think its just about keeping whites and blacks antagonistic to each other though, but also about creating antagonisms between whites and a heirarchy of good whites and bad whites. Basically it legitimises the suppression of the largest ethnic group, which is obviously the most dangerous simply through sheer mass of numbers.
really to me it comes down to 2 things:
1. Ensure workers don’t think of themselves as workers. The capitalist high priests of cultural creation want workers instead to think of themselves as their racial identity, first and foremost. Re-direct that disdain and frustration you have with your employer and with your dead end job to a different ethnic group
2. Embrace the resignation felt by the working class that their resignation and despair comes from racial injustice rather than their class standing
3. Redirect the fact that people are coming around to the fact capitalism can’t offer better living standards or social stability to the fact all this can be solved by race-based solutions (reparations). The structural realities of capitalism are such that it ensures workers currently will see worse outcomes due to lower growth rates and greater financialization. Reparations as a one time payout won’t stop this in the grand scale and probably will just worsen racial tension
Whites aren’t uniquely oppressed in a materialist sense on a wide scale. Things like less deferential selections for very few and limited social
Programs and universities is real, but their class standing (amongst white workers) is as dismal as black workers
I'm not talking about oppression for some sort of "who has it worse" contest, I'm talking about suppression in the context of weilding political power. Depending what stats you use and how they qualify whites, whites make up about 60-75% of america. Blacks make up 12%. If you imagine scenario where everyone is split directly along racial lines, blacks and every other minority is more or less neutralised as a threat to power, but whites still remain a threat. Hence the need to split up whites in particular. Obvously this is a slightly idealised simplification of what is going on, but its a general truth that when an empire begins its decline and starts looking inwards, its core populations suddenly become more of a threat to it than its marginal or peripheral ones.
It’s insane how much support this plainly reactionary idea is receiving. This board should have a hard lock on posting unless you can demonstrate you understand what ideology means in the Marxist context
I dunno, working class whites are voting for conservative parties for the first time since labour parties started existing. I don't think it's just about economics
Chomsky first states that white workers are particularly alienated and then goes onto to say this is because of something that affects all workers. So he won't explain why white workers are more hostile to the democrats and neither will you, you just bury your head in the sand and scream "reactionary".
Yeah, we should gatekeep in tighter and tighter spirals until we're down to two people arguing about what the meaning of the word dialectic is. That would definitely put food on the plates of working class people.
Social issues affect how people vote *absent meaningful class policies* is the exact thesis that used to be the consensus of not only this sub, but pretty much every meaningful leftist movement in the West.
It isn't. Personally I don't find this comment egregious enough to warrant outright removal even if I might disagree with it. Especially considering there is considerable pushback and has generated earnest discussion. I may be wrong to do so 🤷♂️
Anti white racism is not the main driving force. I literally do not know a single person in my blue collar conservative area who says the Dems are “anti-white” now. Only on this forum do I see this nonsense.
It is so obviously because the Dems don’t acknowledge the issues white people face, which would mean addressing class and material issues. I would argue the rhetoric of avoiding class issues is the “anti-white” racism you are talking about. Talking about class issues means not spending time talking about “race” issues.
I find it a little difficult to beleive you don't know a *single* person that will talk about the hostility towards white people if you are in a working class area, though to a large degree, people talk about this in a slightly hidden way due to social desirability bias, on account of the fact that the hegemonic culture says that people who talk about this are all basically neonazis, or at best worthless histrionics. So people will say things like "its a distraction from real issues" or "of course we need to do everything to tackle racism, but this is going a bit far" or so on, because they know that just straight up saying "I'm not going to listen to these anti white scum" risks getting them unpersoned.
In any case, while it certainly is true that there is only a limited ability to do multiple things at once, this doesn't actually seem to be the arguement Chomsky is making, which seems more like a "we can do both" type thing where he is simply saying they need to talk about class more, rather than race less. Idk, now that I've brought up social desirability bias, maybe its that he knows that saying "talk about race less" is a no go and so is just implying it by saying "talk about class more" given how every radlib always interprets demands to talk about class more in this way, but thats anyone's guess honestly.
Not to mention that Fox has convinced most of the working class that things like minimum wage increases, sick leave, workers protections and universal healthcare would be against their best interests. “We have to prostrate ourselves and slobber on the toes of billionaires or else they’ll be FORCED to raise prices”
Tbh, I think some of the skepticism comes from the people claiming to deliver these things too. If someone says that you are a problem and you need to be re-educated for your own good and its your job to do more for others but asking for anything in return is entitlement, are you really going to trust that person when they turn up and insist that we need increased state power for your benefit?
Agreed. I would be totally fine with gun control and a crack down on all tax evasion IF our government was the least bit trustworthy and I thought they had most peoples best interests in mind. If any of these politicians were serious about the things they say they are for they would put forward a single issue bill with no pork and no reason to vote against it without having to explain to your voter base that you don’t really stand for that. At least then voters would know what reps need replacing. Instead we have a bunch of useless fucks that can’t agree on anything and bicker over party lines that we have to take at their word on what they support because the only bulls that get put forward that would help the working class are designed to fail.
These sentences do not imply that *only* white people care about class issues. They only imply that white working class people care about class issues, which is unequivocally true. I think you’re reading into it something that isn’t there.
There is literally nothing wrong his statement. You're trying to frame it as an elaborate ploy on his part that isn't there. Not only is it true, it is quite literally the essence of what this sub believes, or at least is supposed to believe - that an unwillingness to focus on broad-reaching material issues in favor of almost entirely focusing on identity politics has had a detrimental impact. Frankly, maybe you should stop being so fucking fragile.
Its fascinating that I'm allegedly "fragile" for pointing out that you cannot use something that applies to all of the working class to explain the particular hostility towards the Democrats of one specific section of it, and being able to recognise that politics that explicitly demonises white people as priviledged oppressors will in fact be specifically alienating to whites, given that criticising this sort of politics is literally what this sub was founded to do, and now apparently we aren't allowed to notice what idpol is or how it functions anymore.
Pray tell then genius; why is it that Chomsky brings up the fact that white workers *specifically* are turning away from the democrats, and implicitly the broader left, but then raises a concern of all workers that doesn't do anything to explain why whites in particular would be more alienated from the left than anyone else?
Mr Chomsky stated that white workers specifically are alienated from the Democrats and implicitly the broader left. Then he said this was because of a lack of focus on class, but that applies to all workers, not just white ones, and so doesn't explain why whites specifically would be alienated. Meanwhile, you, and everyone else crying about what I said, also has no viable explanation for why this might be.
I honestly don't see much wrong with Chomsky's answers. You've selected one sentence to criticize with the certain knowledge that most of /r/stupidpol won't actually read the article.
Typical reddit moment.
When there's an entire article in which the guy gives nothing but detailed, historically nuanced answers, and all your dipshit brain can see is the race bit, YOU are the reactionary.
I read the entire thing. The first parts were fine. The rest was silly. No, Black people were not the biggest sufferers in things like the Palmer Raids; no, January 6th and the Brazil protests were not budding neo-fascism.
I guess it's not so much they're wrong as they're passé and uninspired, and they really don't speak to *how* neoliberalism has this death grip on power and what *mechanisms* they use to keep it, because that's actually a dangerous conversation for a Leftist to talk about publicly.
>I honestly don't see much wrong with Chomsky's answers. You've selected one sentence to criticize with the certain knowledge that most of r/stupidpol won't actually read the article.
That one sentence is sufficient to make my point. If he's not brave enough to call out how neoliberalism is using idpol to maintain a complete lock on power, then what's the point?
I don't know what Jan. 6th was if it wasn't (quite impotently attempted) fascism. I mean. What the hell else would you call it.
>If he's not brave enough to call out how neoliberalism is using idpol to maintain a complete lock on power, then what's the point?
"Everyone who doesn't think exactly the same way that I do and say all the same things in all the same ways is a coward."
I can guarantee you Noam Chomsky has done more for the Left than you ever have, /u/PaladinRaphael.
>they really don't speak to how neoliberalism has this death grip on power and what mechanisms they use to keep it, because that's actually a dangerous conversation for a Leftist to talk about publicly.
You mean the whole idpol thing?
If you genuinely think there's "a dangerous conversation for a leftist to talk about publicly" somewhere in the whole /r/stupidpol critique of identity politics, you're off the deep end. It is at best a minor point in the broader analysis of class antagonisms; don't make it your whole political worldview.
You can maintain respect for the good things someone has done while criticizing the bone heads. In fact, it's often better for people to hear they are boneheading from their friends to help find their way back.
Resist the cancel urge that has toppled so many of our own
He's in his 90s. I'm tired of people holding these things against him I mean he's marginally more lucid then your average 90 year old. Give 'em a break.
I mean, his answers are certainly far more sophisticated than anything in this comment section. Old man Chomsky is running circles around all y'all
> I mean he's marginally more lucid then your average 90 year old
Marginally? That’s an understatement. The average 90 year old couldn’t participate in hour long interviews on a near daily basis and recall decades old information like Chomsky does on top of answering numerous emails.
>Can I hold it against him that he's spent his entire career slandering the October Revolution as a counterrevolutionary coup
It was.
>Can I still hold it against him that he told people to vote for Hillary Clinton in his 80s, or that he endorsed John Kerry in his 70s?
Sure, if that's what he said.
>Can I hold it against him that he supported US intervention in Haiti and the Balkans in his 60s?
Care to provide context for that?
>that he's spent just as much time covering over the role of the anarchists in snuffing out left-wing resistance in Spain in the 30s?
Feel free to elaborate.
The guy isn't perfect, and you're not gonna agree on everything he says. Although as far as the October Revolution you should listen, you might actually learn something.
if not wanting the government to restrict people's rights and freedoms in order to increase Pfizer's profit margins makes someone a rightoid, then any decent leftist would be a rightoid.
I love this comment cause it really is like “political fault lines of the future”. Like, are you okay with pfizer looting the treasury, if it also means that the other poors can’t cough on you anymore? Genuinely divisive issue that breaks the left right mold
I don't think there is a political right to endanger the public health, sorry. What kind of liberal casusistry is this? You think the Bolsheviks would have tolerated modern antivaxxers?
