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Showing posts from April 28, 2019
Heresy There is a glimpse of hope, sometimes. German SPD youth chief leader lambasted for proposing collective ownership of big firms
"Thriving liberal democracy" They're not only corrupt, money-launderers, vampiristic, they love women's blood. HSBC's gende pay gap grows to 61%
First part of an interview with Venezuelan sociologist Edgardo Lander He’s professor emeritus at the Central University of Venezuela, and a fellow of the Transnational Institute. He did his Ph.D. at Harvard University, and he is the author of numerous books and research articles on democracy, the myths of industrialization and economic growth, and left-wing movements in Latin America. There are also some interesting comments at the end.
An event in London Videogames industry, profit, class struggle, etc. Consoles, Controllers and Class Struggle A book by Jamie Woodcock
How the charge of antisemitism has been deployed in Great Britain and against grassroots social justice activism to silence Israel's critics. Israel and the Antisemitism Playbook in Great Britain and Grassroots

Sanctions on Iran

Another example of collective punishment led by the leader of "the free world" to help people, especially "oppressed Iranian women",  "regain their freedoms". And don't tell me that the American people are not complicit in this. Six charts that show how hard US sanctions have hit Iran
Jeffrey Sachs is not a marxist or even a socialist The headline of the interview is not accurate though, but one gets the idea. "A humanitarian catastrophe deliberately caused by the United States"
From Iran to Chile, from Honduras to Venezuela (2002 and 2019), the U.S. has a tradition in supporting coups and coup attempts.
This is from 2017. The motives behind the backing of certain regimes are scantly mentioned though. The article does not go beyond description. The projection of power and support of authoritarian regimes for what reaons?  There is not mention of domestic power structures and power relations in the U.S. itself. No mention at all of the ideological (cultural) hegemony: the Americanisation of the globe require military power to back it up. Primacy is a preponderance vis-a-vis other powers whether they are subordinate allies or rivals. And economic expansion (investing surplus capital) requires stable and predictable world order. Thus the presence of military bases. The article has more of a moralistic tone than an analytical one. How can one talk about military hegemony without situating it the capitalist context? How U.S. Military Bases Back Dictators, Autocrats, and Military Regimes
Is Bourgeois representative democracy democratic? An example from 2010-2014 Is it a democracy when none of its representatives were endorsed by even half of their constituents? There are 650 MPs. If we rank them all by this measure of legitimacy, the median MP won 30.1 per cent of their votes, which is very similar to the mean winning margin (30.6 per cent). 14 sitting MPs were backed by less than a fifth of their constituents. In other words, most MPs are endorsed by less a third of their constituency.

Einstein: The World As I See It

"This topic [the importance of individuality] brings me to that worst out-crop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how I hate them! War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the press." — Albert Einstein , (1879 - 1955) Physicist & Nobel L
While other writings on the Kampuchea period have blamed its violence on the supposed “totalitarian aspects” of attempts to create a more equal society — or on either the personalities of CPK leaders or Cambodian and Buddhist culture — Tyner situates the CPK regime in its social and economic context.  Rice Fields to Killings Fields  aims to critically apply Marxist concepts to a regime that claimed to be Marxist. Tyner focuses on the CPK’s economic policy as providing the “base” for the DK regime, allowing him to dispel several myths about the Khmer Rouge. But in the end, the book is unable to fully explain the exceptional violence of the regime.  (My emphasis, N. M.) Inside the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields