You are right in general that SCMP is going to cheer on China, but MBFC is a stupid, question-begging, centrist website run by someone with no qualifications and spread around so centrists can use it as a “gotcha” in the style of an informal fallacy. I’m sure that others will have takedowns saved to share with you.
I think the article is good since it’s just dryly reporting on a survey from what I can tell, I just sympathize with being wary.
The term neoliberal encompasses conservatives unless it’s from the standpoint of a feudal society
I find it unfathomable how someone can come to that of all conclusions. Obviously she doesn’t have a commitment to it religiously or out of ethnic supremacy, but it’s just as obvious that she’s interested in being the slay kween on top of the bloodiest empire in history, and so she knows it behooves her to take care of all of its apparati for maintaining power.
When you’re a top-level politician like Kamala is failing-up into being, Israel’s appeal to you in not the chump change from AIPAC (not that you don’t take that too), it’s Israel’s actual use, the reason that AIPAC is allowed to exist when virtually no other foreign lobby is, that being that it spreads chaos and destruction among America’s enemies in the Middle East.
The idea that AIPAC effectively authored and single-handedly perpetuates zionism in the US political establishment is both antisemitic and just plain stupid. Where do you think they got the money from?! It didn’t just spring from Palestinian blood or from being Jewish or whatever, that money comes from the US initially! Or by proxy from US resources. The money AIPAC has is circling back to the US like in a money-laundering scheme.
I said “setting aside what we think of Hamas” for a reason, if that helps you interpret my meaning, I’m just doing a bad job managing both impulsively responding after the conversation ran its course and also avoiding getting into a useless dispute about the main force of military resistance to an ongoing genocide.
That’s interesting. I clearly hadn’t been giving those protestors enough credit, but the corollary of that is that Kamala, while an absolute zionist bastard, was still generalizing but not nearly as aggressively as I thought (there are definitely a bunch of triangles). I underestimated the ability of westerners to cut through zionist concern-trolling, even if not all present can.
Aside from the fact that she’s clearly using it as an opportunity to make it look like the entire protest (and perhaps all pro-Palestine protest) took such a tact
pro-Hamas messages
If you mean “From the river to the sea” I swear to God
Dude, setting aside what we think of Hamas, I wasn’t talking about Hamas, I was talking about people in America protesting against genocide being branded as terrorist sympathizers.
She “knows what’s up,” and has self-consciously chosen to side with genocide, branding all of its opponents terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.
Have they been supported by AIPAC? Surely, but them personally getting a check from a foreign lobby that is mysteriously allowed to exist in US politics is not a good explanation for what is going on. Israel serves a purpose extending America’s power in the Middle East and terrorizing its rivals. If Israel was against America’s interests in the region, AIPAC wouldn’t exist and America’s lavish cooperation with Israel would not be happening.
Ah, I see! Please, instruct me further: For how long will it be permissible to blame the Kamala regime for their crimes? For surely there will be a new Most Important Election of Our Lifetime next election, as there has been for at least the last three (and arguably the last dozen or more), and by this logic it would be terrible to imperil the that election as well. Shall it be whenever the new Republican we’re calling Uniquely Fascist announces their candidacy, and/or when the media instructs us that an already-announced candidate turns out to be Uniquely Fascist? The election cycles seem to be starting earlier and earlier each year, so I don’t expect you could produce a date for when it becomes unacceptable to state obvious facts, but surely something must tell us the window of time it is Ideal!
You must understand, this is all so very complicated, so it’s good to have an Adult in the Room to help out us children.
right now is the exact wrong time to be raising alarm bells and turning blame toward the Biden Administration. It’s not that they haven’t made mistakes;
They haven’t made mistakes. What they are doing is deliberate. They are not some oafish giant who tripped and fell and flattened a section of Gaza. They are continuously supplying bombs of all kinds to a military committing the one of the most well-documented genocides in history.
What’s the correct schedule for blaming the material facilitator of a genocide for their actions, if you wouldn’t mind instructing us plebeians according to your enlightened timetables? Is it the two years following an election but not the two years beforehand?
The formatting is admittedly not the most readable, but this is the best article I have seen on the topic.
I find this reply very strange because it’s the core point of Marxism that it’s dialectical but materialist. It has a lot of forebears, but Hegel is the most direct and obvious of them.
This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system — and herein is its great merit — for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process — i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view, the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, all equally condemnable at the judgment seat of mature philosophic reason and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways, and to trace out the inner law running through all its apparently accidental phenomena.
That the Hegelian system did not solve the problem it propounded is here immaterial. Its epoch-making merit was that it propounded the problem. This problem is one that no single individual will ever be able to solve. Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age. To these limits, a third must be added; Hegel was an idealist. To him, the thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of actual things and processes, but, conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the “Idea”, existing somewhere from eternity before the world was. This way of thinking turned everything upside down, and completely reversed the actual connection of things in the world. Correctly and ingeniously as many groups of facts were grasped by Hegel, yet, for the reasons just given, there is much that is botched, artificial, labored, in a word, wrong in point of detail. The Hegelian system, in itself, was a colossal miscarriage — but it was also the last of its kind.
It was suffering, in fact, from an internal and incurable contradiction. Upon the one hand, its essential proposition was the conception that human history is a process of evolution, which, by its very nature, cannot find its intellectual final term in the discovery of any so-called absolute truth. But, on the other hand, it laid claim to being the very essence of this absolute truth. A system of natural and historical knowledge, embracing everything, and final for all time, is a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectic reasoning.
– Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
i don’t think social change boils down to just one theory.
If we believe that the universe fundamentally makes sense, then it must stem from that that it can all be explained on the same terms. Furthermore, within a domain, the extent to which a theory is unable to explain some part of that domain is the extent to which it either fails or is in-utero just a component of a larger theory whose other parts can cover those other areas. Not only can social change boil down to one theory, if you believe we live in an interconnected, logical world, it must boil down to one theory. Obviously there are many competitors for that title, and none of them are yet developed enough to properly claim it, but it is a legitimate and even a necessary title.
Edit: Sorry for piling on about the dialectics part, I see Cowbee did go over it later. fwiw I think he didn’t represent materialism fairly, but part of why I included the Engels quote is because I think he does represent Hegelian idealism and its fundamental problem (How can this dialectic of humans – material beings – take place in the world of ideas?) fairly.
Most people will take “freedom” as an axiom, but how “freedom” is defined varies a lot. In a society where the commons are pretty much fully enclosed and you are homeless, the petite-bourgeois may very well be free, but you really aren’t.
I chose to avoid most of the bait so far, even with those cloying :)s that you like adding so much, but this one is too disgusting. It’s historical revisionism pure and simple that they were ever “allies” with Germany. They had a treaty to try and stall German invasion, but they never imagined things would go otherwise than one party defeating the other (though they did underestimate how soon the Germans would attack).
I’m really struggling to follow some of this. Are you saying the Soviets didn’t need to fight Germany and didn’t need to take as much time as they could manage to prepare to do so?
I’m happy I could be helpful!
I guess this is in some ways an admittal of defeat
There’s no need to claim defeat or victory, we’re just talking; Success in communication is determined by the extent to which we are able to understand each other, and I think we did alright.
I think i still need to educate myself more on this topic.
I can’t claim to represent any perspective but my own, but the text that really helped me to begin to see things differently was Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Feel free to DM me/necropost here if there’s anything I can help with.
I’m going to avoid touching the rest of that and say that a centralized production not making sushi or shawarma is not the same as censoring those things. You can still make them at home, it’s not like fish, rice, and seaweed were beyond the reach of the existing production. Again, it sounds like a production issue.
This could be a language barrier thing, but it sounds like you’re talking about a production issue, not a censorship issue.
I’d hesitate to be too smol bean Japan about it considering they were brutalizing East Asia systematically at the time.