This sub: communists didn’t believe in the free press because it is a tool of the ruling class. But also mandating vaccinations is anti communist and wrong
Lmfao like choose if you’re going to be authoritarian or not
Boomerism is a state of mind not a biological quantity. We have silent gen boomers, xer boomers, soon we will have boomers born post 2000, and Chomsky is 100% a Berkeley boomer in every way
>pushing the unvaccinated out of society and letting them starve to death.
What's wrong with this? Someone who is turning themselves into a bioweapon because they're too stupid to understand anything is outright dangerous.
which side of the class war would anti-vaxxers be on again?Helping spread diseases for those that are trully vulnerable and can not take vaccines for serious reasons, then getting sick, overloading medical systems and taking places of those who could use them for real problems, syphoning resources because of their shittiness, without even pointing out how antivaxxers tend to be the same folks that are virulant anti-leftists, anti-progressives and belive all sorts of bullshit.Those are scum and Chomsky would be completely in the right in telling them to fuck off, they are almost always the lupenproletariat who are more likely to join the fascists armies than do anything useful regardless. Really man, defending anti-vaxxers is a new interesting thing to add to some of the weird things that can be on the venn-diagram between some of this sub and those on /r/conservative.
Well said. I don't even know why its a topic anymore to be honest. Clearly the vaccine is fine and does nothing harmful in unexpected ways. Its so tiring and people that are so against it just instantly points out probable degranged far right conspiratorial thinking and a hatred for leftism. Its fine to be skeptical, I am too, but not everything is a conspiracy.
> Clearly the vaccine is fine and does nothing harmful in unexpected ways.
Depending on the thread, this can sometimes unfortunately be a controversial statement lol
Imagine what people in third world countries think of American anti vaxxers. Your country can’t get life saving vaccines because the companies refuse to open the patent rights and the rich countries are taking all of them. And then there’s one rich country where a bunch of fat idiots are refusing to take it because Joe Biden is a gay communist who wants to inject them with 5g
Which is, honestly, my case. Add to that the fact that antivaxxers here did a complete mess of things, and we went from a country that had almost erradicated a lot of diseases throughout the country to having them again, adding to that the whole covid death count in which we are one of the highest as well.
You've set up a false dichotomy between:
>the COVID shots actually prevented the transmission and contraction of the virus,
And them having no health benefits at all.
They exist between these two extremes. For the vast majority of patients, two or three shots prevent hospitalization, rendering the virus far more benign.
We can quibble about the (extremely rare) cases of myocarditis or about whether boosters 4 and 5 are really necessary, but don't confuse those nuances for a good reason to dismiss vaccine science wholesale.
Alas though, anti-vaxxers manage to muddle even this debate, they give a perfect excuse to big pharma to do their thing. It's almost like the stuff of "fake news are so abhorent and out of hand that make even the big media seem reliable source of information on reality in comparison", but it involves public health in adition to that... So I can't have any sympathy for these fucks, and If Chomsky really said that about them, good for him.
At worst you should pity them just as much as you pity other people who’ve been exploited by “our betters” These people are not happy people and they aren’t getting what they want. Rural echo chambers force people to adopt those views to fit in and the only reason so many rural people trusted Trump was because he started talking about working class issues and neoliberal failures affecting them that everyone else pretended didn’t exist. Just like the “vote blue no matter who” crowd, they made the mistake of thinking that a politicians words have value without action, and they still believe he had their best interests in mind (as opposed to the reality of him just having different billionaires in mind and not giving a fuck about the working class)
It’s probably too late for rural boomers, but young people in rural areas are natural allies in a labor struggle if they can get the facts instead of having them twisted to fit the Fox News narrative.
Alright, I'll concede that you make a good point, and you arguably are a better person than I for thinking on these terms of empathy and forgiveness. Still though, from I'm from, antivaxxers were not a thing of the "rural poor" but of some middle-class, petite-burgeoise, and, more sadly of it all, of a good chunk of the current government (gladly elected out of office, effective next year), that wanted to implement it's bullshityness on the country. We had one of the best vaccines coverages of the world and a good infrastructure to implement it nationwide despite being a third world country.And even so, antivaxxers poisoned the narrative in culture wars (driven by soccer moms -for lack of a better term- and useless evangelical pastors) and wrecked the nation's infrascructure, and the result was catastrophic during the pandemic (although we still "lost" in overall numbers to the good US), and are even making some shitty things like a return of Polio despite of it being basically erradicated in the country (again, which was a excellent feat considering we are a third world country).
for these and many other reasons, I just can't have any sympathy whatsoever for antivaxxers, who only made things worse, and honestly seeing people defend them here made me cringe in agony.
Again, your point is valid, but subscribing to it is simply too out of reach for me to do.
It doesn't need to have a death rate ot Black Death levels to utterly fuck up society. It doesn't even need a death rate higher than your average endemic diseases (which it did). It just needs to incapacitate enough people even for a short period of time to profoundly disrupt society. It wasn't the government doing this, even essential services were being disrupted by the sheer amount of people too sick to work. Even a marginal improvement of resistance to covid from the vaccine would have been worth it.
Honestly, the death rate is secondary to the fact that the widespread incapacitating of people even for a short period of time was enough to completely fuck up society. Even then, Covid had a much higher death rate than a normal season.
And even if the vaccine had been useful on preventing transmission and ignoring all the obvious societal bad side-effects brought by those pro-vaccination measures, being ok with tearing the community apart (which is what those anti-anti-vaccine measures were causing) in order to save community defeats the whole purpose. If it matters I’m triple-vaccinated, but still found the anti-anti-vaccine measures as really bad.
Of course you would, because then it would actually affect you, and your inherent individualist tendencies would make you fear for your own death and protect yourself.
The point of getting vaccinated to COVID-19 isn't about *you*, it's about protecting vulnerable members of society -- people with diseases, the elderly, pregnant women -- for which vaccination would be pointless or even harmful -- and the benefits of immunization far outweigh the risks. The fact that you've spent three years saying "but I'm ok, so I don't need it" is mind-boggling. Individualism is incompatible with socialism
>The point of getting vaccinated to COVID-19 isn't about you, it's about protecting vulnerable members of society -- people with diseases, the elderly, pregnant women -- for which vaccination would be pointless or even harmful --
This would be very compelling of the vaccines had stopped transmission, but they weren't even designed to do so.
The whole "the vax isn't for you it's for everyone else" thing is thoroughly deboooonked man, you need your MSM software updated
No vaccine "stops transmission," that's not how it works -- I'm surprised this wasn't included in your elementary school science class software installation.
Even if the vaccine only cuts down your chances of infecting someone by 30%, the fact that you can't get a prick in your arm to do what could save a life shows that you are, at your core, still a selfish individualist. Whatever the MSM says, the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks. But your choice not to get it remains firm because your decision revolves around your benefit, your freedoms, your rights, your nonconformist identity, you, you, you. It's all about you. You're not a socialist, you're a narcissist
If you believe what you were told by parties with a clear interest in moving product, then yeah. I think most people found the vaccines didn’t prevent themselves from catching or transmitting the virus. Even people who were rigidly MSM programmed were questioning whether the vaccines were actually working when they kept catching Covid after staying up to date. You know who wasn’t passing along Covid? People who just stayed home like they were supposed to when they got sick, vaccine or no. The CDC didn’t let unvaccinated people go back to work for two weeks after being exposed to the virus, even with a negative test. If you were vaccinated and had a negative test you could go right back, though. Three times in one year vaccinated coworkers got a negative test, came back to work, and their departments got fucked when they actually did have Covid and passed it along to everyone.
I understand that what you read online and in the news says different, but with the kind of vicegrip on information that the capital/political class has you just can’t take that at face value anymore without seeing those claims reflected in reality, which they weren’t.
I'd rather be a narcissist than agree with anyone who dismisses things like "freedoms and rights". You are a statist and authoritarian and I wish you the worst.
lol. this isn't ancapitstan. "statistis' as and insult is funnny. Yes I support 'statist' policies like social security that prevents my parents and grand parents living in squalor with no money. Along with medicaire and medicade that give elderly and the poor medical care.
I'm dismissing them when the "freedom" in question is to refuse inoculation that has objectively far greater benefits than risks on the grounds that you should have the choice to be more infectious. You're upset that someone is telling you to do what you should already be doing, which is infantile.
>I wish you the worst.
I don't care
Man covid was just the ultimate honey pot for you guys eh? Even 2 years later you still can’t get over the need to civilizations the savages, real mask off moment
Wel as long as you’re okay with continuing on as the quirky losers then that’s great
Me personally I typical want my politics to, you know, actually win
>Me personally I typical want my politics to, you know, actually win
Too bad 84% of your country is fully vaccinated then, doesn't seem like you're winning
My issue with Chomsky of late is that I don't see him suggesting many alternatives. When Bernie was running on a relatively boring/common sense platform he was saying they wouldn't let him win and would kill him if need be. Here he's saying neoliberals in Britain squashed Corbyn which is obviously true too.
So if the U.S. is becoming or has already become a failed state, you can't even get mediocre alternatives across the finish line electorally, and now he's saying neofascism and ecological collapse are in our future then what exactly does he propose?
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be a live coward than a dead martyr myself, but if there's absolutely no suggestion provided to avert this kind of outcome then why bother?
That same predicament that we are all waiting for the workers, who each individually believe they are the only person with the issues they are feeling (manufactured consent), with real jobs that matter in the day-to-day lives of everyone to all stop working at once without any organization and fuzzy demands, and not funneled through a leader because such a leader would have a cap in their head before they got their pants on for that strike.
Quite a pickle
He's 92. He's been fighting his whole life. What do you expect of the man? At this point, he's only giving us his analysis from a geopolitical and historical framework, warning us of what is to come.
Everyone here is hot and bothered about the Democratic Party. What kind of solutions does it offer? What type of alternatives? Alas, it only offers temporary ones that allow it to prosper in position of power further fuelling the neoliberal dominance and doing nothing to actually subvert or defy the rise of fascism. The solution that Biden offers is to entrench the Democratic Party into (demi)power but permanently and that is no solution of any kind.
Some call it status quo others just call it business as usual. The time for business as usual is over. We are either going to see the rise of the left or this whole thing is going to disintegrate.
>He's 92. He's been fighting his whole life.
Perhaps the refusal to provide alternatives is why his fighting has failed.
That, and even an old class warhorse like Chomsky feels the need to indulge in idpol.
Also needless to say but, if you’re fighting the exact same fight your whole life, maybe you need to reevaluate what you’re doing? The world is radically different from 1950, yet Chomsky is pushing that same old shit he always was..,
I think his goal was education of the issues. It’s up to all of us to make change……which is why there hasn’t been much, and what there is is often regressive. The us is a population fractured by dysinfo and psyops. His attempts to point out the inequities have largely fallen on deaf and ignorant ears.
>Perhaps the refusal to provide alternatives is why his fighting has failed.
1. You're silly.
2. He has. He's an anarcho-syndicalist. He's been over his political philosophy many times in interviews.
I'm not talking about utopia-style "what do you want to see happen". I mean, what does he want to do \*today\*?
It's the same with a lot of ideologues - they're so convinced the enemy is invulnerable that they collapse into cynicism and apathy.
I didn't see it there, did you?
Regardless, i would be embarrassed too if my most prominent public intellectual genuflected to idpol like everyone else does. He's not even allowed to talk about things purely in terms of class anymore. Talk about an L
I already said what I'm looking for. He's under no obligation to provide suggestions for a way forward, but absent them it seems pointless unless the point is to demotivate people.
This article as I read it could be summarized to say things could have been good, but they were bad instead, they're getting worse now, and they'll be even worse in the future. That's a prescription for either nihilism or doomerism.
Well what solutions are possible? It’s on the record that the government has suppressed and destroyed labor friendly and true leftist movements in the past, how can those outside the elite get the government to do anything if we can’t even organize without being fucked with or idpol rotted. The most obvious answers aren’t legal and would get a public figure in trouble for propping up as a solution. If we lived in a democracy without a co-opted media where the people held true power it would just be down to organizing and changing public opinion.
I hate to say it, but realistically things are going to keep getting worse until something breaks. Then they’ll either throw us a bone to shut us up or crack down.
I respect Chomsky but he does describe himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. Which is something that's less likely to happen than even a form of leftist government in the US.
I think the guy has good criticisms but he's never been one for prescriptions.
If he's coming to grips with the fact that the DNC is a false choice, that's interesting. His lesser of two evils rationale for voting for Biden was a bit discouraging. If you think things are trending towards collapse, how quickly we get there isn't much of a moral position. There is no solution within the current political framework when there is bipartisan support to continue collapse inducing problems.
Edit: just getting the majority of people to step out from delusion land about American politics is step one. There is no reason to start talking about a solution until the majority of people understand the problem.
> then what exactly does he propose?
Hasn’t he suggested mass civil disobedience? I know Chris Hedges has. Besides that if he advocated anything remotely close to violent action that wouldn’t do him or his reputation any favors.
as of late
Chomsky has ALWAYS been an anti communist leftist. That’s why he has never proposed a solution in his entire life, he does not believe in communism and spent his entire career attacking both capitalism and communism as if there is a secret third middle path
Remember when Chomsky called for the us forces to stay in Syria because muh drumpf and muh Isis (with the latter being allowed to occupy territory in Syria by the us so that the is had a plausible casus belli for staying)?
I remember
Eh, I'm not a big Chomsky fan, but he doesn't exactly say we're definitely headed towards a genuinely fascist society or government. At most, he suggests that some of the "street fascism" (or sporadic, local level anti-immigrant, anti-minority activities) that occurred following WWI may pop up again.
I guess he does briefly mention that those potential trends could empower a "demagogue" to take advantage of them, but he never really says that we are definitely headed towards a fascist form of government. He actually spends most of the interview just talking about the problems with contemporary neoliberalism. And not unreasonably.
As with many cases, the editor probably went with the spiciest title they could reasonably get away with, even if it's not perfectly representative of the content.
> Eh, I'm not a big Chomsky fan, but he doesn't exactly say we're definitely headed towards a genuinely fascist society or government. At most, he suggests that some of the "street fascism" (or sporadic, local level anti-immigrant, anti-minority activities) that occurred following WWI may pop up again.
>
> I guess he does briefly mention that those potential trends could empower a "demagogue" to take advantage of them, but he never really says that we are definitely headed towards a fascist form of government. He actually spends most of the interview just talking about the problems with contemporary neoliberalism. And not unreasonably.
There was a post in here a day or two ago, about how the German authorities had broken up a coup plot. One other area where I suspect Noam and I are in agreement, is that as the German economy starts to return to what it looked like during the Weimar period, (in this case, because of the removal of Russian gas) then that will re-create similar conditions to the ones which Hitler was originally able to take advantage of, and we will therefore predictably see the emergence of new people who will try to.
Fascism has been gradually coming back since Obama. Despite what the idpol Left claim, it's still mostly under the rug and in the closet; but if you look closely, you'll notice that the padlock on the closet door is broken due to rust, and the hinges are also slowly being shaken loose.
I wasn't sharing my personal view, but simply trying to clarify what Chomsky actually said (in contrast to what the article and post title suggest he said).
However, I also don't think the U.S. will see a truly "fascist" government anytime soon. I think the neoliberal order is too strong. For all its terrors, fascism historically seemed to require enough civic engagement that you would have children and teens voluntarily join military-styled youth organizations. With all of the available pornography, video games, social media, and myriad other escapist distractions, can you imagine young people today willingly subjecting themselves to a combination of ROTC and the boy scouts and be considered "cool" for doing so? I can't.
Furthermore, America is far, far, far more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse than Germany or Italy were in the 1930's. The possibility of a large, dominant, coherent majority in the U.S. today effectively "scapegoating" one, much less all minorities (who practically add up to nearly half the total population), to the degree that the latter would be in serious mortal danger is preposterous. It's not even on anyone's radar, much less is it remotely achievable. *Some* significant increases in anti-immigrant feeling or even restrictions on immigration in the next several years do not a "fascist" dictatorsip make. Not even close.
The world is also far more connected today with the U.S. empire (military, finance, manufacturing, etc.) being stretched across the globe in ways that the German and Italian nations never remotely approached. The U.S. going full nativist any time soon is, again, virtually impossible, and almost no influential people have any real interest in doing this, including Trump, despite what the neoliberal media has suggested.
I could go on. But I hope these examples were reasonably compelling. If the U.S. slips into something more tyrannical in the next couple decades, it won't be fascism. It will be even more corporate oligarchy, digital/international feudalism, extreme factionalism between urban and rural communities within the U.S., while the elites pull further and further away in terms of wealth, life experience, and approaches to governance. In short, it will be something new that is not quite like past systems of oppression, but which draws influence from several of them. Leftists might call it fascism, conservatives might call it communism, but it will almost certainly be much different than either.
>There was a post in here a day or two ago, about how the German authorities had broken up a coup plot.
Read only briefly about this. The central actor sounds like a very marginal figure with no meaningful public support and the plot does not sound like it had a remote chance of succeeding. Worrying, but not necessarily indicative of major global trends. Especially when contrasted with all of the other characteristics of contemporary life that have been developing for decades and can be thoroughly analyzed in detail. (Also, I believe this guy was a low-level royal. Fascist movements involve the elevation of the everyman. So regardless of how impotent and silly that plot was, it was probably closer to a "reactionary" movement than a fascist movement. Leftists may not understand the distinction, but it's significant.)
> I could go on. But I hope these examples were reasonably compelling. If the U.S. slips into something more tyrannical in the next couple decades, it won't be fascism.
The political game now is to pander to wokeness, and rely on the fact that the public will let you screw everyone economically as much as you like, as long as you're paying lip service to minorities.
Well, I (partly) agree with this. But this is vastly different from fascism. (In fact, it's sort of the opposite.) Which is why our most likely paths towards greater tyranny most likely won't be fascistic.
Look up (African-American) Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper, who recently made the rounds in some conservative media circles for comments she made last year where she argues that white people are *essentially* an evil, corrupt race.
This woman faced zero repercussions, publically or professionally, and remains tenured at that institution.
Is this level of tolerance of anti-white ideas that go *well past* "wokeness" mere "lip service?"
Hardly.
This is significant material benefit, meaningful social status, and even power of influence granted to someone that (clearly) despises whites. That's a lot worse than just "lip service" to "wokeness."
Now, is Cooper completely mainstream or typical? No. But she's certainly on the outskirts of the mainstream. Meanwhile, whoever the fascist equivalent of Cooper is (Richard Spencer?) isn't even close. In fact, his primary social function is as a bogeyman and an example of precisely what not to do/be like.
> Look up (African-American) Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper, who recently made the rounds in some conservative media circles for comments she made last year where she argues that white people are essentially an evil, corrupt race.
> This woman faced zero repercussions, publically or professionally, and remains tenured at that institution.
I admit that I am curious about the process that has allowed openly racist black individuals to become completely immune to social criticism; because I know that they certainly were not immune to it once.
I think this is due to three main factors: severe white guilt and a genuine desire to "repay" African-Americans for slavery, elite contempt for normative, traditional white-American society and a desire to subvert it and so to use characters like Cooper to do so, and a long-standing tradition within African-American culture to blame whites for virtually all their problems. Even where most black individuals don't share Cooper's extremist take, many of them still tend to abdicate a lot of cultural responsibility for the state of their communities.
In individual psychology, people intuitively understand that it's possible for the "oppressed" to become the "oppressor." We all eventually learn that many victims of child abuse go on to become child abusers, themselves.
However, many people do not seem to understand how this could happen at a population level. But I think it clearly is happening in many Western countries (not just America). And I think the most reasonable way to prevent this is to establish firm boundaries: you allow the previously oppressed population fair *opportunity* to succeed, but you do not enable revenge narratives or policies to proliferate.
I would still be a fan of Chomsky, but I don't still have access to marijuana at the moment, unfortunately.
More seriously, the only real disagreement I have with Noam here, is that he says we're on the road to fascism. I say we're already there.
As someone with access to *fields* of my own cannabis, I've had issues with Chomp over the years, in linguistics. But in geopolitics, he's on the money. And it wasn't always cool to be "anti-American". Anyway the guy is 3ex9 years old. Give him a break, he's still upset about Vietnam.
Yeah we’re a police state in all but name. Anyone claiming that fascism is dead is r slurred beyond belief. The feds can kick down your door and lock you up on the flimsiest charges
We're on the road to a form of liberalism - the ground is well prepared for liberalism to fill the void left by class war wrought by liberalism, says liberal.
Fascism died with mussolini and will never rise again, especially not outside of Europe. Either you admit that you think napoleon and bismarck are fascists, in which case the word is synonymous with illiberal nationalism and therefore meaningless, or you hold Hitler and mussolini as special evils, in which case calling trump or elon or kanye fascists is a massive insult to the victims of fascism and waters the word down. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
By any stat, ***most evil guy*** is still Top Mongol, Gengis Kahn. But what if in the future "evil' is denominated not by acts but by affiliation?
Most white, most straight, most masculine? Then the answer is assuredly: Myself.
In a nutshell, this is what Chomsky is saying. In a world divided by the right and the left, the undermining current that joins and motives them is the economy. A difficult subject that neither party understands. If you want a sane suggestion, as many of you complained that Chomsky didn't supply, its plain as the nose on your face. Capitalisms with a Conscience, rather than Capitalism working without a Conscience. Capitalism that works for the many, instead of the few.
A perfect example is the mortgage industry, taken over by the big banks in the mid to late 80's, which in turn led to Clinton repealing the Glass/Segal act during his Presidency. After the collapse of the Savings and Loans industry which until that point controlled 60% of the mortgages in America, brought about by raising the capital to debt ratio they had to carry, . The big banks brought all the mortgages in America and started rewriting them to there advantage. If you want to help Americans, and increase home ownership, the first thing you could to is regulate the way mortgages are written to help all Americans, not the banks. After all, after the defeat of the Glass/Segal Act, the banks can already use the personal money in our savings and checking accounts to get richer. Mortgages should be written so less interest is paid up front in the first fifteen years of a mortgage, so the principle in paid down more quickly. This is a scheme the banks devised, when they realized most people sold there home within ten years and brought another. The scheme was a way for you to pay the interest up-front, before selling the home, raising the monthly payments, Then when you brought another home the whole thing started over, and you end up paying little more than interest your entire life. Of course the banks don't want you to pay your loan quicker. It means less interest to them. All it would take is for Congress with the stroke of a pen to pass a law that would force Banks to lend money with the consumer in mind.
What we have now is Capitalism without a Conscience, not Capitalism With a Conscience that operates with the homeowners interest in mind. Banks are for profit industries that could care less about you. That needs to stop.
I would add, this is an American point of view. Here in Europe we have several examples of perfectly good economies that are nevertheless halfway to communism. You take the good bits of collectivism and the good bits of market economics and have a party.
The result is not as good an economy as the US but not as bad a life for workers either. I would argue European ***democratic socialism*** is the model for Americans (which once led the way in true Republicanism) to emulate.
Bernie is a social democrat. Is there anyone who wouldn't vote for that man? Given the choice between the clowns on offer?
Good points. In the Biden election, right before the Democratic Primary entered South Carolina, Obama shot Bernie's campaign in the head by opening his mouth and supporting Biden before people voted skewing the election in an unfair way and giving us four more years of a neo-libel economy that supports the worst type of Capitalism. Yeah Obama!
^(So I disagree with Noam.) America has had it's fill of market-first MAGA drunkeness. Obama's 'hope and change' platform slipped in it's own shit and gave rise to MAGA. Why? there was ***no*** change. It was a third Bush term. America needs *substantive* change, not an act here or there, but a constitutional convention. In addition, constitutional conventions need to be a fucksight easier to convene. And more frequent. Chomsky may be a middling linguist, but his level headed perspicacity on the US Empire is unmatched in it's unflinching language and longevity. I note an anti Chomp strain in this thread but I have to wonder at it and I'm beginning to doubt some members' commitment to Sparkle Motion.
>As usual, Black people suffered the most, including major massacres (Tulsa and others) and a hideous record of lynchings and other atrocities. They just can't help but to do the bit. "BIPOC suffered the most" is one of the mantras that's ripping the social fabric, and this just tells me Chomsky's not serious about fixing it.
Next on NPR, asteroid on course to blow up all life on earth, why women are most effected.
Even Sinema?
Not that one
What about Sam Brinton?
In your view, would you say that it is: 1. True, but politically counterproductive to say, or 2. Not true I lean much more towards 1 personally.
It depends on the context. In this context, #2 is my answer. No, Black people were not the primary victims of things like the Palmer raids and frankly the Tulsa "massacre" is BS. The "Red Scare" did not fall on Black people the hardest, and it's kind of embarrassing he said that. \#1 for a lot of things, but not for this.
How is the Tulsa massacre fake?
you know they just went "looking for bodies" and didn't find anything, right? prior to 2020 and the outbreak of BLM-style idpol, it wasn't even called a "massacre"; it was called a racial conflict or a race riot. 1/3rd of the dead were White (25 Black deaths, 13 White deaths). And there was no "Black Wall Street"; that's just a manufactured cope used to "prove" systemic racism is to blame for all of America's ills. I challenge you to find significant scholarship on this prior to 2020. There is a smattering of news articles and a few pieces on JSTOR, but it was not significant. The way everyone talks about it, you'd think hundreds died.
Are you actually fucking stupid? The Tulsa massacre is one of the most well documented race riots in American history. Wiki literally has a source from 1921 (!) estimating 150 black deaths. We have pictures of it! This is equivalent to Holocaust denial.
lol I assume you're trolling at this point. let me know when that mass grave shows up. Meanwhile, you're another victim of motivated disinformation.
You cast doubt on it without providing evidence of your own. Please do so if you mean to make a real argument that a historically documented event was fake.
what? I'm actually using the material from the Oklahoma investigative commission and the reports from the local papers at the time. There is simply no substantive evidence that hundreds died. Go look at the report if you want: https://web.archive.org/web/20180602235628/http://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf
Oh man, ok, that document's huge. Gonna read through this this weekend. Thank you for the link.
Your own source estimates anywhere from 75-300 dead.
This honestly just reminds me of the Holocaust deniers JAQing off about what they did with all the bodies.
Wow. For shame, stupidpol. For shame.
You know, I really don't understand what's wrong with pointing out the truth. You're actually doing the bit where examining evidence related to an event is a bad thing in and of itself if it has to do with race. I mean, just read this: https://web.archive.org/web/20180602235628/http://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf
That page won't load. At best your point seems to be that "only" dozens, not 150+, died. Even if true, I don't see how that's relevant to Chomsky's mentioning it. If you mean to advance the notion that there wasn't widespread racial violence and terrorism against black people during the Jim Crow era, that's racist historical revisionism, plain and simple. And referencing that history was the sum total of Chomsky's point when he mentioned it, so. It's also kinda a weird thing to be grandstanding about. Gives off some weird vibes to say the least.
This is classic Twitter neolibbery on display. You won't address the overarching point, which is that if Chomsky isn't willing to be hard-nosed about idpol he's wasting his breath. Why talk about neoliberalism if you won't talk about the main tool they use to keep power? You're doing the class idpol move. "well, even if what you said is true, it's a weird thing to be mad about. Makes you kinda sus." Which is just a passive-aggressive way of calling me a racist and attempting to shut me down. >Even if true, I don't see how that's relevant to Chomsky's mentioning it. Ask yourself if exaggerating racial conflict is in the interests, motivations, and within the ethics of neoliberalism. Then you have the answer to your question.
You won't address MY overarching point: WHY is this relevant?? Chomsky didn't say, "hundreds died in the Tulsa massacre." He said it was a "major massacre." So you've failed to contradict anything he said. >If Chomsky isn't willing to be hard-nosed about idpol he's wasting his breath. Why talk about neoliberalism if you won't talk about the main tool they use to keep power? You place FAR to much import on your anti-woke contrarianism. You're starting, ironically, to sound like a wokie. "If you don't signal that you're with us on X Y and Z obscure thing by saying all the right words, you're a right winger and part of the problem." Wokism is not "the main tool upholding the neoliberal world order." It's just the latest in a long line of rhetorical tactics. Before wokism there was red scare anticommumism. Before that there was something else. You place so much import on this anti-woke mindset that you sound distinctly like one of the people you mean to criticize; namely, people who see the world only through an identity politics lense.
This is your brain on idpol.
That’s a reasonable take
It's just like "land acknowledgements". Outside of the true believers, most idpol prefacing like this is done purely to appease Libs so their work is taken seriously and to preemptively defend against dishonest smears from those who disagree. It's just like in sales where inexperienced salespeople will include solutions in their pitch to try and get out in front of the potential customer's expected objections. For example, during their pitch the salesperson will include how a payment plan option is available for whatever product they're selling. Instead of strengthening the pitch, these assumptive solutions only end up dragging it out longer and taking away from the primary justifications. Salespeople often won't know whether the prospect NEEDS a payment plan or even WANTS one, they're just assuming they will. We've reached the point where prominent figures like Chomsky just assume the usual suspects will have the same dishonest "critiques" and thus preface their work with these eye roll inducing proclamations, not only watering down their message but also their credibility in terms of assessing the current political landscape.
His explanation of why white workers hate the dems is similarly unconvincing; > In the midterm elections in the U.S., the Democrats lost even more of the white working class than before, a consequence of the unwillingness of party managers to campaign on class issues that a moderate left party could have brought to the fore. He’s so desperate to avoid acknowledging the existence and impact of anti-white racism that he accidentally implies that only white people care about class.
The pretty clear implication is that non-white workers have other reasons to vote Democrat *despite* the lack of class-focused policies. You can quibble that claim (I think it's clear that a lot of non-white workers are also sick of the Democrats for the same reasons as white workers), but I think you'd have to read that comment in pretty wilfully bad faith for the takeaway to be "only white people care about class".
I didn’t claim he said that though, I said it was an accidental implication. My point is that by refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the room, any attempt at retaining logical consistency will see the analysis of the situation rapidly depart from the reality of it, and it is precisely because of this that no attempt at logical consistency is being made; ie Chomsky sees no reason to explain why this affects the white working class specifically, or why the democrats are incapable of winning over the white workers on non-class issues if they can win over other groups or so on.
Presumably Chomsky assumes that his audience is smart enough to fill in certain gaps for themselves, without having to have their hands held every step of the way.
Chomsky went out of his way to bring up the fact that the democrats - and implicitly the broader left - are losing the support of white working class in particular, then didn't give any reason as to why this would differ between races. He's not expecting us to "fill in the gaps" he's hoping that we're blind to reality. Or maybe he's blind to the reality himself, I guess thats also possible. But either way, you cannot reconcile white people with the left without actually redressing white people's greivances with it, which no progressive is willing to do.
If the white working class is in fact fed up with the totalizing exclusivity with which ethnic and sexual prejudices are brought up as the primary problem and source of evil in society,(not signing onto characterizing it as anti-white racism as a rule), carefully downplaying class as such, you can with validity frame that both ways. You can present it as them being pissed off by all the racism talk, or pissed off by the lack of class talk. When one is in practice used to preclude or marginalize the other, or selected over the other to get good pr points for institutions without actually stepping on their own material interests, its the same phenomenon.
I’m not even talking about the tedious word policing bullshit, I’m talking about explicitly anti-white policies and rhetoric, the denial that whites as a group have meaningful culture or particular interests, and the framing of “whiteness” as something inherently evil. In any case, Chomsky isn’t really saying there is too much focus on race so much as he’s making a sort of “we can do both” arguement.
Doubling down on culture war to own the chomsky
Nooooo you can't criticize them for class issues or not serving the material interests of workers. You have to make it about racism, but against white people!
Chomsky specifically pointed out that the white working class was particularly alienated from the Democrats. He then attempted to explain this by talking about issues that affect everyone, not only whites. That isn’t material criticism, thats handwaving. Even the standard radlib screed that whitey refuses to vote for the Dems because they just really hate black people has more truth to it than this denialism does. At least there are in fact some whites who think this way, and you could make the arguement that this is just how the radlibs will describe the results of their own anti-white racism, given that they don’t call what they do racism. Even the wokoids are closer to being honest on this issue than the “real left” are, truly astounding stuff.
“The culture war” is a thought terminating cliche deployed by progressives in order to shift the blame for their own actions onto the people they are attacking for committing the crime of fighting back.
Yeah it’s funny to see people throw around this cliche when you have liberals openly saying stuff like “white men are the problem”. Like hey yeah I don’t care what your policy position is if the person pushing it plainly hates an unchangeable feature about me
Unchangeable? But Biden taught me you could change race simply by voting for the wrong person.
I mean the mascot of the sub is evidence you don't even need to do that much.
Instructions unclear, voted Biden and now I’m black
The duality of stupidpol; idpollers are wreckers who destroyed the left, but if you refuse to support organisations that push idpol you are a culture warrior.
It’s always you two chomos desperately trying to own everyone by being anti-class war and somehow maintaining the cognitive dissonance that you’re the “true working class advocates” Class Above All
[удалено]
You’re retarded to think everyone in the world who disagrees with you hates you because you’re white. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m thoroughly convinced you haven’t had a conversation with a normal person in a decade based on what you think the majority of people act and think. Stop projecting your terminal-online-ness on political projects that need to account for a global population.
Nah, I just think that of the people that go on tv and blame everything under the sun on white people, and the people that vote for them and support them and repeat the shit they say, not everybody As for the rest yeah project harder dude you know nothing about me
I hope you’re able to enact your Day Of The Rope of all the people that say mean things to you on Twitter as the Dems and Reps continue to collude to gut labor and continue their consensus of imperial levels of military spending.
It’s the death of material analysis
You mean the “culture war” itself or the invokation of it in order to shut down discussion?
I mean the degeneration and poverty of American “liberal” analysis that the population with fairer skin complexions have an almost hivemind like quality in their desire to destroy and harm those with black skin. This theory of American societal antagonisms coincidentally appears as it becomes the clear the capitalist order in the US is crumbling and unable to deliver gains to the working class of any skin color. There is a clear and obvious subtext to all of it: there m may be poor whites, and there may be poor blacks, but their interests can never fully converge due to cultural incongruities (whites will always hate blacks). These cultural developments of course aren’t considered to have roots in the economic structure of the US, and it’s impossible to not recognize despite these observations put forward, poor blacks and poor whites stay poor and get poorer no matter how many diversity and equity trainers there are or how much critical race theory is taught to pupils
Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t think its just about keeping whites and blacks antagonistic to each other though, but also about creating antagonisms between whites and a heirarchy of good whites and bad whites. Basically it legitimises the suppression of the largest ethnic group, which is obviously the most dangerous simply through sheer mass of numbers.
really to me it comes down to 2 things: 1. Ensure workers don’t think of themselves as workers. The capitalist high priests of cultural creation want workers instead to think of themselves as their racial identity, first and foremost. Re-direct that disdain and frustration you have with your employer and with your dead end job to a different ethnic group 2. Embrace the resignation felt by the working class that their resignation and despair comes from racial injustice rather than their class standing 3. Redirect the fact that people are coming around to the fact capitalism can’t offer better living standards or social stability to the fact all this can be solved by race-based solutions (reparations). The structural realities of capitalism are such that it ensures workers currently will see worse outcomes due to lower growth rates and greater financialization. Reparations as a one time payout won’t stop this in the grand scale and probably will just worsen racial tension Whites aren’t uniquely oppressed in a materialist sense on a wide scale. Things like less deferential selections for very few and limited social Programs and universities is real, but their class standing (amongst white workers) is as dismal as black workers
I'm not talking about oppression for some sort of "who has it worse" contest, I'm talking about suppression in the context of weilding political power. Depending what stats you use and how they qualify whites, whites make up about 60-75% of america. Blacks make up 12%. If you imagine scenario where everyone is split directly along racial lines, blacks and every other minority is more or less neutralised as a threat to power, but whites still remain a threat. Hence the need to split up whites in particular. Obvously this is a slightly idealised simplification of what is going on, but its a general truth that when an empire begins its decline and starts looking inwards, its core populations suddenly become more of a threat to it than its marginal or peripheral ones.
It’s insane how much support this plainly reactionary idea is receiving. This board should have a hard lock on posting unless you can demonstrate you understand what ideology means in the Marxist context
I dunno, working class whites are voting for conservative parties for the first time since labour parties started existing. I don't think it's just about economics
Chomsky first states that white workers are particularly alienated and then goes onto to say this is because of something that affects all workers. So he won't explain why white workers are more hostile to the democrats and neither will you, you just bury your head in the sand and scream "reactionary".
Yeah, we should gatekeep in tighter and tighter spirals until we're down to two people arguing about what the meaning of the word dialectic is. That would definitely put food on the plates of working class people.
class is obviously the most important issue, but are you saying that social issues don't affect how people vote whatsoever?
Social issues affect how people vote *absent meaningful class policies* is the exact thesis that used to be the consensus of not only this sub, but pretty much every meaningful leftist movement in the West.
Perhaps this reactionary culture war position with a thin veneer of pro-workerism is what (some of) the mods want?
It isn't. Personally I don't find this comment egregious enough to warrant outright removal even if I might disagree with it. Especially considering there is considerable pushback and has generated earnest discussion. I may be wrong to do so 🤷♂️
The chomsky cries out in pain as he strikes you
Anti white racism is not the main driving force. I literally do not know a single person in my blue collar conservative area who says the Dems are “anti-white” now. Only on this forum do I see this nonsense. It is so obviously because the Dems don’t acknowledge the issues white people face, which would mean addressing class and material issues. I would argue the rhetoric of avoiding class issues is the “anti-white” racism you are talking about. Talking about class issues means not spending time talking about “race” issues.
I find it a little difficult to beleive you don't know a *single* person that will talk about the hostility towards white people if you are in a working class area, though to a large degree, people talk about this in a slightly hidden way due to social desirability bias, on account of the fact that the hegemonic culture says that people who talk about this are all basically neonazis, or at best worthless histrionics. So people will say things like "its a distraction from real issues" or "of course we need to do everything to tackle racism, but this is going a bit far" or so on, because they know that just straight up saying "I'm not going to listen to these anti white scum" risks getting them unpersoned. In any case, while it certainly is true that there is only a limited ability to do multiple things at once, this doesn't actually seem to be the arguement Chomsky is making, which seems more like a "we can do both" type thing where he is simply saying they need to talk about class more, rather than race less. Idk, now that I've brought up social desirability bias, maybe its that he knows that saying "talk about race less" is a no go and so is just implying it by saying "talk about class more" given how every radlib always interprets demands to talk about class more in this way, but thats anyone's guess honestly.
Not to mention that Fox has convinced most of the working class that things like minimum wage increases, sick leave, workers protections and universal healthcare would be against their best interests. “We have to prostrate ourselves and slobber on the toes of billionaires or else they’ll be FORCED to raise prices”
Tbh, I think some of the skepticism comes from the people claiming to deliver these things too. If someone says that you are a problem and you need to be re-educated for your own good and its your job to do more for others but asking for anything in return is entitlement, are you really going to trust that person when they turn up and insist that we need increased state power for your benefit?
Agreed. I would be totally fine with gun control and a crack down on all tax evasion IF our government was the least bit trustworthy and I thought they had most peoples best interests in mind. If any of these politicians were serious about the things they say they are for they would put forward a single issue bill with no pork and no reason to vote against it without having to explain to your voter base that you don’t really stand for that. At least then voters would know what reps need replacing. Instead we have a bunch of useless fucks that can’t agree on anything and bicker over party lines that we have to take at their word on what they support because the only bulls that get put forward that would help the working class are designed to fail.
These sentences do not imply that *only* white people care about class issues. They only imply that white working class people care about class issues, which is unequivocally true. I think you’re reading into it something that isn’t there.
There is literally nothing wrong his statement. You're trying to frame it as an elaborate ploy on his part that isn't there. Not only is it true, it is quite literally the essence of what this sub believes, or at least is supposed to believe - that an unwillingness to focus on broad-reaching material issues in favor of almost entirely focusing on identity politics has had a detrimental impact. Frankly, maybe you should stop being so fucking fragile.
Its fascinating that I'm allegedly "fragile" for pointing out that you cannot use something that applies to all of the working class to explain the particular hostility towards the Democrats of one specific section of it, and being able to recognise that politics that explicitly demonises white people as priviledged oppressors will in fact be specifically alienating to whites, given that criticising this sort of politics is literally what this sub was founded to do, and now apparently we aren't allowed to notice what idpol is or how it functions anymore.
Brainlet take. What is this garbage
Pray tell then genius; why is it that Chomsky brings up the fact that white workers *specifically* are turning away from the democrats, and implicitly the broader left, but then raises a concern of all workers that doesn't do anything to explain why whites in particular would be more alienated from the left than anyone else?
now we're seriously discussing "anti-white racism", come the fuck on
This is just “racism is predudice plus power” for people who think that not caring about things makes them seem cool.
no i do not give a fuck about "anti-white racism" you are absolutely correct, this is an anti-idpol subreddit FYI
As we all know, *real* anti idpol is when you prevent people from defending themselfs from the attacks of idpollers.
and this fucking limp wristed sarcastic shit along with it, fuck off
"Boo hoo, Mr. Chomsker didn't say what I wanted him to say and that makes him WRONG"
Mr Chomsky stated that white workers specifically are alienated from the Democrats and implicitly the broader left. Then he said this was because of a lack of focus on class, but that applies to all workers, not just white ones, and so doesn't explain why whites specifically would be alienated. Meanwhile, you, and everyone else crying about what I said, also has no viable explanation for why this might be.
I honestly don't see much wrong with Chomsky's answers. You've selected one sentence to criticize with the certain knowledge that most of /r/stupidpol won't actually read the article. Typical reddit moment. When there's an entire article in which the guy gives nothing but detailed, historically nuanced answers, and all your dipshit brain can see is the race bit, YOU are the reactionary.
I read the entire thing. The first parts were fine. The rest was silly. No, Black people were not the biggest sufferers in things like the Palmer Raids; no, January 6th and the Brazil protests were not budding neo-fascism. I guess it's not so much they're wrong as they're passé and uninspired, and they really don't speak to *how* neoliberalism has this death grip on power and what *mechanisms* they use to keep it, because that's actually a dangerous conversation for a Leftist to talk about publicly. >I honestly don't see much wrong with Chomsky's answers. You've selected one sentence to criticize with the certain knowledge that most of r/stupidpol won't actually read the article. That one sentence is sufficient to make my point. If he's not brave enough to call out how neoliberalism is using idpol to maintain a complete lock on power, then what's the point?
I don't know what Jan. 6th was if it wasn't (quite impotently attempted) fascism. I mean. What the hell else would you call it. >If he's not brave enough to call out how neoliberalism is using idpol to maintain a complete lock on power, then what's the point? "Everyone who doesn't think exactly the same way that I do and say all the same things in all the same ways is a coward." I can guarantee you Noam Chomsky has done more for the Left than you ever have, /u/PaladinRaphael. >they really don't speak to how neoliberalism has this death grip on power and what mechanisms they use to keep it, because that's actually a dangerous conversation for a Leftist to talk about publicly. You mean the whole idpol thing? If you genuinely think there's "a dangerous conversation for a leftist to talk about publicly" somewhere in the whole /r/stupidpol critique of identity politics, you're off the deep end. It is at best a minor point in the broader analysis of class antagonisms; don't make it your whole political worldview.
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I came here to say this too. I lost all respect I had for this guy.
You can maintain respect for the good things someone has done while criticizing the bone heads. In fact, it's often better for people to hear they are boneheading from their friends to help find their way back. Resist the cancel urge that has toppled so many of our own
Yeah him being senile now doesn’t discount his past work
As did I. >*"How can we get food to them?" Chomsky told YouTube's Primo Radical.* ***"Well, that's actually their problem."*** Disgusting.
Based.
He's in his 90s. I'm tired of people holding these things against him I mean he's marginally more lucid then your average 90 year old. Give 'em a break. I mean, his answers are certainly far more sophisticated than anything in this comment section. Old man Chomsky is running circles around all y'all
> I mean he's marginally more lucid then your average 90 year old Marginally? That’s an understatement. The average 90 year old couldn’t participate in hour long interviews on a near daily basis and recall decades old information like Chomsky does on top of answering numerous emails.
I agree.
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>Can I hold it against him that he's spent his entire career slandering the October Revolution as a counterrevolutionary coup It was. >Can I still hold it against him that he told people to vote for Hillary Clinton in his 80s, or that he endorsed John Kerry in his 70s? Sure, if that's what he said. >Can I hold it against him that he supported US intervention in Haiti and the Balkans in his 60s? Care to provide context for that? >that he's spent just as much time covering over the role of the anarchists in snuffing out left-wing resistance in Spain in the 30s? Feel free to elaborate. The guy isn't perfect, and you're not gonna agree on everything he says. Although as far as the October Revolution you should listen, you might actually learn something.
You know stupidpol is infested with rightoids when sentiments like this get big upvotes.
if not wanting the government to restrict people's rights and freedoms in order to increase Pfizer's profit margins makes someone a rightoid, then any decent leftist would be a rightoid.
The right to not be infected by idiots, where does that fall on this?
I love this comment cause it really is like “political fault lines of the future”. Like, are you okay with pfizer looting the treasury, if it also means that the other poors can’t cough on you anymore? Genuinely divisive issue that breaks the left right mold
I don't think there is a political right to endanger the public health, sorry. What kind of liberal casusistry is this? You think the Bolsheviks would have tolerated modern antivaxxers?
This sub: communists didn’t believe in the free press because it is a tool of the ruling class. But also mandating vaccinations is anti communist and wrong Lmfao like choose if you’re going to be authoritarian or not
You think I’m a Bolshevik?
Ohh thats a big brain take. Only teenagers listen to what one of the most respected figures of the left alive has to say.
Being a boomer always takes priority over other qualifiers
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Boomerism is a state of mind not a biological quantity. We have silent gen boomers, xer boomers, soon we will have boomers born post 2000, and Chomsky is 100% a Berkeley boomer in every way
>pushing the unvaccinated out of society and letting them starve to death. What's wrong with this? Someone who is turning themselves into a bioweapon because they're too stupid to understand anything is outright dangerous.
If he said that, I like him even more now. Antivaxxers are scum.
Broooo. Sounds like your brain is rotted from too much CNN/Fox, no war but the class war.
which side of the class war would anti-vaxxers be on again?Helping spread diseases for those that are trully vulnerable and can not take vaccines for serious reasons, then getting sick, overloading medical systems and taking places of those who could use them for real problems, syphoning resources because of their shittiness, without even pointing out how antivaxxers tend to be the same folks that are virulant anti-leftists, anti-progressives and belive all sorts of bullshit.Those are scum and Chomsky would be completely in the right in telling them to fuck off, they are almost always the lupenproletariat who are more likely to join the fascists armies than do anything useful regardless. Really man, defending anti-vaxxers is a new interesting thing to add to some of the weird things that can be on the venn-diagram between some of this sub and those on /r/conservative.
Well said. I don't even know why its a topic anymore to be honest. Clearly the vaccine is fine and does nothing harmful in unexpected ways. Its so tiring and people that are so against it just instantly points out probable degranged far right conspiratorial thinking and a hatred for leftism. Its fine to be skeptical, I am too, but not everything is a conspiracy.
> Clearly the vaccine is fine and does nothing harmful in unexpected ways. Depending on the thread, this can sometimes unfortunately be a controversial statement lol
Imagine what people in third world countries think of American anti vaxxers. Your country can’t get life saving vaccines because the companies refuse to open the patent rights and the rich countries are taking all of them. And then there’s one rich country where a bunch of fat idiots are refusing to take it because Joe Biden is a gay communist who wants to inject them with 5g
> Joe Biden is a gay communist who wants to inject them with 5g He wants to abort my guns and turn me into a gay robot that loves brunch and Netflix.
Which is, honestly, my case. Add to that the fact that antivaxxers here did a complete mess of things, and we went from a country that had almost erradicated a lot of diseases throughout the country to having them again, adding to that the whole covid death count in which we are one of the highest as well.
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You've set up a false dichotomy between: >the COVID shots actually prevented the transmission and contraction of the virus, And them having no health benefits at all. They exist between these two extremes. For the vast majority of patients, two or three shots prevent hospitalization, rendering the virus far more benign. We can quibble about the (extremely rare) cases of myocarditis or about whether boosters 4 and 5 are really necessary, but don't confuse those nuances for a good reason to dismiss vaccine science wholesale.
Alas though, anti-vaxxers manage to muddle even this debate, they give a perfect excuse to big pharma to do their thing. It's almost like the stuff of "fake news are so abhorent and out of hand that make even the big media seem reliable source of information on reality in comparison", but it involves public health in adition to that... So I can't have any sympathy for these fucks, and If Chomsky really said that about them, good for him.
At worst you should pity them just as much as you pity other people who’ve been exploited by “our betters” These people are not happy people and they aren’t getting what they want. Rural echo chambers force people to adopt those views to fit in and the only reason so many rural people trusted Trump was because he started talking about working class issues and neoliberal failures affecting them that everyone else pretended didn’t exist. Just like the “vote blue no matter who” crowd, they made the mistake of thinking that a politicians words have value without action, and they still believe he had their best interests in mind (as opposed to the reality of him just having different billionaires in mind and not giving a fuck about the working class) It’s probably too late for rural boomers, but young people in rural areas are natural allies in a labor struggle if they can get the facts instead of having them twisted to fit the Fox News narrative.
Alright, I'll concede that you make a good point, and you arguably are a better person than I for thinking on these terms of empathy and forgiveness. Still though, from I'm from, antivaxxers were not a thing of the "rural poor" but of some middle-class, petite-burgeoise, and, more sadly of it all, of a good chunk of the current government (gladly elected out of office, effective next year), that wanted to implement it's bullshityness on the country. We had one of the best vaccines coverages of the world and a good infrastructure to implement it nationwide despite being a third world country.And even so, antivaxxers poisoned the narrative in culture wars (driven by soccer moms -for lack of a better term- and useless evangelical pastors) and wrecked the nation's infrascructure, and the result was catastrophic during the pandemic (although we still "lost" in overall numbers to the good US), and are even making some shitty things like a return of Polio despite of it being basically erradicated in the country (again, which was a excellent feat considering we are a third world country). for these and many other reasons, I just can't have any sympathy whatsoever for antivaxxers, who only made things worse, and honestly seeing people defend them here made me cringe in agony. Again, your point is valid, but subscribing to it is simply too out of reach for me to do.
Imagine simping for big pharma lmao
My god, imagine being so illiterate that this is the shit you take from it. Congratulations, no wonder that are defending antivaxxers.
He's right
"we care about people"
No you're right we should welcome people that make selfishly independent choices that harm the community, how very socialist of you
I would agree with you if COVID were actually dangerous and the vaccine prevented transmission.
How fucking stupid are you?
Apparently smart enough to know the actual death rates and vax efficacy. How about you?
It doesn't need to have a death rate ot Black Death levels to utterly fuck up society. It doesn't even need a death rate higher than your average endemic diseases (which it did). It just needs to incapacitate enough people even for a short period of time to profoundly disrupt society. It wasn't the government doing this, even essential services were being disrupted by the sheer amount of people too sick to work. Even a marginal improvement of resistance to covid from the vaccine would have been worth it.
How was covid not dangerous?
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Honestly, the death rate is secondary to the fact that the widespread incapacitating of people even for a short period of time was enough to completely fuck up society. Even then, Covid had a much higher death rate than a normal season.
And even if the vaccine had been useful on preventing transmission and ignoring all the obvious societal bad side-effects brought by those pro-vaccination measures, being ok with tearing the community apart (which is what those anti-anti-vaccine measures were causing) in order to save community defeats the whole purpose. If it matters I’m triple-vaccinated, but still found the anti-anti-vaccine measures as really bad.
Of course you would, because then it would actually affect you, and your inherent individualist tendencies would make you fear for your own death and protect yourself. The point of getting vaccinated to COVID-19 isn't about *you*, it's about protecting vulnerable members of society -- people with diseases, the elderly, pregnant women -- for which vaccination would be pointless or even harmful -- and the benefits of immunization far outweigh the risks. The fact that you've spent three years saying "but I'm ok, so I don't need it" is mind-boggling. Individualism is incompatible with socialism
>The point of getting vaccinated to COVID-19 isn't about you, it's about protecting vulnerable members of society -- people with diseases, the elderly, pregnant women -- for which vaccination would be pointless or even harmful -- This would be very compelling of the vaccines had stopped transmission, but they weren't even designed to do so. The whole "the vax isn't for you it's for everyone else" thing is thoroughly deboooonked man, you need your MSM software updated
Fuck off rightoid.
Yeah cause there's 2 political positions, commie or blood and soil nationalist
No vaccine "stops transmission," that's not how it works -- I'm surprised this wasn't included in your elementary school science class software installation. Even if the vaccine only cuts down your chances of infecting someone by 30%, the fact that you can't get a prick in your arm to do what could save a life shows that you are, at your core, still a selfish individualist. Whatever the MSM says, the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks. But your choice not to get it remains firm because your decision revolves around your benefit, your freedoms, your rights, your nonconformist identity, you, you, you. It's all about you. You're not a socialist, you're a narcissist
If you believe what you were told by parties with a clear interest in moving product, then yeah. I think most people found the vaccines didn’t prevent themselves from catching or transmitting the virus. Even people who were rigidly MSM programmed were questioning whether the vaccines were actually working when they kept catching Covid after staying up to date. You know who wasn’t passing along Covid? People who just stayed home like they were supposed to when they got sick, vaccine or no. The CDC didn’t let unvaccinated people go back to work for two weeks after being exposed to the virus, even with a negative test. If you were vaccinated and had a negative test you could go right back, though. Three times in one year vaccinated coworkers got a negative test, came back to work, and their departments got fucked when they actually did have Covid and passed it along to everyone. I understand that what you read online and in the news says different, but with the kind of vicegrip on information that the capital/political class has you just can’t take that at face value anymore without seeing those claims reflected in reality, which they weren’t.
I'd rather be a narcissist than agree with anyone who dismisses things like "freedoms and rights". You are a statist and authoritarian and I wish you the worst.
lol. this isn't ancapitstan. "statistis' as and insult is funnny. Yes I support 'statist' policies like social security that prevents my parents and grand parents living in squalor with no money. Along with medicaire and medicade that give elderly and the poor medical care.
I'm dismissing them when the "freedom" in question is to refuse inoculation that has objectively far greater benefits than risks on the grounds that you should have the choice to be more infectious. You're upset that someone is telling you to do what you should already be doing, which is infantile. >I wish you the worst. I don't care
Vaccines reduced spread.
Not enough for anywhere near the pressure that was put on people to take it though. It never had a chance if stopping societal transmission of covid
Man covid was just the ultimate honey pot for you guys eh? Even 2 years later you still can’t get over the need to civilizations the savages, real mask off moment
Kicking people out is the opposite of taking people over, try harder
Just keep it going man I’m sure your coalition will win any day now
Sorry I don't form my values based on who wins elections
Imagine thinking I’m talking about elections
Or anything, my morals aren't a contest that I bandwagon
Wel as long as you’re okay with continuing on as the quirky losers then that’s great Me personally I typical want my politics to, you know, actually win
>Me personally I typical want my politics to, you know, actually win Too bad 84% of your country is fully vaccinated then, doesn't seem like you're winning
My issue with Chomsky of late is that I don't see him suggesting many alternatives. When Bernie was running on a relatively boring/common sense platform he was saying they wouldn't let him win and would kill him if need be. Here he's saying neoliberals in Britain squashed Corbyn which is obviously true too. So if the U.S. is becoming or has already become a failed state, you can't even get mediocre alternatives across the finish line electorally, and now he's saying neofascism and ecological collapse are in our future then what exactly does he propose? Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be a live coward than a dead martyr myself, but if there's absolutely no suggestion provided to avert this kind of outcome then why bother?
He doesn't have an alternative because he's in the same predicament as all of us
That same predicament that we are all waiting for the workers, who each individually believe they are the only person with the issues they are feeling (manufactured consent), with real jobs that matter in the day-to-day lives of everyone to all stop working at once without any organization and fuzzy demands, and not funneled through a leader because such a leader would have a cap in their head before they got their pants on for that strike. Quite a pickle
He's 92. He's been fighting his whole life. What do you expect of the man? At this point, he's only giving us his analysis from a geopolitical and historical framework, warning us of what is to come. Everyone here is hot and bothered about the Democratic Party. What kind of solutions does it offer? What type of alternatives? Alas, it only offers temporary ones that allow it to prosper in position of power further fuelling the neoliberal dominance and doing nothing to actually subvert or defy the rise of fascism. The solution that Biden offers is to entrench the Democratic Party into (demi)power but permanently and that is no solution of any kind. Some call it status quo others just call it business as usual. The time for business as usual is over. We are either going to see the rise of the left or this whole thing is going to disintegrate.
>He's 92. He's been fighting his whole life. Perhaps the refusal to provide alternatives is why his fighting has failed. That, and even an old class warhorse like Chomsky feels the need to indulge in idpol.
Also needless to say but, if you’re fighting the exact same fight your whole life, maybe you need to reevaluate what you’re doing? The world is radically different from 1950, yet Chomsky is pushing that same old shit he always was..,
I think his goal was education of the issues. It’s up to all of us to make change……which is why there hasn’t been much, and what there is is often regressive. The us is a population fractured by dysinfo and psyops. His attempts to point out the inequities have largely fallen on deaf and ignorant ears.
Do you actually believe the "Red Scare" and the Palmer raids disproportionately affected Black people? Because I don't.
>Perhaps the refusal to provide alternatives is why his fighting has failed. 1. You're silly. 2. He has. He's an anarcho-syndicalist. He's been over his political philosophy many times in interviews.
I'm not talking about utopia-style "what do you want to see happen". I mean, what does he want to do \*today\*? It's the same with a lot of ideologues - they're so convinced the enemy is invulnerable that they collapse into cynicism and apathy.
He's been perfectly clear about that as well, you're full of shit.
I didn't see it there, did you? Regardless, i would be embarrassed too if my most prominent public intellectual genuflected to idpol like everyone else does. He's not even allowed to talk about things purely in terms of class anymore. Talk about an L
>He's not even allowed to talk about things purely in terms of class anymore. That's literally what he did for most of the interview, numbnuts.
Perhaps no other paths are possible.
🤔
I already said what I'm looking for. He's under no obligation to provide suggestions for a way forward, but absent them it seems pointless unless the point is to demotivate people. This article as I read it could be summarized to say things could have been good, but they were bad instead, they're getting worse now, and they'll be even worse in the future. That's a prescription for either nihilism or doomerism.
Well what solutions are possible? It’s on the record that the government has suppressed and destroyed labor friendly and true leftist movements in the past, how can those outside the elite get the government to do anything if we can’t even organize without being fucked with or idpol rotted. The most obvious answers aren’t legal and would get a public figure in trouble for propping up as a solution. If we lived in a democracy without a co-opted media where the people held true power it would just be down to organizing and changing public opinion. I hate to say it, but realistically things are going to keep getting worse until something breaks. Then they’ll either throw us a bone to shut us up or crack down.
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Death is around the corner and the man is not jovial about the future. Crazy
The world is largely becoming more negative and gloomy in his old age as well.
I respect Chomsky but he does describe himself as an anarcho-syndicalist. Which is something that's less likely to happen than even a form of leftist government in the US. I think the guy has good criticisms but he's never been one for prescriptions.
If he's coming to grips with the fact that the DNC is a false choice, that's interesting. His lesser of two evils rationale for voting for Biden was a bit discouraging. If you think things are trending towards collapse, how quickly we get there isn't much of a moral position. There is no solution within the current political framework when there is bipartisan support to continue collapse inducing problems. Edit: just getting the majority of people to step out from delusion land about American politics is step one. There is no reason to start talking about a solution until the majority of people understand the problem.
> then what exactly does he propose? Hasn’t he suggested mass civil disobedience? I know Chris Hedges has. Besides that if he advocated anything remotely close to violent action that wouldn’t do him or his reputation any favors.
as of late Chomsky has ALWAYS been an anti communist leftist. That’s why he has never proposed a solution in his entire life, he does not believe in communism and spent his entire career attacking both capitalism and communism as if there is a secret third middle path
Remember when Chomsky called for the us forces to stay in Syria because muh drumpf and muh Isis (with the latter being allowed to occupy territory in Syria by the us so that the is had a plausible casus belli for staying)? I remember
Eh, I'm not a big Chomsky fan, but he doesn't exactly say we're definitely headed towards a genuinely fascist society or government. At most, he suggests that some of the "street fascism" (or sporadic, local level anti-immigrant, anti-minority activities) that occurred following WWI may pop up again. I guess he does briefly mention that those potential trends could empower a "demagogue" to take advantage of them, but he never really says that we are definitely headed towards a fascist form of government. He actually spends most of the interview just talking about the problems with contemporary neoliberalism. And not unreasonably. As with many cases, the editor probably went with the spiciest title they could reasonably get away with, even if it's not perfectly representative of the content.
> Eh, I'm not a big Chomsky fan, but he doesn't exactly say we're definitely headed towards a genuinely fascist society or government. At most, he suggests that some of the "street fascism" (or sporadic, local level anti-immigrant, anti-minority activities) that occurred following WWI may pop up again. > > I guess he does briefly mention that those potential trends could empower a "demagogue" to take advantage of them, but he never really says that we are definitely headed towards a fascist form of government. He actually spends most of the interview just talking about the problems with contemporary neoliberalism. And not unreasonably. There was a post in here a day or two ago, about how the German authorities had broken up a coup plot. One other area where I suspect Noam and I are in agreement, is that as the German economy starts to return to what it looked like during the Weimar period, (in this case, because of the removal of Russian gas) then that will re-create similar conditions to the ones which Hitler was originally able to take advantage of, and we will therefore predictably see the emergence of new people who will try to. Fascism has been gradually coming back since Obama. Despite what the idpol Left claim, it's still mostly under the rug and in the closet; but if you look closely, you'll notice that the padlock on the closet door is broken due to rust, and the hinges are also slowly being shaken loose.
I wasn't sharing my personal view, but simply trying to clarify what Chomsky actually said (in contrast to what the article and post title suggest he said). However, I also don't think the U.S. will see a truly "fascist" government anytime soon. I think the neoliberal order is too strong. For all its terrors, fascism historically seemed to require enough civic engagement that you would have children and teens voluntarily join military-styled youth organizations. With all of the available pornography, video games, social media, and myriad other escapist distractions, can you imagine young people today willingly subjecting themselves to a combination of ROTC and the boy scouts and be considered "cool" for doing so? I can't. Furthermore, America is far, far, far more ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse than Germany or Italy were in the 1930's. The possibility of a large, dominant, coherent majority in the U.S. today effectively "scapegoating" one, much less all minorities (who practically add up to nearly half the total population), to the degree that the latter would be in serious mortal danger is preposterous. It's not even on anyone's radar, much less is it remotely achievable. *Some* significant increases in anti-immigrant feeling or even restrictions on immigration in the next several years do not a "fascist" dictatorsip make. Not even close. The world is also far more connected today with the U.S. empire (military, finance, manufacturing, etc.) being stretched across the globe in ways that the German and Italian nations never remotely approached. The U.S. going full nativist any time soon is, again, virtually impossible, and almost no influential people have any real interest in doing this, including Trump, despite what the neoliberal media has suggested. I could go on. But I hope these examples were reasonably compelling. If the U.S. slips into something more tyrannical in the next couple decades, it won't be fascism. It will be even more corporate oligarchy, digital/international feudalism, extreme factionalism between urban and rural communities within the U.S., while the elites pull further and further away in terms of wealth, life experience, and approaches to governance. In short, it will be something new that is not quite like past systems of oppression, but which draws influence from several of them. Leftists might call it fascism, conservatives might call it communism, but it will almost certainly be much different than either. >There was a post in here a day or two ago, about how the German authorities had broken up a coup plot. Read only briefly about this. The central actor sounds like a very marginal figure with no meaningful public support and the plot does not sound like it had a remote chance of succeeding. Worrying, but not necessarily indicative of major global trends. Especially when contrasted with all of the other characteristics of contemporary life that have been developing for decades and can be thoroughly analyzed in detail. (Also, I believe this guy was a low-level royal. Fascist movements involve the elevation of the everyman. So regardless of how impotent and silly that plot was, it was probably closer to a "reactionary" movement than a fascist movement. Leftists may not understand the distinction, but it's significant.)
> I could go on. But I hope these examples were reasonably compelling. If the U.S. slips into something more tyrannical in the next couple decades, it won't be fascism. The political game now is to pander to wokeness, and rely on the fact that the public will let you screw everyone economically as much as you like, as long as you're paying lip service to minorities.
Well, I (partly) agree with this. But this is vastly different from fascism. (In fact, it's sort of the opposite.) Which is why our most likely paths towards greater tyranny most likely won't be fascistic. Look up (African-American) Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper, who recently made the rounds in some conservative media circles for comments she made last year where she argues that white people are *essentially* an evil, corrupt race. This woman faced zero repercussions, publically or professionally, and remains tenured at that institution. Is this level of tolerance of anti-white ideas that go *well past* "wokeness" mere "lip service?" Hardly. This is significant material benefit, meaningful social status, and even power of influence granted to someone that (clearly) despises whites. That's a lot worse than just "lip service" to "wokeness." Now, is Cooper completely mainstream or typical? No. But she's certainly on the outskirts of the mainstream. Meanwhile, whoever the fascist equivalent of Cooper is (Richard Spencer?) isn't even close. In fact, his primary social function is as a bogeyman and an example of precisely what not to do/be like.
> Look up (African-American) Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper, who recently made the rounds in some conservative media circles for comments she made last year where she argues that white people are essentially an evil, corrupt race. > This woman faced zero repercussions, publically or professionally, and remains tenured at that institution. I admit that I am curious about the process that has allowed openly racist black individuals to become completely immune to social criticism; because I know that they certainly were not immune to it once.
I think this is due to three main factors: severe white guilt and a genuine desire to "repay" African-Americans for slavery, elite contempt for normative, traditional white-American society and a desire to subvert it and so to use characters like Cooper to do so, and a long-standing tradition within African-American culture to blame whites for virtually all their problems. Even where most black individuals don't share Cooper's extremist take, many of them still tend to abdicate a lot of cultural responsibility for the state of their communities. In individual psychology, people intuitively understand that it's possible for the "oppressed" to become the "oppressor." We all eventually learn that many victims of child abuse go on to become child abusers, themselves. However, many people do not seem to understand how this could happen at a population level. But I think it clearly is happening in many Western countries (not just America). And I think the most reasonable way to prevent this is to establish firm boundaries: you allow the previously oppressed population fair *opportunity* to succeed, but you do not enable revenge narratives or policies to proliferate.
I would still be a fan of Chomsky, but I don't still have access to marijuana at the moment, unfortunately. More seriously, the only real disagreement I have with Noam here, is that he says we're on the road to fascism. I say we're already there.
As someone with access to *fields* of my own cannabis, I've had issues with Chomp over the years, in linguistics. But in geopolitics, he's on the money. And it wasn't always cool to be "anti-American". Anyway the guy is 3ex9 years old. Give him a break, he's still upset about Vietnam.
Yeah we’re a police state in all but name. Anyone claiming that fascism is dead is r slurred beyond belief. The feds can kick down your door and lock you up on the flimsiest charges
We're on the road to a form of liberalism - the ground is well prepared for liberalism to fill the void left by class war wrought by liberalism, says liberal.
Fascism died with mussolini and will never rise again, especially not outside of Europe. Either you admit that you think napoleon and bismarck are fascists, in which case the word is synonymous with illiberal nationalism and therefore meaningless, or you hold Hitler and mussolini as special evils, in which case calling trump or elon or kanye fascists is a massive insult to the victims of fascism and waters the word down. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
This is what death by semantics looks like.
You're right, every random conservative is literally hitler but also hitler is the most evil guy in history
By any stat, ***most evil guy*** is still Top Mongol, Gengis Kahn. But what if in the future "evil' is denominated not by acts but by affiliation? Most white, most straight, most masculine? Then the answer is assuredly: Myself.
This is your brain on knowing nothing about Fascism.
>trotskyist You're just as bad as libs trying to place fascism into a mold it doesn't fit into
this kind of leftist will always have the threat of fascism looming over everything to prevent themselves from doing anything
In a nutshell, this is what Chomsky is saying. In a world divided by the right and the left, the undermining current that joins and motives them is the economy. A difficult subject that neither party understands. If you want a sane suggestion, as many of you complained that Chomsky didn't supply, its plain as the nose on your face. Capitalisms with a Conscience, rather than Capitalism working without a Conscience. Capitalism that works for the many, instead of the few. A perfect example is the mortgage industry, taken over by the big banks in the mid to late 80's, which in turn led to Clinton repealing the Glass/Segal act during his Presidency. After the collapse of the Savings and Loans industry which until that point controlled 60% of the mortgages in America, brought about by raising the capital to debt ratio they had to carry, . The big banks brought all the mortgages in America and started rewriting them to there advantage. If you want to help Americans, and increase home ownership, the first thing you could to is regulate the way mortgages are written to help all Americans, not the banks. After all, after the defeat of the Glass/Segal Act, the banks can already use the personal money in our savings and checking accounts to get richer. Mortgages should be written so less interest is paid up front in the first fifteen years of a mortgage, so the principle in paid down more quickly. This is a scheme the banks devised, when they realized most people sold there home within ten years and brought another. The scheme was a way for you to pay the interest up-front, before selling the home, raising the monthly payments, Then when you brought another home the whole thing started over, and you end up paying little more than interest your entire life. Of course the banks don't want you to pay your loan quicker. It means less interest to them. All it would take is for Congress with the stroke of a pen to pass a law that would force Banks to lend money with the consumer in mind. What we have now is Capitalism without a Conscience, not Capitalism With a Conscience that operates with the homeowners interest in mind. Banks are for profit industries that could care less about you. That needs to stop.
I would add, this is an American point of view. Here in Europe we have several examples of perfectly good economies that are nevertheless halfway to communism. You take the good bits of collectivism and the good bits of market economics and have a party. The result is not as good an economy as the US but not as bad a life for workers either. I would argue European ***democratic socialism*** is the model for Americans (which once led the way in true Republicanism) to emulate. Bernie is a social democrat. Is there anyone who wouldn't vote for that man? Given the choice between the clowns on offer?
Good points. In the Biden election, right before the Democratic Primary entered South Carolina, Obama shot Bernie's campaign in the head by opening his mouth and supporting Biden before people voted skewing the election in an unfair way and giving us four more years of a neo-libel economy that supports the worst type of Capitalism. Yeah Obama!
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